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Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Novels/Assessment/Top-important/Archive 1

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Latest comment: 17 years ago by Kevinalewis

Documentation edit

This is talk page associated with the WikiProject assessment department "Top-Important" page belonging to Wikipedia:WikiProject Novels. It is used as a base for those trying to agree the "Top" priority or importance of existing articles.

In other words a forum to discuss agreement on which Novel articles should "Always" be present in representations of this on-line encyclopedia. See also the WP:1.0 and WP:0.5 WikiProjects.

Discussion of the Assessment Department's Top-Important page edit

Lists of top novels edit

A list compiled by others. edit

Latest comment: 17 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

The Observer published a list in 2003 of the top 100 novels of all time. I thought it might be worth reprinting it here, to compare to our list. I'm bolding those which are already on our list. The list is in chronological order, and seems to be limited to a single work by any author, and is notably anglocentric and focused on recent works:

Anyway, I think that many of these should probably only be at high, but worth a look for the stuff before 1950, at least. john k 20:14, 20 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

Modern Library English language Top 100 edit

see Category:Modern Library 100 best novels

Time edit

See here. Novels are in alphabetical order.

Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 novels of the 20th century edit

  1. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
  2. Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
  3. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
  4. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
  5. The Color Purple, Alice Walker
  6. Ulysses, James Joyce
  7. Beloved, Toni Morrison
  8. The Lord of the Flies, William Golding
  9. 1984, George Orwell
  10. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
  11. Lolita, Vladmir Nabokov
  12. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
  13. Charlotte's Web, EB White
  14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
  15. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
  16. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
  17. Animal Farm, George Orwell
  18. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
  19. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
  20. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
  21. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
  22. Winnie-the-Pooh, AA Milne
  23. Their Eyes were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
  24. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
  25. Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
  26. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
  27. Native Son, Richard Wright
  28. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
  29. Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
  30. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
  31. On the Road, Jack Kerouac
  32. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
  33. The Call of the Wild, Jack London
  34. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
  35. Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
  36. Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin
  37. The World According to Garp, John Irving
  38. All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren
  39. A Room with a View , EM Forster
  40. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
  41. Schindler's List, Thomas Keneally
  42. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
  43. The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
  44. Finnegans Wake, James Joyce
  45. The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
  46. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
  47. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Frank L. Baum
  48. Lady Chatterley's Lover, DH Lawrence
  49. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
  50. The Awakening, Kate Chopin
  51. My Antonia, Willa Cather
  52. Howard's End, EM Forster
  53. In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
  54. Franny and Zooey, JD Salinger
  55. Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
  56. Jazz, Toni Morrison
  57. Sophie's Choice, William Styron
  58. Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner
  59. Passage to India, EM Forster
  60. Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton
  61. A Good Man is Hard to Find, Flannery O'Connor
  62. Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
  63. Orlando, Virginia Woolf
  64. Sons and Lovers, DH Lawrence
  65. Bonfire of the Vanities, Thomas Wolfe
  66. Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
  67. A Separate Peace, John Knowles
  68. Light in August, William Faulkner
  69. The Wings of the Dove, Henry James
  70. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
  71. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
  72. A Hithchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
  73. Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs
  74. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
  75. Women in Love, DH Lawrence
  76. Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe
  77. In Our Time, Ernest Hemingway
  78. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein
  79. The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
  80. The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer
  81. The Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
  82. White Noise, Don DeLillo
  83. O Pioneers!, Willa Cather
  84. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
  85. The War of the Worlds, HG Wells
  86. Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad
  87. The Bostonians, Henry James
  88. An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser
  89. Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather
  90. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
  91. This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald
  92. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
  93. The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles
  94. Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis
  95. Kim, Rudyard Kipling
  96. The Beautiful and the Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald
  97. Rabbit, Run, John Updike
  98. Where Angels Fear to Tread, EM Forster
  99. Main Street, Sinclair Lewis
  100. Midnight's Children , Salman Rushdie

The Novel 100:A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time edit

This list is from a book by Daniel Burt.

  1. Don Quixote 1605, 1630 Miguel de Cervantes
  2. War and Peace 1869 Leo Tolstoy
  3. Ulysses 1922 James Joyce
  4. In Search of Lost Time 1913-27 Marcel Proust
  5. The Brothers Karamazov 1880 Feodor Dostoevsky
  6. Moby-Dick 1851 Herman Melville
  7. Madame Bovary 1857 Gustave Flaubert
  8. Middlemarch 1871-72 George Eliot
  9. The Magic Mountain 1924 Thomas Mann
  10. The Tale of Genji 11th Century Murasaki Shikibu
  11. Emma 1816 Jane Austen
  12. Bleak House 1852-53 Charles Dickens
  13. Anna Karenina 1877 Leo Tolstoy
  14. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 1884 Mark Twain
  15. Tom Jones 1749 Henry Fielding
  16. Great Expectations 1860-61 Charles Dickens
  17. Absalom, Absalom! 1936 William Faulkner
  18. The Ambassadors 1903 Henry James
  19. One Hundred Years of Solitude 1967 Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  20. The Great Gatsby 1925 F. Scott Fitzgerald
  21. To The Lighthouse 1927 Virginia Woolf
  22. Crime and Punishment 1866 Feodor Dostoevsky
  23. The Sound and the Fury 1929 William Faulkner
  24. Vanity Fair 1847-48 William Makepeace Thackeray
  25. Invisible Man 1952 Ralph Ellison
  26. Finnegans Wake 1939 James Joyce
  27. The Man Without Qualities 1930-43 Robert Musil
  28. Gravity's Rainbow 1973 Thomas Pynchon
  29. The Portrait of a Lady 1881 Henry James
  30. Women in Love 1920 D. H. Lawrence
  31. The Red and the Black 1830 Stendhal
  32. Tristram Shandy 1760-67 Laurence Sterne
  33. Dead Souls 1842 Nikolai Gogol
  34. Tess of the D'Urbervilles 1891 Thomas Hardy
  35. Buddenbrooks 1901 Thomas Mann
  36. Le Père Goriot 1835 Honore de Balzac
  37. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 1916 James Joyce
  38. Wuthering Heights 1847 Emily Bronte
  39. The Tin Drum 1959 Gunter Grass
  40. Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable 1951-53 Samuel Beckett
  41. Pride and Prejudice 1813 Jane Austen
  42. The Scarlet Letter 1850 Nathaniel Hawthorne
  43. Fathers and Sons 1862 Ivan Turgenev
  44. Nostromo 1904 Joseph Conrad
  45. Beloved 1987 Toni Morrison
  46. An American Tragedy 1925 Theodore Dreiser
  47. Lolita 1955 Vladimir Nabokov
  48. The Golden Notebook 1962 Doris Lessing
  49. Clarissa 1747-48 Samuel Richardson
  50. Dream of the Red Chamber 1791 Cao Xueqin
  51. The Trial 1925 Franz Kafka
  52. Jane Eyre 1847 Charlotte Bronte
  53. The Red Badge of Courage 1895 Stephen Crane
  54. The Grapes of Wrath 1939 John Steinbeck
  55. Petersburg 1916/1922 Andrey Bely
  56. Things Fall Apart 1958 Chinue Achebe
  57. The Princess of Cleves 1678 Madame de Lafayette
  58. The Stranger 1942 Albert Camus
  59. My Antonia 1918 Willa Cather
  60. The Counterfeiters 1926 Andre Gide
  61. The Age of Innocence 1920 Edith Wharton
  62. The Good Soldier 1915 Ford Madox Ford
  63. The Awakening 1899 Kate Chopin
  64. A Passage to India 1924 E. M. Forster
  65. Herzog 1964 Saul Bellow
  66. Germinal 1855 Emile Zola
  67. Call It Sleep 1934 Henry Roth
  68. U.S.A. Trilogy 1930-38 John Dos Passos
  69. Hunger 1890 Knut Hamsun
  70. Berlin Alexanderplatz 1929 Alfred Doblin
  71. Cities of Salt 1984-89 'Abd al-Rahman Munif
  72. The Death of Artemio Cruz 1962 Carlos Fuentes
  73. A Farewell to Arms 1929 Ernest Hemingway
  74. Brideshead Revisited 1945 Evelyn Waugh
  75. The Last Chronicle of Barset 1866-67 Anthony Trollope
  76. The Pickwick Papers 1836-67 Charles Dickens
  77. Robinson Crusoe 1719 Daniel Defoe
  78. The Sorrows of Young Werther 1774 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  79. Candide 1759 Voltaire
  80. Native Son 1940 Richard Wright
  81. Under the Volcano 1947 Malcolm Lowry
  82. Oblomov 1859 Ivan Goncharov
  83. Their Eyes Were Watching God 1937
  84. Waverley 1814 Sir Walter Scott
  85. Snow Country 1937, 1948 Kawabata Yasunari
  86. Nineteen Eighty-Four 1949 George Orwell
  87. The Betrothed 1827, 1840 Alessandro Manzoni
  88. The Last of the Mohicans 1826 James Fenimore Cooper
  89. Uncle Tom's Cabin 1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe
  90. Les Misérables 1862 Victor Hugo
  91. On the Road 1957 Jack Kerouac
  92. Frankenstein 1818 Mary Shelley
  93. The Leopard 1958 Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
  94. The Catcher in the Rye 1951 J.D. Salinger
  95. The Woman in White 1860 Wilkie Collins
  96. The Good Soldier Svejk 1921-23 Jaroslav Hasek
  97. Dracula 1897 Bram Stoker
  98. The Three Musketeers 1844 Alexandre Dumas
  99. The Hound of the Baskervilles 1902 Arthur Conan Doyle
  100. Gone with the Wind 1936 Margaret Mitchell

