Western Literature Works - Harold Bloom

Bloom has a long list, and in his book there are chapters to talk about key authors.The source of the list comes from this online site, which I refer to from time to time. http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtbloom.html. Instead of replicating most of the list, I would use the same bucketing as Bloom, only list out authors / texts whose category from which Bloom hasn't selected authors as central to the western canon (i.e. not covered in his chapters).

 

A. The Theocratic Age

The Ancient Near East

• Gilgamesh
• Egyptian Book of the Dead
• Holy Bible (King James Version)
• The Apocrypha
• Sayings of the Fathers (Pirke Aboth)

 

Greco / Roman section skipped - already studied through the Leob catalogue.

 

The Middle Ages: Latin, Arabic, and the Vernacular Before Dante

• Saint Augustine
• The Poetic Edda
• Snorri Sturluson: The Prose Edda
• The Nibelungen Lied
• Wolfram von Eschenbach: Parzival
• Chrétien de Troyes: Yvain: The Knight of the Lion
• Beowulf
• The Poem of the Cid
• Christine de Pisan: The Book of the City of Ladies
• Diego de San Pedro: Prison of Love

 

B. The Aristocratic Age

Italy: Dante

  

Portugal

• Luis de Camoëns: The Lusiads
• Antònio Ferreira: Poetry

 

Spain: Cervantes

  

England and Scotland: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Samuel Johnson

 

France: Montaigne, Moliere

 

Germany: Goethe

 

C. The Democratic Age

Italy

• Ugo Foscolo: On Sepulchres, Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, Odes, and The Graces
• Alessandro Manzoni: The Betrothed, On the Historical Novel
• Giacomo Leopardi: Essays and Dialogues, Poems, The Moral Essays
• Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli: Roman Sonnets
• Giosué Carducci: Hymn to Satan, Barbarian Odes, Rhymes and Rhythms
• Giovanni Verga:  Little Novels of Sicily, Mastro-Don Gesualdo, The House by the Medlar Tree, The She-Wolf and Other Stories

 

Spain and Portugal

• Gustavo Adolpho Bécquer: Poems
• Benito Pérez Galdós: Fortunata and Jacinta
• Leopoldo Alas (Clarín):  La Regenta
• José Maria de Eça de Queirós: The Maias

 

France

• Benjamin Constant: Adolphe, The Red Notebook
• François-Auguste-René de Chateaubriand:  Attala, René, The Genius of Christianity
• Alphonse de Lamartine: Meditations
• Alfred de Vigny: Chatterton, Poems
• Victor Hugo: The Distance, the Shadows: Selected Poems, Les Misérables, Notre-Dame of Paris, William Shakespeare, The Toilers of the Sea, The End of Satan, God
• Alfred de Musset: Poems, Lorenzaccio
• Gérard de Nerval: The Chimeras, Sylvie, Aurelia
• Théophile Gautier: Mademoiselle de Maupin, Enamels and Cameos
• Honoré de Balzac: The Girl with the Golden Eyes, Louis Lambert, The Wild Ass's Skin, Old Goriot, Cousin Bette, A Harlot High and Low, Eugénie Grandet, Ursule Mirouet
• Stendhal: On Love, The Red and the Black, The Charterhouse of Parma
• Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary, Sentimental Education, Salammbô, A Simple Soul
• George Sand: The Haunted Pool
• Charles Baudelaire:  Flowers of Evil, Paris Spleen
• Stéphane Mallarmé:  Selected Poetry and Prose
• Paul Verlaine:  Selected Poems
• Arthur Rimbaud:  Complete Works
• Tristan Corbière:  Les Armours Jaunes
• Jules Laforgue:  Selected Writings
• Guy de Maupassant:  Selected Short Stories
• Émile Zola:  Germinal, L'Assommoir, Nana

 

Scandinavia: Ibsen

 

Great Britain: William Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens, George Eliot 

 

Germany

• Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenburg): Hymns to the Night, Aphorisms
• Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm: Fairy Tales
• Eduard Mörike: Selected Poems, Mozart on His Way to Prague
• Theodor Storm: Immensee, Poems
• Gottfried Keller: Green Henry, Tales
• E. T. A. Hoffmann: The Devil's Elixir, Tales
• Jeremias Gotthelf: The Black Spider
• Adalbert Stifter: Indian Summer, Tales
• Friedrich Schlegel: Criticism and Aphorisms
• Georg Büchner: Danton's Death, Woyzeck
• Heinrich Heine: Complete Poems
• Richard Wagner: The Ring of the Nibelung
• Friedrich Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, The Will to Power
• Theodor Fontane: Effi Briest
• Stefan George: Selected Poems

 

Russia: Tolstoy

 

The United States: Whitman, Dickinson 

 

From this summary, it is pretty clear that Bloom is extremely western Europe focused, and probably overweight literature in the English language.