Seminal work
A seminal work is one that is highly influential in an original way.Any list of "seminal works" is of course debatable and can never be considered exhaustive either. Nevertheless there seems to be general agreement as to a handful of works. Among them are the following written texts:
- The four (Canonical) Gospels (1st century AD) (Christian charity)
- The U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776) (democracy)
- Immanuel Kant's Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals) (1785) (Categorical Imperative)
- Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species (1859) (theory of evolution)
- Karl Marx: Das Kapital (1867) (critique of capitalism)
- H. G. Wells: The Time Machine (1896) (time travel)
- Sigmund Freud: Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams) (1900) (psychoanalysis)
- John Osborne: Look Back in Anger (1956) (the Angry Young Men movement)
- Frantz Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth (1963) (postcolonialism)
- Michel Foucault: Surveiller et punir (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison) (1975) (invisible power structures)
- Bret Easton Ellis: American Psycho (1991) (pornography in mainstream literature)