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Category
Disciplines in Literature & Letters
Novelists, poets, philosophers, theologians, New Thought authors, historians and the students of language itself.
Era
Countries (85)
13 figures
Geoffrey Chaucer
1343 – 1400Made English a literary language with The Canterbury Tales.
William Shakespeare
1564 – 1616Built the language most of the planet now negotiates in.
Thomas Hobbes
1588 – 1679Leviathan founded the modern theory of sovereignty and the social contract.
John Locke
1632 – 1704Consent, property and toleration — the template for liberal constitutions.
Adam Smith
1723 – 1790The Wealth of Nations founded economics as a discipline.
Mary Wollstonecraft
1759 – 1797A Vindication of the Rights of Woman founded feminist political theory.
Jane Austen
1775 – 1817Free indirect style and the social novel; still the most adapted author in English.
Mary Shelley
1797 – 1851Frankenstein invented science fiction and the ethics-of-creation debate.
John Stuart Mill
1806 – 1873Principles of Political Economy and On Liberty joined markets to individual freedom.
Thomas Troward
1847 – 1916Indian-service judge whose Edinburgh Lectures gave New Thought a systematic metaphysics.
James Allen
1864 – 1912Wrote As a Man Thinketh, the movement's most reprinted book.
Virginia Woolf
1882 – 1941Stream of consciousness and A Room of One's Own.
Iris Murdoch
1919 – 1999The Sovereignty of Good returned attention and love to moral philosophy.