Temporary Comment Section for "The Best Introduction To . . . "

Updated!

[Please see this post for the updated version of the list.]

It all started when I was an undergraduate.  One morning I woke up and decided to read a general history of every single American state. I made it through four or five before tiring of the genre.  At the time I wish I had a list of the best history of each state.  I asked a history professor of mine if such a list existed and was informed that not only did no list exist, but that the labor required to create one would boggled his imagination.  Needless to say, all of this happened when the WWW was in its infancy and blogs but a twinkle in its eye.  I thought perhaps I could cull a decent one from Wikipedia entries, but a cursory examination of topics upon which I have some expertise revealed that those references are of dubious quality.  Then I thought: I can start a movement.  So I sent Ralph an email about the state history project.  (About ten minutes ago.  Some nerve he has, not replying yet.)  But I can start a little something here.

My choice of both category and best book concerning it is intended as a way to begin the discussion.  I can only work with what I've read.  (Some areas I've read around in but can't think of a qualifier for "best introduction.")  This project has the possibility to demonstrate the real strength of the distributive intelligence review process.  Please suggest additional categories and alternative selections, as my list is no way authoritative or exhaustive.  I also want to avoid "representative" works, i.e. the best introduction to psychoanalysis being The Interpretation of Dreams.  I want books which cover a wider swath than a single work by a representative figure can. 

Note: All categories and/or periods contain all the problems inherent to categorization and periodization.  I also imagine that there must be a better way to organize this list, as this somewhat chronological organization seems unwieldy.  I expect many edits to both the body of this post and the substance of the list.

Literature or Literary Theory:

• Homeric: The Best of the Achaeans, Gregory Nagy
  
• Presocratic:
  
• Aristotelian:
• Platonic: Images of Excellence, Christopher Janaway
• Horatian:
• Augustinian:
• Patristic:
• Anglo-Saxon:
• Early Medieval:
• Twelfth Century Renaissance: The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950-1200, C. Stephen Jaeger
• Medieval: The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, David Wallace, ed.
• Late Medieval: Hochon's Arrow, Paul Strohm
• Italian Renaissance:
• Early Modern:
• English Renaissance: Renaissance Self-Fashioning : From More to Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt
• Elizabethan:
• Jacobean:
• Caroline:
• Commonwealth Period: Writing the English Republic : Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627-1660, David Norbrook
• Metaphyiscal Poetry:
• Neoclassical:
• Enlightenment:
• Age of Johnson:
• Early American:
• Captivity Narratives:
• Restoration:
• Augustun:
• Revolutionary American: Revolution and the Word, Cathy Davidson
• Romantic:
• Gothic:
• Picaresque:
• Antebellum American:
• Pre-Raphaelite:
• Victorian: The Victorian Frame of Mind, Walter Houghton
  
• American Civil War: Patriotic Gore: Studies in the American Civil War, Edmund Wilson
• Slave Narratives: To Wake The Nations, Eric Sundquist
• American Renaissance: Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination n the Age of Emerson and Melville,  David S. Reynolds
  
• Transcendalist:
• Domestic Fiction:Domestic Individualism, Gillian Brown
• Sentimental: Sensational Designs, Jane Tompkins
• Aestheticism and Decadence:
• Realist: The Social Construction of American Realism, Amy Kaplan
• Naturalist:
• American Modernist:
• British Modernist:
• Irish Modernist:
• Vorticist:
• Futurist:
• Russian Formalism:
• 1922: Reading 1922: Return to the  Scene of the Modern, Michael North
• The Jazz Age: Terrible Honesty, Ann Douglas
• The Harlem Renaissance:
• Social Realist:
• The Beats:
• The New York Intellectuals: The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930'2 to the 1980's Alan Wald
• Southern Agrarian: The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism, Mark Jancovich
• New Criticism: The New Apologists for Poetry, Murray Krieger
• Phenomenological: Truth and Method, Hans-George Gadamer
• Geneva School: Critics of Consciousness, Sarah Lawall
• Structuralism: Structuralist Poetics, Jonathan Culler
• French Structuralism: History of Structuralism I & II, Francoise Dosse
• Freudian Psychoanalytic:
• Lacanian Psychoanalytic: Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight, Shoshana Felman
• Bloomian:
• Post-Structural:
• Deconstructive: Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction, Vincent Leitch
• Marxist: Considerations on Western Marxism, Perry Anderson
• Frankfurt School: The Dialectical Imagination, Martin Jay
• Rhizomatic: A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari, Brian Massumi
• Semiotic:
• Reception Theory:
• Reader-Response Theory: Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction, Steven Mailloux
• Foucauldian: Saint Foucault, David Halperin
• First-Wave Feminist:
• Second-Wave Feminist: Around 1981: Academic Feminist Literary Theory, Jane Gallop
• Third-Wave Feminist:
• Post-Colonial:
• New Historicist: New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics, Brook Thomas
• Cultural Studies:
• Gender Studies:
• Queer Theory: Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
• African American:
• Asian American: Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance, Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong
• Chicano/Chicana: Chicano Narratives: The Dialectics of Difference, Ramon Saldivar
• Posthuman:

Additional Categories:

• Pastoral:
• Analytic:
• Existential:
• Settler Australian:
• Visual Culture: Reading American Photographs, Alan Trachtenberg
• New Americanist: The Futures of American Studies, Donald Pease and Robyn Wiegman, eds.
• French Realism:
• French Naturalism:

Comments

[Tim]

Homeric: Gregory Nagy/The Best of the Achaeans is probably still the best book to read if you're only going to read one (and now has the virtue of being published in a new edition--which I can only hope has gotten rid of the god-awful-ugly practice of boldfacing Greek transliterations--with a new introduction, so it fits both the "seminal" and "introductory" categories).

[Jon]

But a campus visit is just a series of dinner parties, with the one difference being that you can't get drunk.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Matt, David and Tim: Thanks for the suggestions. They'll be up there next slew of revisions.

MinnesotaJ, I'll answer the first part of your comment in a future post, since it's something I think frequently; as for the list getting more play, well, I have ideas about how to do that (things I should've done in the first place) and will be implementing them shortly. Cross-promotional-type stuff.

Jon, campus visits elsewhere must not be like what they are at Irvine; namely, brutal for the candidates. Maybe this means I'll actually enjoy mine.

[Jon]

Scott, of course they're brutal. They're a series of dinner parties at which you can't get drunk.