Norwegian Book Clubs list edit

Latest comment: 17 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

As printed in The Guardian.

This list is of the top 100 works of fiction, some of which are in forms that would not be appropriate for this wikiproject (poems, plays, short stories). Alphabetical by author:

Note - considerably more international, as a Norwegian list could hardly include only Norwegians. I'll add some of the particularly obvious ones from this (Tale of Genji, most notably). john k 22:14, 20 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

How many novels should be top-important? edit

Or high important? I propose the following scheme: 1% of the articles should be of top-importance, 10% of high-importance or better, 50% of mid-importance or better. There are currently 3788 articles in scope, so 38 should be top-importance. However, the most important novels are probably the first to be rated, so we can expect this number to be higher at the moment (and it is, count is 60). Errabee 00:11, 21 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

I'm not sure that we should think of quotas at a point when so little of the project is complete. Look at it another way: if the purpose of top-importance is to indicate clearly what articles must be eternally present in an encyclopedia, then we should be looking at a lot more than 38 articles for the Novels project. Most of the Low/Mid important novels will either never have an article written or will end up as stubs. I do think, though, that we will eventually have to give top-importance to non novel-specific articles in order to limit the numbers. For example, there should be a top-important article on the Victorian novel. Although it feels at present as though we are producing a canon, that's not really why we're here. --Sordel 07:09, 21 September 2006 (UTC)Reply
I agree with Sordel. While only a small percentage of all the novels ever written should be at top, it makes a fair amount of sense that a considerably higher percentage of the articles that currently have wikipedia articles should be so rated. 38 seems low for top importance, and 380 seems low for high importance, as well. I don't see a need for a rigid scheme, though. john k 08:18, 21 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

I agree with the both of you for now, but when all articles have been placed in scope, this should be the situation. Errabee 08:37, 21 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

I'm not sure that I would want to have strictly defined quotas because then we risk putting ourselves into the situation of saying something cannot be top importance, when most people would think it should be, because we're over quota. As Sordel observed, there is a good chance that the more important novels are also the ones most likely to have articles, and that may skew percentages. I am, however, willing to say that we should keep a vague idea of percentages in mind just to keep things in perspective. I just don't think we should be rigid about it Silverthorn 11:39, 21 September 2006 (UTC)Reply
Agreed. But I think there are a lot of fancruft novels out there, see e.g. Doctor Who Books, Category:Star Wars books, List of Star Trek novels, Buffy novels. I don't think there's one novel in them that merits more than a Low-importance rating. And there are tons of those articles, so I think we will have plenty of space to assign novels to Top-importance. Errabee 12:17, 21 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

Don't get the wrong idea edit

See my note at the beginning of the main page. This is about priority of articles to be in the encyclopdeia of any outtake of it. Not about the relative merits of the novel itself. I.e. how surprised would the encyclopedia be not to find a suitable article on it present. :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/(Desk) 10:51, 21 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

Imho this almosts amounts to the same thing. Most notable exceptions are those novels that have very little literary significance but had major popular impact recently, like Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code. Errabee 11:01, 21 September 2006 (UTC)Reply
The key word here is "almost", and you even use the obvious example of an exception. We do need to keep in mind the popular culture does have a place in the encyclopedic. Another one would be certain genre, Fantasy for instance is extrodinarily popular, but is often scorned by the literary world. :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/(Desk) 11:44, 21 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

Of course, "surprise" is a very subjective thing! I would be astonished not to find an article on every single Dickens novel in an encyclopedia, or for that matter an article on the ten or so most famous novels by Conrad, Thomas Hardy, Henry James etc. The list that is being evolved, however, seems to hold itself to a much lower (higher?) standard than that. I agree, though, that it's worth saying again that top-importance is not an evaluation of literary merit. Quite apart from the theoretical discussion, however, I think that the expansion of the top-importance list is having a significant practical value. --Sordel 11:34, 21 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

Agreed. Not sure I follow what you meant by the "much lower (higher?) standard" clause. :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/(Desk) 11:44, 21 September 2006 (UTC)Reply
It is worth noting though that we could have many of those authors' works that you name and rate their articles as high rather than top. The article would still exist. It is merely differentiating between what is the author's magnum opus and what are less important works compared to all the others written by that individual. I do not believe that a novel should be defined as top important simply because it is by an important author, particularly if that author was fairly prolific and wrote a number of works. Dickens, for example, is obviously an influential author, but does every single work he wrote truly deserve to be top important just because he wrote them? I do not think they should be. Silverthorn 11:43, 21 September 2006 (UTC)Reply
Not every single work by Dickens, but I think there's a good case to be made that every major novel is of top importance for a writer like Dickens. Compare him to a relatively important contemporary like Trollope. It seems to me that even Dickens' least important novels - Barnaby Rudge and Martin Chuzzlewit, say - are at a level of fame comparable to Trollope's best known works (Barchester Towers and The Way We Live Now, say). the magnum opus of a mediocre writer might not be as important as the relatively minor works of a great one. Take a look at Wilkie Collins, for instance. His magnum opera are clearly The Woman in White and The Moonstone. But I'd think that every novel by Jane Austen (except maybe Northanger Abbey) is pretty clearly better known and more important than Collins' best, and there's at least half a dozen Dickens that I would say the same of. john k 15:21, 21 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

Hide/Show Request edit

I don't know how to do it myself, but could we have the ability to collapse the three lists please, as the page is already becoming unwieldy, with every prospect of growing exponentially. --Sordel 12:12, 21 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

I'll have a think about how best to do that. Needs careful thought :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/(Desk) 16:21, 21 September 2006 (UTC)Reply
An easier alternative may be to split the page and have candidates on their own page. This page is getting very unusable now. --Sordel 21:37, 21 September 2006 (UTC)Reply
I have collapsed the "Now reassigned" section to see if this is a viable way to proceed - at least for now. Unless people have violent objections we can do the same for the other two section; perhaps with macro alphabetic subdivisions. :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/(Desk) 15:44, 22 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

Project Boxes edit

I've noticed that an alarming number of the novels under consideration for top-importance don't yet have project boxes. Can I ask that those proposing new novels enter a project box on the article's talk page with - where confident - a quality assessment and an importance assessment of High (for now!) --Sordel 15:12, 21 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

I'll also have a look at this tomorrow - little time left for me today. :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/(Desk) 16:24, 21 September 2006 (UTC)Reply
I have just finished going through these and responding as suggested. All those so proposed should at least have a banner and mainly with "High" priority / importance. As this has been a hugh piece of work taking most of the day, please excuse me if I have made a few mistakes. :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/(Desk) 14:55, 22 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

Underlying assumptions edit

It seems that both those advocating a quota or proportion system for the project and those who have a problem with all the works of a certain author being rated Top (in other words a proportion system for an author's work), have a similar perspective, and I'm not sure I really get that. We do not have to consider the space restrictions of a traditional encyclopedia (i.e. nothing ever need be left out). In my view, all that should be considered is a novel's own status. The criteria for assessment should be absolute not relative. If such and such a book is considered part of the canon, has influenced subsequent literature, has won critical awards, has become part of the cultural heritage through an adaptation, or has entered the lexicon it should be rated Top because there is a need to have a complete article for it. It shouldn't matter how many other books have met the same criteria or whether those books were written by the same author. We should also, as much as possible use external evidence to determine assessment. If a book appears on a couple of those "greatest" lists or "canon" lists, if a book has won one or more of the major awards, that should lead to a top assessment. I think familiarity through adaptation in other media should have slightly less weight since we're rating novels qua books (so for example, I recently added a novel template to the novel Bambi and rated it as Mid importance despite the familiarity of the character and story derived from the Disney adaptation--most people probably don't even know that a book exists). I suspect that if this approach were followed, there would likely be a significantly higher proportion of Top and High rated novels -- and so it should be. That's kind of the point of the assessment in the first place. All novels that deserve to be rated Top should be and should have thorough articles. The Mid or Low can be neglected to a degree (and we can see that happening naturally--we have a list of Star Trek novels or Grafton's alphabet mystery novels, not yet individual articles--and that's all right.--Ibis3 15:51, 21 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

Actually, my problem isn't so much that I believe that only a proportion of an author's work deserves a top rating. My problem is when the novel is rated top because of who the author is and not on any other criteria. If an author has several equally deserving works, then by all means rate them all equally high, but only because the novels themselves deserve it and not because of who the author is. Silverthorn 16:13, 21 September 2006 (UTC)Reply
The argument from proportion works both ways: it cuts down the prominence of writers for whom there is an overwhelmingly strong argument to include multiple novels (such as Dickens) but also encourages us to make an argument for the top-importance of at least one of the novels by such comparatively minor novelists as Trollope and Camus. It might even encourage us to scrape up a top-important novel for Thailand or Lichtenstein in order to show our international even-handedness. I don't think that any of us argue for proportion per se, but I do sympathise with the view that in constructing this list it must be proportionate, in the sense of representing a broad and satisfactory range of novels. Having all Dickens's novels (we might get there again some day) makes sense if we have five hundred top-important novels but not if we have forty. The need for proportion implies that we have a responsibility to consider non-English language literature, and (as we have today with Children's literature) specific genres whose claims to eternal literary value are not so immediately evident as they are in the case of the canonical "great novel". We'll get there. --Sordel 16:40, 21 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

I just wanted to ask - is there any dispute at all as to whether, for instance, all of Dickens' novels (even Barnaby Rudge) should be at "High"? Or whether Trollope's more important novels (the novels of the Barset and Palliser sequences and The Way We Live Now) should be the same? And so forth? I think we can all agree that any novel which is "in the canon" should at least be ranked at "high." The question then becomes what is the precise distinction between High and Top? Ulysses is obviously of top importance. I think that, say, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall should pretty clearly be listed only at High. The question comes with works somewhere in the middle - not seminal works often listed as the best novel of the century, but reasonably famous, frequently showing up on lists of the top 100, and so forth. Where do we draw the line for, say, Balzac? He wrote something like a hundred novels or novellas. He is clearly one of the most important novelists of the 19th century - the Dickens of France, if you will, except more prolific. Clearly, at least one or two (Père Goriot being the most obvious) of his novels should be in top. Just as clearly, some of the really little known works should probably be in "mid," and the vast majority (say, The Chouans and The Girl with the Golden Eyes), as But what do you do with Cousin Bette or A Harlot High and Low? At what point in the list of Balzac novels (far too few of which, by the way, we have articles about) do we cut off and say "these are not of top importance anymore? How do we make this determination? What exactly is the rule? john k 17:00, 21 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

There's no rule that I can see. I'm not sure that you're right about Dickens, either: Barnaby Rudge and The Mystery of Edwin Drood would be mids in my book. After all, not everything by a major novelist is major, and I'm not sure that I agree that every really major novelist produces something of top-importance: I haven't taken a position on Balzac, but if you had put a knife to my throat and asked me to name a novel by him I couldn't have done it. I think that the list is like the blind men with the elephant ... we've each got one part of it that we can make sense of, and with any luck we'll reconstitute the entire animal between us. --Sordel 17:15, 21 September 2006 (UTC)Reply
As you see, there is a dispute even over novelists like Dickens and Austen, since there is a tendency to list the novels in order of importance within the author's work (Persuasion is less important than Sense and Sensibility is less important than Pride and Prejudice) and rate them accordingly. So instead of all her novels being rated Top since they're all canonical we have those who would wish to rate them relative to each other. The problem with this is two-fold: 1)we only have 5 categories and as it's been pointed out, the least of Austen's (or Dickens' etc.) novels should be rated higher than the greatest of most other authors 2) All of Austen's (etc.) novels should have articles in a comprehensive encyclopedia. With someone as prolific Balzac or Trollope, it would seem logical that some of their novels will have been considered major works and others to have been considered minor. All we have to do is look to external evaluations to discover which those are (look at literature encyclopedias, translation into foreign languages, literary or scholarly criticism, inclusion on canonical lists, adaptations into other media, general familiarity, etc.). But for a canonical author like Balzac, I don't think any of his books should be rated lower than High.--Ibis3 17:37, 21 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

National and Generic Novels edit

Here's something else we should hash out. I know we're having enough difficulty with assessing literary novels of international and long-standing repute, but of course there are two other piles of books over here, and we should come to some agreement on how to handle them. As an aside in another discussion, I proposed that if a book is highly acclaimed, has won national awards, is considered by scholars and critics to be of high importance to a country's literature no matter what the language, it should be rated High. If it has made a splash in the wider stream of literary consciousness (e.g. by winning an international award) then it deserves a Top rating. Further, I would suggest that a parallel system of evaluation should be employed for genre fiction. If a book is considered an important work within the fantasy or mystery or thriller genre (take Starship Troopers to use a recently discussed example), then it should be rated High. Once it has crossed the line into mainstream awareness or been included on a canonical list or given a literary award outside of its genre (e.g. The Time Machine), it should be rated Top.--Ibis3 18:01, 21 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

