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
Marlowe’s Faustus is a clock; Goethe’s Faust is a career. Both sell a soul for knowledge, but only one is allowed to keep striving past the wreck of the beloved. The English play damns; the German poem almost canonizes appetite.
Dramatic poem · 1808 / 1832
Faust Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The scholar’s wager with Mephistopheles becomes a tour of desire: Gretchen’s ruin, classical Helena, land reclaimed from the sea. Striving itself is the poem’s ambiguous good.
Striving Seduction and care Tragedy · c. 1592
Doctor Faustus Christopher Marlowe
A scholar, bored of every faculty, sells his soul for twenty-four years of magic. He performs tricks for emperors and cannot repent. The clock is the play’s real antagonist.
Knowledge and damnation Time