Someone just proposed it, so here's a preliminary Top 10:

1. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
2. The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
3. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
4. Ulysses - James Joyce
5. The Tale of Genji - Murasaki Shikibu
6. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
7. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
8. The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
9. In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust
10. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

It depends if this is just going to be "DDD's Favorite Classic Literature" or something that actually attempts to quantify greatness. If the latter then first off: The Brothers K and Lolita aren't top ten worthy. Neither are nearly important enough to the novel or representative enough of an important strain in the novel's development, especially Lolita. Huckleberry Finn, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, Tom Jones, Tristam Shandy, Pride and Prejudice, The Scarlet Letter, Vanity Fair, Middlemarch, Madame Bovary, and any number of novels by Dickens, James, Conrad, and Woolf are more important than those two. I think the only thing The Brothers K (or Crime and Punishment) and Lolita have going for them over any of these is current popularity (and even then Pride and Prejudice and Huckleberry Finn are probably more popular)

Yeah makes sense. Again, it was a preliminary Top 10. I guess we could use the same criteria we use on the rest of the site.

What would your Top 10 look like?

These have to be in the top 10:
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
The Tale of Genji - Murasaki Shikibu
Ulysses - James Joyce

Other possible contenders for top 10:
Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

Below that:
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
The Ambassadors - Henry James
Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
Tom Jones - Henry Fielding
Tristam Shandy - Laurence Sterne
The Scarlet Letter - Nathanael Hawthorne

And then after that I could maybe start to see Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Conrad, Woolf. Then it would be a ways down again before getting to Nabokov.

I'd say that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn would have to be top 10.

Dreww, I agree about Lolita not being worthy of the top ten, but why not Dostoevsky? Maybe not top ten, but why is Tolstoy so much greater a novelist than Dostoevsky? Dostoevsky brought a new level of psychological depth to the novel that influenced tons of authors.

This one sticks out to me because it's the only one not from a Western tradition. It really has no relation to anything else on the list. I'm not saying we shouldn't include novels from traditions beyond the Western world, but if we do it really complicates things. The Tale of Genji was written 700 years before anything that we now call a novel appeared in Europe. And even when the novel did finally develop in Europe, I doubt the level of intercultural communication was great enough that many of these original novelists had even read The Tale of Genji. It's only now in the information age that this appears to be one of the greatest, most influential novels of all time. A hundred or two hundred years ago, I imagine many literary scholars had never even heard of it, let alone read or studied it. I think we need to define what exactly we're grading things on and in what context. Something like The Tale of Genji could be hugely influential on Japanese literature for hundreds of years without making the tiniest of marks on European literature, so how do we judge all these various literary traditions simultaneously and decide which works from which traditions are the most important?

Personally, I'm of the opinion that this list is next to impossible to make and that anything we do end up with will be virtually incoherent.

Yeah I agree with Tudwell on Brothers K. I could very easily see that one in the top ten. Especially over than, say, The Ambassadors. And without reading either, I've read up pretty extensively on both and I'm positive BK won't be just havin' its own way and really does deserve to be above that one, as pretty much every one in the third (and a bit of the second) tier save possibly Tristam Shandy and Madame Bovary. Because as Tud said, Dostoevsky brought the novel into a new psychological foray, one that was more influential overall on a good deal of the modernism movement than James's trilogy (and why not Wings of the Dove in that case?) or even Knut Hamsun's Hunger, the first proper "modern novel". Brothers K is his most renowned and (so I hear) most ambitious work. I personally think he's up there with Tolstoy and Dickens, although I can't see BK ranking up there ahead of W&P and probably not even over Great Expectations.

And Tuds, since Tale of Genji is pretty widely considered the first novel, I think it should be able to make its way on this list. I don't think it should really limit itself to certain cultures when it had such a huge impact on the form of the novel itself. It's obviously not as influential to the novel we know it now as Don Quixote was (The first real western novel, which should be a lock for #1) but I think it should be up there in that top tier.

Lolita I could see anywhere in the 30-50 range

And as for Faulkner, what should be his highest ranked? Depending on who you ask, either The Sound and the Fury[i] or Absalom, Absalom![/i] is his greatest. But we'll get to that a bit later.

My view of the top ten would look roughly like this:
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Ulysses - James Joyce
The Tale of Genji - Murasaki Shikibu
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

Not sure of the placements (or that they should all be in the top ten) except the top two or three.

