The Canon Library

Western Canon reading path

Modernism

A route through fractured time, unstable narrators, urban consciousness, and formal experiment.

How to use this reading path

Read the poems, novels, and philosophical provocations alongside one another. Modernism becomes clearer as a shared crisis of inherited forms rather than a single style.

Books
9
Estimated hours
190
Suggested pace
7 months
Difficulty
Advanced

The reading order

  1. Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche Find available editions on Bookshop.org
  2. The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois Find available editions on Bookshop.org
  3. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka Buy this available edition
  4. The Trial by Franz Kafka Find available editions on Bookshop.org
  5. Ulysses by James Joyce Find available editions on Bookshop.org
  6. The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot Find available editions on Bookshop.org
  7. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf Buy this available edition
  8. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald Buy this available edition
  9. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison Buy this available edition

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