Do you really think that every single Booker Prize winner, for instance, is of top importance? There's a lot of annual awards, and it strikes me that it's unlikely that every single year will produce several novels that are of top importance (well, either unlikely, or based on a too expansive definition of top importance). That's going to leave us with a lot of top importance novels. The general principle, though, sounds mostly good to me. Works should have to have significant impact outside their own country, or outside their genre ghetto, for them to be considered for top importance. john k 18:05, 21 September 2006 (UTC)Reply
No, I don't think every Booker Prize winner should be rated Top. But if an Australian or Bermudian novel had won considerable critical acclaim at home and then won the Booker Prize I do. The reason for this is because I think that in order to provide a culturally balanced point of view, we have to treat national literature (for want of a better term) on its own merits. Even if we want to consider just novels written in English, British and American novels/authors are far more likely to be known by the masses of English-speaking people world-wide. If we were to say only authors that are as well-known as J.K. Rowling or studied as Charles Dickens need apply for Top assessment, and should be rated relative to those Top rated authors, how many Canadian or Indian books would make it? And the resulting ranking would follow in kind. So, even though a book is known by just about every Canadian or Australian, the highest ranking it could get would be High--and that for only what would be rated as Top if the writer were American. Most works of literature which would be included as separate articles in an encyclopedia of national literature would end up with a Mid or Low rating on Wikipedia. Books written in a language other than English would have an even tougher rating, and we end up with only a smattering of articles dealing with novels other than British or American and even fewer dealing with those in, say Portugese or Hindi or French-Canadian. The same thing applies to works in generic fiction. If only books on the same canonical level as those by Austen get Top ranking, the seminal works in a genre could only ever rank as Mid.--Ibis3 18:55, 21 September 2006 (UTC)Reply
So, then, you think every non-British or Irish Booker Prize winner should be rated as top. Again, this seems problematic. One issue worth considering is that small countries know they're small. Take a look at the Norwegian list above. It includes just two Norwegian works - an Ibsen play (which would, I think, be included in just about any list of the world's best literature) and a novel by Knut Hamsun. A couple of works from any nation's national literature is defensible, but for the Booker Prize, for instance, take a look at the list of non-British or Irish winnders (I excluded Ishiguoro and Jhabvala, who are both arguably British):
  1. V. S. Naipaul, In a Free State (not even one of Naipaul's best known works)
  2. Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist
  3. Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
  4. Thomas Keneally, Schindler's Ark
  5. J. M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K.
  6. Keri Hulme, The Bone People
  7. Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda
  8. Ben Okri, The Famished Road
  9. Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
  10. Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
  11. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
  12. Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
  13. Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang
  14. Yann Martel, Life of Pi
  15. D. B. C. Pierre, Vernon God Little
This is a distinguished list, certainly, and includes some major novelists, but if you included all these, there's any number of other novels to include. I particularly think that privileging Canadian and Australian novelists over comparable American or British ones seems silly. Why these books but not A. S. Byatt's Possession, for instance, or Ian McEwan's Amsterdam, likewise distinguished and Booker Prize winning? Or why not prominent recent Pulitzer or National Book Award winners? Besides Midnight's Children, which probably should be at top importance, are any of these books more worthy than, say, American Pastoral? Affirmative action for writers simply because they're from less populous English-speaking countries seems silly. If there's some novel that is just omnipresent in Canada or Australia, but not known in Britain and America, I suppose we might consider it. But I find such a situation highly unlikely. All of the novels listed above are reasonably well known in America, for instance. They just aren't particularly more well known than any number of recent novels by American or British authors.

I'm writing this after the bit below as a more direct answer to what you say here. First of all, the Booker is an international prize and shouldn't be equated with a Pulitzer. Australia and Canada have their own national awards equivalent to those national awards of the U.S. Second, you're making my point when you say these novels are known in America. They're obviously also known in Britain where the Booker prize is awarded. Do you think for a moment that in all the years of the Booker these are the only novelists that those countries produced and that even then they should only be rated High because they aren't equivalent to whatever American and British authors rated Top from the same period of time? How few non-Brit/non-American novels would ever be considered important to include. I don't think it's silly to try and ensure that we address the lack of balance.--Ibis3 21:28, 21 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

There's plenty of non-British/non-American novels - plenty of French, German, and Russian novels, at the very least, and a smattering of novels from other traditions. But beyond that, I genuinely don't understand your point. Is the work of J. M. Coetzee as famous in South Africa as Charles Dickens is? I would suggest that this is unlikely, that, in fact, even in these commonwealth countries older British (and to a lesser extent, American) authors are better known than contemporary novelists. Peter Carey's role in Australia is not comparable to that of Dickens or Zola or Faulkner or Joyce, but to that of someone like Philip Roth or A. S. Byatt, or whatever, whom I don't see us suggesting novels by to add to top. The domination of American and British authors is not a "lack of balance." It is, in fact, demonstrative of the presence of balance - there simply aren't any genuine literary giants who have yet emerged from Canada or Australia. We shouldn't try to pretend that Oscar and Lucinda is equivalent to Anna Karenina. Beyond this, this argument is particularly ridiculous because, as far as I can gather, native writers only form a relatively small part of the literary canon in Canada and Australia themselves. I would guess that native writers are more highly regarded in their own countries than elsewhere, but I find it dubious that, even in Australia, people do not generally find James Joyce to be a more important writer than Peter Carey. What you are demanding is affirmative action for small anglophone countries, which is silly. The point of a Dickens or a Faulkner isn't that they are recognized as great in their own countries, but that they are recognized as great throughout the English-speaking world. The same is true of foreign writers like Cervantes or Tolstoy. The same cannot be said of Thomas Keneally and Margaret Atwood. They are simply, and pretty clearly, at a lesser level of importance, and trying to force them into top importance simply makes that all the more clear. We should aim to be representative, but this seems silly. Beyond that, I think that we should be quite cautious about including very recent books at top importance. Top importance should, I think, be reserved for books "in the canon" - for books that are likely to be read for a long time, and that have, to some extent, already withstood the passage of time to continue to be viewed as important. Most novels in the last 40 years or so are simply too recent to really meet that standard, and most notable Canadian and Australian novels that I am aware of were written fairly recently. john k 02:12, 22 September 2006 (UTC)Reply
Likely because Canada, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand etc. etc. are fairly recent themselves. I guess where we really differ is in the determination of what the point is of the assessment in the first place. We are not trying to define a canon. If we were, I'd more readily agree with you. As I said elsewhere, I'm not contending that, say Midnight's Children is as important a novel as Ulysses, or that Margaret Atwood is as canonical an author as Jane Austen. That would be silly (and your characterization as 'affirmative action' would have some validity). If you want to have Top importance restricted only to the accepted canon of novels, you'd have to restrict it to the two middle portions of Bloom's list for example (sans all the plays and poetry and most of the European works of course). Nothing written in the past 40 or 50 years would rank, no genre fiction at all would rank, hardly any books written outside of UK or US would rank. But we aren't trying to define a canon. We're trying to determine what novels should be given priority when including and developing articles on Wikipedia. There's a big difference. First of all, we have to take pop culture into account, to a certain degree anyway. Second, we have to be comprehensive by including genre fiction, children's literature, and currently well-known authors. Third, we have to consider the users. This English language encyclopedia is meant to serve all anglophones, not just those in the States. Wikipedia has articles about Notable people places and events--but not just notable to the world at large. There are articles about things I know are Notable only for select groups (how many Star Trek articles are there? I bet in the Britannica there is probably only 1; do you think many people outside of the U.S. care about who Jack Abramoff is? but look at how thorough that article is). There are already a slew of articles about Australia, Australian English, Australian government, Australian law, Australian culture, Australian music, Australian films, Australian people etc.--and not just those things known by the world at large. But we're just going to neglect Australian novels because they don't belong to the canon? That would be silly.--Ibis3 05:31, 22 September 2006 (UTC)Reply
I think the basic issue is that we differ on how big the "top importance" category should be. Perhaps the "top" category isn't defining a canon. But it seems to me that it is more or less close to doing that. My basic feeling is that the "high" category should be about as you seem to think the top category should be - any article that we feel that there should definitely be an encyclopedia article about should be ranked at least "high". But to go from high to top, I think that some kind of canonization is necessary, especially given how small the "top" category currently is, and how slow it is likely to grow if it is entirely based on individual nominations (as it seems to be). Basically, I think the "top" category should be reserved for what is, essentially, a canon of genuinely immortal novels, while the "high" category should be for any "important" novel. By your standard, what exactly would qualify as a novel of "high" importance? john k 17:08, 22 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

