Somebody said they didn't like lists of 100 best authors, but I think it's a fun parlour game, so I'm going to try a top ten. Caveat: this is a game - I don't seriously think there's a single scale of literary excellence. Wodehouse may not have the political scope or depth of character as Tolstoy but he's a lot funnier.
Best authors, not best books, because of the difficulty of defining a book when it comes to plays and non-epic poems. Yes, it's unfair to Anon and multi-author works.
Western authors only because of sheer ignorance. I've seen too many lists of 100 great authors where the only non-Western author is Murasaki Shikibu - who deserves her place, but that implies that there aren't any others, which is not true.
So:
Homer (assuming he's an author)
Virgil
Dante
Cervantes
Shakespeare
Goethe
Dostoyevsky
Tolstoy
Proust
Kafka
Arguments?
Top twenty?
Best non-dramatic non-epic poet? (For my part, Horace, though I can't read languages other than English.)
I'm on a re-watch of Star Trek Deep Space Nine with a friend, and we've just reached the episode in which Sisko is likened to Inspector Javert from Les Miserables, for his relentless pursuit of a Starfleet traitor. Which I thought was a pretty serious literary reference for Star Trek, though I suppose the musical was already popular.
Somebody said they didn't like lists of 100 best authors, but I think it's a fun parlour game, so I'm going to try a top ten. Caveat: this is a game - I don't seriously think there's a single scale of literary excellence. Wodehouse may not have the political scope or depth of character as Tolstoy but he's a lot funnier.
Best authors, not best books, because of the difficulty of defining a book when it comes to plays and non-epic poems. Yes, it's unfair to Anon and multi-author works.
Western authors only because of sheer ignorance. I've seen too many lists of 100 great authors where the only non-Western author is Murasaki Shikibu - who deserves her place, but that implies that there aren't any others, which is not true.
So:
Homer (assuming he's an author)
Virgil
Dante
Cervantes
Shakespeare
Goethe
Dostoyevsky
Tolstoy
Proust
Kafka
Arguments?
Top twenty?
Best non-dramatic non-epic poet? (For my part, Horace, though I can't read languages other than English.)
Arguments? Yeah. You mention one woman, but then there are no women on your list. You can call this a game, but I guess you didn't think about what it implies when you include no women.
Also: Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Medieval Florence, Renaissance Spain, Renaissance England, Weimar Classicism, Golden Era Russia (two of these), Belle Epoque France, Early Modernist Austria-Hungary -- five of these ten are from Europe, late 18th century to early 20th. Which is more than a little skewed.
What I thought the absence of women implies is that the patriarchy makes things difficult for women writers.
Austen had to follow her family around to Bath for ten years instead of concentrating on her writing . If Dickens had died after writing six novels he wouldn't have written David Copperfield, let alone Bleak House or Great Expectations.
five of these ten are from Europe, late 18th century to early 20th. Which is more than a little skewed.
I don't think it's as skewed as the graph of the literate population of Europe though. Looking at the list I'm surprised I can't think of more twentieth century writers I'd want to include.
One paradox of my list of top ten. I've put both Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky on it, and I didn't and wouldn't put Pushkin on it. On the other hand, if you asked for a list of the greatest Russian authors Pushkin unquestionably gets the top spot.
This is one reason these lists are a game.
In terms of influence, it seems to me that for most Western thought the top of the list is going to be Plato, Aristotle and Shakespeare. I think people have enjoyed Cervantes for many centuries but I am unconvinced that it was really influential in the sense that others followed the same theme or patterns. There is not much else like Don Quixote.
In terms of novels that are not rubbish and were game-changers for the future development of the genre, I would certainly think Austen and the Brontes would be high up there.
I think Dickens and Hardy would be there because they were so popular and because their characters entered the lexicon of conversation for generations in a way that others did not. I do not think they are "great" in the sense of really being top literature.
It does depend on what you mean, I think a novel can be popular without being influential. A piece can even be read for many generations without the context within it was written. For example Jonathan Swift was satire of his time, later people read the stories as imaginative fantasy without that context.
