Survey of 18 –19th Century British and American Literature
EXAMINATION TOPICS
(British)
1. Augustan poetry: John Dryden and Alexander Pope
2. Neoclassical prose satire: Jonathan Swift
3. The 18th century novel (with an analysis of ONE novel in detail)
4. William Blake and the Lake poets: William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge
5. Second generation Romantics: Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats
6. The 19th century novel (with an analysis of ONE novel in detail)
(American)
7. The English Colonies: the religious and the secular spirit of the ”New Man”. John Smith,
Anne Bradstreet, Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening. The New Republic: Benjamin
Franklin Thomas Jefferson, M.G. Crévecoeur
8. The New Literature of the New Republic: Washington Irving, J.F. Cooper. The American
Renaissance: intellectual currents, literary trends. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David
Thoreau
9. The Power of Blackness: Nathaniel Hawthorne. Edgar Allan Poe: A one-man literary
institution; his fiction, poetry and critical works
10. Walt Whitman: an extended embrace; liberation of form and content in poetry. Emily
Dickinson: intensity in impersonal confessions
11. The Power of Blankness. Herman Melville. Slave Narratives and Literary Accounts of the
Civil War: Frederick Douglass, Ambrose Bierce
12. Local Color, Humor, Social Criticism, early Naturalism. Mark Twain, Jack London,
Stephen Crane. Rediscovering Europe: Henry James
see next page
Required Reading
(American)
I. FICTION: NOVELS
-- Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter OR Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn
-- Henry James: The Turn of the Screw
II. SHORT FICTION
Washington Irving: “Rip Van Winkle”;
Edgar Allan Poe: “The Tell-Tale Heart”; “The Fall of the House of Usher”,
Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Young Goodman Brown”; “Rappaccini’s Daughter”
Herman Melville: “Bartleby the Scrivener”;
Ambrose Bierce: “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”
Stephen Crane: “The Blue Hotel”
III. POETRY
Anne Bradstreet: “To My Dear and Loving Husband”
Edgar Allan Poe: “The Raven”; “Annabel Lee”; “Israfel”
Walt Whitman: “Song of Myself” (1-21, 24, 33, 40, 41, 51, 52); “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”;
“To a Locomotive in Winter”
Emily Dickinson: Poems numbered 241 (“I like a look of Agony”), 249 (“Wild Nights”), 695 (“As if the
sea should part”), 712 (“Because I could not stop for Death”), 754 (“My life had stood -- a loaded
Gun”), 1539 (“Now I lay thee down to sleep”), 1732 (“My life closed twice”), 1755 (“To make a
prairie”) + 5 of your own choice!
IV. MISCELLANEOUS PROSE
Jonathan Edwards: Excerpts (TBA)
Benjamin Franklin: Excerpts (TBA)
Thomas Jefferson: “The Declaration of Independence”
Edgar Allan Poe: “The Philosophy of Composition”
Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Self-Reliance”
Frederick Douglass: The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave
(British)
I. POETRY
John Dryden: MacFlecnoe (first 28 lines)
Alexander Pope: excerpts from The Essay on Man (Epistle 1: VIII, IX, X), from the Rape of the Lock
(Canto I, 121-148. Belinda’s toilet preparations)
Thomas Gray: Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
William Cowper:The Poplar Field OR from The Winter Evening in The Task (lines 268-332)
William Blake: ’The Proverbs of Hell’, London, The Lamb, The Tyger, ‘The Sick Rose’, ‘Mock on,
mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau’, ‘And did those feet’ Introduction (To Innocence), Infant Joy, A Dream,
Infant Sorrow, The Clod and the Pebble CHOOSE FOUR POEMS
William Wordsworth: ‘She dwelt among the untrodden ways’, ‘It is a beauteous evening’, ‘Composed
upon Westminster Bridge’, ‘My heart leaps up’, ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ CHOOSE THREE
POEMS
William Wordshwoth: Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey OR Wordsworth: Ode:
Intimations of Immortality OR Lord Byron: Don Juan, Canto I
S. T. Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner OR Kubla Khan
P. B. Shelley: Ode to the West Wind OR ‘The world’s great age’ and ‘England in 1819’
John Keats: Ode on a Grecian Urn OR ‘Ode to a Nightingale’
II. PROSE
Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels, Book I OR II OR IV
one 18th century novel to choose from:
Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders
Henry Fielding: Tom Jones
Laurence Sterne: Sentimental journey
one 19th century novel to choose from:
Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre
Charles Dickens: Great Expectations
Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights