Redfield / Qualifying Exam Reading Lists

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18th-Century British Literature

Reading for Qualifying Examination :: Compiled by Marc Redfield

Students should use this list as a guide while constructing their own lists in consultation with Professor Redfield. As a literary-historical period the eighteenth century is an elastic thing, stretching from 1660 to the early Romantic era. Students wishing to concentrate on the Restoration and Augustan periods are strongly advised to minor in seventeenth-century literature; those interested in mid- or late-eighteenth-century developments should consider minoring in Romanticism.

This list includes a very select number of texts from the French and German traditions. All students are encouraged to acquaint themselves with a few of these texts in order better to understand eighteenth-century British literature. Students wishing to pursue a comparative project on the doctoral level may augment and adapt this part of the list in consultation with their advisor. Interdisciplinary readings in other fields (art and architecture, philosophy, etc.) may also be arranged.

In all cases it is assumed that students taking the qualifying exam will be familiar not only with the primary texts, but with the major critical issues that have marked the reception of these texts and authors, and shaped the period as an academic field. The list of secondary texts provided here is intended to be suggestive but not exhaustive.

Poetry

Denham, “Cooper’s Hill”
Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, “MacFlecknoe,” “Song for St. Cecilia’s Day,” “Alexander’s Feast”
Finch, “A Nocturnal Reverie,” “The Spleen,” “To the Nightingale”
Behn, “The Disappointment”
Pope, “Windsor Forest,” Essay on Criticism, Rape of the Lock, Essay on Man, “Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot,” The Dunciad IV.
Swift, “Description of a City Shower,” “Verses on the Death of Dr Swift,” “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed,” “The Lady’s Dressing Room,”
“Stella’s Birthday 1727,” “To Stella Visiting Me in My Sickness”
Watts, “The Sluggard”
Thomson, The Seasons; “Rule, Britannia,” extracts from The Castle of Indolence
Johnson, “London,” “Vanity of Human Wishes,” “Death of Dr Robert Levet”
Young, Night Thoughts (I and VII)
Montague, “The Lover,” “The Reasons that Induced Dr. Swift...”
Akenside, The Pleasures of Imagination, Bk I.
Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” “Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat,” “The Bard”
Collins, “Ode to Fear,” “Ode on the Poetical Character”
Smart, “My Cat Jeoffry”
Goldsmith, The Deserted Village
Crabbe, The Village Bk I.
Burns, “To a Mouse,” “To a Louse,”
Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience
Barbauld, “Washing Day”
Darwin (Erasmus), The Botanic Garden (extracts)
Cowper, The Task Bk. I, “The Cast-away”
Smith, two or three sonnets

British Prose Fiction

Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress
Behn, Oroonoko
Swift, A Tale of a Tub, Gulliver’s Travels
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Roxana
Richardson, Pamela, Clarissa (preferably unabridged)
Fielding, Shamela, Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones
Lennox, The Female Quixote
Smollett, Humphrey Clinker
Walpole, Castle of Otranto
Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield
Johnson, Rasselas
Sterne, Tristram Shandy, Sentimental Journey
Burney, Evelina
Radcliffe, Italian
Godwin, Caleb Williams
Lewis, The Monk

Comparative Prose Fiction

(choose two)

Voltaire, Candide
Rousseau, Julie
Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist
Laclos, Dangerous Liaisons
Goethe, Sorrows of Young Werther
Sade, Justine

Required British Prose Nonfiction

Dryden, Of Dramatick Poesy (1668)
Pepys, Diary, extracts from Longman anthology or equivalent.
Addison and Steele, from Tatler (1709) and Spectator (1711-12) (esp “On Milton,” “On the Pleasures of the Imagination”): Use Longman or Norton selections, or equivalent.
Swift, “A Modest Proposal” (1729)
Burke, Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757)
Johnson, Preface to the Dictionary (1755), Preface to Shakespeare; selected Ramblers (1750) and Idlers (1758-60); Lives of the Poets (1779-81: Milton, Cowley, Pope, Gray).
Boswell, Life of Johnson (1791, abridged version ok)
Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) (selections ok)

Supplemental British Prose Nonfiction

(choose three; substitutions possible)

Hobbes, Leviathan (1651: selections)
Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690: selections)
Shaftesbury, Characteristicks (1711)
Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees (1714)
Hume, Treatise of Human Nature (1739); Essays Moral and Political (1741-42); Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding (1748); Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779)
Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759); The Wealth of Nations (1776)
Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88: selections)
Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
Paine, Rights of Man (1791)

Comparative:

(counts as supplemental)

Rousseau, Emile, Confessions, Discourses.

