Fifty works of English Literature we could do without

This is a brilliant book by Brigid Brophy, Michael Levey, and Charles Osborne. The authors skewer some perennial favorites, and one of the ironies is that their book is much more enjoyable to read if you are conversant with all of the works that they repudiate. Their curmudgeonliness makes it all worthwhile.

Here's the canonical list of Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without:

• Beowulf
• The York Mystery Plays
• The Faerie Queen
• The Alchemist
• Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
• Pilgrim's Progress
• Moll Flanders
• Tom Jones
• Elegy Written in a Country Courtyard
• I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud
• The Bride of Lammermoor
• The Essays of Elia
• The Confessions of An English Opium Eater
• The Dream of Gerontius
• The Scarlet Letter
• Aurora Leigh
• The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table
• Pickwick Papers
• The Warden
• Jane Eyre
• Wuthering Heights
• Moby Dick
• Leaves of Grass
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
• Tom Brown's Schooldays
• The Golden Treasury
• Lorna Doone
• Huckleberry Finn
• Tess of the D'Ubervilles
• Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins
• Esther Waters
• Poems of A. E. Houseman
• The Hound of Heaven
• Peter Pan
• An Habitation Enforced
• The History of Mr Polly
• The Forsyte Saga
• South Wind
• The Moon and Sixpence
• To The Lighthouse
• Lady Chatterley's Lover
• 1914 Sonnets
• Collected Poems of Edith Sitwell
• Notes on 'The Waste Land'
• Point Counter Point
• The Sound and the Fury
• The Silver Chair
• A Farewell to Arms

Much of what has been written in the press (and formerly on e2) about this book misses the point of this book. The unstated point of the book is that these fifty books are so widely known, so widely read, so widely parodied and their stories so widely rehashed that we wouldn't notice if we suddenly didn't have them since we'd always have a rehash, parody or vague memory to understand a reference to them.

There is actually a name for this process where books and ideas become so well known they are no longer directly referenced. It's called the obliteration phenomenon.