Great Works of Literature II

A Reader

by Catherine Keohane

Great Works of Literature II invites you to explore texts written by authors around the world from 1650 to the present. This reader collects and links to texts we’ll be exploring this semester. The Manifold platform will also allow us to engage in social annotation, sharing comments, questions, and ideas within the readings.

19th-century illustration of a scene in "The Bookworm", a short story by Pu Songling in Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Metadata

  • rights
    Creative Commons License Great Works of Literature II: A Reader by Catherine Keohane is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. License excludes materials from the Rockefeller Archive Center, used by permission for this reader only
  • publisher place
    New York City
  • rights holder
    Catherine Keohane

Table of Contents

“A Private Experience” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2009)

"Secretly I walk to the park" by Oral Arukenova (2020)

“Female 2000” by Souad Al-Mubarak Al-Sabah (2010)

“Elevation” by Charles Baudelaire (1857); please read the first translation by William Aggeler

“kitchenette building” by Gwendolyn Brooks (1963)

“The Lady with the Dog” by Anton Chekhov (1899)

A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe (1722)

“Our Casuarina-tree” by Toru Dutt (1899)

“You Foolish Men” by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (excerpt) by Olaudah Equiano (1789)

“A Nocturnal Reverie” by Anne Finch (1713)

“A Small Needful Fact” by Ross Gay (2015)

The Madman, Selected poems by Kahlil Gibran (1918)

Fantomina by Eliza Haywood (1725)

“To One who has been Long in City Pent” by John Keats (1817)

“Happiness” by Jane Kenyon (1995)

“Extra” by Yiyun Li (2005)

Horror Story Carmen Maria Machado

“Los Perdidos del Bosque” by Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)

“Trowbridge Street” by Octavio Paz (written between 1969-1975)

“Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti (1862)

Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, chapters 2 and 4 by Mary Seacole (1857)

“The Walk” by Kamila Shamsie (2020)

“To Melancholy. Written on the Banks of the Arun” by Charlotte Smith (1786)

“The Young Gentleman Who Couldn’t Spell” by Songling Pu (written by 1679, published 1740)

“The Lady’s Dressing Room” by Jonathan Swift (1732)

“Punishment” by Rabindranath Tagore (1893)

The Importance of Being Earnest Oscar Wilde

“On Imagination” by Phillis Wheatley (1773)

“Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” by William Wordsworth (1798)

Other Resources

“Formatting Quotations from Literary Texts”

Rockefeller Archives Center Great Smoky Mountains correspondence and diaries

Rockefeller Archives Center National Parks Photos