Novels that have been considered the greatest ever
Related: Western canon - Western culture - classic - novels
Lists: 1001 Books (2006)
Random House's 1998 list of "best 20th century novels"
- Ulysses by James Joyce
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
- Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
See also: http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100bestnovels.html [Sept 2005]
See also: greatness - list - novel - literature - 1900s - canon
Literary canon at Wikipedia
Top importance novels category
Anna Karenina - Bleak House - Brave New World - Crime and Punishment - David Copperfield - Doctor Zhivago - Dracula - East of Eden - Fathers and Sons - Frankenstein - Gone with the Wind - Jane Eyre - Lolita - Madame Bovary - Max Havelaar - Nineteen Eighty-Four - Oliver Twist - Pride and Prejudice - Sherlock Holmes - Starship Troopers - The Assault - The Brothers Karamazov - The Fall - The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby - The Lord of the Rings - The Master and Margarita - The Pickwick Papers - The Plague - The Satanic Verses - The Sorrows of Young Werther - The Three Musketeers - The Trial - The Wonderful Wizard of Oz - Treasure Island - Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea - Ulysses - War and Peace - Wuthering Heights
Great Books (1996) - David Denby
Great Books: My Adventures With Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World (1996) - David Denby [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Amazon.com
David Denby, New York city movie critic and journalist, entered Columbia University in 1991 to take the university's famous course in "Great Books." This is the course that, in preserving the notion of the western canon without apology to multiculturalists and feminists, has been an unlikely focus of America's culture war in recent years. Where other universities have caved in and revised or enlarged the canon, Columbia's course has remained intact. Denby's intention as a writer and protagonist in the culture war was to record the experience and the personal impact of the course. He has produced a cry from the heart in favor of the classics of western civilization, relaying with infectious enthusiasm how literature touched his soul.--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Does a great books canon exist? Left-wing critics denounce the notion of a canon, while right-wingers often use it to assert unquestioned Western supremacy. This superb book suggests an answer. Denby, the film critic for New York magazine, returned to his alma mater, Columbia University, after 30 years to retake the two core curriculum courses, grapple with the world's classics and regenerate his own lapsed reading habit. It is a heartening portrait of (elite) American education and a substantial?sometimes enthralling?read. His teachers are committed pedagogues, the students a diverse (religious faith separates more than does ethnicity) and thoughtful lot. But the students are young, and the book's richest moments are when the mature Denby engages with the texts. Reading the tragedy of Oedipus Rex, he feels anxious, recognizing the ironic truth "[W]hat we avoid, we become." Hobbes's comments on the state of nature lead Denby to muse on insider trading and the time he was mugged. He contrasts Beauvoir's call for female liberty with the "Take Back the Night" antirape march on campus. Denby steps aside to interview academics and analyze the debate about the canon; he acknowledges that white male critics too long ignored the likes of Virginia Woolf, but resolutely argues for the seeking out of all great books, not merely ones that represent excluded groups. Why? Because the "Western classics were at war with each other," and learning to read Hegel and Marx, or the Bible and Nietzsche, is no lesson in indoctrination but the beginning of "an ethically strenuous education" and "a set of bracing intellectual habits." Author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
See also: books - literature
2006, Mar 05; 12:05 :::
Time Magazine 100 best novels
A * The Adventures of Augie March * All the King's Men * American Pastoral * An American Tragedy * Animal Farm * Appointment in Samarra * Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret * The Assistant (novel) * At Swim-Two-Birds * Atonement (novel) B * Beloved (novel) * The Berlin Stories * The Big Sleep * The Blind Assassin * Blood Meridian * Brideshead Revisited * The Bridge of San Luis Rey C * Call It Sleep * Catch-22 * The Catcher in the Rye * A Clockwork Orange * The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) * The Corrections * The Crying of Lot 49 D * A Dance to the Music of Time * The Day of the Locust * Death Comes for the Archbishop * A Death in the Family * The Death of the Heart * Deliverance * Dog Soldiers (book) F * Falconer (novel) * The French Lieutenant's Woman G * Go Tell It on the Mountain * The Golden Notebook * Gone with the Wind * The Grapes of Wrath * Gravity's Rainbow * The Great Gatsby H * A Handful of Dust * The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter * The Heart of the Matter * Herzog (novel) * A House for Mr Biswas * Housekeeping (novel) I * I, Claudius * Infinite Jest * Invisible Man L * Light in August * The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe * Lolita * Lord of the Flies * The Lord of the Rings * Loving (novel) * Lucky Jim M * The Man Who Loved Children * Midnight's Children * Money (novel) * The Moviegoer * Mrs. Dalloway N * Naked Lunch * Native Son * Neuromancer * Never Let Me Go * Nineteen Eighty-Four O * On the Road * One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (novel) P * The Painted Bird (novel) * Pale Fire * A Passage to India * Play It As It Lays * Portnoy's Complaint * Possession: A Romance * The Power and the Glory * The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie R * Rabbit, Run * Ragtime (novel) * The Recognitions * Red Harvest * Revolutionary Road S * The Sheltering Sky * Slaughterhouse-Five * Snow Crash * The Sot-Weed Factor * The Sound and the Fury * The Sportswriter * The Spy Who Came in from the Cold * The Sun Also Rises T * Their Eyes Were Watching God * Things Fall Apart * To Kill a Mockingbird * To the Lighthouse * Tropic of Cancer (novel) U * Ubik * Under the Net * Under the Volcano W * Watchmen * White Noise (novel) * White Teeth * Wide Sargas--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Time_Magazine_100_best_novels [Mar 2006]
Modern Library List of Best 20th-Century Novels
The Modern Library created a list of the 100 best novels and the 100 best non-fiction books of the 20th century in 1998. A reader's poll of the best 100 novels was also compiled. The list is copyrighted and cannot be reproduced --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Library_List_of_Best_20th-Century_Novels [Aug 2006]
Cultural Capital : The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (1995) - John Guillory
Cultural Capital : The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (1995) - John Guillory [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Book Description
John Guillory challenges the most fundamental premises of the canon debate by resituating the problem of canon formation in an entirely new theoretical framework. The result is a book that promises to recast not only the debate about the literary curriculum but also the controversy over "multiculturalism" and the current "crisis of the humanities." Employing concepts drawn from Pierre Bourdieu's sociology, Guillory argues that canon formation must be understood less as a question of the representation of social groups than as a question of the distribution of "cultural capital" in the schools, which regulate access to literacy, to the practices of reading and writing.
See also: culture - capital - canon - culture theory - humanities - literary theory
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