Readers Preference Reviews

Divided into seven major sections this large collection of lectures by five different professors covers every period from the Near Eastern and Mediterranean, Classical, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Neoclassic, and 19th Century, to Modern literature. The section on Near Eastern and Mediterranean Foundations includes lectures on Gilgemesh, Genesis, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Job, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Sappho and Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The following section on Literature of the Classical World includes the works of Herodotus, Thucydides, Aristophanes, Plato, Menander, Catullus and Horace, Virgil, Ovid, Tacitus, Plutarch, Petronius and Apuleius, The Gospels, and Augustine. Both of these first two sections are presented by professor Elizabeth Vandiver, a professor of Classics at Whitman College.

The third part, Literature of the Middle Ages includes Beowulf, The Song of Roland, El Cid, Tristan and Isolt, The Romance of the Rose, Dante Alighieri, Petrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio, Sir Gwain and the Green Knight, and Chaucer. This portion is presented by professor Thomas F. X. Noble, Director of the Medieval Institute and Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He does a particularly good job of presenting Sir Gwain and the Green Knight and Chaucer in a very interesting manner.

The fourth part, Literature of the Renaissance, covers Christine de Pizan, Erasmus, Thomas More, Michel de Montaigne, Francois Rabelais, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Miguel de Cervantes, John Milton, and Blaise Pascal. These are all presented by professor Ronald B. Herzman, Professor of English at the State University of New York, Genesco.

Part five, Neoclassic Literature and the 18th Century, examines Moliere, Jean Racine, Sister Juana Ines de la Cruz, Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Volatire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Johnson, Denis Diderot, William Blake, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. This section is done by Professor Susan Sage Heinzelman, Associate Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. A particularly good lecturer, her treatment of Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and William Blake is not to be missed.

Parts six and seven, Literature of the 19th Century and Modern Literature, covers the likes of William Wadsworth, Jane Austen, Stendhal, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Gustave Flaubert, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, William Butler Yeats, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Bertolt Brecht, Albert Camus, and Samuel Beckett. These sections are both presented by professor James A. W. Hefferman, retired professor of English at Dartmouth College.

If you want to understand some of the best that western literature has to offer I can't think of a better introduction to the authors behind those works than this series of lectures. Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition, 2nd Edition is highly recommended to anyone wanting to better understand these authors and literary works.

Lecturers: Various Professors
Publisher: The Teaching Company
4151 Lafayette Center Drive, Suite 100
Chantilly, VA 20151-1232
Copyright: 2005
Format: Audio CD, DVD, Audio Tape
Lectures: 84