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GRADUATE PROGRAM

 

MASTER'S EXAM READING LIST

 

 

Literature before 1660

Anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1375).
Aristotle Poetics.
Chaucer, Geoffrey Selections from The Canterbury Tales (c. 1390): General Prologue; The Clerk's Tale; The Miller's Prologue and Tale; The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale; The Man of Law's Prologue and Tale; The Nun's Priest's Prologue and Tale; The Prioress's Prologue and Tale; Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1380).
Donne, John "The Canonization," "The Extasie," "The Flea," "Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star," "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning"; Holy Sonnets: "At the Round Earth's Imagin'd Corners," "Death Be Not Proud," "Batter My Heart."
Herbert, George Selections from The Temple (1633): "The Pilgrimage," "Easter Wings," "The Altar," "Redemption," "Time," "Death," "The Collar," "Love III."
Jonson, Ben The Alchemist (1610, published 1612).
King James Bible Genesis, Song of Solomon, Gospel of Luke, Gospel of John, I Corinthians, Revelation (translation published 1611).
Langland, William The Vision of Piers Plowman (B text), passus 1-7 (c. 1360-90).
Milton, John "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" (c. 1631, published 1645); Lycidas (1637); Areopagitica (1644); Paradise Lost (1667-74).
More, Thomas Utopia (1516).
Plato Symposium.
Shakespeare, William Henry IV, Part I (c. 1597); As You Like It (c. 1599); Othello (1604); King Lear (c. 1604); The Tempest (1610); Twelfth Night (c. 1601); Sonnets nos. 12, 15, 18, 55, 106, 130.
Spenser, Edmund The Faerie Queene, Books 1 and 2 and "A Letter of the Author to Sir Walter Raleigh" (1590).


 

English and American Literature,
1660-1819

Austen, Jane Pride and Prejudice (1813).
Behn, Aphra Oroonoko (1688).
Blake, William The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1790-93); selections from Songs of Innocence & Experience (1789-95): both Introductions, "The Echoing Green," "The Lamb," "The Little Black Boy," "The Tyger," both "Nurse's Songs," "London," "The Human Abstract." From Milton (1804): "And Did These Feet in Ancient Time."
Burney, Frances Evelina (1778).
Byron, George Gordon, Lord Don Juan, cantos 1 and 2 (1819).
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1798-1817); "Kubla Khan" (1816); Biographia Literaria (1817), chapters 13, 14, 17.
Congreve, William The Way of the World (1700).
Defoe, Daniel Moll Flanders (1722).
Equiano, Olaudah The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1791).
Fielding, Henry Joseph Andrews (1742).
Franklin, Benjamin Autobiography (1793).
Johnson, Samuel Rasselas (1759).
Keats, John "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," "On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again," "La Belle Dame sans Merci," "Lamia," "To Autumn," "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn"; letters to Benjamin Bailey (22 November 1817), John Hamilton Reynolds (3 May 1818), and George and Georgiana Keats (Feb.-May 1819).
Pope, Alexander The Rape of the Lock (1712-14); "Moral Essay II, To a Lady: Of the Characters of Women" (1735).
Richardson, Samuel Pamela (1740-41).
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Frankenstein (1818), with the Introduction of 1831.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe "Adonais" (1821); A Defence of Poetry (1821, published 1840).
Swift, Jonathan Gulliver's Travels (1726); "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift" (1739).
Wollstonecraft, Mary A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).
Wordsworth, William "My Heart Leaps Up," "Strange Fits of Passion," "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey," "The Solitary Reaper," "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," "The World Is Too Much with Us"; Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800).


 

