Commonly Read Novels and Major Literary Works
The College Board publishes a recommended reading list, while emphasizing that it "does not mandate any particular authors or reading list." The reading list contains four major categories:
- Poetry, ranging from the 16th century (William Shakespeare) to living poets (Seamus Heaney);
- Drama, ranging from Greek tragedies (Aeschylus) to post-modern absurdists (Tom Stoppard);
- Fiction – novels and short stories, from the 18th century comedies of manner of Jane Austen to the famous "Lost Generation" of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway;
- Expository prose (essays), including Ralph Waldo Emerson and George Orwell.
Read more about this topic: Advanced Placement English Literature And Composition
Famous quotes containing the words literary works, commonly, read, novels, major, literary and/or works:
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)
“Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Philosophy ... does not talk, but write, or, when it comes personally before an audience, lecture or read; and therefore it must be read to-morrow, or a thousand years hence. But the talker must naturally be attended to at once; he does not talk on without an audience; the winds do not long bear the sound of his voice.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Of all my novels this bright brute is the gayest.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“No culture on earth outside of mid-century suburban America has ever deployed one woman per child without simultaneously assigning her such major productive activities as weaving, farming, gathering, temple maintenance, and tent-building. The reason is that full-time, one-on-one child-raising is not good for women or children.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“Criticism occupies the lowest place in the literary hierarchy: as regards form, almost always; and as regards moral value, incontestably. It comes after rhyming games and acrostics, which at least require a certain inventiveness.”
—Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)
“We have not all had the good fortune to be ladies. We have not all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)