Drama

Dryden, All for Love
Behn, The Rover
Wycherley, The Country Wife
Otway, Venice Preserved
Congreve, The Way of the World
Gay, The Beggar’s Opera
Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer
Sheridan, The School for Scandal

Secondary Literature in British 18th-Century Studies

Backscheider, Paula, ed. Probability, Time, and Space in Eighteenth-Century Literature. 1979.
Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility. 1992.
Barrell, John. The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730-1840. 1980
Battestin, Martin. The Providence of Wit. 1974
Bender, John. Imagining the Penitentiary. 1987.
Brewer. The Pleasures of the Imagination. 1997.
Brown, Laura. Ends of Empire: Woman and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century English Literature. 1993.
Brown, Marshall. Preromanticism. 1991.
Castle, Terry. The Female Thermometer: 18c Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny. 1995.
-----. Masquerade and Civilization. 1986.
Davis, Lennard. Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel. 1983.
Doody, Margaret. The Daring Muse. 1985.
-----. The True Story of the Novel. 1996
Fried, Michael. Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. 1980.
Fussell, Paul. The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism. 1965.
Gallagher, Catherine. Nobody’s Story. 1994.
Hay, Douglas, ed. Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England. 1975.
Hill, Christopher. Reformation to Industrial Revolution: The Making of Modern English Society, 1530-1780. 1967.
Laslett, Peter. The World We Have Lost. 1966.
McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel. 1987.
Monk, Samuel. The Sublime. 1935.
Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory. 1959.
Nussbaum, Felicity, and Laura Brown, eds. The New Eigheenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature. 1987.
Paulson, Ronald. Emblem and Expression. 1975.
Pocock, J. G. A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. 1975
Price, Martin. To the Palace of Wisdom. 1970.
Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800. 1977.
Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. 1963.
Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. 1973

19th-Century British Literature

Option A: Romanticism Reading for Qualifying Examination :: Compiled by Marc Redfield

Modern scholarship and its bureaucratic support systems distinguish two ways of working in the British nineteenth century: as a Romanticist and as a Victorianist. The Qualifying Exam in this field subdivides accordingly. In both of its versions it covers the entirety of the nineteenth century (and dips back into the end of the eighteenth); but the Romantic list is weighted toward the texts and questions that have gone into the making of a British “Romantic period” (often delimited chronologically as 1789-1832, but a number of beginning and terminal dates are in common use). Students intending to become Romanticists should use the following list as a guide while constructing their own lists in consultation with Professor Redfield. Interdisciplinary readings in other fields (art and architecture, philosophy) may be arranged, or, via a minor in Critical Theory, an emphasis on twentieth-century literary theory in conjunction with Romanticism.

This list includes a very select number of texts from the German Romantic tradition. Students wishing to pursue a comparative project on the doctoral level may augment and adapt this part of the list in consultation with their advisor. Readings in other national literatures may also be arranged.

British Poetry

( M = McGann, ed., The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse; N = Norton Anthology; L = Longman Anthology; M/M = Mellor and Matlak, eds., British Literature 1780-1830 )

