Georgetown College English Department
Senior Comprehensive Examinations: Oral Exam Core List
ANGLO-SAXON AND MEDIEVAL (5TH CENTURY-1485)
Choose at least two of the following works:
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Selected riddles from Exeter Book and The Dream of the Rood
Beowulf
Anonymous, Judith, and Cynewulf, Juliana
The Seafarer, The Wanderer, and The Wife’s Lament
Selected Middle English lyrics (at least five), studied in a class
The Owl and the Nightingale
King Horn and Havelok the Dane
Anonymous, Sir Orfeo and Thomas Chestre, Sir Launfal
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell and Dame Sirith
Pearl
Saint Erkenwald or one other representative saint’s life studied in a class
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (“General Prologue” and two Tales)
Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde
Geoffrey Chaucer, two of the following: The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of
Fowls, The House of Fame, The Legend of Good Women
William Langland, Piers Plowman
Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love
Thomas Malory, Morte Darthur, selections studied in a class
Everyman or one other representative morality or mystery play studied in a class
Relevant Terms and Concepts: Epic, Heroic Ideal, Elegy, Anglo-Saxon Prosody, Romance,
Courtly Love, Chivalric Code, Alliterative Revival.
RENAISSANCE (1485-1660)
Choose at least two of the following:
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John Skelton, The Book of Phillip Sparrow, The Tunning of Eleanor Rumming, or three
selected lyric poems
Sir Thomas Wyatt, five representative lyric poems
Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, one book
Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella
Sir Philip Sidney, Defense of Poesy
William Shakespeare, five sonnets
John Donne, three representative poems
Ben Jonson, three representative poems
George Herbert, three representative poems from The Temple
Robert Herrick, three representative poems from the Hesperides
John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
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Georgetown College English Department
Senior Comprehensive Examinations: Oral Exam Core List
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Lady Mary Wroth, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus
Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedy of Mariam
Mary Sidney, selections from The Psalms
Aemilia Lanyer, selections from Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum
Thomas Carew, “A Rapture”
Sir John Suckling, Richard Lovelace, Edmund Waller, and/or Abraham Cowley, three
representative cavalier poems studied in a class
Katherine Philips, three representative poems
Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”
John Milton, Paradise Lost, at least one book
Relevant Terms and Concepts: Humanism, Blank Verse, Italian and Shakespearean Sonnet,
Petrarchan Love, Epic.
SHAKESPEARE (1564-1616)
Choose two plays, including:
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One representative comedy
One representative tragedy
Relevant Terms and Concepts: Comedy, Tragedy, Revenge Tragedy, Overreacher.
RESTORATION AND NEOCLASSICAL (1660-1798)
Choose at least two shorter works or one longer work:
Shorter Works
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John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, three representative poems
Aphra Behn, The Rover or one other play
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko
Aphra Behn, two short stories or three representative poems
John Dryden, MacFlecknoe
John Dryden, “Absalom and Achitophel”
Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock
Alexander Pope, Essay on Man
Samuel Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes
Longer Works
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Jane Austen, Emma, Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe or Moll Flanders
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Georgetown College English Department
Senior Comprehensive Examinations: Oral Exam Core List
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Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, at least Books I, II, and IV
Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
Samuel Johnson, Rasselas
Samuel Richardson, Pamela
Samuel Richardson, Clarissa
William Wycherley, The Country Wife
Relevant Terms and Concepts: Satire, Heroic Couplet, Reason, Enlightenment, Restoration,
Nature, Wit, Irony.
ROMANTIC (1798-1832)
Choose at least two works by two different authors:
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Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
William Blake, four to six representative poems from The Songs of Innocence and
Experience
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
William Wordsworth, three representative poems including either “Lines” or “The
Immortality Ode”
William Wordsworth, “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, three representative poems
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner
John Keats, two of the major odes
John Keats, The Eve of St. Agnes
George Gordon, Lord Byron, Manfred
George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don Juan, Cantos I and II
Percy Shelley, three representative short poems
Percy Shelley, Adonais
Percy Shelley, A Defense of Poetry
Relevant Terms and Concepts: Greater Romantic Lyric, Nature, Transcendence, Ode, the
Sublime, Spots of Time, Byronic Hero.
