Enlightenment
c. 1660–1800Swift to Goethe. Reason, satire, and the birth of the modern novel. Literature becomes a tool for social criticism.
Hamlet
William Shakespeare·1601
Troilus and Cressida
William Shakespeare·1601
Othello
William Shakespeare·1603
All's Well That Ends Well
William Shakespeare·1604
Measure for Measure
William Shakespeare·1604
Timon of Athens
William Shakespeare·1605
King Lear
William Shakespeare·1605
Antony and Cleopatra
William Shakespeare·1606
Coriolanus
William Shakespeare·1608
Pericles
William Shakespeare·1608
Shakespeare's Sonnets
William Shakespeare·1609
Cymbeline
William Shakespeare·1610
The Tempest
William Shakespeare·1611
Henry VIII
William Shakespeare·1613
The Two Noble Kinsmen
William Shakespeare·1614
Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra·1615
The Winter's Tale
William Shakespeare·1623
Macbeth
William Shakespeare·1623
Twelfth Night
William Shakespeare·1623
The Temple
George Herbert·1633
The Complete English Poems
John Donne·1633
Meditations on First Philosophy
René Descartes·1641
The Book of Five Rings
Miyamoto Musashi·1645
Leviathan
Thomas Hobbes·1651
Paradise Lost
John Milton·1667
Pensées
Blaise Pascal·1670
Ethics
Baruch Spinoza·1677
The Pilgrim's Progress
John Bunyan·1678
The Rape of the Lock
Alexander Pope·1714
Robinson Crusoe
Daniel Defoe·1719
Gulliver’s Travels
Jonathan Swift·1726
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
David Hume·1748
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
Henry Fielding·1749
Candide
Voltaire·1759
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Laurence Sterne·1767
Confessions
Jean-Jacques Rousseau·1773
Common Sense
Thomas Paine·1776
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin·1791
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Samuel Taylor Coleridge·1798