This list is a sample of what you might be asked to read during graduate school! Most of the texts you would read during through classes.

British Literature 


 
 
 
 
 

Chaucer
 

Thomas More

Wyatt and Surrey

Spenser

Marlowe

Sidney

Shakespeare

Donne

Bacon

Jonson

Webster

Marvell

Seventeenth-Century Lyric Poetry

Milton

Dryden
 
 

Etherege or Wycherley

Rochester

Congreve

Behn

Gay

Early Eighteenth-century Novel
 

Swift

Pope

Addison

Sheridan or Goldsmith

Johnson

Boswell

Later Eighteenth-Century Poetry
 
 

Later Eighteenth-Century Novel
 

Blake
 

Wordsworth
 

Coleridge

Byron

Shelley
 

Keats

Lamb

Austen

Bronte, E.

Bronte, C.

Dickens

Thackeray

Eliot, George

Hardy
 

Tennyson

Browning

Arnold
 

Modern British Fiction:

Conrad

Joyce

Lawerence

Woolf

Shaw

Irish Renaissance

Modern Hritish and Irish Poetry

                 Eliot, T. S.


Yeats

Modern And Contmporary British and Irish Drama

Beckett

Pinter

Stoppard

C. Churchill

Contemporary British and Canadian Fiction:

Beowulf

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

The Second Shepherd’s Play

"The General Prologue," Knight’s Tale, Miller’s Tale, Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, Franklin’s Tale, Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale, Nun’s Priest’s Tale from Canterbury Tales.

Utopia

Selected poetry

The Faerie Queen, Book I; The Shepheardes Calendar; Amoretti 

Hero and Leander and one play

An Apology for Poesy; Astrophel and Stella

Hamlet, King Lear, and other plays and sonnets

The First Anniversary; poems from Songs and Sonnets and The Holy Sonnets

One of his Essays; The Advancement of Learning or The New Atlantis

One play; selected poetry

The Duchess of Malfi or The White Devil

"The Garden," "To His Coy Mistress" and the ode to Cromwell

Poems by two of the following: Herrick, Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne, Carew, Suckling, Crashaw

"L’Allegro," "Il Penseroso," "Lycidas," Paradise Lost

Absolom and Achitophel, Mac Flecknoe, All for Love, and "An Essay of Dramatic Poesie" 

The Man of Mode or The Country Wife or The Plain Dealer

"A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind"

The Way of The World

Oroonoko or The Rover

The Begger’s Opera

Defoe, Robinson Crusoe or Moll Flanders; Richardson, Pamela or Clarissa; Fielding, Joseph Andrews or Tom Jones

Gulliver’s Travels, "A Modest Proposal" 

The Rape of the Lock; Moral Epistles 1 and 3; Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot

The Spectator

The Rivals or The School for Scandal or She Stoops to Conquer

"The Vanity of Human Wishes," "Preface to Shakespeare," and Rasselas

Life of Samuel Johnson

Thomson, "Winter" from The Seasons; Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"; Collins, "Ode on the Poetical Character"; Goldsmith, "The Deserted Village"

Sterne, Tristram Shandy, and one of the following: Smollett, Humphry Clinker; Burney, Evelina; or a Gothic novel (e.g. Walpole, Lewis, Radcliffe)

The Book of Thel or The Marriage of Heaven and Hell or Visions of the Daughters of Albion

"Preface" to Lyrical Ballads; Prelude, "Tintern Abbey"; "Ode: Intimations of Immortality"

poems

Childe Harold’s Pilgramage, Canto III; Don Juan, Cantos I-IV

"Mont Blanc," "Adonais," selections from Prometheus Unbound, "A Defense of Poetry"

"The Eve of St. Agnes," the five major odes

"Old China"

Pride and Prejudice or Emma

Wuthering Hieghts

Jane Eyre

David Copperfield or Great Expectations or Bleak House

Vanity Fair or Henry Esmond

Middlemarch

Return of the Native or Tess of the D’Urbervilles or Jude the Obscure
 

Selections from In Memoriam

Six poems

"The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," Sweetness and Light" from Culture and Anarchy

A novel by one of the following: Huxley, Greene, Cary, Forester, Durrel, Orwell

Lord Jim or The Heart of Darkness and "The Secret Sharer"

Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man or Ulysses

Women in Love or Sons and Lovers

Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse

Two of the following: Man and Superman, Major Barbara, and one other play

One play by O’Casey of Synge

Poems by Hopkins, Auden, Hardy, Thomas Larkin

"Tradition and Individual Talent," The Waste Land, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and one play

