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
  2. The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois
  3. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
  4. The Trial by Franz Kafka
  5. Ulysses by James Joyce
  6. The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot
  7. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
  8. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  9. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

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