Barbauld, selections from Poems 1773 in M/M; Eighteen Hundred and Eleven; “Washing-Day”
Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience; Marriage of Heaven and Hell; Thel; America; Urizen; Milton; Jerusalem; “The Mental Traveller.”
Beddoes, “To the River Itchin”
More, Slavery, A Poem; extracts from Cheap Repository Tracts in M/M.
Yearsley, A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade
Smith, Elegiac Sonnets (selections in M/M or comparable).
Burns, “To a Mouse,” “To a Louse,” “Flow Gently Sweet Afton,” “Tam o’Shanter”
Robinson, sonnets from Sappho and Phaon (in L); extracts from Lyrical Tales (in L)
W. Wordsworth, all of Lyrical Ballads (but especially “Tintern Abbey,” “The Thorn,” “Nutting,” “The Old Cumberland Beggar,” “Michael,” the Lucy poems); major poems from Poems 1807 (especially “Resolution and Independence,” “Immortality Ode,” “Solitary Reaper,” “Ode to Duty,” “Elegiac Stanzas,” the major sonnets, “The Solitary Reaper,” “Stepping Westward”); The Prelude (1805 version); some poems from Poems 1815 (esp. “Surprised by Joy”)
D. Wordsworth, “Floating Island at Hawkshead,” journal selections (in M/M, N, or L)
Coleridge, “Eolian Harp,” “Fears in Solitude,” “France: An Ode,” “Frost at Midnight,” “This Lime-Tree Bower,” Rime of the Ancient Mariner; Christabel; “Kubla Khan,” “Dejection: An Ode”; “Ne Plus Ultra”
Scott, “Lord Randall,” “Proud Maisie,” or some other representative lyrics or ballads.
Byron, Childe Harold, “Chillon,” Manfred, Giaour, “She walks in beauty,” “On this day I complete,” Don Juan.
Shelley, “Mont Blanc,” “Hymn,” Alastor, “Ozymandias,” “Lift not the painted veil,” “England in 1819,” Mask of Anarchy, Prometheus Unbound, “West Wind,” “Sensitive Plant,” “To --,” Adonais, Triumph of Life.
Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” Sleep and Poetry, “Elgin Marbles,” Endymion (extracts ok), “When I Have Fears,” Eve of St. Agnes, “La Belle Dame,” “If by dull rhymes,” Lamia, Hyperion, odes of 1819, Fall of Hyperion, “This Living Hand,” “To ---”
Hemans, “The Graves of a Household,” “Casabianca,” “The Homes of England,” “Corinne at the Capitol”
Clare, “Swordy Well,” “The Mouse’s Nest,” “Clock a Clay”
Tennyson, “Kraken,” “Mariana,” “Lady of Shalott,” “Palace of Art,” “Lotos-Eaters,” “Ulysses,” “Tithonus,” In Memoriam (extracts in L ok), Idylls of the King (extracts in L ok), “Crossing the Bar”
E. B. Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese (extracts in L ok), Aurora Leigh (extracts in L ok), “A Musical Instrument”
R. Browning, “Porphyria’s Lover,” “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” “My Last Duchess,” “Pied Piper,” “Bishop Orders His Tomb,” “‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’,” “Fra Lippo Lippi,” “Andrea del Sarto,” “Caliban Upon Setebos”
Arnold, “Thyrsis,” “Dover Beach”
Swinburne, “Laus Veneris,” “Hymn to Proserpine,” “Dolores,” “Ave Atque Vale,”
D.G. Rossetti, “The Blessed Damozel,” The House of Life (selections from L ok)
C. Rossetti, “When I am dead, my dearest,” “She sat and sang alway,” “After Death,” “Dead before Death,” “Goblin Market,” Later Life #17 (“Something this foggy day”)
Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur,” “The Windhover,” “Pied Beauty,” “Hurrahing in Harvest,” “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”
Wilde, “Impression du Matin”

Comparative Poetry

Bürger, “Lenore” (“Ellenore” in William Taylor’s 1795 translation: in M 121)
Goethe, “The Erl-King” (in Matthew Lewis’s 1795 translation: in M, 129)

Prose Fiction

Radcliffe, Mysteries of Udolpho, The Italian
Lewis, The Monk
Scott, Waverley
M. Shelley, Frankenstein
Austen, Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma
C. Brontë, Jane Eyre
E. Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Thackeray, Vanity Fair
Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Dickens, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations
Collins, The Moonstone
Eliot, Middlemarch
Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray
Hardy, Jude the Obscure

