English literary canon

Comprehensive canon
The following is a list of canonical authors and canonical works. Names bolded represent highly significant authors or works.

Medieval
Drama
 * The York Cycle
 * Everyman

Poetry
 * Beowulf
 * Brunanburh
 * Cædmon: Cædmon's Hymn
 * Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde
 * William Langland: Piers Plowman
 * Cynewulf: The Ascension
 * Deor
 * Discourse of the Soul to its Body
 * Dream of the Rood
 * Pearl Poet: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl
 * The Battle of Maldon
 * The Seafarer
 * The Wanderer
 * Widsith

Prose

Renaissance
Drama
 * Frances Beaumont and John Fletcher: Philaster
 * Thomas Dekker: The Shoemaker's Holiday
 * Robert Greene: Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, James the Fourth
 * John Lyly: Endimion
 * Ben Jonson: The Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair: A Comedy, Volpone, Every Man in His Humour
 * Christopher Marlowe: The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
 * Philip Massinger: A New Way to Pay Old Debts
 * George Peele: The Old Wives' Tale
 * William Shakespeare
 * Nicholas Udall: Ralph Roister Doister
 * John Webster: The Duchess of Malfi

Poetry
 * John Donne
 * George Herbert: The Temple
 * William Shakespeare
 * Edmund Spenser: The Fairie Queen
 * Alexander Pope

Prose
 * Francis Bacon: New Atlantis
 * Robert Burton: The Anatomy of Melancholy
 * Thomas Deloney: Jack of Newbury
 * George Gascoigne: The Adventures of Master F. J.
 * John Lyly: Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit
 * Thomas Malory: Morte D'Arthur
 * Thomas More: Utopia
 * Thomas Nashe: The Unfortunate Traveller
 * Henry Neville: The Isle of Pines
 * Philip Sidney: Arcadia

English Civil War and Restoration
Drama

Poetry
 * Thomas Carew: The Rapture
 * John Cleveland: The Rebel Scot
 * Abraham Cowley: The Mistress
 * Richard Crashaw: 'Delights of the Muses
 * John Denham: Cooper's Hill
 * John Dryden
 * Robert Herrick: Hesperides
 * Andrew Marvell
 * John Milton: Paradise Lost
 * Francis Quarles: Emblems
 * Thomas Traherne: The Wonder
 * Henry Vaughan: Silex Scintillans
 * Edmund Waller: The Bud, Go, lovely Rose, On a Girdle

Prose
 * Richard Baxter: Saints' Everlasting Rest
 * Aphra Behn: Oroonoko
 * Thomas Browne
 * John Bunyan: The Pilgrim's Progress
 * Thomas Fuller: The Worthies of England
 * Jeremy Taylor: Holy Living, Holy Dying
 * Thomas Urquhart
 * Izaak Walton: The Compleat Angler

Romantic
Drama
 * Henry Fielding: The Modern Husband
 * David Garrick and George Colman: The Clandestine Marriage;
 * John Gay: The Beggar's Opera
 * Oliver Goldsmith: She Stoops to Conquer
 * John O'Keeffe: Wild Oats
 * Percy Shelley: The Cenci, Prometheus Unbound

Poetry
 * William Blake: Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Jerusalem
 * Robert Burns
 * George Gordon Byron: Don Juan, Child Harold's Pilgrimage
 * Samuel Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Cristabel
 * William Collins
 * William Cowper
 * Thomas Gray: Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
 * Leigh Hunt
 * John Keats: Sleep and Poetry, Lamia, Hyperion, Odes, Fall of Hyperion
 * Samuel Johnson: The Vanity of Human Wishes
 * Charles Lamb
 * Edgar Allan Poe: "The Raven"
 * Alexander Pope: Dunciad, Rape of the Lock
 * Walter Scott
 * Percy Bysshe Shelley: Mont Blanc, The Cloud, Ozymandius, Adonais
 * Christopher Smart: A Song to David
 * James Thomson
 * William Wordsworth: The Prelude, "Lucy" poems, "Matthew" poems, Tintern Abbey

Prose
 * Jane Austen
 * Frances Burney: Evelina
 * Jane Collier:
 * James Fenimore Cooper
 * Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders
 * Thomas De Quincey: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
 * Maria Edgeworth: Belinda
 * Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones
 * Charlotte Lennox: The Female Quixote
 * Matthew Lewis: The Monk
 * Henry Mackenzie: The Man of Feeling
 * Ann Radcliffe
 * Samuel Richardson: Pamela, Clarissa
 * Walter Scott: Waverley
 * Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
 * Tobias Smollet: Humphrey Clinker
 * Lawrence Sterne: Tristam Shandy, Sentimental Journey
 * Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's Travels
 * Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto

