GRE Preparation Reading List (in progress)

Students: use this list for ideas for summer reading or independent study courses. Consult the Norton Anthologies and read their selections.

Remember to see the English Department Chair about the general and subject GREs, if you are considering graduate school.

This is a suggested and partial list only:

BRITISH PROSE

Beowulf (Seamus Heaney translation)

Defoe, Moll Flanders

Richardson, Pamela

Fielding, Joseph Andrews

Gulliver’s Travels, "A Modest Proposal"  (Swift)

Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)

Wuthering Hieghts (Bronte)

Jane Eyre (Bronte)

Great Expectations or Bleak House (Dickens)

Vanity Fair (Thackery)

Middlemarch (Eliot)

Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Hardy)

 

BRITISH POETRY

Marvell, "The Garden," "To His Coy Mistress"

A few poems by: Herrick, Herbert, Vaughan

"L’Allegro," "Lycidas," Paradise Lost selections (Milton)

The Rape of the Lock (Pope)

Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"

Goldsmith, "The Deserted Village"

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Blake)

"Preface" to Lyrical Ballads, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" (Wordsworth)

Coleridge "Kubla Khan"

Shelley, selections from Prometheus Unbound, "A Defense of Poetry"

Keats "Ode on a Grecian Urn"

 

AMERICAN POETRY AND PROSE

Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" and Walden

Emerson's "Nature"

Poetry by Emily Dickinson and

Walt Whitman

Novels by:

Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter)

Mark Twain

Henry James (Portrait of a Lady)

William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury)

Edith Wharton (Age of Innocence)

Kate Chopin (The Awakening)

Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

TWENTIETH CENTURY and THEORY

Terry Eagleton, Introduction to Literary Theory