Poems and one play
 
 
 

Waiting for Godot and one other play

The Homecoming or one other play

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead or one other play
 

One of the following: Vinegar Tom, Cloud 9, Top Girls

A novel by one of the following: Lessing, Martin Amis, Angela Carter, Rushdie, Atwood

American Literature

 
Early American Poetry

Early American Prose
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Franklin

Irving

Cooper

Poe
 
 

Emerson
 
 

Thoreau

Douglass

Jacobs

Hawthorne

Melville

Whitman
 
 

Dickinson

Nineteenth-Century Poetry
 

Nineteenth-Century Fiction





James
 

Twain

Chesnutt

Chopin


African-American Literature:

Nonfiction
 

Fiction
 

Poetry
 
 

Drama


                      Dubois

Modern Fiction:
 
 

Faulkner
 
 

Hurston

Hemingway

Wright

Ellison

O’ Conner, Flannery

Modern Poetry:

Pound

Frost

Stevens

Williams

Modern Drama

O’Neill

Glaspell

Williams, Tennessee

Miller

Albee

Contemporary Drama:
 
 

Contemporary Poetry:
 
 

Contemporary Fiction
 
 

Morrison

































 

Three poems each: Bradstreet, Taylor, Wheatley, Freneau

One of the following: Edwards, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" and "A Divine and Supernatural Light"; Byrd, The History of the Dividing Line; Mather, The Wonders of the Invisible World and Magnalia Christi Americana; Jefferson, Autobiography and Notes on the State of Virginia
 
 
 
 
 

Autobiography

"Rip Van Winkle" and "Legend of Sleepy Hollow"

The Pioneers or one other novel

"The Philosophy of Composition" and "Twice-Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Review"; three poems and three short stories
 

"Nature" and two essays from the following: "The American Scholar," "Self-Reliance," "The Divinty School Address," and "The Poet"
 

Walden

The Narrative of Fredrick Douglass

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

The Scarlet Letter and four tales

Moby Dick and Billy Budd or "Benito Cereno"

"Song of Myself," "Preface" to 1855 Edition of Leaves of Grass, "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"
 

Poems

Two poems by one of the following: Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, Homes, Lowell
 

Two of the following: Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham or A Hazard of New Fortunes; Crane, The Red Badge of Courage or Maggie; Norris, McTeague; Dreiser, Sister Carrie; Wharten, The House of Mirth; or, in lieu of one novel, these four short stories: Gilman, "The Yellow Wallpaper," Jewett, "The White Heron," Freeman, "A New England Nun," Wharton, "Roman Fever."

"The Art of Fiction"; Portrait of a Lady or The Ambassadors; "The Beast in the Jungle" or "The Real Thing"

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The Conjure Woman or The Marrow of Tradition

The Awakening
 
 
 

One of the following: Ellison, Shadow and Act; Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son; Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Two of the following: Larsen, Quicksand or Passing; Baldwin, Go Tell it on the Mountain or Another Country; Walker, Meridian or The Color Purple

Poems by one of the following: Brooks, Lorde, Giovanni, Baraka

Six poems by Hughes

Two of the following: Hughes, Mulatto; Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun; Baraka, Dutchman; Shange, for colored girls or Spell #7; Wilson, The Piano Lesson

The Souls of Black Folks

Two of the following: Steinback, The Grapes of Wrath; Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio; Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Cather, My Antonia or Death Comes for the Archbishop; Dos Passos, The Big Money or Manhattan Transfer; Salinger, Franny and Zooey; one novel or five stories by Bellow; one novel or five stories by Porter

One of the following: The Sound and the Fury, As I lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom, Light in August

Their Eyes Were Watching God

One of the following: The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Farewell to Arms

Native Son

The Invisible Man

Four Stories

Poems by Robinson, Masters, Moore, H. Crane, Cummings

Poems

Poems

Poems

Poems
 
 

Long Day’s Journey into Night, plus one other play

Trifles

A Streetcar Named Desire or one other play

Death of a Salesman or one other play

Zoo Story or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

One play by two: Sheperd, Mamet, Fornes, hwang, Kushner
 
 

Three poems each: Jarrell, Roethke, Lowell, Bishop, Plath, Ginsberg, Rich, Sexton, Levertov
 

One novel or five stories by two of the following; Nabokov, Welty, Updike, Cheever, Heller, Erdrich, Kingston, Barth, Barthelme, Oates, Momaday
 

Beloved or Song of Solomon

 

Created and maintained by Dr. Taimi Olsen, English Program, Tusculum College
updated 11/01/2002