I should say first of all that my list is almost entirely based around importance in form and style (either in being particularly inventive or being the best example of a general movement that was formally/stylistically important). This is why I don't rank Dostoevsky as being as important as he is popular. He was a talented but stylistically conservative author who created a sense of importance in his works by using them as a vessel for his idiosyncratic beliefs, the intensity and skilled rhetorical handling of which is, I believe, the source of his continuing popularity. Dosteovsky is important to the ideas of modernism, but I don't see how he's any more important to the style of the novel or what novels should concern than Balzac. If I were considering influence on or representation of modern thought, philosophy, psychology, and other intellectual systems as the thing that is most important in fiction then Dosteovsky would place a lot higher (as would Orwell and Camus). What I am interested in here though is importance to the art form itself.

Dostoevsky's formal achievement is simply not comparable to the greatness of Tolstoy's. To make an analogy, the achievement of War and Peace is basically what Ulysses was to the modern era. A work that completely throws formal caution to the wind and breaks rules while still somehow working and gaining great popularity considering its obtuseness. Having that many detailed sprawling characters and simultaneous narratives was seen as something like insanity at its time, and even challenges readers today. Tolstoy only looks like formally conservative to us because we've been raised on modernism and postmodernism. Dostoevsky's achievement is pretty narrow in comparison (like a Woolf to Tolstoy's Joyce, if we extend the analogy). Tolstoy was a much more stylistically sophisticated writer than Dostoevsky; obviously in translation we lose this, but from what I understand Tolstoy actually went to great lengths to maintain syntactic and intellectual parallelism, while in comparison Dostoevsky simply told intellectual things with whatever style he happened to be using at the time. This is part of why I reject the idea that Dostoevsky brought a new psychological depth to fiction. What exactly did Dostoevsky do with the aesthetic representation of the inner life that had not already been done? I think this sort of claim about Dosteovsky's achievement has more to do with the fact that the ideas that accompanied his psychological style are more interesting to audiences today than the ideas of people like Balzac and Hugo who represent the inner lives of their characters in basically the same way. And if we consider all fiction outside of the novel then the representation of psychological depth in the short fiction of someone like Poe basically does everything that Dosteovsky's work did before it. I think you REALLY have to place a LOT of importance on popularity in order to get Dostoevsky anywhere near the top 10.

As for Tale of Genji (which incidentally is also more psychologically deep than Dostoevsky, from what I've read) I don't really understand the argument that it's somehow completely cut off from the western tradition. It demonstrably isn't, any more than Arabian Nights is (both of which were popularly translated into English by Arthur Waley). Even if it was cut off from the western tradition (which it isn't) you'd still have all your work ahead of you if you intended to demonstrate that it's being cut off from the western tradition is somehow a valid reason to exclude it. If things that are only immediately influential are counted then we're gonna see Moby Dick drop below the novels of Victor Huge. And sure, if we're going to include the Tale of Genji, we have to include other works that aren't incredibly popular in the western tradition, and that's going to make the creation of a coherent list a little harder. In that case let's embrace that challenge rather than just rewriting and reshuffling all the things that are already in Bloom's Western Canon.

Don't really understand the devaluing of James' achievement here. Just because he's not as fashionable as Dostoevsky doesn't mean Dostoevsky's achievement is actually more important to the novel. Pretty much everything James wrote from 1899 on is of incredible stylistic innovation and idiosyncrasy. It's not incredibly influential, but that's just because it's nearly impossible to mimic. James' achievement is actually very similar to Proust's--the only difference is that Proust was working at a time when there was a sophisticated critical infrastructure that could understand, praise, and promote his accomplishments, while the critics during James' time were too stupid to understand what he had done in his late work. In my list I tried to include those works that actually pushed the novel forward or are representative of a movement that pushed the novel forward, rather than simply those that were the most imitated/influential. Keep in mind that if we value influence over idiosyncrasy, then authors like Victor Hugo are going to end up placing higher than authors like Herman Melville, and I don't know, I just don't think that's as interesting or valuable. I'd rather have a list that shows, with some degree of historical consideration, all the different sorts of things that the novel can do, rather than just charting the most common trends (in which case we probably have to give space to pop trash). I have tried to maintain a good balance between idiosyncrasy and influence in my list (which is why I choose The Ambassadors as the height for James; a good middle ground between the influence/popularity of The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl and the stylistic iconoclasm of The Sacred Fount and The Awkward Age).

As for Faulkner, I think he should be around the same place that James and Proust and Woolf are. And it should definitely be The Sound and the Fury.

You make some good points regarding Dostoevsky, particularly how Poe was doing that sort of thing even earlier. I guess if you put the emphasis on style and form, I can certainly see why Dostoevsky would rank lower, but I'd still want him top 20 at the least.