British Prose Nonfiction

Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (N or L extracts ok)
Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (extracts in L ok)
Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
Paine, Rights of Man (extracts in L ok)
Wordsworth, “Prefaces” of 1802 and 1815"; Essays on Epitaphs
Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Lectures on Shakespeare (selections in L, or equivalent)
Lamb, extracts from Elia and Last Essays in M/M
Hazlitt, “On Gusto,” “My First Acquaintance with Poets,” The Spirit of the Age (Coleridge, Byron, Wordsworth)
Keats, major letters (N or L or M/M)
P. Shelley, Defence of Poetry, “On Love”
De Quincey, Confessions; “On the Knocking at the Gate,” “Literature of Power”
Carlyle, Sartor Resartus
Ruskin, Modern Painters (extracts in L ok), Stones of Venice (extracts in L ok), Praeteritia (extracts in L ok)
Arnold, “Function of Criticism,” Culture and Anarchy (extracts in L ok)
Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (extracts in L or N ok)
Mill, “What is Poetry?”Autobiography (extracts in L ok)
Pater, “La Giocanda,” “Winckelmann” and “Conclusion” to Renaissance.

Comparative Prose Fiction

F. Schlegel, Critical Fragments, Athenaeum Fragments
De Stael, Of Germany, Of Literature

Drama

No separate category for drama is required of students majoring in this field. Students interested in adding readings in Romantic drama (e.g., Wordsworth, Borderers; Coleridge, Remorse; Shelley, Cenci; etc.) may consult with their advisor.

Secondary Literature on Romanticism and the 19th Century

Students should take this list as suggestive rather than exhaustive: wide and ongoing reading in the secondary literature in the field forms an essential part of advanced graduate study. For exam purposes students should, in consultation with their advisor, select five or six texts of the sort listed here for inclusion in the exam list. As always, Romanticists should focus on their period, but should also be able to display some acquaintance with Victorian studies.

A. Romanticism

M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp. 1958.
-----, Natural Supernaturalism. 1971.
Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company. 1961.
-----, ed. Romanticism and Consciousness. 1970.
Stephen Bruhm, Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction. 1994.
Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries. 1981.
James K. Chandler, England in 1819. 1998.
Cynthia Chase, ed. Romanticism. 1990.
-----, Decomposing Figures. 1986
David Collings, Wordsworthian Errancies. 1994
Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism. 1984.
David Erdman, Prophet Against Empire.
Steven Goldsmith, Unbuilding Jerusalem: Apocalypse and Romantic Representation. 1993
Geoffrey Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth. 1987.
-----, Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787-1814. 1964.
-----, Beyond Formalism. 1971. (Selected essays on Romantics)
Neil Hertz, The End of the Line. 1985.
Jerrold E. Hogle, Shelley’s Process. 1988
Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in 19c Women’s Writing. 1986.
Carol Jacobs. Uncontainable Romanticism. 1989
Mary Jacobus, Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference. 1989.
-----, Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads
Theresa M. Kelley, Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics. 1989.
Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832. 1987.
Steven Knapp, Personification and the Sublime. 1985.
Greg Kucich, Keats, Shelley, and Romantic Spenserianism. 1991.
Marjorie Levinson, Keats’ Life of Allegory. 1988
----. Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems. 1986.
Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History. 1989.
Peter Manning, Reading Romantics: Texts and Contexts. 1990.
Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin. 1981
Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology, 1983
Anne K. Mellor, ed. Romanticism and Feminism. 1988.
-----, Romanticism and Gender. 1993.
Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1789-1820). 1983.
Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion. 1996.
Forest Pyle, The Ideology of the Imagination. 1995
Laura Quinney, Literary Power and the Criteria of Truth. 1994
T. Rajan, Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism. 1980.
Arden Reed, ed. Romanticism and Language. 1984.
David Simpson, Wordsworth's Historical Imagination. 1987.
-----, Romanticism, Naturalism, and the Revolt Against Theory. 1993
Willard Spiegelman, Majestic Indolence: English Romantic Poetry and the Work of Art. 1995
Earl Wasserman, The Finer Tone: Keats's Main Poems. 1953.
-----, The Subtler Language. 1959.
Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime. 1976.
Susan J. Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism. 1997.
-----, The Questioning Presence. 1986.
Woodring, Carl. Politics in English Romantic Poetry. 1970.

