Comprehensive Reading List

Comprehensive Reading List

Narrative Literature (Epic or Romance)

• Bible: Genesis, Exodus 1-2, Samuel, Job, Four Gospels
  Homer: The Iliad, The Odyssey
  Vergil: The Aeneid
  Dante: The Divine Comedy
  Anon: Beowulf
  Anon: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
  Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales ("General Prologue," "Miller's Tale," "Wife of Bath's Tale,"  "Merchant's Tale," "Franklin's Tale," "Pardoner's Tale")
  More: Utopia
  Spenser: The Faerie Queene, Book I
  Milton: Paradise Lost
  Swift: Gulliver's Travels
  Wordsworth: The Prelude,  books 1-2, 6, 10, 13-14
  Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
  Eliot: The Waste Land

Narrative (Novel)

• Fielding: Joseph Andrews
  Sterne: Tristram Shandy
  Austen: Emma
  Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment
  Flaubert: Madame Bovary
  Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
  Melville: Moby Dick
  Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
  Eliot: Middlemarch
  Dickens: David Copperfield
  James: The Portrait of a Lady
  Conrad: Heart of Darkness
  Hardy: The Return of the Native
  Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
  Woolf: To the Lighthouse
  Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury

Dramatic

• Aeschylus: Oresteia, Prometheus
  Sophocles: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone
  Euripides: The Bacchae
  Aristophanes: The Frogs
  Anon: Everyman, Second Shepherd's Play
  Marlowe: Dr. Faustus
  Shakespeare: Othello, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Richard II, Henry IV & V, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest
  Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
  Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer
  Becket, Waiting for Godot

Lyric

• Bible: Selected Psalms: Psalm 23,42,130, 137; The Song of Solomon 8
  Anglo-Saxon: "The Wanderer," "The Seafarer," "Caedmon's Hymn"
  Middle-English: "I Sing of a Maiden," "Sir Patrick Spens," "The Corpus Christi Carol," "Western Wind"
  Wyatt: "Whoso List to Hunt"
  Raleigh: "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd"
  Sidney: Astrophel and Stella, 1
  Shakespeare: Sonnets 29, 65, 73, 116, 129, 146; "Full Fathom Five"
  Donne: "The Canonization," "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," "The Good-Morrow," "Holy Sonnets 10 and 14.
  Jonson: "To Penshurst," "On My First Son," "Queen and Huntress, Sweet and Fair"
  Herrick: " To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time," "Corinna's Going A-Maying"
  Herbert: " The Altar" "Virtue," "The Pulley," "The Collar," "Easter Wings," "Love (III)"
  Vaughn:  "The World"
  Milton: "Lycidas," "On Morning of Christ's Nativity," "How Soon Hath Time," "When I Consider How My Light is Spent"
  Marvell: "To His Coy Mistress," "The Garden"
  Gray: "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"
  Blake: "The Lamb," "The Tyger," "The Sick Rose," "London"
  Wordsworth: "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey," " I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," "Ode: On Intimations of Immortality," "The Solitary Reaper," "Surprised by Joy"
  Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; "Kubla Khan," "Dejection: An Ode"
  Shelley: "Ozymandias," "Ode to the West Wind," "Mont Blanc"
  Keats: "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "To Autumn," "Bright Star"
  Tennyson: "Ulysses," "The Lady of Shalott," In Memoriam 1, 7, 55, 56
  Browning: "My Last Duchess," "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came"
  Arnold: "Dover Beach"
  Whitman: "Song of Myself" (1), "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "Vigil Strange Kept I on the Field One Night"
  Dickinson: "Success is Counted Sweetest," "There's a Certain Slant of Light," "After Great Pain a Formal Feeling Comes," "I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died," "Because I Could not Stop for Death,""Tell all the Truth but Tell it Slant"
  Hopkins: "God's Grandeur," "The Windhover," "Pied Beauty," "Spring and Fall"
  Hardy: "Hap," "The Darkling Thrush,"
  Housman: "To an Athlete Dying Young,"
  Yeats: "Easter 1916," "The Second Coming," "Leda and the Swan," "Sailing to Byzantium," "Adam's Curse"
  Eliot:  The Waste Land, "Preludes," "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "The Journey of the Magi"
  Frost: "Birches," After Apple-Picking," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "Nothing Gold Can Stay," "The Road Not Taken," "Design"
  Stevens: "Sunday Morning," "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," "The Idea of Order at Key West," "The Snow Man"
  Auden: "Muse des Beaux Arts," "The Shield of Achilles"
  Thomas: "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night"
  Bishop: "One Art"
  Heaney: "Digging"
  Wilbur: "Love Calls Us to the Things of this World"
  Williams: "This is Just to Say"

Literary Criticism

• Plato, Book 3 and 10 of The Republic
  Aristotle, The Poetics
  Sidney, "An Apology for Poetry"
  Pope, "Essay on Criticism"
  Jonson, Preface to Shakespeare
  Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads
  Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (Chapter 13)
  Keats, Selected Letters
  Shelley, "A Defense of Poetry"
  Arnold, "The Study of Poetry"
  Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
  James, Preface to Portrait of a Lady (1908)
  Conrad, Preface to Nigger of the Narcissus
  Woolf, "Modern Fiction"
  Stevens, "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"