Atlas Trail
A path through the eight authors LiteratureAtlas opened with, from the oldest surviving epic voice to a Nobel laureate of the twentieth century, tracing how the novel, the epic and the short story took shape across three thousand years and five literary traditions.
Stop 1 of 8.
Authors
Homer opens the trail: the epic voice the whole Western tradition of long narrative poetry answers to, and whose own existence is itself an open question on this atlas.
Stop 2 of 8.
Authors
Murasaki Shikibu, writing at the Heian court around the year 1000, gives the trail its earliest novelist and its first non-Western tradition.
Stop 3 of 8.
Authors
Dante carries the trail into the European Middle Ages and into the same Italian tradition that fixed the sonnet.
Stop 4 of 8.
Authors
Shakespeare, writing mostly in blank verse, shows the trail a single writer working across drama, the sonnet and narrative poetry at once.
Stop 5 of 8.
Authors
Jane Austen marks the novel's arrival as the dominant literary form of the century that followed.
Stop 6 of 8.
Authors
Fyodor Dostoevsky extends the novel's reach into psychological and philosophical territory later writers on this trail inherit.
Stop 7 of 8.
Authors
Gabriel Garcia Marquez brings the trail into twentieth-century Latin America and the magical realism the novel absorbed there.
Stop 8 of 8.
Authors
Toni Morrison closes the trail in the late twentieth century, a Nobel laureate whose novels return, at the trail's end, to the questions of memory and voice it opened with in Homer.
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