The Illustrated Timeline of Western Literature

Book excerpt: Professors, students, and anyone who loves to read will want this fascinating and attractive volume. Beginning with great works from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, this literary timeline gallops from Mesopotamian pictograms and Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic to Renaissance and Baroque masterworks by Machiavelli and Moli�re, and on to modernism. Along the way, it presents the birth of the novel, Gothic chills, Thomas Paine’s rabble-rousing, as well as landmark French and Russian authors, Emerson’s essays, and the first detective story by Poe. Victoriana, the Aesthetic Movement, Utopian Literature, and Naturalism make their appearance, all the way up to today’s Tom Stoppard and Tony Kushner. There’s a detailed introduction, plus color-coding to show whether a work is poetry, fiction, non-fiction, or drama.