A Note About the Literature Section
There are a few things to keep in mind when studying this section
- You will most likely only get one question on literature in the IMAT, so do not overstudy!
- The literature section tends to focus mostly on European literature and to a lessor degree American
- Be concise with your note taking, you should not try to understand what entire books are about, the focus is just to remember certain specific pieces of information about them
What to Know About the Author?
When studying for the literature section make sure you study by the author as appose to learning facts about individual pieces of literature. This will allow you to memorize more information.
For an author you should know the following…
- Their name, who they were, where they were from
- When they lived (roughly)
- Any special significance the author had
- The most important books they wrote
Example: Voltaire
I will show you how a good summary of an author looks with Voltaire as an example…
- Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher
- Lived during the late 1600s to late 1700s
- One of the Enlightenment’s most important thinkers, famous for his criticism of the catholic church and of his support for freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state
- Writings…
- Candide: A short novel (novella) about a man named Candide who starts off with great optimism in life and then after travelling and experiencing hardship develops a greater level of disillusionment
- Henriade: An epic poem in honour of a French king and concerning the political state of France.
- Treatise on Tolerance: A philosophical work calling for religious tolerance and criticizes fanaticism.
Voltaire wrote more than what is just written above, but these are some of the most important works. You can of course, if you have time, go deeper.
You should also try read or watch a quick summary of the books written by the author, so that you have a better idea of what the book is about. This will avoid you mixing up books with each other.
List of Authors to Study
*Note: Some authors fall into sections such as philosophy, economics etc, I have not included these authors in the below list as they will be covered in other sections.
*Note: Non-English-speaking authors generally wrote the title of their book in their native language and that title has an English translation. For the IMAT you should remember the English name.
- For example, Dante was an Italian, and his book is titled Divina Commedia, but you should remember the name Divine Comedy for IMAT purposes
Most important (in no particular order) …
Virgil
Apuleius
Leo Tolstoy
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Miguel de Cervantes
Desiderius Erasmus
Charles Dickens
Agatha Christie
Alexander Pushkin
Giovanni Verga
Luigi Pirandello
Dante Alighieri
Ovid
Jules Verne
Niccolò Machiavelli
Giovanni Boccaccio
Alessandro Manzoni
Carlo Collodi
Herodotus
Beowulf (the name of the author is unknown)
Giovanni Pascoli
William Shakespeare
Cicero
Horace
Francesco Petrarca
Ludovico Ariosto
Alberto Moravia
Aristophanes
Sophocles
Alessandro Manzoni
Gabriele D’Annunzio
Important (in no particular order)
Jonathan Swift
Gustave Flaubert
Mark Twain
Goethe
William Golding
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Victor Hugo
C.S Lewis
Rumi
Ian Fleming
Elena Ferrante
Ernest Hemingway
Herbert George Wells
James Joyce
Charlotte Brontë
Marcel Proust
Robert Louis Stevenson
Harper Lee
Murasaki Shikibu
T.S. Eliot
George Orwell
Alexandre Dumas
Herman Melville
Jane Austen
Emily Brontë
Daniel Dafoe
Laurence Sterne
J.R.R. Tolkien
Sun Tzu
Robert Frost
Edgar Allan Poe
Less important
You can (if you have time) add more authors than just the ones listed above.
- But make sure not to overstudy!
What about more modern authors?
- It is less likely to show up on the IMAT, so only focus on more modern writers if you have plenty of time
- These authors include those such as JK Rowling, Dan Brown, Stieg Larsson etc.
- Search for the most famous modern writers and you will find many that you can learn about