British Literature to 1500
Beowulf
Selections from Old English lyrics:
“The Wanderer,”
“The Seafarar”
Or “The Wife’s Lament”
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The Pearl
Langland, Piers Plowman
Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
Malory, Morte d’ Arthur
Second Shepherd’s Play
Everyman
6 Middle-English Lyrics and one ballad
British Literature 1500-1600
Wyatt
“The Long Love,”
“My Lute Awake”
“They Flee from Me”
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
“Love that Doth Reign and Live…”
“The Soote Season”
More, Utopia
Sidney, Astrophil and Stella: Sonnets 1, 5, 7, 31, 39, 74
Spenser
The Fairie Quenne (books 1 and 3)
From Amoretti: Sonnets 37, 54, 64, 75, 79;
“Epithalamion”
Marlowe, Dr. Faustus
Shakespeare
Hamlet
Othello
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The Merchant of Venice
I Henry IV
And from Sonnets: 12, 15, 18, 30, 35, 55, 60,
71, 73, 94, 97, 116, 130, 138, 144.
Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter 13
Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
Bacon,
From Essays:
“Of Truth”
“Of Superstition”
“Of Studies”
From Novum Organum:
“The Idols”
Lady Mary Wroth
Excerpts from Pamphilia to Amphilanthus
And The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania
Cary, Excerpts from The Tragedy of Mariam
Milton
“On Shakespeare”
“Aeropagitica”
“Lycidas”
Paradise Lost: Books 1 and 9
Sonnets:
“Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint,”
And “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent”
Donne The Norton Anthology of English Literature,
v. 1, 6th ed. Abrams M.H., ed.
Herbert
“Easter Wings”
“Denial”
“The Collar”
“The Pulley”
“Love (3)”
“Redemption”
“Jordan (1)”
“The Flower”
“Affliction”
Herrick
“To the Virgins, to Make Use of Time,”
“Corinna’s Going A-Maying,”
“Delight in Disorder,”
“The Night Piece, to Julia,”
“Upon Julia’s Clothes,”
“Upon Prue His Maid”
Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”
Suckling
“Song”
“Out Upon it!”
Lovelace
“To Lucasta, Going to the Wars”
“To Althea, from Prison”
Johnson
“Song: To Celia”
“To the Memory of My Loving Shakespeare”
“To Penhurst”
“On My First Son”
“Queen and Huntress Chaste and Fair”
“Oh Do Not a Wanton With Those Eyes”
Philips
“A Married State”
“Upon the Double Murder of King Charles”
“Friendship’s Mystery”
“To My Dearest Lucasian”
“To Mrs. M.A. at Parting”
“On the Death of My First and Dearest
Child, Hector Philips”
Browne
Excerpts from Religio Medici
Hydrotaphia
Or Urn Buria
British Literature 1660-1800
Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress
Dryden
Absolom and Achitophel
or MacFlenoe
Congreve, The Way of the World
Pope
“Essay on Criticism”
“Rape of the Lock”
Defoe
Robinson Crusoe
or Journal of the Plague Year
Swift
Gulliver’s Travels
“A Modest Proposal”
Gay, The Beggar’s Opera
Richardson, Pamela
Fielding
Joseph Andrews
Or Tom Jones
Blair, The Grave
Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”
Johnson
Dictionary (selections)
or RasselasSterne, Tristram Shandy
Walpole, The Castle of Otranto
Goldsmith
The Vicar of Wakefield
or She Stoops to Conquer
Smollet, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker
Sheridan, School for Scandal
Cowper, The Task
Behn, Oroonoko
British Literature 1800-1900
Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience (selections)
Wordsworth
“Preface to the Lyrical Ballads”
And selections from Lyrical Ballads
Selections from The Prelude
Coleridge
“4 poems
Readings in Biographia Literaria,
(chapters 14 and 17)
Byron
Manfred
Or Don Juan, Canto 2
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
P.B. Shelley
Adonais
“A Defense of Poesy”
Keats
“The Eve of St. Agnes”
Or “Lamia”
Odes
Tennyson
In Memoriam
Or Maud
Eliot, Middlemarch
Browning, 4 dramatic monologues
Arnold
“The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,”
“Thyrsis”
2 other poems
Hardy
Tess of the D’Uerbervilles
Or Jude the Obscure
6 poems
British Literature since 1900 and Comparative Literature
Conrad
Lord Jim
Or Heart of Darkness
Shaw
Man and Superman
Or Heartbreak House