I think the issue is more serious for novelists writing in other linguistic traditions, but not seriously so. This is an English-language wikipedia, and if no Serbian or Turkish or Malay novels have widespread familiarity to the English speaking public, that's fine - The Serbian and Turkish anad Malay wikipedias can have wikiprojects for the important novels in their traditions. We should try to make some allowance for famous novels in other literary traditions that are well known in English. We should perhaps go some distance in trying to make sure our list doesn't entirely consist of British and American novels. But we shouldn't be surprised if there's an imbalance in favor of the English language - we're the English language wikipedia! john k 20:07, 21 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

I guess it comes down to how comprehensive we believe Wikipedia should be. And don't think I'm advocating that all novels should have an equal importance rating. I'm just thinking that as far as notability is concerned we ought to make allowances for the obvious American (and to a lesser extent British) bias of Wikipedia. In terms of genre, I suppose the parallel bias in importance rating would be for literary fiction as opposed to genre. I recently added a novel template to a Canadian novel and I assessed it as High. Why? because it has been included in the New Canadian Library, meaning it's been judged by a panel of literary experts to be part of the Canadian canon, and because, The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature gives it an article of its own saying "Hugo MacPherson writes that [the book] 'ushered in the most productive period in the nation's writing, and it introduced a novelist who was to lead his contemporaries in a most absorbing quest.' This quest was for a new relevance in fiction that would examine Canadian consciousness." As well, I understand that it is on the cirricula of many highschool English classes across the country. Another member of the project dropped it to Mid importance saying that the book had only won national awards and wasn't the most well-known of the author's works. True enough. The title of one of the author's other novels has become part of the Canadian English lexicon and an allusion to it has even made it's way onto the motto of the current governor general's coat of arms. Yet shouldn't that novel be rated Top? But then I doubt many people outside of Canada have even heard of him or either of these novels (Hugh MacLennan, Barometer Rising, and Two Solitudes). I'm sure the same situation prevails in Australia, New Zealand, and other English speaking countries. Why shouldn't the most significant Australian, Kiwi, or Canadian novels be rated on par with the most significant American novels? There will always be more of the latter in any case, so it's not like there would be a significant distortion. Again, my feeling is that if a book is Notable within its own country or culture or genre alone it should get a High rating and if it gets recognition outside of this sphere that means that it has progressed beyond High and ought to be rated Top. That's not to say that Hugh MacLennan's Two Solitudes should be considered as equal to Dickens' Bleak House in important to the canon, but rather that both ought to have a complete article in Wikipedia.
And anyway, an argument could indeed be made that any novel that has won the Booker or the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award or Pulitzer should be included in the encyclopedia as a matter of course (which is the criterion for a Top rating).--Ibis3 21:06, 21 September 2006 (UTC)Reply
I don't think the most significant Australian, Kiwi, or Canadian novels should be rated on a par with the most significant American novels, and this is perhaps where we disagree. The most important American novels are widely read outside the United States.
As are the non-Brit, non-American novels I'm proposing be rated as Top. They've broken out of their "national ghettos" to be brought into the consciousness of the wider world. They're known by non-South Africans/Canadians/Kiwis or won international acclaim, or international awards. If an American reader wants to look up A Handmaid's Tale or Midnight's Children, there should be a good article there. Those books that are part of a national/cultural/generic canon, but haven't really gone beyond the borders, should merit a rating of High. It's important to include them but not as crucial.--Ibis3 05:31, 22 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

I'm certainly not saying that there shouldn't be an article on A Handmaid's Tale, just that I don't think it qualifies as top importance. If we were to include Handmaid's Tale, we'd have to include a huge number of other novels as top, as well. It seems to me that the "High" category exists precisely for books like this, and should be used for them. "Top" should be reserved for genuinely canonical works, which Handmaid's Tale is not. (I'll exempt Midnight's Children, for reasons I discussed above - it may be a genuine classic, deserving to be at top importance). john k 16:56, 22 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

The same is true for the most important British (including Irish!), Russian, French, and German novels, at least, and for perhaps a select few from other countries (Don Quixote from Spain, for instance). It is, by your own admission, not true for the most important Canadian novels. A Canadian compiling a list of the top 100 novels of all time would likely include a number of American novels (Moby-Dick, Huckleberry Finn, something by Faulkner, The Great Gatsby, and so forth, are likely to appear on any list, I think, although perhaps I'm overestimating the reach of my national literature). Certainly a Canadian compiling a list would include a goodly number of novels from the British Isles (something by Dickens, something by Austen, Jane Eyre, Ulysses, and so forth come to mind). An American or a Brit compiling such a list could easily do so without including a single Canadian novel (although one imagines that such a list might include one or two - but probably no more). I have no problem with works that are important in a national literature being ranked at "high", even if they aren't too well known outside that country. But I do think that "top" should be reserved for works that are generally considered masterpieces of world literature (or, at least, of world anglophone literature), and not simply masterpieces within their own country. I'd be willing to make some allowances for a whole major literary tradition that might be neglected - some Italian novel, for instance, should probably be included, even though there's isn't anything which is that famous in English, simply because Italian is a major literary language, with a lot of novels written in it. But Canada and Australia do not really have their own independent literary traditions. They are part of a much larger anglophone literary tradition, and while they certainly have their own novelists of whom they are proud, I'm not sure that is really equivalent to the most important British and American novels, which are widely respected outside their home countries. So international recognition seems like the big thing to me. To get back to the Booker Prize, I think the big problem is that it's a pretty bad judge of "international recognition." It was only instituted in 1969, and is annual. This means that it consists of a large number of quite recent novels. This seems like a bad way to go about finding masterpieces. Something like Midnight's Children (like, say, One Hundred Years of Solitude, a novel from a literary tradition not widely known in the English-speaking world) seems perhaps to have entered the canon quite quickly, and perhaps deserves to be here. Perhaps we can think of some others. But can we really say the same for Vernon God Little and The Bone People? john k 02:12, 22 September 2006 (UTC)Reply
This 'UK/US stuff is more internationally recognised' argument is bogus. Representing the impact of two countries that've had more time and far greater economic means is not tantamount to a representing any 'presence of balance' at all, and catering primarily to what the average English Wikipedian considers the 'most important novels' is to represent only this and this.
In our rush to make WP as useful as possible, we're being irresponsible with the medium. Simply jotting down all the works global media and academia have chosen to christen 'Greatest Ever' over the last century is just perpetuating that Anglospheric viewpoint 'collective'. I don't think a novel should be barred from 'Top' designation merely because it isn't read/recognised/known/appreciated the world over. Romance of the Three Kingdoms is practically unknown outside China (and possibly Japan), yet it's one of China's seminal national works, having influenced Chinese thinking for generations.
It's not responsible to allocate our resources on every Kerouac, Salinger and Steinbeck beside Ulysses, Don Quixote and Huck Finn, it's just easier. Hide&Reason 13:05, 27 September 2006 (UTC)Reply
The US/UK being more internationally recognized business was solely referring to anglophone works. Kerouac, Steinbeck and Salinger are pretty arguably more notable writers than whoever the great writers of Canada and Australia of their generations were. The most important works by these three authors (On the Road, The Grapes of Wrath, The Catcher in the Rye) are important and famous novels that are quite likely to be looked up by wikipedia users. There are important Canadian and Australian writers at present, but there's also a ton of American and British authors who are equally important. Is Margaret Atwood really more important than Philip Roth, say? Is Peter Carey more worth noting than A. S. Byatt? I don't think anybody is advocating, by the way, that Visions of Cody, The Pearl, and Franny and Zooey ought to be at top importance, so I'm not sure where you're coming from with the idea that "every" novel by those authors is being pushed here. Beyond that, Romance of the Three Kingdoms is not unknown outside of China. Anyone who knows a tiny bit about Chinese literature has heard of it, and a fair number of non-Chinese people (you and I, for instance, if I assume correctly from your use page that you are Australian) have certainly heard of it. Genuinely seminal works from other important linguistic/literary traditions should generally be included (I am dubious of the merits of including, say, the seminal novel from the 19th century written in Slovene or Romanian). What I do think is that the supposed "systemic bias" that moderately famous/important novels from the anglophone tradition get included, while novels of similar importance from other linguistic traditions do not is perfectly appropriate in an English language encyclopedia. I would suggest, for instance, that any novel which does not have a currently in-print English translation should not be at a higher level of importance than "mid." If there is one thing that it is very for an English language encyclopedia to be biased towards, it is literature published in English. It is much much much more likely that someone is going to come to this wikipedia to look for, say, an article on a medium importance novel by Steinbeck than they are to look for a medium importance novel by, say, André Malraux. This is not to say that Steinbeck is more important than Malraux (I'd say they're writers of comparable importance), but Steinbeck is a more important writer to speakers of English. And speakers of English is who this encyclopedia is geared towards. I don't see what the big deal is with such a conclusion. john k 15:40, 27 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

