Foundation Year Program Book List 2024-2025

The following is a list of the books to be read for the Foundation Year Program 2025-2026. There will be additional readings from the Foundation Year Handbook, which will be distributed to students by the FYP Office prior to the first day of classes.

All books will be available through the King’s Bookstore, located on the lower level, King’s Academic Building (also called the NAB). Any questions for the Bookstore can be directed to manager Paul MacKay at manager@kingsbookstore.ca. Should you plan to purchase second-hand books, please aim to obtain the specified translations.

Note for Science students (K1101/2): Students enrolled in KING 1101/2 should not purchase any of the books indicated by * as these are required readings for Thursday lectures only.

download book list [PDF]

Section I: The Ancient World

You will begin by studying the classical cultures of ancient Greece, Rome and Israel through religious, poetic and philosophical works that articulate ideas and institutions at the origins of Western culture.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, trans. N.K. Sandars (Penguin Classics) 9780140441000

Homer, Iliad, trans. C. Alexander (Ecco) 9780062046284

Plato, Republic, trans. D. Lee, 2nd edition (Penguin) 9780140455113

*Sophocles, Antigone, trans. R. Blondell (Focus Classical Library) 9780941051255

The Holy Bible, ESV (Crossway) 9781433558412

Bhagavad Gita, trans. L. Patton (Penguin) 9780140447903

Virgil, Aeneid, trans. S. Ruden (Yale University Press) 9780300240108

Section II: The Middle Ages

From the collapse of the ancient world arose medieval Europe, a culture apparently unified both religiously and politically, but in fact riven by deep tension and conflict. This section is brought to profound poetic conclusion in a reading of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Augustine, The Confessions, trans. H. Chadwick (Oxford World’s Classics) 9780199537822

The Holy Bible, ESV (Crossway) 9781433558412 [Note: Same text used in Section I]

*Marie de France, The Lais of Marie de France, trans. G.S. Burgess and K. Busby (Penguin Classics) 9780140447590

Ibn Tufayl Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, A Philosophical Tale, trans. L.E. Goodman (University of Chicago Press) 9780226303109

Qur’an, trans. M.A.S. Abdel Haleem (Oxford World’s Classics) 9780199535958

*Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. R. Brown-Grant (Penguin Classics) 9780140446890

Dante, The Divine Comedy: Inferno; Purgatorio; Paradiso, trans. A. Mandlebaum (Everyman’s Library) 9780679433132

*Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. K. Harrison (Oxford World’s Classics) 9780199540167

Section III: The Renaissance and the Reformation

This section is characterized by ambiguity as Europeans look back to revive the ideals of antiquity (renaissance) and begin something new, the modern world. It is an age of worldliness, but also, as the Reformation shows, of radical piety. This is an age of a new sense of the human and of nature that will lead to good and evil as Europe spreads its culture throughout the world.

Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man, trans. C.G. Wallis, P.J.W. Miller, and D. Carmichael (Hackett Classics) 9780872203969

*Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. P. Bondanella (Oxford World’s Classics) 9780199535699

Wu Cheng’en, Monkey King – Journey to the West, trans. J. Lovell (Penguin Classics) 9780143136309

*Michel de Montaigne, The Essays: A Selection, trans. M.A. Screech (Penguin Classics) 9780140446029

Francis Bacon, “New Atlantis” from Three Early Modern Utopias (Oxford World Classics) 9780199537990

Zara Yaqob, The Hatata Inquiries, trans. R. Lee (De Gruyter) 9783112214114

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. A.R. Braunmuller (Pelican Shakespeare) 9780143128540

Section IV: The Age of Reason

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the modern world fully established itself in thought, in science, in politics and society. Here you encounter accounts of human freedom and nature that are at the basis of our own sense of a secular world established for human happiness and well-being.

René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. I. Johnston (Broadview) 9781554811526

*Molière, The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, and Other Plays, trans. M. Slater (Oxford University Press) 9780199540181

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Parts 1 and 2, ed. A.P. Martinich and B. Battiste (Broadview) 9781554810406

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Fundamental Political Writings, trans. I. Johnston (Broadview) 9781554812974

*Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Nathan the Wise (Dover) 9780486796765

Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery (Penguin Classics) 9780140447507

Boston King, The Life of Boston King, ed. C.A.M. Robertson and R. Holmes Whitehead (Nimbus) 9781551094519

Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. T. K. Abbott (Broadview Press) 9781551115399

Jane Austen, Emma, ed. John Mullan (Oxford University Press) 9780198837756

Section V: The Era of Revolutions

With the French Revolution, Europeans began a series of revolutions that sought to overthrow the older world of order and hierarchy to create a world that directly serves human ends and purposes. In this effort arose theories and political movements of liberalism and socialism and in response to them, profound political, literary and philosophic reactions and critiques.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus (Broadview) 9781554811038

G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. L. Rauch (Hackett), 9780872200562

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. L.M. Findlay (Broadview) 9781551113333

J.S. Mill, On Liberty, ed. L. Kahn (Broadview) 9781554810444

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Vintage) 9780679724629

*Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground, trans. R. Pevear (Vintage) 9780679734529

W.E.B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk (Dover) 9780486280417

Section VI: The Contemporary World

In our own age, two world wars and a deepened experience of the modern world have given rise to a radical rethinking of various aspects of the western tradition, and a concern for much that characterizes our time: technology, globalization, social and political structures, and the human relation to nature and our own bodies.

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (Broadview) 9781551119687

Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (Simon & Schuster) 9781501167638

Aimé Césaire, The Tragedy of King Christophe (Northwestern World Classics) 9780810130586

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. C. Borde (Vintage) 9780307277787

N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn(Harper Perennial) 9780062909954

R. C. Lewontin, Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA (Anansi) 9780887845185

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