English Literature M.A. Reading List

British Literature

Beowulf

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

The Tain

Marie de France: Lais

Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales, Troilius and Criseyde

John Gower: Confessio Amantis

Edmund Spenser: The Faerie Queene, Sonnets 2, 3, 5, 6, 10,1 4, 15, 18, 21, 23, 25, 26, 30, 32, 33, 34, 38, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46, 48, 53, 54, 56, 60, 62, 63, 66, 67, 69, 71, 72, 74, 75, 78, 83, 85, 88

Margery Kempe: The Book of Margery Kempe

William Shakespeare: As You Like It, King Lear, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, The Taming of the Shrew; and Sonnets 18, 20, 55, 73, 116, 130, 144

Christopher Marlowe: Dr. Faustus, "The Passionate Shepherd to his Love"

Sir Walter Raleigh: "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd"

Ben Jonson: Volpone and the Alchemist

Robert Herrick: "Delight in Disorder," "The Vine," "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time"

John Donne: Holy Sonnets, "Satire 3," "The Canonization," "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning," "The Flea," "The Bait"

John Ford: 'Tis Pity She's a Whore
John Wilmot: "The Imperfect Enjoyment," "The Disabled Debauchee," "Love and Life"

John Milton: Paradise Lost "How Soon Hath Time," "To the Lord General Cromwell,”" "Methought I Saw"

George Herbert: "The Altar," "Redemption," "The Collar," "The Pulley," "Love(3)"

Andrew Marvell: "To His Coy Mistress"

Samuel Johnson: The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia

Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels

Aphra Behn: Oroonoko, The Rover

William Congreve: The Way of the World

Henry Fielding: Tom Jones

Alexander Pope: The Rape of Lock

Mary Shelley: Frankenstein

Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice

Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights

William Wordsworth: "The Prelude," "Tintern Abbey," "The World is Too Much with Us," "Mutability," "Scorn Not the Sonnet," "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802," "September 1^st, 1802," "London, 1802," "She dwelt among untrodden ways"

John Keats: "Ode on Indolence," "Ode to Psyche," "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode on Melancholy," "To Autumn," "On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer," "The Eve of St. Agnes," "Bright Star," "La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad," "Lamia"

Lord Byron: The Giauur, Don Juan

Alfred Lord Tennyson: "The Lady of Shallot," "Ulysses," "Tithomus," "Locksley Hall"

Robert Browning: "Porphyria’s Lover," "Soliloquy to the Spanish Cloister," "My Last Duchess," "The Bishop Orders His Tomb," "A Toccata of Galuppi’s," "Andrea del Sarto"

Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre

Percy Shelley: Defense of Poetry

Christina Rossetti: "Goblin Market," "In an Artist’s Studio," "Promises Like Pie-Crust," "After Death," "Cobwebs," "At Triad"

William Butler Yeats: "Leda and the Swan," "The Second Coming," "Among School Children," "Sailing to Byzantium," "No Second Troy," "Easter 1916," "Lapis Lazuli," "The Circus Animals’ Desertion"

Gerard Manley Hopkins: "God’s Grandeur," "The Windhover," "Pied Beauty," "Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord"

Charles Dickens: Dombey and Son, Hard Times, Great Expectations

Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness

E.M. Forster: Howard’s End, Passage to India

Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway

James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners

T.S. Eliot: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

John Millington Synge: Playboy of the Western World

Seamus Heaney: "Digging," "Bogland," "The Tollund Man"

Phillip Larkin: "Church Going," "Aubade"

W.H. Auden: "As I Walked Out One Evening," "Stop All the Clocks," "Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love," "Musee des Beaux Arts," "September 1, 1939," "The More Loving One"

George Orwell: Down and Out in Paris and London

Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea

Tom Stoppard: The Real Thing, Arcadia

Caryl Churchill: Top Girls, Cloud Nine

Carol Ann Duffy: "Stealing," "Warming her Pearls," "Nostalgia," "Medusa," "Mrs. Lazarus," "Mrs. Faust"

Andrea Levy: Small Island

Doris Lessing: To Room Nineteen

A.S. Byatt: Possession

Zadie Smith: On Beauty

American Literature


Christopher Columbus: Letter to Luis de Santangel Regarding the First Voyage (Feb. 15, 1493)
John Winthrop: "A Model of Christian Charity"

Edward Taylor: "The Preface"

J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur: Letters from an American Farmer

Catharine Sedgwick: Hope Leslie: Or, Early Times in Massachusetts

Anne Bradstreet: "The Author to Her Books," "Before the Birth of One of Her Children," "To My Dear and Loving Husband," "A Letter to Her Husband, Absent Upon Public Employment," "Prologue," "Upon the Burning of Our House"

Olaudah Equiano: "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself"

Phillis Wheatley: "On Being Brought from Africa to America," "On Imagination," "On Virtue," "On the Death of Rev. Mr. George Whitefield," "To the University of Cambridge, in New England," "To the Right and Honorable William, Earl of Dartsmouth"

Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography

Edgar Allan Poe: "Murders in the Rue Morgue," "Annabel Lee," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Raven," "The Black Cat," "Ligeia," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "William Wilson"

Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Blithedale Romance, The Scarlet Letter, "The Custom House"

Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Self-Reliance," "The Poet," "Divinity School Address"

Frederick Douglass: Narrative of the Life of a Slave

Margaret Fuller: Woman in the Nineteenth Century

Henry David Thoreau: "Resistance to Civil Government," Walden

Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Herman Melville: “Benito Cereno,” “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” “Billy Budd”

Nancy Prince: A Black Woman’s Odyssey through Russia and Jamaica: The Narrative of Nancy Prince

Walt Whitman: "Song of Myself (1881 ed.)," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," from Leaves of Grass "The Dalliance of the Eagles," "This Compost," "To a Foil’d European Revolutionaire"

Mark Twain: Huckleberry Finn

Emily Dickinson: "After great pain, a formal feeling comes," "We grow accustomed to the Dark," "I had been hungry, all the Years," "I started early – took my dog -," "Because I could not stop for Death-," "Water, is taught by thirst," "These are the days when Birds come back-," "I’m 'wife' – I’ve finished that-," "Some keep the Sabbath going to Church-," "One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted-," "This was a Poet – It is That," "I cannot live with You," "I dwell in Possibility," "He fumbles at your Soul," "A still – Volcano – Life -," "Undue Significance a starving man attaches," "'Nature' is what we see-," "Ah, Teneriffe!," "My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun -," "She rose to His Requirement – dropt," "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant-," "I taste a liquor never brewed-," "The Soul selects her own Society-," "I heard a Fly buzz – when I died-," "I Like a look of Agony," "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain," "The World is not Conclusion," "It was not Death, for I stood up," "Much Madness is divinest Sense"

Henry James: The American, "The Real Thing," Portrait of a Lady, The Turn of the Screw, "Daisy Miller"

Edith Wharton: The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence

Zitkala-Sa: American Indian Stories

Willa Cather: My Ántonia, A Lost Lady

Kate Chopin: The Awakening

Wallace Stevens: "Sunday Morning," "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," "The Emperor of Ice Cream," "Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock," "Anecdote of the Jar," "The Idea of Order at Key West," "Of Modern Poetry," "Study of Two Pears"

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night

T.S. Eliot: "The Hollow Men," "Tradition and the Individual Talent," "Four Quartets," The Wasteland, "Sweeney Erect"

William Carlos Williams: "Raleigh Was Right"

William Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom!, As I Lay Dying, "A Rose for Emily"

Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises, In Our Times, "A Clean, Well, Lighted Place," "Hills Like White Elephants"

Zora Neal Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God

John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath

Lorraine Hansberry: A Raisin in the Sun

Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman

Richard Wright: Black Boy, Uncle Tom’s Children, Native Son

Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire

Alice Walker: The Color Purple

Cathy Song: "The Youngest Daughter," "Beauty and Sadness," "Lost Sister," "Girl Powdering Her Neck," "The White Porch"

Alice Notley: The Descent of Alette

Toni Morrison: Beloved

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

Americo Paredes: With a Pistol in His Hand

Robert Hass: "Meditation at Luganitas"

Carolyn Kizer: "Thrall," "The Intruder," "Semele Recycled"

Sylvia Plath: Ariel

Adrienne Rich: "Diving into the Wreck," "Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers," "Grandmothers," "Living in Sin"

Maxine Hong Kingston: China Men

August Wilson: Fences, The Piano Lesson

Cormac McCarthy: The Road

Percival Everett: Erasure

David Henry Hwang: M. Butterfly

Linda Hogan: Solar Storms

Kathy Acker: Don Quixote

Leslie Marmon Silko: Ceremony

Fae Myenne Ng: Bone

Jhumpa Lahiri: The Lowland, Unaccustomed Earth

World Literature

Homer: The Iliad, The Odyssey

Virgil: The Aeneid

Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: 100 Years of Solitude

J.M. Coetzee: Waiting for the Barbarians

Ousmane Sembene: God’s Bits of Wood

Salman Rushdie: Midnight’s Children

Jose Saramago: Blindness

Patricia Powell: The Pagoda

Raja Roa: Kanthapura

Literary Criticism

Terry Eagleton: Literary Theory: An Introduction

Friedrich Nietzsche: “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense”

Sigmund Freud: Civilization and Its Discontents, “The Uncanny”

Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s Own

Henry James: “The Art of Fiction”

Jacques Derrida: Acts of Literature

Fredric Jameson: The Political Unconscious

Homi Bhabha: The Location of Culture

Gayle Rubin: “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex”

Roland Barthes: “The Death of the Author”

Julia Kristeva: The Powers of Horror

Judith Butler: “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” “Subversive Bodily Acts”

Edward Said: Orientalism

Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar: The Madwoman in the Attic

Michel Foucault: from History of Sexuality 2

Toni Morisson: Playing in the Dark

Gayatri Chakravory Spivak: An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization

Henry Louis Gates: The Signifying Monkey

bell hooks: Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics

Lentricchia & McLaughlin: Critical Terms for Literary Study 2^nd ed.

Louis Tyson: Critical Theory Today