William Stoner, a Missouri farm boy who discovers literature almost by accident, spends a quiet, largely unnoticed life teaching English at the University of Missouri, sustained through a loveless marriage and departmental cruelty by his devotion to scholarship.
Books mentioned in Stoner (13)
Everyman by Philip Roth: “"It's difficult to—There's Everyman ..." "Can you name any more?" "No, sir," Walker said.”
English Literary Criticism: The Medieval Phase by J. W. H. Atkins: “Stoner said, "Our texts will be"—and he enunciated the words slowly as he wrote them down—" Medieval English Verse and Prose, edited by Loomis and Willard; and English Literary Criticism: The Medieval Phase, by J.”
Medieval English Verse and Prose by Roger Sherman Loomis and Rudolph Willard: “Stoner said, "Our texts will be"—and he enunciated the words slowly as he wrote them down—" Medieval English Verse and Prose, edited by Loomis and Willard.”
Adonais by Percy Bysshe Shelley: “would you comment on Shelley's principle of knowledge—specifically, the principle of beauty—enunciated in the final stanzas of 'Adonais'?”
King Lear by William Shakespeare: “"We're all poor Toms, and we're a-cold." "King Lear," Stoner said seriously.”
Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe: “"And—and the— The Jew of Malfi." "Faustus and The Jew of Malta."”
The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe: “Tell me something about The Jew of Malta.”
Prometheus Unbound by Percy Bysshe Shelley: “through the mature use of that ideal, in Prometheus Unbound, as a comprehensive synthesis of his earlier atheism, radicalism, Christianity, and scientific necessitarianism”
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer: “he finished his course work for the Master of Arts degree in the spring of 1915 and spent the summer completing his thesis, a prosodic study of one of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales”
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty by Percy Bysshe Shelley: “I intend to trace Shelley's first rejection of Godwinian necessitarianism for a more or less Platonic ideal, in the 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty'”
Rhetoric by Aristotle: “You will find an extended discussion of the 'topic' in Book Two of The Rhetoric of Aristotle, and in Lane Cooper's edition there is an introductory essay”
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes: “You, too, are among the infirm—you are the dreamer, the madman in a madder world, our own midwestern Don Quixote without his Sancho, gamboling under the blue sky.”