Two books, one table
Compare Set two works beside each other. Suggested pairings are arguments, not assignments.
First work Choose a work The Iliad The Odyssey Oedipus Rex Antigone Lyric Fragments The Aeneid The Georgics Metamorphoses Odes The Divine Comedy La Vita Nuova The Canterbury Tales Beowulf Hamlet King Lear Sonnets Don Quixote Essays Paradise Lost Tartuffe Gulliver’s Travels Candide Confessions The History of Rasselas Lyrical Ballads The Prelude The Great Odes Frankenstein The Tell-Tale Heart Pride and Prejudice Emma Great Expectations Bleak House Anna Karenina War and Peace Middlemarch Ulysses A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Mrs Dalloway To the Lighthouse The Trial The Metamorphosis The Waste Land Beloved One Hundred Years of Solitude Giovanni’s Room The Fire Next Time The Handmaid’s Tale Genesis The Book of Job The Psalms The Oresteia The Bacchae The Song of Roland Confessions Doctor Faustus Faust Moby-Dick Madame Bovary The Brothers Karamazov Poems Heart of Darkness The Sun Also Rises Absalom, Absalom! Blood Meridian Second work Choose a work The Iliad The Odyssey Oedipus Rex Antigone Lyric Fragments The Aeneid The Georgics Metamorphoses Odes The Divine Comedy La Vita Nuova The Canterbury Tales Beowulf Hamlet King Lear Sonnets Don Quixote Essays Paradise Lost Tartuffe Gulliver’s Travels Candide Confessions The History of Rasselas Lyrical Ballads The Prelude The Great Odes Frankenstein The Tell-Tale Heart Pride and Prejudice Emma Great Expectations Bleak House Anna Karenina War and Peace Middlemarch Ulysses A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Mrs Dalloway To the Lighthouse The Trial The Metamorphosis The Waste Land Beloved One Hundred Years of Solitude Giovanni’s Room The Fire Next Time The Handmaid’s Tale Genesis The Book of Job The Psalms The Oresteia The Bacchae The Song of Roland Confessions Doctor Faustus Faust Moby-Dick Madame Bovary The Brothers Karamazov Poems Heart of Darkness The Sun Also Rises Absalom, Absalom! Blood Meridian
Founding as a crime that the founder cannot stop committing. Aeneas leaves Dido for a future people; Sutpen discards a son for a design. Both books know that a house is built on a refused tenderness.
Epic poem · 19 BCE
The Aeneid Virgil
Aeneas flees burning Troy and, after Carthage and the underworld, fights to plant a future Rome in Italy. Piety wins; the cost is written in every victory.
Novel · 1936
Absalom, Absalom! William Faulkner
Quentin Compson and Shreve reconstruct Thomas Sutpen’s design: a plantation, a house, a dynasty built on a repudiated son. The story is told in overlapping voices until design and incest and racial terror are one wreck.