B. Victorian

Carol T. Christ, Victorian and Modern Poetics. 1984.
Jonathan Crary. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th C. 1995.
Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and the Transformations of the Novel. 1992.
D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police. 1988.
Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. 1988.
Eve Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. 1985

19th-Century British Literature Option B: Victorian

Reading for Qualifying Examination :: Compiled by Marc Redfield

Modern scholarship and its bureaucratic support systems distinguish two ways of working in the British nineteenth century: as a Romanticist and as a Victorianist. The Qualifying Exam in this field subdivides accordingly. In both of its versions it covers the entirety of the nineteenth century (and dips back into the end of the eighteenth); but the Victorian list is weighted toward the texts and questions that have gone into the making of a “Victorian period” (roughly superimposable on the reign of Victoria, 1837-1901). Students intending to become Victorianists should use the following list as a guide while constructing their own lists in consultation with their faculty advisor.

The field of Victorian studies traditionally subdivides by genre: one becomes a specialist in Victorian poetry, Victorian non narrative prose, or the Victorian novel. The following list assumes interest in the novel, the genre that most students of the period want to study and teach. Students interested in placing greater emphasis on poetry or non narrative prose should develop those aspects of the base list accordingly, in consultation with their advisor. Interdisciplinary readings in other fields (art and architecture, philosophy) may also be arranged.

This list includes a very select number of texts of French or German provenance. They are optional, but highly recommended, particularly the novels. Students wishing to pursue a comparative project on the doctoral level may augment and adapt this part of the list in consultation with their advisor. Readings in other national literatures may also be arranged. (Ambitious future Victorianists may wish to recall how important German literary and philosophical writing was for many of the period’s central authors (Coleridge, Carlyle, Eliot, Arnold), and may wish to invest some time in reading Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister and other major texts in the German tradition.)

Poetry

(N= Norton Anthology; L=Longman Anthology; M/M=Mellor and Matlak, eds., British Literature 1780-1830)

Barbauld, selections from Poems 1773 in M/M; “Washing-Day”
Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience; Marriage of Heaven and Hell; Thel; America; Urizen
Smith, Elegiac Sonnets (selections in M/M or comparable).
Burns, “To a Mouse,” “To a Louse,” “Flow Gently Sweet Afton,”
W. Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey,” “The Thorn,” “Nutting,” “The Old Cumberland Beggar,” “Michael,” the Lucy poems, “Resolution and Independence,” “Immortality Ode”; The Prelude (extracts in L, N, or M/M ok).
D. Wordsworth, “Floating Island at Hawkshead,” journal selections (in M/M, N, or L)
Coleridge, “Eolian Harp,” “Frost at Midnight,” Rime of the Ancient Mariner; Christabel; “Kubla Khan,” “Dejection: An Ode”
Scott, “Lord Randall,” “Proud Maisie,” or some other representative lyrics or ballads.
Byron, “She walks in beauty,” “On this day I complete,” Don Juan (cantos I and II)
Shelley, “Mont Blanc,” “Hymn,” Alastor, “Ozymandias,” “Lift not the painted veil,” “England in 1819,” “West Wind,” Triumph of Life.
Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” “When I Have Fears,” Eve of St. Agnes, “La Belle Dame,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “To Autumn”
Tennyson, “Kraken,” “Mariana,” “Lady of Shalott,” “Palace of Art,” “Lotus-Eaters,” “Ulysses,” “Tithonus,” “Locksley Hall,” In Memoriam, Maud, Idylls of the King (extracts in L ok), “Crossing the Bar”
E. B. Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese, Aurora Leigh, “A Musical Instrument”
R. Browning, “Porphyria’s Lover,” “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” “My Last Duchess,” “Pied Piper,” “Bishop Orders His Tomb,” “‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’,” “Fra Lippo Lippi,” “Andrea del Sarto,” “Caliban Upon Setebos,” Ring and the Book (Book I)
Arnold, “Forsaken Merman,” “Scholar-Gypsy,” “Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse,” “Thyrsis,” “Dover Beach”
E. Brontë, “No Coward Soul is Mine”
Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Swinburne, “Laus Veneris,” “Hymn to Proserpine,” “Dolores,” “Ave Atque Vale,”
D.G. Rossetti, “The Blessed Damozel,” The House of Life
C. Rossetti, “When I am dead, my dearest,” “She sat and sang alway,” “After Death,” “Dead before Death,” “In an Artist’s Studio,” “An Apple-Gathering,” “Up-Hill,” “Goblin Market,” “‘No Thank You, John,’” Later Life #17 (“Something this foggy day”)
Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark
Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur,” “The Windhover,” “Pied Beauty,” “Hurrahing in Harvest,” “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” Wreck of the Deutschland.
Wilde, “Impression du Matin,” Ballad of Reading Gaol
British Prose Fiction
Radcliffe, Mysteries of Udolpho, The Italian Lewis, The Monk
Scott, Waverley
M. Shelley, Frankenstein
Austen, Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion
C. Brontë, Jane Eyre, Villette
E. Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Thackeray, Vanity Fair
Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass
Gaskell, Wives and Daughters
Dickens, Oliver Twist, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend
Collins, The Moonstone, The Woman in White
Eliot, Adam Bede, Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda
Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Trollope, Barchester Towers, The Eustace Diamonds, The Way We Live Now
Conan Doyle, some Holmes stories
Haggard, She
Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray
Stoker, Dracula
Hardy, Mayor of Casterbridge, Jude the Obscure, Tess of the Durbervilles
Comparative Prose Fiction
Balzac, Old Goriot
Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Zola, Nana