I think the word "canon" gives a clue as to current attitudes to literature (and poetry).
I'm not convinced about this use of "canon" originating in satirical use, but I did find the following:
In 1595 William Covell, a church of England clergyman and a fellow of Queen’s College in Cambridge, wrote Polimanteia, which was produced by John Legate, the Cambridge University printer. Polimanteia is a polemical treatise aimed at “the frivolous and foolish conjectures of this age,” as the title-page states. ("this age" being a time of economic inflation and political discontent.)
In which:
Addressing the English universities, Covell exhorted them, in his words, to “take the course to canonize your owne writers, that not every bald ballader to prejudice of Art, may passe current with a Poet’s name.” By “your own writers,” Covell meant any English poets who had a claim to a liberal education. Covell named several: Spenser, “Lucrecia Sweet Shakspeare,” and “courte-deare-verse happie Daniell”among others.
In terms of influence, it seems to me that for most Western thought the top of the list is going to be Plato, Aristotle and Shakespeare. I think people have enjoyed Cervantes for many centuries but I am unconvinced that it was really influential in the sense that others followed the same theme or patterns. There is not much else like Don Quixote.
I find myself wondering if English speakers would rate Shakespeare higher than non-English speakers might. Is Shakespeare studied in non-English speaking countries like he is the Anglosphere? I know ballets and non-English operas and the like have been based on his plays, but it seems to me that his influence was primarily on the language. Does that translate, as it were?
Which raises the question of how well anyone can assess the influence of an author who wrote in a language the one making the assessment doesn’t speak.
In terms of influence, it seems to me that for most Western thought the top of the list is going to be Plato, Aristotle and Shakespeare.
Does Shakespeare really influence Western thought (in a way comparable with Plato or Aristotle)?
He's persuasive on how people would feel in the situations he puts them in, - and in finding resonant metaphors to express them in. And he's persuasive on how his characters would think, which is not the same as how they rationally ought to think. Ulysses' speech on degree doesn't mention the obligations of the higher to the lower, because he's using the ideas to flatter Agamemnon. What Shakespeare believed on the subject we don't know.
I think people have enjoyed Cervantes for many centuries but I am unconvinced that it was really influential in the sense that others followed the same theme or patterns. There is not much else like Don Quixote.
It's been said that every subsequent novel is a rewrite of Don Quixote. That is, the classic novel plot has a protagonist who thinks they're in one kind of story whereas they're actually in a different kind of story. It's probably an overgeneralisation: it doesn't apply to Persuasion or Bleak House I think (at least not as far as Anne or Esther are concerned, but maybe it does to Wentworth and Richard). But it does apply to Emma, to Madame Bovary, to Middlemarch, to Great Expectations, Crime and Punishment, and War and Peace. (None of the above play the metafictional games of the second part of Don Quixote.)
Cervantes I think originated the basic realist move of invoking what would happen in a dominant genre of books and then having the plot do something less exalted.
Each culture has its own canon. It borrows some things from other cultures to put in its own canon, but the canon is nevertheless its own. I don't see why everything has to be either completely universal or entirely personal; there is space for other scales of unit at which cultural factors work. To me, it's pretty obvious that there is a British, and indeed an English, canon, working alongside others in the English language. How one constitutes that canon, in literary and/or pedagogical terms and for these different if related purposes, is another matter.
Nonetheless, it would be nice to talk about actual works of literature, rather than just focussing on the sociology and/or philosophy of literature as a phenomenon.
Each culture has its own canon. It borrows some things from other cultures to put in its own canon, but the canon is nevertheless its own. I don't see why everything has to be either completely universal or entirely personal; there is space for other scales of unit at which cultural factors work.
I agree. But the post as I responding to said “for most Western thought the top of the list is going to be Plato, Aristotle and Shakespeare.” (Emphasis added.). I take that to be suggesting if not a universal canon as such, a multicultural Western canon.
I find myself wondering if English speakers would rate Shakespeare higher than non-English speakers might. Is Shakespeare studied in non-English speaking countries like he is the Anglosphere? I know ballets and non-English operas and the like have been based on his plays, but it seems to me that his influence was primarily on the language. Does that translate, as it were?
