Foundation Year Program Book List 2024-2025

The following is a list of the books to be read for the Foundation Year Program 2024-2025. 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, The Odyssey, trans. R. Fitzgerald (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) 9780374525743

The Holy Bible (Penguin) 9780452006478

Plato, Republic, trans. G.M.A Grube and C.D.C. Reeve (Hackett) 9780872201361

Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. S. Bartsch (Random House) 9781984854124

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.

The Holy Bible (Penguin) 9780452006478 [Note: Same text used in Section I]

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

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

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

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

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

Anonymous, 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

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

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

William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. F. Dolan (Pelican Shakespeare) 9780143131748

Francis Bacon, Selected Philosophical Works, ed. Rose-Mary Sargeant (Hackett Classics) 9780872204706

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 Press) 9781554811526

Baruch Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, trans. S. Shirley (Hackett) 9780872206076

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

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

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

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

*Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Le Nozze di Figaro: Libretto (G. Schirmer Inc) 9780793525928

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.

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

*Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories, trans. Kirsten Lodge (Broadview) 9781554813223

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

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

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 Press) 9781551119687

Nella Larsen, Passing (Penguin Classics) 9780142437278

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

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. R. Philcox (Grove Press) 9780802158635

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

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