British Prose Nonfiction

Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (N or L extracts ok)
Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (extracts in L ok)
Wordsworth, “Prefaces” of 1802 and 1815
Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (selections in L, or equivalent)
Lamb, extracts from Elia in M/M
Hazlitt, “On Gusto,” “My First Acquaintance with Poets,”
Keats, major letters (N or L or M/M)
Shelley, Defence of Poetry
De Quincey, Confessions; “On the Knocking at the Gate,” “Literature of Power”
Carlyle, Sartor Resartus
Ruskin, Modern Painters (extracts in L ok), Stones of Venice (extracts in L ok), Praeteritia (extracts in L ok)
Darwin, Origin of Species (extracts ok)
Mayhew, London Labour and London Poor (extracts ok)
Arnold, “Function of Criticism,” Culture and Anarchy
Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (extracts ok)
Mill, On Liberty, “What is Poetry?”, Autobiography
Pater, “La Giocanda,” “Winckelmann” and “Conclusion” to Renaissance.

Comparative Prose Nonfiction

Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto
Marx, Capital (extracts ok; be sure to read chapter 1)

Drama

No separate category for drama is required of students majoring in this field.

Secondary Literature on Romanticism and the Victorian era

Students should take this list as suggestive rather than exhaustive: wide and ongoing reading in the secondary literature in the field forms an essential part of advanced graduate study. For exam purposes students should, in consultation with their advisor, select five or six texts of the sort listed here for inclusion in the exam list. As always, Victorianists should focus on their period, but should also be able to display some acquaintance with Romantic studies. This list, once again, presupposes a guiding interest in the novel.

A. Romantic

Bloom, Harold, ed. Romanticism and Consciousness.
Chase, Cynthia, ed. Romanticism.

