The modern tradition; backgrounds of modern literature, edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson, Jr.

Symbolism. Imagination and nature: The revolt against nature. The priority of art / Oscar Wilde ; The unnatural will to art / Rainer Maria Rilke ; Art as individual idea / Pablo Picasso ; Art as the modern absolute / André Malraux
The interaction of imagination and nature. The imaginative faculty and the function of art / Immanuel Kant ; The coalescence of mind and nature / Samuel Taylor Coleridge ; The penetration of things / Rainer Maria Rilke ; Concrete art / Hans Arp
Symbolic nature. The eternal world of vision / William Blake ; Natural apocalypse / William Wordsworth ; The temple of nature / Charles Baudelaire ; Symbol as revelation / W.B. Yeats ; Eternal genesis / Paul Klee
Imagination and thought: The state of doubt. Escape from ideas / Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ; Negative capability / John Keats ; Art without conclusions / Gustave Flaubert
The role of thought in poetry. Poetry, language, and thought / Paul Valéry ; Pseudo-statements / I.A. Richards ; Sensibility and thought in metaphysical poetry / T.S. Eliot
The state of affirmation. The acceptance of untruth / Friedrich Nietzsche ; The conquest of skepticism / W.B. Yeats
The autonomy of art: The doctrine of purity. The didactic heresy / Charles Baudelaire ; The improvidence of art / Oscar Wilde ; Literature as music-drama / Richard Wagner ; Poetry as incantation / Stéphane Mallarmé ; Pure painting / Guillaume Apollinaire ; The non-picture / Marcel Duchamp
The purification of fiction. The novel of consciousness / Virginia Woolf ; Style as absolute / Gustave Flaubert ; The pure novel / André Gide
The objective artifact. The impersonality of art / Gustave Flaubert ; Artistic objectivity / Rainer Maria Rilke ; The objective correlative / T.S. Eliot ; Stasis and objective form / James Joyce ; Imagism / F.S. Flint and Ezra Pound ; Vorticism / Ezra Pound ; The value of materials / Jean Dubuffet
Alogical structure. Language within language / Rainer Maria Rilke ; Plastic language / James Joyce ; A battle of images / Dylan Thomas ; The dynamics of metaphor / Hart Crane ; Multiple vision / Max Ernst ; The image in process / Sergei Eisenstein
The morality of the artist. The courage of the artist / W.B. Yeats ; Art as ascetic religion / Gustave Flaubert ; The mission of the artist / Rainer Maria Rilke ; The artist as universal man / Paul Valéry
The art of life. The intensity of the moment / Walter Pater ; Artificial sensation / Joris-Karl Huysmans ; The reflexive image / André Gide ; The completed image / W.B. Yeats ; The aesthetic transformation of the earth / Rainer Maria Rilke
The artist and society. An aesthetic mysticism / Gustave Flaubert ; Art as evidence of order / E.M. Forster ; The poet as revolutionary seer / Arthur Rimbaud ; Art as aristocratic mystery / Stéphane Mallarmé ; Poetry as a game of knowledge / W.H. Auden ; Poetry as rite / W.H. Auden ; Art as establisher of value / Wallace Stevens
Realism: Objectivity. A realism of love / George Eliot ; False ideals exposed / Bernard Shaw ; Heroic honesty / Gustave Flaubert ; Dunghills as artistic material / Anton Chekhov
Historical determinism. Society as historical organism / Honoré de Balzac ; Art as historical product / Hippolyte Taine ; Shortcomings of Taine's theory / Gustave Flaubert ; Man as the creature of history / Leo Tolstoy
Naturalistic determinism. Man as natural mechanism / Theodore Dreiser ; Clinical realism / Edmond and Jules de Goncourt ; The novel as social science / Emile Zola ; A naturalistic manifesto / August Strindberg ; The fad of naturalism / Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
Melioristic realism. Art as ethical communication / Leo Tolstoy ; Prophetic realism / F.M. Dostoevsky ; The counter-religions of humanity and art / George Sand and Gustave Flaubert ; The counter-claims of content and form / H.G. Wells and Henry James
Socialist realism. Social reality as class struggle / Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels ; The economic sources of consciousness / Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels ; The limitations of formalism / Leon Trotsky ; Historical truth in fiction / Georg Lukács
A new realism. Dehumanizing nature / Alain Robbe-Grillet
Nature: Struggle. The struggle for existence and natural selection / Charles Darwin ; The will in nature / Arthur Schopenhauer
Organicism. Nature as organism / A.N. Whitehead ; Nature, man, and art / Rainer Maria Rilke ; The life of the hawthorn / Marcel Proust ; Natural joy / André Gide ; The death of Pan / D.H. Lawrence
