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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)
10 figures
Benjamin Franklin
1706 – 1790Electricity, bifocals, and the American public sphere.
Cao Xueqin
1715 – 1763Dream of the Red Chamber, China's supreme novel, spawned its own academic field.
Adam Smith
1723 – 1790The Wealth of Nations founded economics as a discipline.
Immanuel Kant
1724 – 1804The categorical imperative and the limits of knowledge.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
1749 – 1832A poet who also did serious science, and defined what a modern European is.
Mary Wollstonecraft
1759 – 1797A Vindication of the Rights of Woman founded feminist political theory.
Alexander von Humboldt
1769 – 1859Invented the idea that nature is a single connected web — and that we can wreck it.
G. W. F. Hegel
1770 – 1831Dialectic and the history of spirit; the pivot from which Marx and existentialism both turn.
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.