B. Victorian

Altick, Richard. The Presence of the Present: Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel. 1991.
Anderson, Amanda. Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture. 1993.
Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction. 1987
Auerbach, Nina. Romantic Imprisonment: Women and Other Glorified Outcasts. 1986.
Beer, Gillian. Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth Century Fiction. 1983
Bernstein, Susan David. Confessional Subjects: Revelations of Gender and Power in Victorian Literature and Culture. 1997.
Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914. 1988.
Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. 1984
Buckley, Jerome. The Victorian Temper. 1951
Christ, Carol T. Victorian and Modern Poetics. 1984.
Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. 1995.
David, Deirdre. Rule Britannia: Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing. 1995
Duncan, Ian. Modern Romance and the Transformations of the Novel. 1992.
Ender, Evelyne. Sexing the Mind: Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Hysteria. 1995.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality Volume One. 1978
Gallagher, Catherine. The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832-1867. 1985.
Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 1979.
Hertz, Neil. The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime. 1985
Houghton, Walter. The Victorian Frame of Mind: 1830-1870. 1957
Kincaid, James R. Child-loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture. 1992.
Levine, George. The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley. 1981.
Lloyd, David, and Paul Thomas. Culture and the State. 1998
Lovell, Terry. Consuming Fiction. 1987
Miller, D. A. The Novel and the Police. 1988.
Miller, J. Hillis. The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers. 1975
-----. The Form of Victorian Fiction. 1968
-----. Victorian Subjects. 1990
Morse, David. High Victorian Culture. 1993
Nunokawa, Jeff. The Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel. 1994
Plotz, John. The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics. 2000
Poovey, Mary. Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830-1864. 1995.
-----. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. 1988.
Redfield, Marc. Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman. 1996.
Richards, Thomas. The Commodity Culture of Victorian England. 1990
Sedgwick, Eve. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. 1985
-----. The Epistemology of the Closet. 1990
Sharpe, Jenny. Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text. 1993.
Wicke, Jennifer. Advertising Fictions. 1988
Yeazell, Ruth Bernard, ed. Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. 1986

20th-Century British Literature

Reading for Qualifying Examination :: Compiled by Marc Redfield

Students should use this list as a guide while constructing their own lists in consultation with Professor Redfield. Various semi-informal subconcentrations are possible within this field: classic (“high”) modernism; post-World War II British and Anglophone literature; comparative literature. Interdisciplinary readings in other fields (art and architecture, philosophy) may also be arranged. Students should be aware, however, that, even in an era of canon revision and cultural studies, Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, and Woolf tend to remain the bread-and-butter authors of British modernists, particularly in the classroom (and consequently in job interviews). These authors should be read as carefully and extensively as possible, even by students who wish to focus on a different area of twentieth-century British literature.

This list includes a very select number of texts from the French, German, and American modernist traditions. All students are encouraged to acquaint themselves with a few of these texts in order better to understand the highly allusive, cosmopolitan phenomenon that literary historians have dubbed “modernism.” Students wishing to pursue a comparative project on the doctoral level may augment and adapt this part of the list in consultation with their advisor.

British Poetry

A few poems by Wilde, L. Johnson, other aesthetes
Kipling, one or two ballads
Hardy, selected poems.
Housman, a few poems
Yeats, an extensive selection of major poems
Eliot, an extensive selection of major poems
Owen, a few poems
Auden, a few of the major poems
Thomas, a few poems
Heaney, a few poems

Comparative Poetry

(suggestions only: choose two or three from this list, or provide your own suggestions)

Rilke, a few poems
Stevens, a few poems
Pound, a few poems
H.D., a few poems
Moore, a few poems

British Prose Fiction

Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray
Kipling, Kim
Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo
Ford, The Good Soldier
W. Lewis, The Wild Body
Forster, A Passage to India, Howards End
Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, Between the Acts
Lawrence, The Rainbow
Mansfield, a couple of short stories
Joyce, Dubliners, Portrait, Ulysses, selections from Finnegans Wake
O’Brien, The Third Policeman
Beckett, Watt, Molloy
Waugh, Decline and Fall
Carter, The Bloody Chamber

Anglophone Prose Fiction

(suggestions only: choose two or three from this list, or provide your own suggestions)

Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas (1961)
Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
Atwood, Wilderness Tips

Comparative Prose Fiction

(suggestions only: choose two or three from this list, or provide your own suggestions)

Proust, Swann’s Way
Kafka, The Metamorphosis, The Castle, short stories
Mann, The Magic Mountain, other novels if you can
Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
James, The Golden Bowl, other novels if you can
Borges, short stories

British Prose Nonfiction

(mainly aesthetic or political statements)

Conrad, “Preface” to Nigger of the Narcissus
W. Lewis, “The Vorticist Manifesto” (1914)
Yeats, A Vision
Forster, “Art for Art’s Sake” (in Two Cheers for Democracy)
Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Eliot,“Tradition and the Individual Talent,” “The Metaphysical Poets,” other.

