Literature Atlas

How Stories Are Told
Atlas

Atlas Trails

A trail is a short, ordered route through the atlas. Each stop says why it comes next, so a journey reads as an argument rather than a list. Start one, leave, and come back: your place is kept in this browser, and you do not need an account for that.

Where Does It Really Begin? Literature's Unsettled Origins

Seven stops through this atlas's own recorded disagreements about where a genre, movement or form actually began, and whether some of them have ended at all.

7 stops

How Literature Sorts Itself: Genres, Movements and Forms

A short path through the atlas's own machinery for classifying literature: a genre asks what a work is (a novel, a fantasy, a horror story), a movement asks when and among whom it was written (Imagism, the Theatre of...

7 stops

From Nature to The Conduct of Life

Twenty-four years of Emerson's own published prose, in order: from the anonymous 1836 essay that founded Transcendentalism to the chastened last major collection of 1860.

7 stops

Rogues, Quatrains and Linked Verse: A World Tour of Genre and Form

Six new stops across genres and forms literary history keeps close at hand but rarely maps together: an Arabic con man's rhymed prose, a Spanish orphan's picaresque road, a Persian astronomer's disputed quatrains, an...

6 stops

The Founding Authors

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...

8 stops

Trails are curated by the atlas. Where you have got to in one is remembered by your own browser and is never sent to us.