Sarah Scott, Sarah Fielding

Victorian
Drama
 * Gilbert and Sullivan
 * George Bernard Shaw (continuing into 20th Century)
 * Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest

Poetry
 * Emily Dickinson
 * Matthew Arnold
 * Elizabeth Barrett Browning
 * Robert Browning
 * Thomas Carlyle
 * Lewis Carroll: Jabberwocky, The Hunting of the Snark
 * Gerard Manley Hopkins
 * A. E. Housman: Shropshire Lad
 * Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


 * Christina Rossetti: Goblin Market
 * Algernon Charles Swinburne
 * Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Ulysses, Idylls of the King, In Memoriam A. H. H., The Lady of Shalott
 * Joanne Slack " A man and his dog"

Prose
 * Mary Elizabeth Braddon: Lady Audley's Secret
 * Charlotte Brontë
 * Emily Brontë
 * Lewis Carroll
 * Wilkie Collins
 * Charles Dickens
 * Benjamin Disraeli: Sybil
 * George Eliot: Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss, Adam Bede
 * Elizabeth Gaskell: Mary Barton, North and South
 * George Gissing: The Odd Women, New Grub Street
 * Thomas Hardy
 * O. Henry
 * Washington Irving
 * Henry James
 * Herman Melville "Moby Dick"
 * Margaret Oliphant: Miss Marjoribanks
 * Robert Louis Stevenson
 * Bram Stoker: Dracula
 * William Makepeace Thackeray: Vanity Fair
 * Mark Twain
 * H. G. Wells
 * Edith Wharton
 * Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray'
 * Ellen Wood: East Lynne

20th century
Drama
 * Samuel Beckett
 * Harold Pinter
 * J. M. Synge
 * William Butler Yeats

Poetry
 * W. H. Auden
 * Rupert Brooke
 * T. S. Eliot
 * Seamus Heaney
 * Dylan Thomas
 * William Butler Yeats
 * Ezra Pound
 * Sylvia Plath
 * Hart Crane

Prose
 * William Faulkner "Light in August", "The Sound and the Fury", "Go Down Moses", "As I Lay Dying", "Absalom, Absalom!"
 * James Joyce "Ulysses", "A portrait of the artist as a young man", "Finnegans Wake", "Dubliners".
 * Virginia Woolf "The Waves", "Orlando", "To the Lighthouse", "Mrs Dalloway".
 * Saul Bellow
 * Thomas Mann
 * Robert Fitzgerald
 * Agatha Christie
 * Felipe Fernández-Armesto
 * E. M. Forster: A Passage to India
 * Aldous Huxley
 * Rudyard Kipling
 * D. H. Lawrence
 * C. S. Lewis
 * George Orwell - Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four
 * J. R. R. Tolkien

Developing novels
Novel development

Historic novels
 * Walter Scott: Waverley (1814)
 * Walter Scott: Rob Roy (1817)
 * Walter Scott: Ivanhoe (1819)
 * Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Crime and Punishment (1866)
 * Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
 * R. D. Blackmore: Lorna Doone (1869)

Gothic novels
 * Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto (1764)
 * Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
 * Matthew Lewis: The Monk (1796)
 * Ann Radcliffe: The Italian (1796)
 * Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey
 * Jonathan Chappell: Jane Slayer (2014)

Sensation novels
 * Wilkie Collins: The Woman in White (1860)
 * Ellen Wood: East Lynne (1861)
 * Mary Elizabeth Braddon: Lady Audley's Secret (1862)
 * Wilkie Collins: Armadale (1866)
 * Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone (1868)

Sentimental novels
 * Henry Mackenzie: The Man of Feeling (1771)

African American Literature
 * Robert Hayden
 * Jay Wright
 * Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Jazz
 * Jean Toomer
 * Maya Angelou
 * Lucille Clifton
 * Rita Dove
 * Nikki Giovanni
 * Michael S. Harper
 * Yusef Komunyakaa
 * Carl Phillips

Major plays
- William Shakespeare complete works

- Knot of the Heart by David Eldridge

- Equus by Peter Shaffer

- Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett