Name Four Classical English Novels

So I was thinking about China's Four Great Classical Novels. Besides being considered masterpieces of the art of prose fiction, they have two interesting traits:

1. They're extremely popular and influential, with all except Dream Of The Red Chamber having inspired manga, films, TV series, and video games.
2. Long books are long.

So I started trying to think of equivalents in other literatures. French was easy: Rabelais' Gargantua And Pantagruel, Balzac's The Human Comedy, and Hugo's The Hunchback Of Notre Dame and Les Miserables, or knock out one of Hugo's and add one by Alexandre Dumas.

In Russian, Tolstoy's War And Peace and Anna Karenina plus Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and Crime And Punishment could crowd out any other authors.

Now, what about in English?

I'd say Oliver Twist, for one, on the basis that it's one of the most adapted books. The Jungle Books, for a second one.

Do you mean "English/British author" or "written in English, author may be British or otherwise?"

Hmm, maybe like Tom Jones, Vanity Fair, Bleak House, and Middlemarch?- although while they all fit the long classic description, not sure they fit the "very culturally influential" part.

@Maddy: Written in English. I thought of naming the American novel Moby Dick, which has been popular enough to get every sort of adaptation but a video game, while also being a great book (it was included in Great Books of the Western World and is even recognized as canonical in France).

Also I think that if our language has an equivalent to the beloved long historical fantasy Journey To The West, it's either La Morte Darther (popular historical fantasy, but perhaps too archaic to be considered a novel) or Gullivers Travels (popular fantasy and an undisputed great book).

edited 3rd Dec '11 9:43:01 PM by Rottweiler

Moby Dick is a must. It's essentially the Citizen Kane of American, if not English, Literature (well, half of it anyways, the other half being Melville's obession with all things WHALE ).

Paradise Lost would be another candidate, reflecting another, very different literature from the Early Modern period of English history.

James Joyce is a more Modern author that comes to mind, though I've only read Dubliners and not the magnum opus Ulysses.

But I think limiting English literature to just 4 is impossible, considering how enormous Western canon is, and we're just limiting it to English and fiction. It makes me wonder why literature from South America, Africa, and Asia in general appears more scarce.

This all reminds how many landmark books I haven't read, but I'm reluctant to because, like Citizen Kane, these are the kind of novels that you really need to have explained to you just why they are important and what makes them so.

Also, I would add The Count Of Monte Cristo to your list of French literature, but just because it's my all-time favorite novel. I think Proust gets mentioned a lot too, but the most I know on him is from the Monty Python sketch.

edited 3rd Dec '11 11:04:52 PM by Eschaton

Paradise Lost is an epic poem, not a novel.

If you're not from South America, Africa, or Asia, their literatures probably appear more scarce because only a little of it (hopefully the best) is imported to your own country and/or translated. Also, of course, developing countries of course don't have as many publishing houses and printshops as industrialised countries.

I've heard repeatedly that Moby Dick and The Great Gatsby are the first and second greatest American novels, so considering the large proportion of English-language literature that's American they should both probably be on there. Overall, though, I think I'm going to agree with whoever it was that said there's far too much highly important English literature to pick a top four.

The War Of The Worlds, which I will never tire of championing, has inspired films, TV series, music and videogames, but it's not particularly long.

Pride And Prejudice for the win. Also possibly Frankenstein, considering it was the first science fiction novel.

edited 7th Dec '11 3:52:47 PM by NoirGrimoir

American or English novels?

For English: Ulysses, Great Expectations, A Tale Of Two Cities, Heart Of Darkness.

For America: The Great Gatsby, Invisible Man, The Sound And The Fury, The Sun Also Rises. Maybe replace one with Steinbeck if necessary.

edited 8th Dec '11 1:03:32 PM by Torquey

The best English novels tend to be a little more concise (or maybe women authors were just better at being relatively succinct - my favourite English books are the Brontes', with Austen pretty close behind them, and Frankenstein also near the top). If Pride and Prejudice or Jane Eyre were longer, I'd suggest them (they're also both in the Top 10 of the BBC's list of the 100 best-loved novels).

The Lord of the Rings fits the bill easily as enormously influential, having plenty of adaptations, and being extremely long, even it was written yesterday compared to classical Chinese literature. Something by Dickens has to go on there - I'd lean towards Oliver Twist, since it is the best-known generally, but Great Expectations may also be a possibility.

For America (I haven't read any of these, so I'm going by length and ubiquity): Moby Dick, The Grapes of Wrath, Gone With the Wind (I loathe it, but it was certainly influential and is absolutely a doorstopper). And, on the other side of the "debate" from GWTW, Uncle Tom's Cabin, which had an immense influence on politics in its day - or, if you want something that's still popular and hugely well-known today, Little Women.

If you go with Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Great Expectations and The Lord of the Rings for Britain, and Moby Dick, The Grapes of Wrath, Gone With the Wind and ''Little Women for the US, that's 50% written by women for each country - pretty good, especially compared with 0% for the other countries mentioned!

edited 8th Dec '11 1:31:59 PM by WarriorEowyn

I'd cut out most of the stuff so far mentioned by a Troper other than Rottweiler. Given how much literature has changed in the past two centuries, stories from the 1300s through the 1700s can't reasonably be compared with stories from the 1800s onwards.

