Choose Some Readings

We are moving on now in the Gymnasium Modersmål course to writing, but that always of course includes reading. Here is a list of just a very few of the major authors and poets from the four eras of modern literature we discussed in the first three lectures. Feel free to browse through the list and choose any one you find interesting. We can do more work on them in the second half of this term.

Romantic Era

William Blake 

(Blake was the artist, writer and poet that ushered in romanticism)

George Gordon, Lord Byron 

(a long biography and then some of his poetry)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge 

(a long biography and then some of his writing)

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley 

Percy Bysshe Shelley 

William Wordsworth 

John Keats

Walter Scott

Jane Austen 

(Not a Romantic writer, but a phenomenon that cannot be ignored. Austen is enigma that is actually difficult to place in literary history as she invented a genre and her work remains very popular today).


 

Victorian Era

Charles Dickens

Sir Richard Burton 

(Burton was a writer but he is more known today as an archetypal character of the Victorian Era. Therefore I include him here as an insight into the time)

Elizabeth Gaskell 

Thomas Hardy 

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (a late Romantic poet really but very much a Victorian)


Modernism

James Joyce 

Virginia Woolf 

T. S. Eliot 

(Within Eliot's impressive collection of works pay particular attention to The Waste Land)

Katherine Mansfield 

(A transitional author, who's work made the cross over from Victorian to Modern)

D. H. Lawrence

Samuel Beckett 

(A bridge between Modernism and Post-modernism -  too many great works to mention one)

Josef Conrad 

(His short novel Heart of Darkness is a game changer for culture, history and literature)

Gertrude Stein 

William Butler Yeats 

(Many poems but the big one is The Second Coming, which has become part of the collective consciousness of the modern English speaking world)

Zora Neale Hurston 

(an important author for the upcoming -  at the time -  African American perspective on literature. Her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is a masterpiece)



Postmodernism 

Hanif Kureishi 

Kurt Vonnegut

Thomas Pynchon

William Gaddis

Philip K. Dick

Kathy Acker

John Barth

Ursula K. Le Guin

William S. Burroughs

Doris Lessing 

(Try reading Briefing for a Descent into Hell and tell me how you feel afterwards - astounding book)

Margaret Atwood (if you have not read her books, go there. You must).

Toni Morrison (Her novel Beloved is particularly important)

Zadie Smith


This list has barely scratched the surface of the literature that is available to you as an English speaker. 

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