Dominant group/Core reading list

The theory of dominant group with respect to literature falls into at least two situations: a dominant group of literature (authors and works) or a dominant group associated with literature (influencing the production of works).

Of necessity to develop a deep and sustained program of reading is the effort to explore human history to encounter those influential thinkers who over the centuries and perhaps millennia have grappled with the fundamental concern of human life posed by dominant groups, not necessarily human groups, and the forces behind them. A group of influential thinkers, acting as a group to rule or govern the thinking of others, would also be a dominant group.


 * Amanda Podany, Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Brotherhood of Kings is a synonym for dominant group, when "brotherhood" means an "association" rather than a "friendship".


 * Stephen Mitchell, Gilgamesh, A New English Version (NY: Free Press, 2004).


 * Confucius, The Analects Translation by R. Dawson, Oxford: Oxford University, 2008.


 * The Qu’ran, M.A. Abdel Haleem, ed. New York: Oxford World Classics, 2008.


 * Beowulf, 2001, Translated by S. Heaney, W.W. Norton & Company.


 * Herodotus (2003) The Histories, Translated by Aubery de Selincourt, Penguin Classics.


 * Killis Campbell, 1907, The Seven Sages of Rome, Ginn.


 * Aeschylus. The Oresteia, trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 1984.


 * Ibn Khaldun. The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans. Franz Rosenthal. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.


 * Plato. The Republic, trans. C.M.A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co., 1992.


 * Ivan Van Sertima and Larry Obadele Williams, ed. Great African Thinkers: Cheikh Anta Diop, Transaction Publishers, 1986.


 * Cheikh Anta Diop, Precolonial Black Africa, 1988, Chicago River Press.


 * M. Nussbaum's "Is Nietzsche a political thinker?" International Journal of Philosophical Studies 1997.


 * J.C. Yardley, Hannibal's War, The complete Livy in English, Oxford World's Classics. 2009.


 * Livy, The Early History of Rome. Penguin Books Limited. 2005.


 * Rhiannon Ash, Alison Sharrock, Fifty Key Classical Authors, 2002.


 * David Rheubottom. Age, Marriage, and Politics in Fifteenth-century Ragusa. 2000. Oxford University Press.


 * Marjorie Shostak, Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman, New York: Harvard University Press, 1981.


 * Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution: Notes on the French Revolution and Napoleon, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, September 2001, prepared between 1853 and 1857, Francois Furet and Francoise Melonio, ed.


 * Charles Robert Darwin, On the origin of the species by means of natural selection: or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, London: John Murray, 1859.


 * Margaret Mead ed. 1955 Cultural patterns and technical change. New York: Mentor Books.


 * George Gaylord Simpson, Tempo and Mode in Evolution, New York: Columbia University Press, 1944.


 * Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, Boston: Harvard University Press, 2002.


 * Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, Linguistic genocide in education, or worldwide diversity and human rights?, Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, January 2000.


 * Ernst Mayr, What Evolution Is Evolution, New York: Basic Books, 2001.