The lists I've seen of essential or top books compiled by Francophones all have Shakespeare at the number one spot.
Eighteenth century European literature was dominated by French neoclassical literature, which was pretty restricted in what it could do. Pretty much every European language that formed its own literature in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including nineteenth century French literature, did so by appealing to Shakespeare as a precedent.
On Shakespeare appearing on French lists of the world's greatest literature: I think this is related to the fact that the French are much more open than most English speaking countries to reading books in translation. In my local library, I'd estimate that a good 30% of the works of fiction on the shelves were originally written in another language (often English but also lots of other European languages, and Japanese*). There is also an excellent English language section.
I don't think people who speak English as their first language are exposed to as much as literature in translation as French people are (no idea about other languages). I'd venture to suggest that this is more about the hegemony of English in recent history than the superiority of English language authors. I would suggest that Shakespeare has been far more widely read in French than Victor Hugo has been in English, for example.
*One of my favourite authors is Haruki Murakami. Given that I can't read Japanese, I always read him in French because I find the French translations much more readable than the English ones.
Does Shakespeare really influence Western thought (in a way comparable with Plato or Aristotle)?
I think that's two different questions - one being the extent to which Shakespeare influences Western thought, the other being the manner in which he influences Western thought.
I also bear in mind that, as briefly alluded to on the Evangelism thread, language is both informational and conceptual. We use words to convey information, and to express concepts. And in our thinking, language (at some level of thought) in turn influences our thoughts and our conceptual view of the world. When a word is created for an idea, people start thinking about that idea as being a thing that exists. Language shapes us, our thoughts, and our societies.
So I think the extent of Shakespeare's influence is comparable - after all, he's explicitly studied by many more students in many more schools that Plato or Aristotle.
But the manner of their respective influence seems distinct. Not only are Plato and Aristotle not studied by so many people, but the profound influence of their philosophical thinking on western society is also not studied as widely.
Which is to say that Shakespeare's influence on thought is through his influence on language, which is probably more visible (eg as evident in his inevitable appearance on canonical lists of English Literature), whereas Plato and Aristotle's influence on thought is probably more direct, and visible to those who have studied it (eg as evident in their inevitable appearance on canonical lists of Western Thought).
He's persuasive on how people would feel in the situations he puts them in, - and in finding resonant metaphors to express them in. And he's persuasive on how his characters would think, which is not the same as how they rationally ought to think.
How many people do you know who think as they rationally ought to think?
In terms of influence, it seems to me that for most Western thought the top of the list is going to be Plato, Aristotle and Shakespeare.
Does Shakespeare really influence Western thought (in a way comparable with Plato or Aristotle)?
He's persuasive on how people would feel in the situations he puts them in, - and in finding resonant metaphors to express them in. And he's persuasive on how his characters would think, which is not the same as how they rationally ought to think. Ulysses' speech on degree doesn't mention the obligations of the higher to the lower, because he's using the ideas to flatter Agamemnon. What Shakespeare believed on the subject we don't know.
I think people have enjoyed Cervantes for many centuries but I am unconvinced that it was really influential in the sense that others followed the same theme or patterns. There is not much else like Don Quixote.
It's been said that every subsequent novel is a rewrite of Don Quixote. That is, the classic novel plot has a protagonist who thinks they're in one kind of story whereas they're actually in a different kind of story. It's probably an overgeneralisation: it doesn't apply to Persuasion or Bleak House I think (at least not as far as Anne or Esther are concerned, but maybe it does to Wentworth and Richard). But it does apply to Emma, to Madame Bovary, to Middlemarch, to Great Expectations, Crime and Punishment, and War and Peace. (None of the above play the metafictional games of the second part of Don Quixote.)
Cervantes I think originated the basic realist move of invoking what would happen in a dominant genre of books and then having the plot do something less exalted.
Can you explain what you mean? I cannot think of another novel that is even slightly similar to Don Quixote, no characters that are similar to Don Q or Sancho Panza, nothing where the author appears inside the novel, nothing where one half of the novel references the reception gained from the other half.
