1
English Department
Tamkang University
Reading List for Doctoral Students in English
American Literature before 1890
Unless otherwise indicated, all selections are from The Norton Anthology of
American Literature, 5th ed. (1998).
I. American Literature before the 19th Century
John Smith
William Bradford
John Winthrop
Anne Bradstreet
Mary Rowlandson
Edward Taylor
Cotton Mather from Magnalia Christi Americana
Jonathan Edwards “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”
Benjamin Franklin The Autobiography
J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur
Thomas Paine from Common Sense
Thomas Jefferson from The Declaration of Independence
The Federalist
Philip Freneau
Phillis Wheatley
II. 19th-Century American Literature
Washington Irving “Rip Van Winkle,” “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
James Fenimore Cooper from The Pioneers
William Cullen Bryant
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nathaniel Hawthorne short stories, The Scarlet Letter, “Preface” to The House of
the Seven Gables
Edgar Allan Poe
Margaret Fuller
Harriet Beecher Stowe
from Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Henry David Thoreau
Frederick Douglass Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Walt Whitman all poems in the Norton Anthology, plus “A Backward Glance o’er
Travel’d Roads” “Democratic Vistas”
Herman Melville
Emily Dickinson
2
Samuel L. Clemens
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
William Dean Howells
Henry James Portrait of a Lady
Sara Orne Jewett
Kate Chopin The Awakening
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
Booker T. Washington from Up from Slavery
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Edith Wharton
W. E. B. Du Bois from The Souls of Black Folk
Stephen Crane
Theodore Dreiser Sister Carrie
Jack London
Henry Adams
from The Education of Henry Adams
Suggested Readings
Baym, Nina. American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790-1860. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1995.
Buell, Lawrence. Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American
Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1973.
Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New
England. N. Y.: Hill and Wang, 1983.
Davidson, Cathy N. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America.
N.Y.: Oxford UP, 1986.
Davis, Charles T., & Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds. The Slave’s Narrative. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1985.
Elliott, Emory, ed. Columbia Literary History of the United States. N. Y.:
Columbia UP, 1988.
Miller, Perry. Errand into the Wilderness. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1956.
Pearce, Roy Harvey. Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the Idea
of the American Mind. Berkeley & London: U of California P, 1988.
Pizer, Donald, ed. The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism:
Howells to London. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.
Reising, Russell. The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature.
N.Y. & London: Methuen, 1986.
Reynolds, David. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination
in the Age of Emerson and Melville. N.Y.: Knopf, 1988.
Tompkins, Jane P. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction,
1790-1860. N. Y.: Oxford UP, 1985.