Comparative Prose Nonfiction

Marinetti, “Futurist Manifesto” (1909)
Tzara, “Dada Manifesto” (1918)
Breton, “Surrealist Manifesto” (1924)
James, essays (“Art of Fiction” etc)

British Drama

Wilde, Importance of Being Ernest
Shaw, Major Barbara, Pygmalion, Man and Superman
Synge, Playboy of the Western World
Yeats, Cathleen ni Houlihan
Beckett, Waiting for Godot, Endgame (1957)
Pinter, The Dumb Waiter
Stoppard, Rosencranz and Guildenstern

Comparative Drama (choose two)

Ibsen, Hedda Gabler
Strindberg, The Ghost Sonata (1907)
Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921)
Brecht, Mother Courage (1939)

Nonfictional Cultural/Philosophical Texts

(a sampling: these are not required texts, but one or two may be put on the exam list if the candidate so desires)

Students are encouraged to acquaint themselves with a few of the most important philosophical or critical-theoretical texts of the era, most of which aren’t British.

Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, “On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense”
Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (extracts)
Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Frazer, Sir James. The Golden Bough (extracts)
Freud, Interpretation of Dreams (1899), Civilization and its Discontents (1930)
Spengler, Decline of the West (1918)
Heidegger, Being and Time (1927), “Letter on Humanism” (1947)
Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936)
Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment
Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure” in Visions of Excess
Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death” in La part du feu
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

Secondary Literature on Modernism

Baudelaire, Charles. “The Modern Artist” (1859); “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863)
Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899)
Wilson, Edmund. Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930. (1931)
Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis : The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. [esp. “The Brown Stocking”]
Frank, Joseph. The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature. (1963) [esp. “Spatial Form in Modern Literature”]
Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. (1971)
Jameson, Frederic. Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist. (1979)
Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918. (1983)
de Man, Paul. “Literary History and Literary Modernity.” In Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. Second Edition (1983).
Berman, Marshall. All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. (1982)
Reiss, Timothy J. The Discourse of Modernism. (1982).
Burger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. (1984).
Perloff, Marjorie. The Dance of the Intellect (1985)
Menand, Louis. Discovering Modernism: T.S. Eliot and His Context. (1987).
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. Vol. I-III. (1988-94).
Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle. (1990).
Dettmar, Kevin, and Stephen Watt, eds. Marketing Modernism: Self-Promotion, Canonization, and Rereading (1996)
Felski, Rita. The Gender of Modernity. (1995)
Tratner, Michael. Modernism and Mass Politics: James, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats. (1995).
Perloff, Marjorie. Wittgenstein’s Ladder (1996).
Davidson, Michael. Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word (1997)
Lamos, Colleen. Deviant Modernism: Sexual and Textual Errancy in T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust. (1998)
Rainey, Lawrence. Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (1998)
Tate, Trudi. Modernism, History, and the First World War. (1998).
Clark, T. J. Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999)
Miller, Tyrus. Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (1999)

Critical Theory: Minor Field

Reading for Qualifying Examination :: Compiled by Marc Redfield

This section is under construction. Students wishing to minor in critical theory may in the meantime do two things:

1. Work from anthologies

The minor list will base itself on texts easily available in the new Norton anthology, but several useful anthologies exist. Here, in chronological order, are three I’ll be consulting in building a core reading list:

Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle, eds., Critical Theory Since 1965 (1986)
Michael Ryan and Julia Rivkin, eds., Literary Theory: An Anthology (1998)
Vincent B. Leitch, ed., The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2001)

2. Read or reread some of the classics of contemporary critical theory. Although theory is a minor rather than a major field at CGU, I plan to allow students to tailor, to some extent, the core reading list according to their interests. So you can begin building a list by reading central texts in your area of interest, e.g.:

Marxism:

Benjamin, Illuminations;
Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment;
Althusser, Reading Capital, For Marx;
Jameson, Political Unconscious; etc.

Deconstruction:

Derrida, Of Grammatology, Positions, “White Mythology” from Margins of Philosophy; Limited Inc, Aporias,

Other texts:

de Man, Blindness and Insight, Allegories of Reading, The Resistance to Theory;
Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference, A World of Difference; etc.

Gender and Sexuality:

Butler, Gender Trouble, Bodies that Matter;
Foucault, The History of Sexuality; etc.