And I didn't mean to assert that The Tale of Genji shouldn't be included (and thanks for clarifying its history with western literature a bit). I'm just worried because the word "novel" does not have as strict of a definition as, for example, "album" does. It's not as temporally or geographically confined. It's easier to determine the greatest album because you only have to look back about 60-70 years and almost exclusively in English speaking countries. I mean, what to do with these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novel#Ante ... _the_world

And even Don Quixote was not a novel when it was published, as there was no tradition of the novel established. Nor did it do much to establish such a tradition. Don Quixote was a romance, a genre that stood in contrast to the novella of the day. Romances followed knights and nobility and their romantic, heroic journeys, while novellas followed the lives of ordinary people and were typically much shorter. It is this latter genre that ultimately evolved into what we now call the novel. Don Quixote is still immensely influential on the novel because, once the genre was established, authors went back to older works and Don Quixote is simply one of the greatest works of art, but I'm not sure it should even be on this list. And if it should, I'm not sure it's a lock for number one. But maybe I'm just being too pedantic.

On an unrelated note, I don't see any way that Moby-Dick could be ahead of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. They're pretty much unanimously considered the two greatest American novels, but one was forgotten and ignored for half of its existence. Huck Finn really opened stylistic doors that helped authors move away from the high diction that people seemed to think literature demanded. I'm not saying Moby-Dick wasn't influential, but it was influential on a much smaller portion of literature (e.g. the postmodern encyclopedic novel), whereas Huck Finn (or rather, Twain's work as a whole) really ushered in a whole new era of American fiction.

How does this sound for an updated Top 10?:

1. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
2. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
3. Ulysses - James Joyce
4. The Tale of Genji - Murasaki Shikibu
5. The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
7. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
8. In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust
9. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
10. Middlemarch - George Eliot


Also, should Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn represent Twain? Sawyer came first and pioneered the use of vernacular before Huck Finn, but Huck has much more critical acclaim. Also, where would you place Gravity's Rainbow and Hayy ibn Yaqdhan (Philosophus Audodidactus)?

^I really like that top ten.

Dreww made some good points about Dostoevsky, but I still think he should be in the top ten. We all know how his prose kind of sucks in comparison to Tolstoy's, but (I'm going to use the only Dos novel I've read, C&P, as an example) it's how his characters seem to progress in their opinions, guilt, feelings in a way that sort of moves as they do. It's basically what Portrait ended up doing later on – only Dos's prose isn't nearly on the level of Joyce's, and he didn't get rid of omniscience entirely (like I hear The Ambassadors does – so it can't be regarded as Stream-of-Consciousness.

As for your take on The Ambassadors, Dreww, not a bad take on it at all. I was skeptical at first because the reason The Ambassadors is often chosen as his best is for the stupid reason alone that James himself considered it his best (yeah good-ass job, scholars; further down the list Something Happened will be higher than Catch-22). But I still think this list, as do many others of its kind, might suffer from putting works down as placeholders for the authors themselves. The Ambassadors should be high, not because James (along with Faulkner) are up there as The Greatest American Novelists, but because it did offer new techniques that were so distinct they became polarizing for the readers of their time (which is, not gonna lie, a pretty good indicator of stylistic innovation) and added to the Psych novel where Dos left off and Modernism would continue from. That's why I wondered why not Wings of the Dove or Golden Bowl, but you're explanation of his old style meets new is actually good enough for me.

As for Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn; while Tom Sawyer has inklings of the style that would appear in Huck Finn, Huck Finn made the style more prominent but also made a more mature work.

As for Gravity's Rainbow, I can't see it being too high. The best listing of novels I've ever seen had it in the mid-forties, but while it may be the best I've seen, there's a lot I disagree with. I still think, greatness-wise, that it's one of the greatest five novels released post-WWII; this has been used to death, but what Ulysses was to modernism, GR was to postmodernism: a summation of the style and ideas that would come to define the entire movement. That being said, being the #1 novel for what possibly might be the most prominent lit-movement after World War II, it's undoubtedly in the top 100… but I really don't know where it should place other than that.

I think this idea would be much more fun as a Project Treefingers-esque compilation list than going through the silly pedantry of deciding that Cervantes' prose and structure is better than Tolstoy's. I mean, what if the fucking purpose? At best, it would encourage me to read more, but my plate is already full. If we insist on doing this with a criteria, at least break the list into time periods or literary genres/movements.

If we did it as a Treefingers compilation thing, would it be our favorites or our own ideas pertaining to what the greatest is? I'd actually be down for either one. Oi, wouldn't even mind counting them theh votes meself I wouldn't.

Forgot to ask. Where should I put One Hundred Years of Solitude?