Level II Masterlist: 22 Literature & Art Hexagonal Galleries
Every primary text on the literature floor of the Babel Nexus Index: epics (Gilgamesh, Homer, the Mahabharata), the first novels (Genji, Don Quixote), wisdom literature (Proverbs, the Analects, Marcus Aurelius), the first plays (Aeschylus, Sophocles, the Nō theatre), first fantasy literature (Apuleius, Malory, MacDonald, Dunsany, Eddison, Mirrlees), fables (Aesop, the Hitopadeśa, the Jātaka, La Fontaine, Reynard, Krylov, Orbeliani, Anansi), wordless novels (Masereel, Hermann-Paul, Nückel, Ward, Gross), the first mystery stories (Poe, Doyle, Collins), the first science fiction (Shelley, Verne, Wells, Burroughs), the first horror (Walpole, Shelley, Stoker), the first romance novels (Richardson, Austen, Brontë), library-set fiction (Borges, France, M. R. James), the craft of writing fiction and poetry (Aristotle’s Poetics, Horace’s Ars Poetica, Wharton, Lubbock, Strunk), satire (Aristophanes, Lucian, Erasmus, Swift, Voltaire, Twain, Bierce), letters and essays (Cicero, Seneca, Montaigne, Bacon, Milton, Emerson), the Victorian novels of Charles Dickens (The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Bleak House, Great Expectations), the plays and sonnets of William Shakespeare (Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, The Tempest), and the adventure novels (Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Dumas’s The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, London’s The Call of the Wild), Russian literature (Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard), the literature of visual art (Vitruvius’s De Architectura, Vasari’s Lives of the Painters, Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting, Ruskin’s Modern Painters, and the letters of Van Gogh), and women’s literature (Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies, Wollstonecraft’s Vindication, Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the Brontës’ Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, Eliot’s Middlemarch, Dickinson’s Poems, and Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own).