English literary canon

## Comprehensive canon

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The following is a list of canonical authors and canonical works. Names bolded represent highly significant authors or works.

### Medieval

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Drama

* The York Cycle
* Eve

Poetry

* Beowulf
* Cædmon: Cædmon's Hymn
* Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde
* William Langland: Piers Plowman
* Cynewulf: The Ascension
* Deor
* Discourse of the Soul to its Body
* Dream of the Rood
* Pearl Poet: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl
* The Battle of Maldon
* The Seafarer
* The Wanderer
* Widsith

Prose

### Renaissance

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Drama

* Frances Beaumont and John Fletcher: Philaster
* Thomas Dekker: The Shoemaker's Holiday
* Robert Greene: Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, James the Fourth
* John Lyly: Endimion
* Ben Jonson: The Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair: A Comedy, Volpone, Every Man in His Humour
* Christopher Marlowe: The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
* Philip Massinger: A New Way to Pay Old Debts
* George Peele: The Old Wives' Tale
* William Shakespeare
* Nicholas Udall: Ralph Roister Doister
* John Webster: The Duchess of Malfi

Poetry

* John Donne
* George Herbert: The Temple
* William Shakespeare
* Edmund Spenser: The Fairie Queen
* Alexander Pope

Prose

* Francis Bacon: New Atlantis
* Robert Burton: The Anatomy of Melancholy
* Thomas Deloney: Jack of Newbury
* George Gascoigne: The Adventures of Master F. J.
* John Lyly: Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit
* Thomas Malory: Morte D'Arthur
* Thomas More: Utopia
* Thomas Nashe: The Unfortunate Traveller
* Henry Neville: The Isle of Pines
* Philip Sidney: Arcadia

### English Civil War and Restoration

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Drama

Poetry

* Thomas Carew: The Rapture
* John Cleveland: The Rebel Scot
* Abraham Cowley: The Mistress
* Richard Crashaw: 'Delights of the Muses
* John Denham: Cooper's Hill
* John Dryden
* Robert Herrick: Hesperides
* Andrew Marvell
* John Milton: Paradise Lost
* Francis Quarles: Emblems
* Thomas Traherne: The Wonder
* Henry Vaughan: Silex Scintillans
* Edmund Waller: The Bud, Go, lovely Rose, On a Girdle

Prose

* Richard Baxter: Saints' Everlasting Rest
* Aphra Behn: Oroonoko
* Thomas Browne
* John Bunyan: The Pilgrim's Progress
* Thomas Fuller: The Worthies of England
* Jeremy Taylor: Holy Living, Holy Dying
* Thomas Urquhart
* Izaak Walton: The Compleat Angler

### Romantic

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Drama

* Henry Fielding: The Modern Husband
* David Garrick and George Colman: The Clandestine Marriage;
* John Gay: The Beggar's Opera
* Oliver Goldsmith: She Stoops to Conquer
* John O'Keeffe: Wild Oats
* Percy Shelley: The Cenci, Prometheus Unbound

Poetry

* William Blake: Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Jerusalem
* Robert Burns
* George Gordon Byron: Don Juan, Child Harold's Pilgrimage
* Samuel Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Cristabel
* William Collins
* William Cowper
* Thomas Gray: Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
* Leigh Hunt
* John Keats: Sleep and Poetry, Lamia, Hyperion, Odes, Fall of Hyperion
* Samuel Johnson: The Vanity of Human Wishes
* Charles Lamb
* Edgar Allan Poe: "The Raven"
* Alexander Pope: Dunciad, Rape of the Lock
* Walter Scott
* Percy Bysshe Shelley: Mont Blanc, The Cloud, Ozymandius, Adonais
* Christopher Smart: A Song to David
* James Thomson
* William Wordsworth: The Prelude, "Lucy" poems, "Matthew" poems, Tintern Abbey

Prose

* Jane Austen
* Frances Burney: Evelina
* Jane Collier:
* James Fenimore Cooper
* Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders
* Thomas De Quincey: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
* Maria Edgeworth: Belinda
* Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones
* Charlotte Lennox: The Female Quixote
* Matthew Lewis: The Monk
* Henry Mackenzie: The Man of Feeling
* Ann Radcliffe
* Samuel Richardson: Pamela, Clarissa
* Walter Scott: Waverley
* Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
* Tobias Smollet: Humphrey Clinker
* Lawrence Sterne: Tristam Shandy, Sentimental Journey
* Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's Travels
* Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto

