Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation: Analysis

Looking at the Table of Contents, on the top level (within each group in order of number of sub-sections in a chapter)

- The Bible (the only one that is not referring to languages)

- Single Language: French, German, Italian, Greek, Latin, Russian, Arabic

- Small-area language groups: Central and East European Languages, Northern European Languages,Celtic Languages, Hebrew and Yiddish

- Big-area language groups: Hispanic Languages, East Asian Languages, African Languages, Indian Languages, West Asian Languages

Roughly, this is a hierarchy being centered in Western Europe - (Bible - probably the author does not want to classify it as a Latin, or Greek or Hebrew work), French, German, Ialian, groups of European languages (the name of Hispanic Languages is curious - first time I saw people refer to Portuguese as a Hispanic language), classical European languages, Russian, Arabic, and then East Asian, African, Indian (also curious that Indian is so low in the hierarchy for a British work), and West Asian.

It is clear that for the least important languages, they would not even have their own independent sections; more important ones have one section of their own, then some will have split into periods, then into genres; then into genre-periods; and then there will be mention of individual authors and works.

On a sub-section basis, one can give the following hierarchy:

French > German = Italian > Greek = Latin > Spanish > Russian > Arabic > Chinese = Japanese > Portuguese = Polish > Gaelic > Welsh = Norwegian = Swedish = Persian > Sanskrit = Tamil > Afrikaans = Armenian = Bulgarian = Georgian = Hungarian = Romanian = Serbo-Croat = Ukrainian = Korean = Hebrew = Yiddish = Catalan (but no Basque!) = Old English = Old Norse / Icelandic = Danish = Dutch = Icelandic = Turkish > Czech = Slovak = Finnish = Finland-Swedish > East African = West African = South African = Modern Indian = Ancient Mesopotamian

On a genre-basis, it recognizes:

Poetry (Epics [and Romances], Lyrics, Pastoral, Epigram, Satire, 

Devotional Writing), Prose (History, Biography, "Thinkers", Philosophy, Oratory), Fiction (Picareque Novels), Drama

And lastly, just looking at the table of contents, one can pick out the following works / authors (altogether 48):

Bible > The Koran = The Mu'allaqat = The Muqaddimah = The Thousand and One Nights = Naguib Mahfouz = La Fontaine = Baudelaire = Proust = Beckett = Goethe = Heine = Marx = Nietzsche = Freud = Rilke = Aeschylus = Sophocles = Euripides = Aristophanes = Cervantes = Camoes = Dante = Boccacio = Aristo = Tasso = Leopardi = Pirandello = Lucretius = Virgil = Horace = Ovid = Kalevala = Ibsen = Strindberg = Pushkin = Tolstoy = Dostoevsky = Chekhov > Rabelais = Montaigne = Kant = Hegel  = Pulci = Boiardo > Hugo = Homer = Goldini