Of the above I am only really familiar with Crime and Punishment and I cannot think of a single aspect that reflects Don Quixote.
I am not a literary critic in any sense but it seems to me that the linkages you point to above are humbug.
In terms of influence, it seems to me that for most Western thought the top of the list is going to be Plato, Aristotle and Shakespeare....
If one is talking specifically about influence on Western thought rather than about a literary canon, would one not be looking at a totally different canon, one to which literary merit is largely incidental, one that contains names like Aquinas, Scotus, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, and perhaps one ot two more recent names? I do not think Shakespeare is that relevant to the history of thought.
In terms of influence, it seems to me that for most Western thought the top of the list is going to be Plato, Aristotle and Shakespeare....
If one is talking specifically about influence on Western thought rather than about a literary canon, would one not be looking at a totally different canon, one to which literary merit is largely incidental, one that contains names like Aquinas, Scotus, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, and perhaps one ot two more recent names? I do not think Shakespeare is that relevant to the history of thought.
Nor are Cervantes, Austin, Dickens or Hardy.
Why would you think Shakespeare was irrelevant to the history of thought? Like or loathe Dickens, he clearly influenced how British people thought about Christmas for many generations.
It's been said that every subsequent novel is a rewrite of Don Quixote. That is, the classic novel plot has a protagonist who thinks they're in one kind of story whereas they're actually in a different kind of story. It's probably an overgeneralisation: it doesn't apply to Persuasion or Bleak House I think (at least not as far as Anne or Esther are concerned, but maybe it does to Wentworth and Richard). But it does apply to Emma, to Madame Bovary, to Middlemarch, to Great Expectations, Crime and Punishment, and War and Peace. (None of the above play the metafictional games of the second part of Don Quixote.)
Cervantes I think originated the basic realist move of invoking what would happen in a dominant genre of books and then having the plot do something less exalted.
Can you explain what you mean? I cannot think of another novel that is even slightly similar to Don Quixote, no characters that are similar to Don Q or Sancho Panza, nothing where the author appears inside the novel, nothing where one half of the novel references the reception gained from the other half.
Of the above I am only really familiar with Crime and Punishment and I cannot think of a single aspect that reflects Don Quixote.
I am not a literary critic in any sense but it seems to me that the linkages you point to above are humbug.
I explained what I meant above. Don Quixote thinks he's the protagonist of a story about knight errants but he's in Renaissance Spain but he's a terrible knight errant; Raskolnikov thinks he's the protagonist of a story about Napoleon but he's a terrible Napoleon.
That's not a kind of protagonist you get before Cervantes.
Likewise, realism as a literary style and virtue doesn't really exist before Cervantes. Don Quixote turns on flea-ridden inns that the Don can mistake for castles and basins that he can mistake for helmets - that kind of material reality isn't found in ambitious fiction before Cervantes.
As I said, the basic gesture, in earlier stories s this would happen, but in this story reality ensues, originates with Cervantes and has been a staple gesture of fiction ever since.
Cervantes' role as a pioneer of metafictional trickery is another matter - that comes back in various postmodernist twentieth century authors (eg Nabokov) though none of them do it with Cervantes' panache.
Laurence Sterne (18th century England) is another progenitor of both realism and metafiction: but he owes a lot to Swift and Swift was an admirer of Cervantes (and Rabelais).
In terms of influence, it seems to me that for most Western thought the top of the list is going to be Plato, Aristotle and Shakespeare....
If one is talking specifically about influence on Western thought rather than about a literary canon, would one not be looking at a totally different canon, one to which literary merit is largely incidental, one that contains names like Aquinas, Scotus, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, and perhaps one ot two more recent names? I do not think Shakespeare is that relevant to the history of thought.
Nor are Cervantes, Austin, Dickens or Hardy.
Why would you think Shakespeare was irrelevant to the history of thought? Like or loathe Dickens, he clearly influenced how British people thought about Christmas for many generations.
I think you're using the everyday definition of "thought" here, which is not the one people are using when they make statements(accurate or otherwise) like "Plato was the originator of western thought."
Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese have influenced the way Americans think about crime for several generations. But I don't think we would list them with William James and John Dewey as exemplars of "American thought".
What I thought the absence of women implies is that the patriarchy makes things difficult for women writers.
Austen had to follow her family around to Bath for ten years instead of concentrating on her writing . If Dickens had died after writing six novels he wouldn't have written David Copperfield, let alone Bleak House or Great Expectations.
So Austen was great a lot earlier in her life than Dickens was.
five of these ten are from Europe, late 18th century to early 20th. Which is more than a little skewed.
I don't think it's as skewed as the graph of the literate population of Europe though. Looking at the list I'm surprised I can't think of more twentieth century writers I'd want to include.
Including no one from the last 100 years makes it extremely skewed, if you're looking at the literate population of Europe.
I think it's worth reflecting on what Shakespeare contributed in literary terms - and no, I don't think of him as a 'philosopher' as such. Yet he did shape the way we speak to a certain extent. He coined new words, and added phrases to the lexicon.
In literary terms, as well as marvellous blank verse (which he didn't invent of course), I think it is fair to say that his characters have greater psychological depth than most characters in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.
That isn't to say that all the other plays were wooden. Some cracking plays around at that time, as well as some turkeys.
We have to disaggregate Shakespeare from the 19th century 'Bardolatry' though. That cast a long shadow.
Did he shape the way we think?
I read an interesting article recently, can't remember where, about how and why the fledgling USA embraced Shakespeare so wholeheartedly. Themes from Julius Caesar, King Lear and so on fed into the new Republic's vision of itself.
Shakespeare is big in Russia too, apparently. I would imagine for different reasons.
It's a cliche I know, but Russian literature seems to have gone for the big themes - sin, redemption, love, death (cue Woody Allen), war ...
I'm told the Chinese have a soft spot for Shakespeare too. I know they like Dickens.
In terms of influence, it seems to me that for most Western thought the top of the list is going to be Plato, Aristotle and Shakespeare....
If one is talking specifically about influence on Western thought rather than about a literary canon, would one not be looking at a totally different canon, one to which literary merit is largely incidental, one that contains names like Aquinas, Scotus, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, and perhaps one ot two more recent names? I do not think Shakespeare is that relevant to the history of thought.
Nor are Cervantes, Austin, Dickens or Hardy.
Why would you think Shakespeare was irrelevant to the history of thought? Like or loathe Dickens, he clearly influenced how British people thought about Christmas for many generations.
I think you're using the everyday definition of "thought" here, which is not the one people are using when they make statements(accurate or otherwise) like "Plato was the originator of western thought."
Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese have influenced the way Americans think about crime for several generations. But I don't think we would list them with William James and John Dewey as exemplars of "American thought".
If that was the case then the only way an author could have an impact on "thinking" would be if they wrote philosophical books. I do not accept that.
In terms of influence, it seems to me that for most Western thought the top of the list is going to be Plato, Aristotle and Shakespeare....
If one is talking specifically about influence on Western thought rather than about a literary canon, would one not be looking at a totally different canon, one to which literary merit is largely incidental, one that contains names like Aquinas, Scotus, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, and perhaps one ot two more recent names? I do not think Shakespeare is that relevant to the history of thought.
Nor are Cervantes, Austin, Dickens or Hardy.
Why would you think Shakespeare was irrelevant to the history of thought? Like or loathe Dickens, he clearly influenced how British people thought about Christmas for many generations.
I think you're using the everyday definition of "thought" here, which is not the one people are using when they make statements(accurate or otherwise) like "Plato was the originator of western thought."
Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese have influenced the way Americans think about crime for several generations. But I don't think we would list them with William James and John Dewey as exemplars of "American thought".
If that was the case then the only way an author could have an impact on "thinking" would be if they wrote philosophical books. I do not accept that.
No, a non-philosopher can obviously have an influence on thinking and hence on thoughts. But when people on this thread were using the phrase "western thought", they were using a definition of "thought" that is more or less synonymous with "philosophy".
Comments
But yes ...