Yeats, selected poems
Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
Joyce
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Or Dubliners
Forster
A Passage to India
Or Howard’s End
Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Auden, selected poems
Waugh
Brideshead Revisited
Or A Handful of Dust
Beckett, Waiting for Godot
Ibsen
A Doll’s House
Or The Master Builder
Pinter, The Homecoming
Chekhov, The Three Sisters
Flaubert
Madame Bovary
Or The Three Tales
Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
Borges, Ficciones
Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Gordimer, July’s People
Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima
American Literature to 1900
Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation (selections)
Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity”
Rowlandson, Narrative
Cooper
Last of the Mohicans
Or Deerslayer
Douglass, Narrative
Emerson
“Self-Reliance”
“Nature (1)”
“American Scholar”
“Divinity School Address”
Thoreau, Walden
Poe
“The Fall of the House of Usher”
“Ligeia”
“The Purloined Letter”
Hawthorne
The Scarlet Letter
3 stories
Melville
“Bartleby”
“Benito Cereno
“Billy Budd
Moby Dick
Whitman
“Preface” to Leaves of Grass
Song of Myself
Dickinson, selected poems
Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
James
“The Aspern Papers”
or “Daisy Miller”
Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
Byrd, from The History of the Dividing Line
Cable, Old Creole Days
Chopin, The Awakening
American Literature since 1900
Frost, selected poems
Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West”
Eliot, The Waste Land
Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury
Or As I Lay Dying
Hemingway
The Sun Also Rises
Or selected stories
Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire
Ellison, Invisible Man
Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Nabokov, Lolita
Miller, Death of a Salesman
O’Connor, 3 stories
Shepard, Buried Child
Morrison, Song of Solomon
Momaday
House Made of Dawn
Or Silko
Or Ceremony
Hwang, M. Butterfly
Wilson, Fences
Menken, “The Sahara of the Bozart”
Agrarians, “Preface” to I’ll Take My Stand
Wright, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow”
Hurston, “How it feels to be Colored Me”
Welty
“A Worn Path”
And “Petrified Man”
Walker, “Everyday Use”
Mason, In Country
Gilchrist, Net of Jewels
Creative Writing
Morrison, Song of Solomon
Atwood, Handmaid’s Tale
Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Barthelme, Sixty Stories
Jones, The Pugilist at Rest
Johnson, Jesus’ Son
Heller, Catch 22
Mailer, The Naked and the Dead
McCarthy, Blood Meridian
Delillo, White Noise
Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Garcia-Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Kerouac, Dharma Bums
Hamsun, Hunger
Steinbeck
East of Eden
Or Grapes of Wrath
Doctorow, Book of Daniel
Carver
“What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”
“Cathedral”
Stone, Dog Soldiers
O’ Brien, The Things They Carried
Updike, Rabbit, Run
Wright, Native Son
Ellison, Invisible Man
Baldwin, Go tell it on the Mountain
Bowles, The Sheltering Sky
Kafka, The Hunger Artist
Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Kosinski, Cockpit
Or The Painted Bird
West
The Day of the Locust
Or Miss Lonelyhearts
Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Gordimer, July’s People
Flannery O’ Connor, five stories,
Peter Hanke (your choice)
Larry Brown (your choice)
Kate Baverman (your choice)
Vladimir Nabokov (your choice)
Two stories each by:
“Richard Ford
“Richard Bausch
“Barry Phillips
“Alice Walker
“Joyce Carol Oates
“Tobias Wolff
“Louise Erdich
“Andre Dubud
“Alice Munro
“Julio Cortazar
“John Cheever
“Naguib Mahfouz
“James Joyce
“Charles Baxter
“Jorge Louis Borges
“Eudora Welty
“William T. Vollman
“Ursula K. Le Guinn
“Pete Taylor
Language, Pedagogy, and Theory
Plato, The Republic (Book X)
Aristotle, Poetics
Eagleton, Literary Theory
Abrams, A Dictionary of Literary Terms
Leitch, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism