This fifth edition of Literature of the Western World is intended, as its predecessors were, to provide the best possible materials for courses in the literatures of Europe and America from the earliest times to the present. It is a textbook in the broad sense of "a book of texts," rather than in the narrow one of a book arranged along the lines of a single course. It is a small library of Western literature upon which a wide range of courses might be based and which students might preserve after a particular class is over as a useful part of their personal libraries. Through the successive incarnations of the book, the editors have clung to a quite personal conception of their roles as participants in a conversation with instructors and students who use the book, and they have made choices of texts and presentation accordingly.
In such a conversation, the first question is, inevitably, "What shall we read?" This text is limited to the literatures of Europe and America and thus is designed either for courses in Western literature or for the Western portions of courses in globle literature. The editions are acutely aware that the West is not the world and that a course in Western literature, even a two-semester one,should be part of a curriculum that includes non-Western literature as well, preferably with books that treat the literatures of East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and South America as thoroughly as this one does Western literature.
- Neoclassicism
- Jean De La Fontaine
- Moliere
- Marie De La Vergne De La Fayette
- Jean Racine
- Jonathan Swift
- Alexander Pope
- Voltaire
- Denis Diderot
- Francis Bacon
,etc.