I don’t remember whether the character in that adaptation was 'plain' or otherwise. Not that that's any indication of sanctity on my part ...
Best authors, not best books, because of the difficulty of defining a book when it comes to plays and non-epic poems. Yes, it's unfair to Anon and multi-author works.
Western authors only because of sheer ignorance. I've seen too many lists of 100 great authors where the only non-Western author is Murasaki Shikibu - who deserves her place, but that implies that there aren't any others, which is not true.
So:
Homer (assuming he's an author)
Virgil
Dante
Cervantes
Shakespeare
Goethe
Dostoyevsky
Tolstoy
Proust
Kafka
Arguments?
Top twenty?
Best non-dramatic non-epic poet? (For my part, Horace, though I can't read languages other than English.)
But if you want a fun parlour game, can you please start it on the board that's for fun parlour games?
Arguments? Yeah. You mention one woman, but then there are no women on your list. You can call this a game, but I guess you didn't think about what it implies when you include no women.
Austen had to follow her family around to Bath for ten years instead of concentrating on her writing . If Dickens had died after writing six novels he wouldn't have written David Copperfield, let alone Bleak House or Great Expectations.
Dante (especially with the Sayers translation and notes!)
Chaucer
Spenser
Shakespeare
Milton
Tolkien
C.S. Lewis
Charles Williams
Lots more, but those are ones that spring most quickly to mind for me.
Lots of theology (which also includes Lewis and Williams of course) but that's not exactly a novel or such.
This is one reason these lists are a game.
In terms of novels that are not rubbish and were game-changers for the future development of the genre, I would certainly think Austen and the Brontes would be high up there.
I think Dickens and Hardy would be there because they were so popular and because their characters entered the lexicon of conversation for generations in a way that others did not. I do not think they are "great" in the sense of really being top literature.
It does depend on what you mean, I think a novel can be popular without being influential. A piece can even be read for many generations without the context within it was written. For example Jonathan Swift was satire of his time, later people read the stories as imaginative fantasy without that context.
I think the word "canon" gives a clue as to current attitudes to literature (and poetry).
I'm not convinced about this use of "canon" originating in satirical use, but I did find the following: In which:
Which raises the question of how well anyone can assess the influence of an author who wrote in a language the one making the assessment doesn’t speak.
He's persuasive on how people would feel in the situations he puts them in, - and in finding resonant metaphors to express them in. And he's persuasive on how his characters would think, which is not the same as how they rationally ought to think. Ulysses' speech on degree doesn't mention the obligations of the higher to the lower, because he's using the ideas to flatter Agamemnon. What Shakespeare believed on the subject we don't know.
It's been said that every subsequent novel is a rewrite of Don Quixote. That is, the classic novel plot has a protagonist who thinks they're in one kind of story whereas they're actually in a different kind of story. It's probably an overgeneralisation: it doesn't apply to Persuasion or Bleak House I think (at least not as far as Anne or Esther are concerned, but maybe it does to Wentworth and Richard). But it does apply to Emma, to Madame Bovary, to Middlemarch, to Great Expectations, Crime and Punishment, and War and Peace. (None of the above play the metafictional games of the second part of Don Quixote.)
Cervantes I think originated the basic realist move of invoking what would happen in a dominant genre of books and then having the plot do something less exalted.
Nonetheless, it would be nice to talk about actual works of literature, rather than just focussing on the sociology and/or philosophy of literature as a phenomenon.
Eighteenth century European literature was dominated by French neoclassical literature, which was pretty restricted in what it could do. Pretty much every European language that formed its own literature in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including nineteenth century French literature, did so by appealing to Shakespeare as a precedent.
I don't think people who speak English as their first language are exposed to as much as literature in translation as French people are (no idea about other languages). I'd venture to suggest that this is more about the hegemony of English in recent history than the superiority of English language authors. I would suggest that Shakespeare has been far more widely read in French than Victor Hugo has been in English, for example.
*One of my favourite authors is Haruki Murakami. Given that I can't read Japanese, I always read him in French because I find the French translations much more readable than the English ones.
