Literature selections and new to CW

[Lisa Kelly]

Hi! I have just received Homer for dd11 and have been reading about CW lately. I have noticed there are literature selections for Diogenes and up and am thinking of using these books as part of our literature studies through grades 8-12. Does anyone have a full list of these books with specific authors and translators preferrred by CW so that I can buy the correct ones as I see them at used book stores, etc.? I try to buy them as I find them. Thank you so much!

[Lene Mahler Jaqua]

Before I tell you our lists so far, let me give a short song and dance about why we choose what we choose. Our aim of course is choosing great literature for analysis. The choices are many. There is so much good material out there, so our secondary selection criteria are that the pieces illustrate the rhetorical concepts that we are trying to teach. That means that one person's favorite piece might not be chosen be it ever so good because right now, f.ex. I am writing a section for CW about invective and I need an author that illustrates invective.

So, our list is a wonderful reading guide, but be sure that your student reads more and broader than what we recommend. Just reading is valuable, not everything can be dissected and analyzed as we do here. Many books should just be read and enjoyed.


Here is the list so far:

Maxim:

Autobiography by Ben Franklin

Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare



Chreia:

Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature by St. Basil

Antigone by Sophocles (optional Oedipus Rex and i]Oedipus at Colonus[/i])

The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien (alternate selections The Hobbit by Tolkien or Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain)

The Oresteia by Aeschylus

Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson



Herodotus:

The Histories by Herodotus

The Oresteia by Aeschylus (Yes, again!!)

On the Incarnation by Athanasius

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

The Ecclesiastical History of the English People by Bede


The book that I am currently working on Plutarch

has the following selections written in stone: Lives by Plutarch, Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. (I could say more, but no more books are scheduled for certain.)


The last book in the core series

Demosthenes

has Demonsthenes' Orations as a given, but that is a vague concept since different editors include different orations of his in their anthologies. [For sure, we will use On the Crown and his orations against Philip II of Macedon.


And for our enrichment series, the

poetry books:

we recommend reading selections from the romantic poets, old English alliterative poetry (like Sir Gawain and Beowulf) as well as The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, the Fairie Queene, the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid.


Finally, our concluding enrichment book

Shakespeare
will require a copy of the complete works of Shakespeare (plays and sonnets) as well as access to the major works of Defoe, Richardson, Austen, Dlckens (Sorry!! I have to write his last name like this because of the Proboards banned word list , George Eliot, Trollope, Hardy, ... all the English (and we will add Americans and other English speaking) greats. Read as much and as broadly as you can here. The books are relatively easy to digest.

Lene

[Lisa Kelly]

Thank you, Lene

We will be using many selections from Ambleside Online as well but I wanted to lay this out so that we can choose carefully and not end up overloaded. Thanks again for your help!