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Beginner’s Guide

This is a beginner’s map of classical literature across East and West. Seventy authors and immortal characters, from Homer’s epics to Shakespeare’s stage, from Li Bai and Du Fu to the rise and fall of Dream of the Red Chamber, from The Tale of Genji to One Thousand and One Nights, on to the modern novels of Tolstoy, Kafka, and Márquez. The goal is not to memorize a reading list, but to see one thing clearly: how the great civilizations, thousands of miles apart and unknown to one another, each raised their own literature to such heights — and how often, at almost the same time, they asked the same questions.

Know These Few Things First

  • This site puts authors and characters in the same graph: Homer, Shakespeare, and Cao Xueqin are authors; Sun Wukong, Hamlet, and Lin Daiyu are the characters under their brush — the "created" relation joins an author to his most famous creation.
  • Many classics carry an "authorship riddle": whether Homer was a real person (the "Homeric question"), the authorship of Journey to the West and Water Margin, who wrote the last forty chapters of Dream of the Red Chamber — this site states the standard accounts and the main disputes without deciding.
  • In literature the "real" and the "fictional" are often intertwined: the model for the Tang monk is the real Xuanzang, and Romance of the Three Kingdoms is seven parts fact, three parts fiction. Note on each card the distinction between "historical model" and "literary figure."
  • This universe connects naturally to the others: Homer’s Troy is in the "Greek & Roman" universe; the Three Kingdoms that Luo Guanzhong wrote is that very stretch of history in the "Three Kingdoms" universe; Xuanzang is both a character here and a real monk of history.

A Few Suggestions

  1. Look at the timeline first, to feel the "meanwhile" — when Dante was writing the Divine Comedy, The Tale of Genji had been out for three hundred years, and Omar Khayyam was in Persia writing poetry with one hand and reforming the calendar with the other. Civilizations scattered across four directions, unknown to each other, raised their literatures to new heights at almost the same time.
  2. The links in the graph are mainly the "author → character" relation of creation, lineage of influence, and ties of friendship; Shakespeare and Cervantes "dying in the same year," the friendship of Li Bai and Du Fu, are all in the graph.
  3. Don’t treat this as a "have I read it" checklist. Even if you have read none of them, once you see "who, in what age, in what form, answered what question," your sense of the map of literature is already built.

How to Read

To feel "what the world was writing at the same time"

Look at the timeline, or go to the "World Lens" and read by year. You will find: in 1616 Shakespeare and Cervantes took their bows at almost the same moment, while in the same century China produced Journey to the West; and when Dante was writing his Hell, The Tale of Genji had long been out. Literature is never one line — it is many lines running at once.

To see "an author and his most famous character"

Look at the "created" links in the graph — Shakespeare and Hamlet, Cervantes and Don Quixote, Cao Xueqin and Baoyu–Daiyu, Wu Cheng’en and Sun Wukong. An author’s greatest creation is often better known than the author himself.

To find the doors into the other subjects

Focus on Homer (connecting to Troy in "Greek & Roman"), Luo Guanzhong (connecting to "Three Kingdoms"), and Xuanzang (connecting to the real Xuanzang of history). Literature is a mirror onto every other subject — the same Troy, in the epic, in the archaeology, in the history, is the same one place.

Go Deeper: Introductory Reading

The Homeric epics (a good verse translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey)The fountainhead of Western literature — worth starting here.
Shakespeare, HamletOne play is enough to taste his language and his insight into human nature.
Dream of the Red ChamberThe summit of the classical Chinese novel; read alongside an introduction to "Redology" to see why two centuries have not exhausted it.

A Thread of Coordinates

Epic and Source (BCE)
  • Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey
  • Sappho founds personal lyric verse
  • Virgil, the Aeneid
  • Valmiki, the Ramayana
Eastern Poetry and Tales (8th–13th c.)
  • 744: Li Bai and Du Fu meet
  • Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji (c. 1010)
  • Omar Khayyam, the Rubáiyát
  • Su Shi, banished to Huangzhou, writes the Red Cliff rhapsodies
Drama and the Modern Novel (14th–19th c.)
  • Dante, the Divine Comedy (c. 1320)
  • Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605)
  • Shakespeare and Cervantes die in the same year (1616)
  • Goethe, Faust (Part One, 1808)
The Four Summits of the Chinese Novel (14th–18th c.)
  • Luo Guanzhong, Romance of the Three Kingdoms
  • Shi Nai’an, Water Margin
  • Wu Cheng’en, Journey to the West (c. 1592)
  • Cao Xueqin, Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1763)