I also bear in mind that, as briefly alluded to on the Evangelism thread, language is both informational and conceptual. We use words to convey information, and to express concepts. And in our thinking, language (at some level of thought) in turn influences our thoughts and our conceptual view of the world. When a word is created for an idea, people start thinking about that idea as being a thing that exists. Language shapes us, our thoughts, and our societies.
So I think the extent of Shakespeare's influence is comparable - after all, he's explicitly studied by many more students in many more schools that Plato or Aristotle.
But the manner of their respective influence seems distinct. Not only are Plato and Aristotle not studied by so many people, but the profound influence of their philosophical thinking on western society is also not studied as widely.
Which is to say that Shakespeare's influence on thought is through his influence on language, which is probably more visible (eg as evident in his inevitable appearance on canonical lists of English Literature), whereas Plato and Aristotle's influence on thought is probably more direct, and visible to those who have studied it (eg as evident in their inevitable appearance on canonical lists of Western Thought).
How many people do you know who think as they rationally ought to think?
Do you, for example, think our choices about literature reveal nothing about the way that privilege is embedded in western societies?
Can you explain what you mean? I cannot think of another novel that is even slightly similar to Don Quixote, no characters that are similar to Don Q or Sancho Panza, nothing where the author appears inside the novel, nothing where one half of the novel references the reception gained from the other half.
Of the above I am only really familiar with Crime and Punishment and I cannot think of a single aspect that reflects Don Quixote.
I am not a literary critic in any sense but it seems to me that the linkages you point to above are humbug.
Nor are Cervantes, Austin, Dickens or Hardy.
Why would you think Shakespeare was irrelevant to the history of thought? Like or loathe Dickens, he clearly influenced how British people thought about Christmas for many generations.
That's not a kind of protagonist you get before Cervantes.
Likewise, realism as a literary style and virtue doesn't really exist before Cervantes. Don Quixote turns on flea-ridden inns that the Don can mistake for castles and basins that he can mistake for helmets - that kind of material reality isn't found in ambitious fiction before Cervantes.
As I said, the basic gesture, in earlier stories s this would happen, but in this story reality ensues, originates with Cervantes and has been a staple gesture of fiction ever since.
Cervantes' role as a pioneer of metafictional trickery is another matter - that comes back in various postmodernist twentieth century authors (eg Nabokov) though none of them do it with Cervantes' panache.
Laurence Sterne (18th century England) is another progenitor of both realism and metafiction: but he owes a lot to Swift and Swift was an admirer of Cervantes (and Rabelais).
I think you're using the everyday definition of "thought" here, which is not the one people are using when they make statements(accurate or otherwise) like "Plato was the originator of western thought."
Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese have influenced the way Americans think about crime for several generations. But I don't think we would list them with William James and John Dewey as exemplars of "American thought".
So Austen was great a lot earlier in her life than Dickens was.
Including no one from the last 100 years makes it extremely skewed, if you're looking at the literate population of Europe.
In literary terms, as well as marvellous blank verse (which he didn't invent of course), I think it is fair to say that his characters have greater psychological depth than most characters in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.
That isn't to say that all the other plays were wooden. Some cracking plays around at that time, as well as some turkeys.
We have to disaggregate Shakespeare from the 19th century 'Bardolatry' though. That cast a long shadow.
Did he shape the way we think?
I read an interesting article recently, can't remember where, about how and why the fledgling USA embraced Shakespeare so wholeheartedly. Themes from Julius Caesar, King Lear and so on fed into the new Republic's vision of itself.
Shakespeare is big in Russia too, apparently. I would imagine for different reasons.
It's a cliche I know, but Russian literature seems to have gone for the big themes - sin, redemption, love, death (cue Woody Allen), war ...
I'm told the Chinese have a soft spot for Shakespeare too. I know they like Dickens.
If that was the case then the only way an author could have an impact on "thinking" would be if they wrote philosophical books. I do not accept that.
No, a non-philosopher can obviously have an influence on thinking and hence on thoughts. But when people on this thread were using the phrase "western thought", they were using a definition of "thought" that is more or less synonymous with "philosophy".
I think maybe culture is the idea you're thinking of here.