English literature's 50 key moments from Marlowe to JK Rowling
By Robert McCrum of the Guardian Newspaper
What have been the hinge points in the evolution of Anglo-American literature? Here's a provisional, partisan list
Literary turning points ... Christopher Marlowe and JK Rowling. Photograph: Hulton Getty/Murdo Macleod
Note: what follows is not merely a book list, but an attempt to identify some of the hinge moments in our literature – a composite of significant events, notable poems, plays, and novels, plus influential deaths, starting with the violent death of Shakespeare's one serious rival …
1. The death of Christopher Marlowe (1593)
2. William Shakespeare: The Sonnets (1609)
3. The King James Bible (1611)
4. William Shakespeare: The First Folio (1623)
5. John Milton: Areopagitica (1644)
6. Samuel Pepys: The Diaries (1660-69)
7. John Bunyan: Pilgrim's Progress (1678)
8. John Locke: Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)
9. William Congreve: The Way of the World (1700)
10. Daniel Defoe: A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)
11. Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's Travels (1727)
12. Samuel Johnson: A Dictionary of the English Language (1755)
13. Thomas Jefferson: The American Declaration of Independence (1776)
14. James Boswell: Life of Johnson (1791)
15. Benjamin Franklin: Autobiography (1793)
16. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792)
17. William Wordsworth: "The Prelude" (1805)
18. Jane Austen: Pride & Prejudice (1813)
19. Lord Byron: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812)
20. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Shakespearean Criticism (1818)
21. Ralph Waldo Emerson: "The American Scholar" (1837)
22. Thomas Carlyle: The French Revolution (1837)
23. The uniform Penny Post (1840)
24. Thomas Hood: "The Song of the Shirt" (1843)
25. Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights (1847)
26. Charles Dickens: David Copperfield (1849)
27. Herman Melville: Moby Dick (1851)
28. Elizabeth Gaskell: North and South (1855)
29. Charles Darwin: On the Origin of Species (1859)
30. Henry Thoreau: Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854)
31. Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)
32. Lewis Carroll: Alice In Wonderland (1865)
33. Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone (1868)
34. First commercially successful typewriter, USA. (1878)
35. George Eliot: Middlemarch (1871)
36. Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
37. Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
38. Thomas Hardy: Poems (c.1900)
39. JM Barrie: Peter Pan (1904)
40. James Joyce: Ulysses (1922)
41. TS Eliot: The Waste Land (1922)
42. F Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby (1925)
43. George Orwell: George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
(1949)
44. Ian Fleming: Casino Royale (1953)
45. Jack Kerouac: On The Road (1957)
46. Maurice Sendak: Where The Wild Things Are (1963)
47. Truman Capote: In Cold Blood (1966)
48. WG Sebald: Vertigo (1990)
49. The launch of Amazon.com (1994)
50. JK Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997)
Plus a bonus book - Ted Hughes: Birthday Letters (1998)
This catalogue, in conclusion, is highly partisan and impressionistic. It makes no claim to be comprehensive (how could it?). Rather, it aims to stimulate a discussion about the turning-points in the world of books and letters from the King James Bible to the present day.
Over to you, what do YOU think should have been included, or left out?
6 comments:
I missed this in the Guardian; I;m working my way down the list and am amazed how many I've read (Not Rowling though)
Didn't think Rowling would appeal to you, Bob. :0) Yes, I was pleased about the number I had read, and a guilty conscience about those I've been trying to 'catch up with' for far too long.
I haven't read Rowling either, but it's nice to see how many I have. I'm surprised Paradise Lost by Milton isn't on the list. Too x-rated, maybe?
You're probably your head over my last comment. I was thinking Canterbury Tales, not the story of Genesis. Mind-slipping.
Yes, you're right, Paradise Lost not as racy as Canterbury Tales.
:0)
The list left me whirling.
Post a Comment