Lineages
Every great book stands on older ones. Homer gave Virgil his wanderings and his war; Virgil walked Dante through Hell. Bring any book to the centre: what it draws on is to its left, what draws on it to its right.
Of its time
It draws on
'I had not thought death had undone so many', Eliot's line for the crowds crossing London Bridge, comes from Dante; and behind Dante stands the messenger in Aeschylus' Persians, reporting that never had so many men died in a single day.
Eliot read Ulysses in instalments while working on his poem, and praised its 'mythical method': an ancient story laid beneath the modern city to give it shape. The Waste Land does the same with London, in fragments and many voices.
Its heirs
Faulkner's novel shares the method of Eliot's poem: times and voices set side by side without explanation, and images repeated across its sections until they form a pattern of loss.
The whole web
Every line in the atlas, by place or by time. Tap a work to bring it to the centre.