This is my reading list on modernism. It’s a work in progress and any suggestions gratefully received, especially with regard to poetry and drama about which I am particularly ignorant. At the moment I’m staying with works written before 1950 (for no good reason, other than the great flowering of modernism seems to have been by then). I’m trying to read roughly chronologically, although I have already messed up that plan.
1890 Knut Hamsun, Hunger
1904 Henry James, The Golden Bowl
1909 Gertrude Stein, Three Lives
1910 E.M. Forster, Howard’s End
1910 Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
1915 Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier
1915 D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow
1915 Dorothy Richardson, Pointed Roofs (Pilgrimage 1)
1916 Dorothy Richardson, Backwater (Pilgrimage 2)
1917 Luigi Pirandello, Right You Are (If You Think You Are)
1917 Dorothy Richardson, Honeycomb (Pilgrimage 3)
1918 Guillaume Apollinaire, Calligrammes
1919 Dorothy Richardson, The Tunnel (Pilgrimage 4)
1919 Dorothy Richardson, Interim (Pilgrimage 5)
1920 Hope Mirrlees, Paris
1921 Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author
1921 Dorothy Richardson, Deadlock (Pilgrimage 6)
1922 T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland
1922 James Joyce, Ulysses
1922 Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party
1922 Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies
1923 Dorothy Richardson, Revolving Doors (Pilgrimage 7)
1923 Italo Svevo, The Conscience of Zeno
1925 F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
1925 Franz Kafka, The Trial
1925 Dorothy Richardson, The Trap (Pilgrimage 8)
1927 Dorothy Richardson, Oberland (Pilgrimage 9)
1927 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
1928 André Breton, Nadja
1930 William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
1930 Olive Moore, Spleen
1931 Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie
1931 Dorothy Richardson, Dawn’s Left Hand (Pilgrimage 10)
1931 Virginia Woolf, The Waves
1935 Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris
[1935 Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet]
1935 Dorothy Richardson, Clear Horizon (Pilgrimage 11)
1936 Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
1936 Stevie Smith, Novel on Yellow Paper
1937 David Jones, In Parenthesis
1938 Samuel Beckett, Murphy
1938 Dorothy Richardson, Dimple Hill (Pilgrimage 12)
1940 Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
1943 Kathleen Raine, Poems 1935–1943
1944 T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
1944 Olive Moore, Spleen
1944 Anaïs Nin, Under a Glass Bell
1947 Ivy Compton-Burnett, Manservant and Maidservant
1947 Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
1967 Dorothy Richardson, March Moonlight (Pilgrimage 13)
To add
Anna Ahkmatova
W.H. Auden
Basil Bunting
Constantine P. Cavafy
e.e. cummings
H.D.
Robert Frost
Peter Jones (ed.), Imagist Poetry
Mina Loy
Marianne Moore
Ezra Pound
Wallace Stevens
Dylan Thomas
William Carlos Williams
William Butler Yeats
Ernst Toller
Paul Valéry
Robert Musil, A Man Without Qualities
Marcel Proust, In Search of Time Past
(Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907); from the MoMA website)