I agree, Romance of the Three Kingdoms is fairly well known, especially to those who are interested in martial arts movies or videogames. People come to Wikipedia trailing different experience and different priorities; I'll bet that the Da Vinci article now gets a lot of hits from people who are not art lovers, for example. For that reason, working solely from lists of awards wouldn't work ... but fortunately we aren't limiting ourselves to any single criterion of top-importance, and can treat awards lists as only one contributing factor. If, looking at the Booker prize list, we are reminded of a novel that deserves its place in our list for additional contributory reasons, then looking at the list has been worthwhile. Putting something to top- or even high-importance purely because of its award haul would be naive, because there are a lot of factors affecting the allocation of awards other than literary merit, such as the "his/her turn" factor. --Sordel 07:42, 28 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

John, I beg to differ. The works of Kerouac, Salinger and Steinbeck ultimately are no more or less 'notable' than that of Atwood, White or Malouf. I'd even go so far as to say that Mark Twain is on no higher a tier of notability than Banjo Paterson--they're both mainly known for corny Americana/Australiana which has had huge impacts on their respective national mythologies, the only difference being the former name is far more lucrative to the trans-Atlantic publishing heirachy. Notable is a weasel word on Wikipedia. It's made so by the project's virtual nature and international userbase.
Notable is a word with a vague meaning. But what this list is attempting to do is to identify those novels which are generally considered as the "most important" novels to have encyclopedia articles on. That Twain is mostly known for "Americana' does not mean that he is no more important than Banjo Patterson, who I will admit to never having heard of until you mentioned his name. (Had you heard of Mark Twain previously? I imagine you had...) Note the lists above - Huckleberry Finn appears on the list compiled by the Observer (an English newspaper, whose list is notably Anglocentric), and on that compiled by some sort of Norwegian book club. Banjo Patterson's work is not to be found on any extra-Australian list of great novels, I would guess. john k 19:07, 28 September 2006 (UTC)Reply
It's fair enough that English-language works generally be given higher priority than the non-English, but English Wikipedia is not "UK-US Wikipedia". I was using the example of Three Kingdoms to illustrate that prioritising the WP's construction based primarily on what the user's familiar with (ie. basing it on what really is cultural ignorance, in the context of WP:Novel) is the soft option. It all returns to systemic bias: I can't change the fact that the en-WP's editorship is mainly American, but I hope we all think twice about putting Gatsby or Triffids in the same box as Robinson Crusoe simply because of a statistical probability. Hide&Reason 10:35, 28 September 2006 (UTC)Reply
Gatsby is frequently on lists of the greatest novels of all time. Of the lists provided above, it appears on the Observer's List, on the Modern Library List (at number 2 of the 20th century), on the Time list, on the Radcliffe list, and on Daniel Burt's list - that is to say, on every list besides the Norwegian one (including, obviously, the British one). It is widely considered the most important American novel of the 20th century, and while, indeed, we are not the USA-UK-opedia, I don't think anyone, from any country, would deny that the most important American novel of the 20th century would be an important novel indeed, given the, er, vigor of American literary culture over the last century, especially given that this is an Anglophone encyclopedia. Let me, again, try to put this in perspective - Canadians and English people and Australians are very likely to have heard of Gatsby. It's a famous American novel, but it is famous outside of the US. It is widely respected critically. I'm not sure what exactly your point is here. Robinson Crusoe, while historically important, is not even a very good book. If you object to Gatsby and Huckleberry Finn as being top importance, are there any American novels you are willing to accept? I can understand wanting to draw the line for, say Tender Is the Night, or Hemingway novels (none of which is generally as well-regarded as his short stories), or Steinbeck, whose literary reputation has declined considerably since his death. But Gatsby? Huckleberry Finn? Do you object to Moby-Dick and The Sound and the Fury as well? Your view here seems to be that American authors are no more important than Australian authors of similar provenance. But this is absurd, as is proved by the fact that Australians have heard of the American authors you object to, while Americans (and Brits, I would guess, as well) usually haven't heard of the Australian authors you would argue are of comparable fame. They simply aren't of comparable fame, and they aren't of comparable critical repute. If you think they are of comparable quality, that is of course your right, and there's no point in arguing about taste. But I think that we should try to divorce, as much as possible, our own preferences from this, and try to look at it from some kind of perpective. I hate Robinson Crusoe, and if my personal tastes were involved in this, I'd be pushing to kick it off the list due to it being awful, and one of the most boring novels of all time. But, sadly, that is not the criteria here. The criteria is something along the lines of fame, critical respect, historical importance. By these categories, RC comes off well, and it would be wrong to exclude it. I agree that we ought to be careful about our nationalistic assumptions, but nonetheless there are fairly objective ways to tell these things. For instance we could look in British literary reference works and see how long the entry is for Mark Twain compared to that for Banjo Patterson. I would guess that Mr. Twain comes out ahead. Hell, I'd be interested to see if Australian literary reference works (assuming such exist) give Patterson more space than Twain. john k 19:07, 28 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

Genre authors or their novels? edit

A separate question arises with regards to authors who produced no work that is obviouly of top-importance but whose body of work and cultural significance combine to make a strong case for top-importance. An example would be Stephen King, who in my view should definitely be included in any encyclopedia. It seems wrong to me, however, arbitrarily to decide that The Stand, The Shining, Carrie or Salem's Lot have to be top-important in order to get him a seat at the table. (I'm not saying that a case couldn't be made for each of those novels, just that it might be invidious to do so.) Similarly, I have been working on Agatha Christie and in my own mind I think that she has only about four high-important novels (And Then There Were None, Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd) but there is a very strong case for giving her top-importance, since she is one of the best-selling authors of all time, is culturally pervasive and is regarded as one of the finest writers in her genre. I think that we should set our minds to producing candidates from this list, and I would suggest that Heinlein may ultimately belong to it, cutting the Gordian knot on Stranger in a Strange Land and Starship Troopers. Of course, this approach need not only be taken with genre authors - it may apply to Albert Camus, Anthony Trollope or other novelists where there seems to have been a struggle to identify a clear top-important example - but it may be genre authors who benefit most from this approach. --Sordel 07:03, 22 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