Mechanical force. The new multiverse / Henry Adams ; The joy of mechanical force / F.T. Marinetti ; The physics of human character / D.H. Lawrence
Indeterminacy. Pluralism, pragmatism, and instrumental truth / William James ; Thought as a natural event / John Dewey ; Non-objective science and uncertainty / Werner Heisenberg
Cultural history: Idealism. History as the self-realization of spirit G.W.F Hegel ; History as human self-knowledge / Benedetto Croce
Patterns of repetition. The three ages / Giambattista Vico ; Eternal recurrence / Friedrich Nietzsche ; The organic logic of history / Oswald Spengler
History and imagination. History as symbolic reality / W.B. Yeats ; The triumph of art over history / André Malraux
Religion and history. The historical meaning of Christianity / Nicolas Berdyaev
Primitive survivals. The pre-human in the human / Charles Darwin ; The savage in the human / Sir James G. Frazer ; An archaic mystery / Henry Miller
The unconscious: Unreason and reason. The demoniac / Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ; Energy and reason / William Blake ; Will and knowledge / Arthur Schopenhauer ; Dionysos and Apollo / Friedrich Nietzsche
The Freudian unconscious. The structure of the unconscious / Sigmund Freud ; The instincts / Sigmund Freud ; The theory of dreams / Sigmund Freud ; The Oedipus complex / Sigmund Freud ; The origins of culture / Sigmund Freud ; The significance of Freud / Thomas Mann
Liberation of the unconscious. A non-Freudian unconscious / D.H. Lawrence ; Dadaism / Tristan Tzara ; Surrealism / André Breton
Myth: Myth in primitive thought. The king of the wood / Sir James G. Frazer ; The social psychology of myth / Bronislaw Malinowski ; The validity and form of mythical thought / Ernst Cassirer
The collective unconscious. The collective unconscious and archetypes / C.G. Jung ; The psychological function of archetypes / C.G. Jung ; The principal archetypes / C.G. Jung
Myth and literature. Modern mythology / Friedrich Schlegel ; Imaginative types / Victor Hugo ; The folk and the myth / Richard Wagner ; Visionary history / William Blake ; Myth as memory / Nicolas Berdyaev ; Psychoanalysis, the lived myth, and fiction / Thomas Mann ; Myth and literary classicism / T.S. Eliot
Self-consciousness: Self-realization. An experiment in self-revelation / Jean-Jacques Rousseau ; The value of inconsistency / André Gide ; The living self / D.H. Lawrence ; The self and reality / Rainer Maria Rilke ; An Expressionist credo / Wassily Kandinsky
The field of consciousness. Centers of consciousness / Henry James ; The stream of consciousness / William James ; Duration / Henri Bergson ; The recapturing of time / Marcel Proust
The divided self. The ironic consciousness / Friedrich Schlegel ; The contrite consciousness / G.W.F. Hegel ; Alienation / Karl Marx ; Indirect communication / Søren Kierkegaard ; The masks of truth / Friedrich Nietzsche ; The anti-self / W.B. Yeats
Freedom. Sympathy and asceticism / Arthur Schopenhauer ; Self-overcoming / Friedrich Nietzsche ; The perverse self / F.M. Dostoevsky
Existence: The definition of existence. The individual and the crowd / Søren Kierkegaard ; Concrete existence and abstract system / Søren Kierkegaard ; The free thinker and the consensus / Friedrich Nietzsche ; Subjective will and objective truth / Friedrich Nietzsche
Moments of existence. The fact of absurdity / Albert Camus ; Existence precedes essence / Jean-Paul Sartre ; Choice / Søren Kierkegaard ; Choice in a world without God / Jean-Paul Sartre ; Dread reveals nothing / Martin Heidegger ; Dread as education toward faith / Søren Kierkegaard ; Authenticity / Jean-Paul Sartre
Value in existence. Absurd freedom / Albert Camus ; Commitment / Jean-Paul Sartre ; Faith by virtue of the absurd / Søren Kierkegaard ; The will to communicate / Karl Jaspers ; The common condition of man / Jean-Paul Sartre ; The primary words / Martin Buber ; The encompassing / Karl Jaspers ; Recollection of being / Martin Heidegger
Faith: Christianity and Christendom. The Lord's prayer modernized / William Blake ; A hypocritical generation / Søren Kierkegaard ; Christ and the Grand Inquisitor / F.M. Dostoevsky
Deified man. God in man / William Blake ; The death of God and the antichrist / Friedrich Nietzsche
Poeticized religion. The finer spirit of knowledge / Matthew Arnold ; An allegory of human life / George Santayana
Paganized Christianity. The resurrection of the body / D.H. Lawrence ; Salvation on earth / André Gide
Orthodoxy. The errors of André Gide / Paul Claudel ; Man becomes God / Charles Baudelaire ; The errors of modern rationalism / Jacques Maritain ; The modern confusion of categories / T.E. Hulme ; The one and only God / Karl Barth
The state of doubt. The meaning of meaninglessness / Paul Tillich.