Those works of fiction that people tend to study at school, often called the "canon". You can tell these by how many
fanfics at
Fanfiction.net have the writer telling you they wrote it for a school assignment and how many people on
MySpace have them listed as their "favorite book" even though they never mention reading anything else. Often where we are taught how to plant
Epileptic Trees and first learn that
Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory and that
Freud Was Right.
Almost none of them were written with
the intent of being studied and analyzed in a classroom, and most of them were
definitely not written
for kids.
See also
Small Reference Pools.
Film
Literature
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, often quite controversially due to people mistaking Mark Twain's point for its exact opposite. Perhaps for this reason, Twain includes a facetious foreword threatening readers who look for meaning in it.
- The Aeneid
- Anabasis for students of Ancient Greek
- All Quiet on the Western Front
- Animal Farm
- Anna Karenina
- Anthem and other Ayn Rand books are becoming increasingly common in the U.S.
- Arabian Nights
- Anything by Jane Austen, the most common being Pride and Prejudice
- The Awakening
- The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is common in the UK
- Brave New World
- Bridge to Terabithia
- Works by the Bronte sisters, such as
- The Brothers Karamazov
- The Butterfly Revolution
- Casabianca
- Cannery Row
- The Catcher In The Rye
- Anything by Charles Dickens
- The Cone Gatherers
- Crime and Punishment
- Daisy Miller
- The Devil\'s Arithmetic
- Anything by Edgar Allan Poe
- Edward Thomas, in Britain
- Effi Briest, in Germany
- Also always there: The works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The rest is rotating, but they are very, very hard to miss.
- Ethan Frome
- The Epic of Gilgamesh
- The Faerie Queene
- Fahrenheit 451
- A Farewell to Arms
- Flowers for Algernon
- For Whom the Bell Tolls
- Frankenstein
- The Gift of the Magi
- The Giver
- Go Ask Alice
- The Grapes of Wrath
- Great Expectations
- The Great Gatsby
- The Handmaid\'s Tale
- Homer's epic poems,
- Harrison Bergeron
- Heart of Darkness
- The Histories of Herodotus, for students of Ancient Greek.
- Johnny Tremain
- Julie of the Wolves
- Anything by Franz Kafka
- The Kite Runner
- The Little Prince
- Lord of the Flies
- Lost Girls
- Lolita
- "The Lottery"
- Miriam
- Moby-Dick
- The Last of the Mohicans
- The Master and Margarita
- Anything by Toni Morrison, but particularly Beloved or Song of Solomon
- The Most Dangerous Game
- Night
- Nineteen Eighty-Four
- In the Philippines, Jose Rizal's novels
- Of Mice and Men
- The Old Man and the Sea
- One Hundred Years Of Solitude
- On My Honor
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but author Ken Kesey objected to its use in classrooms because it wasn't "great literature" and guessed that teachers probably only used it because the sex and swearing could hold students' attention
- Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit in the U.K.
- The Outsiders
- Paradise Lost
- The Poisonwood Bible
- Alexander Pushkin's works (Eugene Onegin, Dubrovsky, The Captain's Daughter, Boris Godunov)
- The Red Pony
- Anything by Robert Frost
- Robinson Crusoe
- The Scarlet Letter
- A Separate Peace
- The Shahnameh in Iran
- Slaughterhouse Five
- Stone Fox
- The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde
- The Stranger
- The Sun Also Rises
- A Tale of Two Cities
- Tess of the d'Urbervilles
- That Was Then This Is Now
- Things Fall Apart
- To Kill a Mockingbird
Live Action TV
- Talking Heads
- Blue Remembered Hills
- Roots
Theatre