This is an interesting point and leads me to ask the question of how much we as the Novels Wikiproject determine the importance of an author rather than their work. The likes of Stephen King and Agatha Christie are the sort of authors that have entered public consciousness. Their works have been adapted into both film and television productions. In the case of Christie there are plays like The Mousetrap too. I suspect they would be considered to have influence far past the borders of their original nation and that people outside the US and Britain would have heard of them. Yet, being a genre author, their works might perhaps not be judged worthy of top-rating, although some may rate high. As part of this process, should we also be assessing the importance of an author via their whole body of work as well as the importance of individual texts? Silverthorn 09:01, 22 September 2006 (UTC)Reply
I would say Death on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express are the most well-known novels, and merit Top-importance in my book. Errabee 09:39, 22 September 2006 (UTC)Reply
I'd vote the four you listed And Then There Were None, Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd) as all Top importance. And for Stephen King, I'd say both Carrie and The Shining should get Top rating too. All of these books are known to a wider audience than just fans of mystery/horror or their respective authors.--Ibis3 13:15, 22 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

In answer to Silverthorn I'd just point out that we're assessing the importance of articles, not novels. To me, the reason that we have thus far been top-listing novels is because it's more likely that someone will look up Don Quixote than Cervantes, Alice in Wonderland than Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. --Sordel 10:10, 22 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

Really? Is it more likely that someone will look up Bleak House than Charles Dickens? I had thought that the reason we were ranking novels was because heretofore that was seen as the purpose of the project - to rate articles on novels. If we want to rate articles on novelists, as well, I'd suggest having a separate rating system - that is to say, that this project should have one rating system for works, and another for authors. In terms of Agatha Christie and Stephen King, I really don't think anything by either one deserves top status, although, as Sordel suggests, they may deserve top importance themselves if we are to rate authors rather than just novels. but I really do think that separate categorization is a must if we're going to do authors too. Otherwise things will get very muddled. john k 17:02, 22 September 2006 (UTC)Reply
I think that it's possible that someone might look up A Christmas Carol without knowing that it was by Dickens. It's the job of the project to define its own scope, I guess, but I assumed that novelists would fall within the scope of a project on novels ..? Alternatively, I suppose that the list could compile a list of authors and submit it to the Literature project for consideration. --Sordel 18:53, 22 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

It was the question about the exact scope of the project that made me ask in the first place to be honest. I presume the authors also to some degree fall under the biography wikiproject, although that isn't in itself a major issue. Several of our novels also fall under different projects (e.g. Horror or Children's Literature). I have no particular problem with us discussing and assigning importance ratings to authors in terms of how important it is that they themselves are included in an article in Wikipedia, but I do view that issue as to some extent separate from the question of how important it is that various of their individual works should be included. The subject of novels and/or major characters (Sherlock Holmes has already been the subject of some debate I believe) is different in my mind to that of the authors themselves. Silverthorn 11:21, 23 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

I would just like to take a moment to question the listing of Agatha Christie's four most influention novels. And Then There Were None- of course. Murder of Roger Ackroyd- Given the innovative narration style, certainly. Murder on the Orient Express- Yes. All of these are innovative situations, or murderers. They created new ways of telling a mystery. But Death on the Nile? I have no idea why this was chosen. It seems so arbitrary. I know it was a movie, but other than that, what on earth does it have to offer? Two of the four are Hercule Poirot. How about a Miss Marple as a classic example? Perhaps her first The Murder at the Vicarage. OR one of her other Detectives. The Secret Adversary is one of my favourites. Or one of her spy-novel mysteries like They Came to Baghdad, which I think is her best novel. (It is only my oppinion, I wouldn't insist). OR her first, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. OR just one of her really good ones like The ABC Murders, The Secret of Chimneys, or The Pale Horse. If someone could explain why Death on the Nile deserves top billing above any of these other suggestions, I would be curious. 74.99.4.176 17:45, 11 December 2006 (UTC)MarisReply

Outreach to other Wiki projects edit

I suggest that it may be valuable to contact other Wikiprojects with more specific expertise within genres. In any case, editors from this project may wish to consult the project pages for Children's literature and Horror and browse at Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory/Culture. --Sordel 07:27, 22 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

it may be valuable to propose doing this type of thing via joint "task forces" in much the same way as projects like "Korean" and "Military History" have done with Wikipedia:WikiProject Korea/Military history. In other words the task force of one is linked to and treated as a task force of the other as well. :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/(Desk) 10:31, 12 December 2006 (UTC)Reply

Promotion edit

Okay, so what exactly are the standards here for promoting? I feel pretty strongly that The Red and the Black and Père Goriot ought to be promoted to top (especially the former), and probably Germinal as well (and, though I haven't formally nominated it, The Charterhouse of Parma, too). However, nobody has seconded any of these nominations. Can I just move them to top, seeing as nobody has objected, or would that be precipitous? Although really, people, how has nobody voted for The Red and the Black? Isn't that an incredibly obvious choice? What the hell? john k 16:30, 23 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

Standard wikipedia rules, I guess: change it if you feel confident. Just so long as the debate on the top-importance page is left intact and moved to the right place it will always be open to a future editor to change your promotion back. As for The Red and the Black, I'm sure that you are right ... I simply don't comment where I have no informed opinion whatsoever, and I guess that there are a few monoglot editors here who feel the same. --Sordel 18:14, 23 September 2006 (UTC)Reply
What does being monoglot have to do with it? Nobody's been shy about Madame Bovary, War and Peace, and so forth. Stendhal's two novels have been widely translated, as have the major novels of Balzac and Zola. They are widely available in major series of "classic literature" like Modern Library, Oxford World's Classics, and Penguin Classics. It is not as though these books are unavailable unless you read French. I think looking at the 19th century novelists who had the most impact in the English-speaking world alone, it would be hard to exclude Stendhal and Balzac, at least (I'm less certain of Zola, who is probably more famous for his political commitments than for his actual writings). I'm going to promote. john k 18:32, 23 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

Well, if it were The Red and The Black or War and Peace, I'd have a view, but Stendhal to me is some guy in the title of a Dario Argento movie. For me, Nana is the big novel by Zola, but what do I know? Foreign language stuff is so difficult to judge .. I'm just glad that there are people around who know that stuff, and I can let them do their thing. --Sordel 19:20, 23 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

Nana is also a big one, but all the lists and stuff I found seemed to pick Germinal as the novel. Nana might qualify for top as well. I'm fairly certain that Charterhouse of Parma does, and probably a couple of other Balzacs (Cousin Bette? A Harlot High and Low? Lost Illusions?) I'd suspect that for other 19th century French stuff, Flaubert's Sentimental Education would perhaps qualify. Also Hunchback of Notre Dame and Count of Monte Cristo, for their fame if not for their literary quality. Stendhal's great, though. You should read him. I will admit to not having actually read Balzac or Zola myself. Not that that prevents me from having an opinion on them! john k 21:25, 23 September 2006 (UTC)Reply
Agreed, Notre Dame de Paris and The Count of Monte Christo really should be there. My mother had to read The Red and The Black at school so its, um, length at least is familiar to me. --Sordel 06:49, 24 September 2006 (UTC)Reply
Stendhal's not that long - editions of The Red and the Black I looked up on Amazon seem to be from about 550-600 pages, and that almost certainly includes about 100 pages of introduction and notes. That's not all that long for a 19th century novel - my copy of The Woman in White is 650, my Vanity Fair is 950, my Moby Dick is 730, The Moonstone is 500 (that's all the 19th century novels I have at hand at the moment). A fairly average length novel. But this is entirely off-topic. john k 13:10, 24 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

