The joy of book organization, aka The classics by ... - Aesop to Oz

So I finished Emma awhile ago and have been meaning to write about it but I got distracted by another project, organizing my classic lit collection into a literary period timeline. Mine is the type of OCD brain that gets a thrill from putting things in their place. Lists, timelines, and charts are delicious to me. I'm sure if any of the authors of the books I am classifying were alive, they would hate me. Screaming that they cannot be easily categorized. They are artists and cannot simply be lumped together with other artists into neat little packages. Haha tough luck sucker. When you put your work out there you subjected it to left brain nutters like me.

Okay I'm exaggerating lol. I'm not primarily concerned with classifying and trapping each work into a box. My goal with the list is to see where each book fits in with the whole. To get a better idea of the over all journey from the Greeks all the way through the Modernist and to think about how they compare to one another while I read through my collection.

So far I have been really surprised by how hard it is to find out which books belongs to which period. I do not want to simply rely on dates because some authors, obviously, will buck the norm. They may be better classified into a movement earlier or later.

My dates for each period are a little rough and require more research. I have a lot of books still to categorize and even the ones I have done already are by no means without error. As I read through the collection I ?will be able to fine tune the list and dates.

Here is a glimpse at part of the literary period timeline.

800-400 BC Greek
Aesop's Fables by Aesop (620-560BCE)
Essential Dialogues of Plato by Plato (380-360BC)
The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides (431BCE)
Poetics and Rhetoric by Aristotle (335BCE)
Republic by Plato (360BC)
Three Theban Plays by Sophocles (401BC)

The Art of War by Sun Tzu (600BC)

259BC-150AD Ancient Rome
The Aeneid by Vergil (29-19BC)
Metamorphoses by Ovid (8 AD)

450-1066 Medieval
The Arabian Nights by Anonymous (700)
Beowulf Translated by John McNamara (850)

1066-1500 Middle English
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (1390)
The Inferno by Dante Alighieri (1313)
Paradiso by Dante Alighieri (1321)
Purgatorio by Dante Alighieri (1315)

1500-1660 The Renaissance
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (1605)
Hamlet by William Shakespeare (1600)

1660-1700 Neoclassical.. The Restoration
Paradise Lost by John Milton (1667)
The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (1678)

1700-1745 Neoclassical.. Augustan
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)
Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe (1722)
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719)

1750-1800 Age of Enlightenment / Reason
Candide by Voltaire (1758)
Common Sense and Other Writings by Thomas Paine (1791)
The Federalist by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, & John Jay (1787)
Founding America: Documents from the Revolution to the Bill of Rights Edited by Jack N. Rakove (1773-1789)

1785-1830 The Romantics
Emma by Jane Austen (1815)
Ivanhoe by Walter Scott (1819)
Lord Byron The Major works (1832)
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (1814)
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (1817)
Persuasion by Jane Austen (1818)
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813)
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (1811)

Something that surprised me already was that The Art of War was written during the same period as the Greeks. Secondly, I had no idea that George Eliot was a Realist. I thought she was earlier, in the Romantics period.

If you're interested, you can find my entire Literary Period timeline under The Collection at the top of the blog.

Source: http://aesoptooz.blogspot.com/2011/05/joy-of-book-organization-aka-classics.html

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