Reading List

[icepixie]

Mostly for my own benefit, but it may be interesting to a few of you:

Default Texts from the Reading List
• Beowulf (Old English/epic poetry)
• The Seafarer (Old English/poetry)
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Middle English/poetry)
• Chaucer - Wife of Bath's Tale (Middle English/poetry)
• Spenser - Faerie Queen/Books I and V (Early Renaissance/epic poetry)
• Shakespeare - Tempest, Hamlet, Henry IV and V, Taming of the Shrew, Sonnet 73 (Early Renaissance/drama, poetry)
• Donne - The Flea, To His Mistress Going to Bed, HS 10/Death be not proud, HS 18/Show me, dear Christ... (Later Renaissance/poetry)
• Herbert - Altar, Easter Wings (Later Renaissance/poetry)
• Milton - Paradise Lost (Later Renaissance/epic poetry)
• Behn - Oroonoko (Restoration/novel)
• Gay - Beggar's Opera (Early 18th century/drama)
• Richardson - Pamela ((Early 18th century/novel)
• Swift - Modest Proposal ((Early 18th century/prose, satire)
• Gray - Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (Later 18th century/poetry)
• Radcliffe - The Italian (Later 18th century/novel)
• Wordsworth and Coleridge - Lyrical Ballads [Preface, Ancient Mariner, Nightingale, The Tables Turned, Lines written at a small distance from my house, Tintern Abbey] (Early Romantic/poetry)
• Coleridge - Kubla Khan, Christabel (Early Romantic/poetry)
• Keats - Five odes, Eve of St. Agnes, La Belle Dame (Later Romantic/poetry)
• Austen - Emma (Romantic/novel)
• Shelley - Defense of Poetry (Later Romantic/prose)
• Eliot - Mill on the Floss (Early Victorian/novel)
• Hardy - Jude the Obscure (Later Victorian/novel)
• Tennyson - 27 and 56 from In Memoriam, Lady of Shalott, Ulysses (Victorian/poetry)
• Rosetti - Goblin Market (Victorian/poetry)
• Franklin - Autobiography (Early American/prose)
• Irving - Rip Van Winkle (Early American/short fiction)
• Poe - Philosophy of Composition and The Fall of the House of Usher (American Romantic/prose, poetry)
• Emerson - The American Scholar, Nature (American Romantic/prose)
• Dickinson - Various numbers (American later 19th century/poetry)
• Twain - Huck Finn (American later 19th century/novel)
• Conrad - Heart of Darkness (Modernism/novel)
• Ford - The Good Soldier (Modernism/novel)
• Joyce - Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses (Modernism/novel)
• Woolf - Mrs. Dalloway (Modernism/novel)
• Synge - Playboy of the Western World (Modernism/drama)
• Eliot - Prufrock, Wasteland (Modernism/poetry)
• Yeats - Stolen Child, Lake Isle of Innisfree, Wild Swans at Coole, Easter 1916, Irish Airman, To Ireland in the Coming Times, The Second Coming, Sailing to Byzantium/Byzantium, 1919, Leda and the Swan, Circus Animals' Desertion (Modernism/poetry)
• Cather - My Antonia (Early American 20th century/novel)
• Frost - After Apple Picking, Mending Wall, Stopping..., Design (Early American 20th century/poetry)
• Williams - Red Wheelbarrow (Early American 20th century/poetry)
• Stoppard - R&G Are Dead (Later 20th century/drama)
• Rushdie - Midnight's Children (Later 20th century/novel)
• Williams - A Streetcar Named Desire (Later American 20th century/drama)
• Bishop - At the Fishhouses, Filling Station, The Fish (Later American 20th century/poetry)
• Rich - Diving into the Wreck, Woman Mourned by Daughters, Atlas of the Difficult World (Later American 20th century/poetry)
• Morrison - Song of Solomon (Later American 20th century/novel)

Stuff from the List I Will Probably (Have To) Use Anyway
• Edwards - Sinners in the Hands... (Early American/prose)
• Marlowe - Doctor Faustus (Early Renaissance/drama)
• Sidney - Apology for Poesy (Early Renaissance/prose)
• Pope - Rape of the Lock (Early 18th century/prose, satire)
• Blake - Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Songs (Early Romantic/poetry)
• Douglass - Narrative... (American 19th century/prose)
• Browning - My Last Duchess, Caliban Upon Setebos (Victorian/poetry)
• Fitzgerald - Great Gatsby (Early American 20th century/novel)
• Beckett - Waiting for Godot (Later 20th century/drama)

(Is it just me, or does dividing these works, as the list does, into American/Everyone Else, make very little sense after about 1900? Hell, even after 1800. Oy.)

Non-Reading List People/Texts to Drag In Where Possible
• Eavan Boland
• Edna St. Vincent Millay
• Carl Sandburg
• Eliot/Adam Bede
• William Morris/Pre-Raphaelites
• John Steinbeck
• E.M. Forster/Passage to India
• Sherwood Anderson/Winesburg, Ohio
• Brian Friel/Translations
• Zamyatin/We

So is it incredibly obvious from this list which theoretical, geographical, and periodical directions I lean in? *g*

Comments

[icepixie]

There is a lot of great stuff on my list, culled from a much larger list of not-as-great stuff. (Which, in theory, I am supposed to have read all of. In practice, even the department administration tells us not to try. I've got about 7/8ths of it down.)

My year has held study groups since last spring, which has been very helpful, but they're not official or anything; just a group of us who were all interested in finding out what people in other specialties had to say. Plus there's lots of solitary work. (Which reminds me, I need to check out some Ian Watt this week, 'cause I know practically nothing about the rise of the novel...)