For some humbleness... edit

See this list from the Daily Telegraph in 1899 of the top 100 novels of all time...it manages to include three novels by W. H. Ainsworth, four by Bulwer-Lytton, and novels like Valentine Vox by Henry Cockton, The Aide de Camp by James Grant, and The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn by Henry Kingsley, while excluding all works by Dickens after Dombey and Son, all but one novel (Orley Farm) by Trollope, War and Peace, all George Eliot save Scenes from Clerical Life, everything by Dostoevsky, Hardy, Stendhal, Zola, Twain, Melville, Flaubert, James, and even 18th century authors like Richardson and Defoe. It has three by Thackeray, none of which is Vanity Fair, 7 by Scott, but not Ivanhoe, Waverley, or The Heart of Midlothian. Does this show that the Daily Telegraph was stupid, that tastes change, or what? I will admit to being fairly astonished by the thing. I imagine that a hundred years from now people will be unearthing the archives of these discussions and shocked at what we included and excluded... john k 14:26, 24 September 2006 (UTC)Reply

No plays? edit

Latest comment: 17 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

I know that the this is the novels project, but I do think that some of the most highly regarded plays of all time, particularly those which are often read as literature, might be included too. Hamlet, of course, and Macbeth come to mind. Badbilltucker 15:04, 2 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

It's not a literature project, it's a novel project. Plays should have their own wikiproject. john k 17:20, 2 November 2006 (UTC)Reply
or , just include under Wikipedia:WikiProject Books. :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/(Desk) 17:28, 2 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

Promotions edit

Latest comment: 17 years ago11 comments5 people in discussion

Would anyone object to promoting all articles that have two or more people in favor of 'top' and nobody yet opposed?

This would involve promoting...

Register opposition now or I'm going to promote them. john k 17:20, 2 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

Ok by me. :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/(Desk) 17:28, 2 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

I think there should be 4 or 5 or more, pros without opposition before promotion. Reason - I am (and probably many others) are not particularly well read and only people that have read and taken an interest in these books can really comment. I think it should take more than just two people to promote so to get a balance (with 4 or 5 with no opposition then much more likely to be hitting on the right consensus for the population), even if that means getting more people to write up their opinions on the novels or reading them ourselves. Sorry to be a pain but I think that this is important. Lethaniol 17:51, 2 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

Maybe what WikiProject Biography did would work here. They chose a set number of "Top-Importance" articles, and allowed the contributors to choose them. Right now, there seem to be 131 total candidates for inclusion in the Top-importance group. Adding all of the names from the list at the top of this section would make the current total of top-importance articles 89. Maybe the top-importance group could be kept open until, say, 100 novels are included. I know that's an arbitrary number, but think it would permit a bit of further discussion while still including all those which are already at top importance. Badbilltucker 18:14, 2 November 2006 (UTC)Reply
That's nonsense. I've voted for numerous books I haven't read. The issue is more whether novels are historically important or significant than whether they are good. A lot of these books have been up there for months. Nobody needs to read a book to have an opinion on the place of the book within the literary canon. For instance, I have read neither Barnaby Rudge nor Great Expectations, but I know that the latter is considered one of Dickens' most important novels, and the former one of his least important. I've not read anything by Thackeray (Vanity Fair is on my bookshelf...), but I know that the aforementioned novel is considered his most important work. I pushed Père Goriot and Germinal into top, despite never having read a word by either Balzac or Zola, because they're both very important novelists and those seem to be generally be considered their most important works. Having read books can often get in the way of an objective assessment of importance. For instance, I know intellectually that Robinson Crusoe is terribly important, but I really really hate the book, and so I want to vote to relegate it. I'm sure there's other books that I'm overly fond of that I should be judging more harshly. What is needed is not that you've actually read all the books, but just some familiarity with the history of literature.
I would add that of the articles currently at top importance, imo Erast Fandorin, My Name is Red, No Great Mischief, Out of Africa, The Fall, and Titus Groan ought to be downgraded. I'd add that I don't see the need for a limit, at least not until we've genuinely sifted through these things and become clear on how top should work. If we're going to set a limit, it should either be considerably smaller than what we now have, or considerably larger. Otherwise it will be genuinely odd, because there will be strange omissions and/or inclusions. john k 21:52, 2 November 2006 (UTC)Reply
I too have voted for several books I haven't read. The purpose of choosing a smaller number, and I only suggested a hundred, would be because the argument for which volumes would be included as being of top-importance could itself continue indefinitely. This way, we could pinpoint what we consider to be among the most important, and at least know that we'd have some people working to improve those specific books. Once the project had brought most or all of them up to acceptable standard, then another list of books could be selected to be worked on. In effect, it would make for a large group of collaborations without a specific time limit, rather than a single collaboration article for a limited period of time. Badbilltucker 22:02, 2 November 2006 (UTC)Reply
I take back what I said - you don't need to have read the novel to be able to assess the relative importance (though it probably helps a bit), but I think you should know your way around literature quite well (something I cant profess to) before you can suggest promoting to top, a novel you have little knowledge of apart from its importance.
Anyway this discussion doesn't answer my original objection to promoting to top those with only 2 unopposed votes in favour... Cheers Lethaniol 23:26, 7 November 2006 (UTC)Reply
Sorry about that. I agree to their inclusion. Badbilltucker 14:25, 14 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

I would make the following suggestions:

1. Do the promotions as suggested. 2. That we think have a thorough look at those bearing top importance. In most instances the summary quite clearly shows a preference for them to retain that status, but there is the odd one or two where its more 50-50. Those could do with a review, I think. If it is in that sort of doubt, they may be better as high. 3. That we then 'shrink' the 'already assigned top importance list' so that it is only visible when we choose to see it as the majority of the discussion appears to be centering around the possible candidates rather than the already assigned ones. As the page is so long, this would help with clarity I think.

Would that be acceptable to everyone? Silverthorn 17:01, 14 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

I agree with Silverthorn's suggestions 2 and 3, but still am not convinced about suggestion 1 (see my arguments above) and think unopposed novels need 3 or 4 for pros for promotion. Lethaniol 23:13, 20 November 2006 (UTC)Reply
The only real objections I have to 3-4 unopposed votes being required are (1) a lot of people will only vote on their favorites, (2) some people just "passing over" what look like what they think are unanimous choices, thinking "why waste my time" thinking about this one and (3) speaking here for myself as well, I may think that the book deserves top ranking, but not know enough about the field to say that conclusively. People like me will often only vote for those we have very strong feelings about, a good source of knowledge of, and/or review after dispute has begun. An alternative suggestion might be to just make out a list of all the books which individual members consider to be of top importance, and then holding a "vote" or something similar to prune down the list to a managable level (say only allowing those that appear on 50% or more of all the ballots to continue as candidates), and finally engaging in final discussion on those which have, say, 50-75% approval. One advantage I can see to having a fairly comprehensive list of candidates is that we can be fairly sure almost all of the qualified contenders are there, and we can then weigh the comparative advantages and disadvantages of each. Badbilltucker 20:16, 22 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

Importance debate edit

Latest comment: 17 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

You guys ought to be aware of this debate Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Novels/Assessment#The_Importance_of_"Importance". :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/(Desk) 09:34, 15 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

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