VICTORIAN (1832-1901)
Choose at least two shorter or one longer work:
Shorter Works
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John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle or John Henry Newman, one essay studied in a class
Robert Browning, three representative dramatic monologues
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Georgetown College English Department
Senior Comprehensive Examinations: Oral Exam Core List
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Alfred, Lord Tennyson, three representative poems
Christina Rossetti, “Goblin Market” and three shorter poems
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Jenny”
Matthew Arnold, three representative poems
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland and/or Through the Looking Glass
William Morris, House of Life , The Blessed Damozel or The Defense of Guinevere
George Meredith, Modern Love
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet or three short stories
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Three Representative Poems
Longer Works
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Any novel, preferably studied in a class, by Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Wilkie
Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, William Makepeace Thackeray,
Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray or The Importance of Being Earnest
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H.
Relevant Terms and Concepts: Realism, Dramatic Monologue, and depending on which
work(s) you choose, “Sweetness and Light,” “Pre-Raphaelite,” Melodrama.
AMERICAN LITERATURE TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (1620-1900)
Choose at least one of the following longer works or two shorter works:
Longer Works
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Henry David Thoreau, Walden, one book
Ralph Waldo Emerson, one essay
Mark Twain, Huck Finn
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Henry James, The American
Shorter Works
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Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” “The American Scholar,” “The Divinity School
Address,” “Experience,” or “Fate”
Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,”
“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” or “Passage to India”
Nathanial Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown,” “The Birth Mark,” or “The Minister’s
Black Veil”
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Georgetown College English Department
Senior Comprehensive Examinations: Oral Exam Core List
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Edgar Allen Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Tell Tale Heart,” or “The Cask
of Amontillado”
Stephen Crane, “The Open Boat”
Herman Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener”
Emily Dickinson, three representative poems (preferably from the 320 reading list)
Relevant Terms and Concepts: The Enlightenment, Transcendentalism, Realism and Literary
Naturalism.
MODERN BRITISH AND AMERICAN (1901-?)
Choose at least two of the following works, including at least one complete novel:
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T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” or The Waste Land
William Butler Yeats, three representative poems
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, or Orlando
James Joyce, selections from Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or Ulysses
(two or three chapters)
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, Sons and Lovers, or one other novel
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
George Orwell, 1984
Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey Into Night
William Faulkner, any novel from a class reading list
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises or A Farewell to Arms
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim
Wallace Stevens, three representative poems
Robert Frost, three representative poems
William Carlos Williams, three representative poems
Elizabeth Bishop, three representative poems
Anne Sexton, three representative poems
Sylvia Plath, three representative poems
Allen Ginsberg, three representative poems
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness or one novel from a class reading list
Willa Cather, My Antonia
Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada or Ardor: a Family Chronicle, Pnin, or The
Real Life of Sebastian Knight
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear it Away
Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory, The End of the Affair, or Brighton Rock
Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust or Brideshead Revisited
E.M. Forster, A Passage to India or Howard’s End
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Georgetown College English Department
Senior Comprehensive Examinations: Oral Exam Core List
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Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road
Toni Morrison, Beloved or Song of Solomon
Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
A novel or short story not listed here and written post-WWII from a class reading list (by
authors such as Donald Barthelme, J.D. Salinger, Grace Paley, Stanley Elkin, Richard
Yates, William Trevor, Frank O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Katherine Mansfield, Margaret
Atwood, Nadine Gordimer, John Barth, Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, and Angela
Carter)
Relevant Terms and Concepts: Modernism, the Jazz Age, the New Criticism, Marxism,
Existentialism, Post-Modernism, Minimalism.
ADDITIONAL WORKS
Choose additional works to bring your total number of works to twenty. These works should
reflect your interests and reading. We encourage you to choose texts from the Core List that you
have read in class. However, you may select works that you did not read for a particular course
and works not listed above. The Chair reserves the right to strike from a student’s list any works
deemed too obscure or insubstantial for worthwhile discussion with the orals committee.
Updates Spring 2013
Barbara Burch
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