So, pre-1800s, a novel (so not Paradise Lost) and highly influential and oft-remade (was Gullivers Travels really that influential?) I'd say The Canterbury Tales for sure, but I'm not sure what else to pick.

edited 10th Dec '11 8:30:23 PM by feotakahari

I'm sure Gullivers Travels is the first (at least the first well-known) example of the "character trying to survive in a too large/too small world" story that became so popular in science fiction. Plus the first appearance I know of of a Floating Island, and the role reversal between sapient houyhnhnhms (not going to pretend I spelled that right) and beastly yahoos in the final part. Also, it's had at least three film adaptations that I know of, and has been repackaged as a children's book many times.

The Canterbury Tales is another narrative poem, not a novel. It's had a huge impact on fiction, but the OP did specifically ask for novels, after all.

edited 11th Dec '11 1:58:04 AM by DoktorvonEurotrash

Let's keep in mind that the novel didn't really establish itself as a genre until relatively recently in English lit. Most early narratives (Beowulf and friends) are not considered novels.

If the books have to be novels, I'd say Pilgrims Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Oliver Twist, and either Moby Dick or The Scarlet Letter.

Your Russian list is way too narrow and ignores a lot of great authors. Replace Anna Karenina with Gogol's Dead Souls and replace Crime and Punishment with a Solzhenitsyn work.

edited 18th Dec '11 7:33:21 PM by lazerface

Lord Of The Rings would have to be on any English list, because while it may not be the best written (AUGGH THE FANS ARE SHOOTING AT ME) book from England, I would argue it is the most influential. Seriously, name one modern fantasy story that isn't influenced in some way or another by it.

Yes, but how much of an influence has it been on what you'd call literary fiction?

This is why I personally believe that the divide between "literary fiction" and "genre fiction" needs to be shot and stamped on until it's dead.

Well, there is a divide, and it's not simple enough to just be 'shot and stamped on'. However, it's not just a divide with literary one side, genre on the other. Take speculative fiction: while they both fall under that category, something like Cat's Cradle is important twentieth-century literature, and something like The Dresden Files isn't. So when I say 'literary fiction', I don't mean 'things that aren't genre fiction'. What the divide is really based on is quality, complexity, themes and so on. Lord of the Rings has been a massive influence on relatively unimportant fantasy, but looking at English literature in general what difference has it really made?

Also, @Jimmmmyman, there are actually quite a few modern fantasy writers, like China Mieville, who think that Lord of the Rings has been a horrible influence on the genre and whose works approach fantasy in a completely different way.

edited 20th Dec '11 3:34:38 AM by cityofmist

The English-language novel didn't really exist until the mid-18th century. What's more, most novels written before 1800 were promising-but-flawed attempts at figuring out the genre's possibilities. Any "Big Four" would probably come from the genre's 19th-century maturity onward.

As others have said, trying to impose a canonical quarter of novels just doesn't fit the "shape" of the English novel's history. If I had to pick the four greatest, I'd go with "Great Expectations," "Moby Dick," "Nostromo," and "The Violent Bear It Away." The four most influential on English letters? "David Copperfield," "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," "Heart of Darkness," and "Ulysses."

edited 28th Dec '11 9:53:12 AM by Jhimmibhob

The English-language novel is a form too young to have created the cornerstones of culture that these Chinese novels seem to comprise. In any case, English prose pales in comparison to the majesty of English verse. Far better to drop the requirement that they be novels, in which case the list actually seems pretty clear to me:

The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer; The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser; William Shakespeare's plays; Paradise Lost by John Milton.

These are easily the closest English analogues.

edited 1st Jan '12 4:31:33 AM by Bajazeth

I think on the whole I agree with you, but I think you'd need something a little more recent than Paradise Lost to account for the huge changes in style and tradition since then. Maybe drop The Faerie Queene and add something from the nineteenth or twentieth century.

Well, looking at the Chinese novels, the most recent of them is from the 18th century, so I'm not sure it's necessarily such a problem. I have no idea what you might include from 19th/20th century literature because I don't really think any of it approaches the significance of any of the four I named.

I am kind of tempted to go for something by T S Eliot because I think he's probably the most recent genuinely 'great' writer but I'm not sure 'The Waste Land' is long enough or if Four Quartets is good/influential enough.

(In any case, TFQ is really important! It's way under-rated but definitely up there on a similar level with the others. I'm not saying Spenser was as good as Shakespeare or anything but he's certainly up there. I think it's something of a Trope Codifier.)

edited 2nd Jan '12 9:02:29 AM by Bajazeth

For American Lit, seconding Ellison's Invisible Man or perhaps Wright's Native Son.

I think a language is way too broad for this sort of thing. Perhaps dividing it further, into time periods or, like some earlier tropers said, countries, might catch more of what we're talking about (hell, we could do this with Pacific region novels (I submit Cuckoo's Nest). Then again, conclusiveness doesn't exactly gel with this either, Journey exceeds destination and all that. Not to mention it'd get too easy and ruin the fun.

That said, one of Shakespeare's plays has to appear on the list. I'd also add Catch 22 if it's not too modern (don't really read a lot of old English).

edited 30th Jan '12 2:22:34 AM by WhoNeedsSleep