English and American Literature,
1820-1900

Brontë, Charlotte Villette (1853).
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Sonnets from the Portuguese (1845-47, published 1850);"To George Sand: A Desire" and "To George Sand: A Recognition" (1844); "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" (1846, published 1848); Aurora Leigh (1853-56, published 1856), books 1, 2, 3, 5; "A Curse for a Nation" (1860).
Browning, Robert "Porphyria's Lover" (1836); "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" (1846); "My Last Duchess" (1846).
Carlyle, Thomas From Sartor Resartus (1834): "The Everlasting No," "Centre of Indifference," "The Everlasting Yea," "Natural Supernaturalism;" from Past and Present (1843): "Midas," "Captains of Industry."
Chopin, Kate The Awakening (1899).
Crane, Stephen "The Open Boat" (1898); "The Pace of Youth" (1898); "The Monster" (1899).
Dickens, Charles Great Expectations (1860-61).
Dickinson, Emily Any twenty poems.
Douglass, Frederick Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845 version).
Hawthorne, Nathaniel "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" (1832); "The Minister's Black Veil" (1836);"The Maypole of Merry Mount" (1836); "Rappacini's Daughter" (1844).
Hopkins, Gerard Manley Poems, 1876-89: "God's Grandeur," "Spring," "Pied Beauty," "Hurrahing in Harvest," "The Windhover," "Spring and Fall," "As Kingfishers Catch Fire," "(Carrion Comfort)," "No Worst, There Is None," "To Seem the Stranger Lies My Lot, My Life," "My Own Heart Let Me Have More Pity On," "Tom's Garland," "That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire," "To R.B."
Martí, José "Our America" (1891); "The Truth about the United States" (1894); "Coney Island" (1881); "Brooklyn Bridge" (1883); "War Diaries" (1895).
Melville, Herman "Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" (1853); "Benito Cereno" (1855); Billy Budd, Sailor (1891, published 1924).
Mill, John Stuart On Liberty (1859); On the Subjection of Women (1860, published 1869).
Rossetti, Christina Goblin Market (1862): "When I Am Dead, My Dearest," "A Triad," "In an Artist's Studio," "A Birthday," "Winter: My Secret," "In the Bleak Midwinter."
Tennyson, Alfred Lord "The Lady of Shalott" (1832, published 1842); "Ulysses" (1833, published 1842); In Memoriam A.H.H. (1833-50, published 1850).
Thoreau, Henry David "Civil Disobedience" (1849).
Twain, Mark A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889).
Whitman, Walt "Song of Myself" (1882); 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass.


 

Literature since 1900

Achebe, Chinua Things Fall Apart (1959).
Atwood, Margaret The Handmaid's Tale (1985); from Second Words (1982): "An End to Audience?" (1980); "Amnesty International: An Address" (1981).
Colón, Jesus A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches (1982).
Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness (1902).
Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land (1922); "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1922).
Faulkner, William Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
Frost, Robert "Home Burial," "After Apple Picking," "Neither Far Out," "Design," "Mending Wall," "The Oven Bird," "Never Again Would Birds' Song."
Greene, Graham The Quiet American (1955).
Hughes, Langston "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "Negro," "Dream Variations," "I, Too," "The Weary Blues," "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," "Bad Luck Card," "Johannesburg Mines," "Come to the Waldorf-Astoria," "The English," "Drum," "Goodbye Christ," "The Same," "Air Raid over Harlem," "Big Meeting," "When the Negro Was in Vogue," "Freedom Train," "Harlem," "Thank You, Ma'm," "Radioactive Red Caps" (1921-61).
Joyce, James A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914-15).
Lessing, Doris The Golden Notebook (1962).
Miller, Arthur The Crucible (1953).
Morrison, Toni Beloved (1987).
Naipaul, V. S. A House for Mr. Biswas (1961).
O'Brien, Tim In the Lake of the Woods (1994).
Plath Sylvia From Ariel (1965): "Lady Lazarus," "Cut," "Ariel," "The Applicant," "Death & Co.," "Daddy," "Balloons," "Kindness," "Edge," "Words."
Stevens, Wallace "Sunday Morning," "The Idea of Order at Key West," "The Snow Man," "Peter Quince at the Clavier," "Of Modern Poetry," "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction."
Thiong'o, Ngugi wa Petals of Blood (1977).
Vonnegut, Kurt Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).
Woolf, Virginia Mrs. Dalloway (1925).
Yamamoto, Hisaye Seventeen Syllables (1988).
Yeats, William Butler The Tower (1928).

 

 


  

 

Rutgers-Newark English Department

Professor Virginia Tiger, PhD, Chair

Hill Hall Room 501

Newark, New Jersey 07102-1801

Telephone: 973.353.5279

Fax: 973.353.1450

Email: engnwk@andromeda.rutgers.edu

Website: http://english.newark.rutgers.edu

 

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