The Experience of Literature

The Experience of Literature: A Reader with Commentaries is an anthology of drama, fiction, and poetry selected and edited by the American critic Lionel Trilling and published in 1967.[1][2] The anthology is intended to provide a representative selection of works that Trilling considered to be great literature.[3] It includes examples from the whole history of western literature, from Greek tragedy up to the 1960s, with each piece preceded by an introductory preface by Trilling.[4] The selections reflect the literary canon of western universities at that time, with correspondingly low representation of women and writers of colour.[5]

Part 1: Drama

Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Lear
Henrik Ibsen, The Wild Duck
Anton Chekhov, The Three Sisters
George Bernard Shaw, The Doctor's Dilemma
Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author: A Comedy in the Making
William Butler Yates, Purgatory
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo

Part 2: Fiction

Nathaniel Hawthorne, My Kinsman, Major Molineux
Herman Melville, "Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street"
Plus 20 more stories.

Part 3: Poetry

  • "Lydicus"
  • "Dover Beach"
  • "Ode to a Nightingale"
  • "To His Coy Mistress"
  • "Ode to the West Wind"

Plus many more poems

Part 4: Poetry for Further Reading

Contains over 200 poems

References

  1. ^ Trilling, Lionel (1967). The Experience of Literature: A Reader with Commentaries. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. ISBN 9780385013949.
  2. ^ O'Hara, Daniel (1988). Lionel Trilling: The Work of Liberation. University of Wisconsin Press. pp. 213–243. ISBN 9780299113148.
  3. ^ Himmelfarb, Gertrude (1999). "Excerpts from On Looking into the Abyss (adapted from 'The Abyss Revisited,' The American Scholar) 1994 (summer 1992)". In Rodden, John (ed.). Lionel Trilling and the Critics. University of Nebraska Press. p. 447. ISBN 9780803239227.
  4. ^ O'Hara 1988, p. 213.
  5. ^ O'Hara 1988, p. 214.


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