Sarah Scott, Sarah Fielding

### Victorian

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Drama

* Gilbert and Sullivan
* George Bernard Shaw (continuing into 20th Century)
* Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest

Poetry

* Emily Dickinson
* Matthew Arnold
* Elizabeth Barrett Browning
* Robert Browning
* Thomas Carlyle
* Lewis Carroll: Jabberwocky, The Hunting of the Snark
* Gerard Manley Hopkins
* A. E. Housman: Shropshire Lad
* Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

* Christina Rossetti: Goblin Market
* Algernon Charles Swinburne
* Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Ulysses, Idylls of the King, In Memoriam A. H. H., The Lady of Shalott
* Joanne Slack " A man and his dog"

Prose

* Mary Elizabeth Braddon: Lady Audley's Secret
* Charlotte Brontë
* Emily Brontë
* Lewis Carroll
* Wilkie Collins
* Charles Dickens
* Benjamin Disraeli: Sybil
* George Eliot: Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss, Adam Bede
* Elizabeth Gaskell: Mary Barton, North and South
* George Gissing: The Odd Women, New Grub Street
* Thomas Hardy
* O. Henry
* Washington Irving
* Henry James
* Herman Melville "Moby Dick"
* Margaret Oliphant: Miss Marjoribanks
* Robert Louis Stevenson
* Bram Stoker: Dracula
* William Makepeace Thackeray: Vanity Fair
* Mark Twain
* H. G. Wells
* Edith Wharton
* Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray'
* Ellen Wood: East Lynne

### 20th century

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Drama

* Samuel Beckett
* Harold Pinter
* J. M. Synge
* William Butler Yeats

Poetry

* W. H. Auden
* Rupert Brooke
* T. S. Eliot
* Seamus Heaney
* Dylan Thomas
* William Butler Yeats
* Ezra Pound
* Sylvia Plath
* Hart Crane

Prose

* William Faulkner "Light in August", "The Sound and the Fury", "Go Down Moses", "As I Lay Dying", "Absalom, Absalom!"
* James Joyce "Ulysses", "A portrait of the artist as a young man", "Finnegans Wake", "Dubliners".
* Virginia Woolf "The Waves", "Orlando", "To the Lighthouse", "Mrs Dalloway".
* Saul Bellow
* Thomas Mann
* Robert Fitzgerald
* Agatha Christie
* Felipe Fernández-Armesto
* E. M. Forster: A Passage to India
* Aldous Huxley
* Rudyard Kipling
* D. H. Lawrence
* C. S. Lewis
* George Orwell - Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four
* J. R. R. Tolkien

## Other canons

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### Great books

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### Developing novels

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Novel development

Historic novels

* Walter Scott: Waverley (1814)
* Walter Scott: Rob Roy (1817)
* Walter Scott: Ivanhoe (1819)
* Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Crime and Punishment (1866)
* Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
* R. D. Blackmore: Lorna Doone (1869)

Gothic novels

* Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto (1764)
* Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
* Matthew Lewis: The Monk (1796)
* Ann Radcliffe: The Italian (1796)
* Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey
* Jonathan Chappell: Jane Slayer (2014)

Sensation novels

* Wilkie Collins: The Woman in White (1860)
* Ellen Wood: East Lynne (1861)
* Mary Elizabeth Braddon: Lady Audley's Secret (1862)
* Wilkie Collins: Armadale (1866)
* Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone (1868)

Sentimental novels

* Henry Mackenzie: The Man of Feeling (1771)

African American Literature

* Robert Hayden
* Jay Wright
* Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Jazz
* Jean Toomer
* Maya Angelou
* Lucille Clifton
* Rita Dove
* Nikki Giovanni
* Michael S. Harper
* Yusef Komunyakaa
* Carl Phillips

### Major plays

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\- William Shakespeare complete works

\- Knot of the Heart by David Eldridge

\- Equus by Peter Shaffer

\- Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

## See also

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* Literary studies reading lists

| Type classification: this is a reading list resource.

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