Nobody has said the classics are perfect. In fact, countless readers who have tackled such lauded works like the epic poems of Homer, or the dense and inexhaustible texts from Joyce or Alighieri, see these works more with a “slow and parsimonious” style than with an artistic statement.
In the twenty-first century, we are seeing opinions about literature veer towards simplicity. Now more than ever we encounter cardboard characters or insignificant narratives, all jammed together as if it were following a fashion trend. It is a nostalgic attitude that tries to rescue the best works of the past because of their quality or simply because of the ignorance regarding present works.
In most cases, this principle lacks a connection with reality: everyone assumes that past times were better, even if there is a complete lack of knowledge on the historical context. This is due to an idealized vision of the past, which not only works to safeguard memory, but also secures bonds through nostalgia.
Do you know the classics or the authors that forever marked the literary world? Discover the main works of authors born before the twentieth century and take the necessary tools to make an informed critique of current literature. Build bridges between the present and those great classics who forged the canon or represent the inevitable ruptures with literature’s previous traditions:
The Epic of Gilgamesh (c.2000-2500 BCE)
The Iliad (6th century BC) – Homer
Oedipus Rex (4th century BC) – Sophocles
Lysistrata (4th century BC) – Aristophanes
The Art of Love (1st centruty BC) – Ovid
Aeneid (1st century BC) – Virgil
The Divine Comedy (1313) – Dante Alighieri
Decameron (1353) – Giovani Boccaccio
The Prince (1513) – Niccolò Machiavelli
The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes and His Fortunes and Adversities (1554) – Anonymous
Romeo and Juliet (1597) – William Shakespeare
Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605) – Miguel de Cervantes
The Suspicious Truth (1619) – Juan Ruiz de Alarcón
Fuenteovejuna (1619) – Lope de Vega
Life Is Dream (1635) – Pedro Calderón de la Barca
Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz (1691) – Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
The Rape of the Lock (1712) – Alexander Pope
Robinson Crusoe (1719) – Daniel Defoe
Gulliver’s Travels (1726) – Jonathan Swift
Tom Jones (1749) – Henry Fielding
Candide (1759) – Voltaire
Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue (1791) – Marquis de Sade
Rameau’s Nephew (1805) – Denis Diderot
Faust (1808) – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Pride and Prejudice (1813) – Jane Austen
Frankenstein (1818) – Mary Shelley
Oliver Twist (1837) – Charles Dickens
The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) – Alejandro Dumas
Wuthering Heights (1847) – Charlotte Brontë
Moby Dick (1851) – Herman Melville
“Song of Myself” (1855) – Walt Whitman
Madame Bovary (1856) – Gustave Flaubert
The Flowers of Evil (1857) – Charles Baudelaire
Les Miserables (1862) – Victor Hugo
“The Kiss” (1863) – Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland (1865) – Lewis Carroll
War and Peace (1869) – Leo Tolstoy
A Season in Hell (1873) – Arthur Rimbaud
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) – Mark Twain
Crime and Punishment (1886) – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Tales of Melpomene (1886) – Antón Chéjov
Blue (1888) – Rubén Darío
The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1890) – Oscar Wilde
The Eleven Thousand Yards (1907) – Guillaume Apollinaire
The Bandits of the Cold River (1891) – Manuel Payno
Santa (1903) – Federico Gamboa
In Search of Lost Time (1913) – Marcel Proust
Los de abajo (1915) – Mariano Azuela
The Immovable Beloved (1922) – Amado Nervo
Steppenwolf (1927) – Herman Hesse
Doña Bárbara (1929) – Rómulo Gallegos
As in other fields of knowledge, women have mostly been excluded because of Western society’s chauvinism. Therefore there will always be amazing literature written by women yet to be discovered and enjoyed.
