Kirstyn J. Leuner, Ph.D. Candidate in English Literature
Comprehensive Exam Lists & Committee
Committee Members Include: Jill Heydt-Stevenson, Committee Director, Associate Professor of
English; Jeffrey N. Cox, Professor of English, Associate Vice Chancellor for Faculty Affairs;
Paul Youngquist, Professor of English, Associate Chair of Graduate Studies; and Lori Emerson,
Assistant Professor of English
 Historical Period: 1750 – 1850, British Literature 
(Requirements: 40-50 primary works; 10-15 secondary works)
Examiner: Jeffrey N. Cox, Professor of English, Associate Vice Chancellor for Faculty Affairs
Novels (in chronological order)
Lennox, Charlotte, The Female Quixote (1752)
Walpole, Horace, The Castle of Otranto (1764)
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)
Burney, Frances, Evelina (1778)
Godwin, William, Things As They Are; Or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794)
Lewis, Matthew, The Monk (1794)
Edgeworth, Maria, Castle Rackrent (1800)
---, Belinda (1801)
Owenson, Sydney (Lady Morgan), The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale (1806)
de Staël, Madame, Corinne, or Italy (1807)
Austen, Jane, Sense and Sensibility (1811)
---, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
---, Mansfield Park (1814)
Burney, Frances, The Wanderer (1814)
Scott, Sir Walter, Waverley; Or ‘Tis Sixty Years Since (1814)
Austen, Jane, Northanger Abbey (1817)
---, Persuasion (1817)
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Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, Or the Modern Prometheus (1818)
Hogg, James, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)
Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre (1847)
Poetry
Barbauld, Anna Letitia: “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven” (1812); “To a Lady, with Some Painted
Flowers” (1773); “The Rights of Women” (1793, pub 1825 posthumously)
Blake, William: Songs of Innocence (1789); Songs of Experience (1794); Visions of the
Daughters of Albion (1793); Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793); The [First] Book of Urizen
(1794)
Byron, George Gordon, Lord: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Cantos III-IV (1816-18); Don Juan,
Dedication, Cantos I-V (1819-24)
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1797), “Christabel” (1816), “Kubla
Khan” (1816), “Frost at Midnight” (1798), “This Lime Tree Bower My Prison” (1797/1800)
Keats, John: “Eve of St. Agnes” (1819), “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” (1817), “Ode to a
Nightengale” (1819), “Ode to Psyche” (1819), “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819), “Ode on
Melancholy” (1819), “To Autumn” (1819), “Endymion” (1818), “Lamia” (1819/1820)
Opie, Amelia Anderson: “The Black Man’s Lament” (1826); “The Orphan Boy’s Tale” (1802)
Robinson, Mary Darby: “All Alone” (1800); “The Poor, Singing Dame” (1800); “The Haunted
Beach” (1800)
Shelley, Percy Bysshe: “Alastor” (1815); “Ode to the West Wind” (1819); “Mont Blanc” (1816),
“The Mask of Anarchy” (1819); “England in 1819” (1819); “Adonais” (1821)
Smith, Charlotte: “Beachy Head” (1806/07); Sonnets (1784-97): LXX (“On being Cautioned
against walking on an headland overlooking the sea, because it was frequented by a lunatic”),
XLIV (“Written in the Church-Yard at Middleton in Sussex”), LXXIV (“The Winter Night”)
Wordsworth, Dorothy: “Floating Island at Hawkshead, An Incident in the Schemes of Nature”
(pub 1842); “Irregular Verses” (comp. 1829); “Thoughts on My Sick-Bed” (comp. 1832)
Wordsworth, William: “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” (1798); “We Are
Seven” (1798); “Simon Lee” (1798); From the 14-book Prelude: Books I-II, VI, XII, XIV,
(1850); Book 1 of “The Excursion” (The Wanderer) (1814); “Michael” (1800); “Salisbury Plain”
(1793-94)
Plays
Inchbald, Elizabeth, Lovers’ Vows (1798)
Baillie, Joanna, De Monfort (1800)
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Byron, George Gordon, Lord, Manfred (1817)
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Prometheus Unbound, (1818)
---, The Cenci, A Tragedy (1819)
Prose
Equiano, Olaudah, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus
Vassa, The African, Written by Himself (1789)
Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
Paine, Thomas, The Rights of Man (Part I) (1791-92)
Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792)
Wordsworth, Dorothy, Grasmere Journals (1797)
Wordsworth, William, “A Preface to Lyrical Ballads” (1798/1802)
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, From “Biographia Literaria” chs. 1 (intro), 13 (imagination), 14 (LB
and poetic controversy), ch. 17 (poetic language) (1817)
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, “A Defense of Poetry” (1821)
Secondary Sources
Abrams, M. H., Natural Supernaturalism (1973)
Bewell, Alan, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (1999)
Bloom, Harold, Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism (1970)
Butler, Marylin, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background,
1760 – 1830 (1985)
Chandler, James, England in 1819: the Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic
Historicism (1998)
Favret, Mary, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (2009)
Fulford, Lee, Kitson, eds., Literature, Science, and Exploration in the Romantic Era (2004)
De Man, Paul, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (1984)
McGann, Jerome, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (1983)
Morton, Timothy, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (2007)
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 Major Author: Ann Radcliffe 
(Requirements: complete corpus of primary works, 15-20 books or the equivalent in secondary
sources)
Examiner: Jill Heydt-Stevenson, Associate Professor of English
Primary Works: Radcliffe’s Corpus
Radcliffe, Ann, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789)
———, A Sicilian Romance (1790)
———, The Romance of the Forest, Interspersed with Some Pieces of Poetry (1791)
———, The Mysteries of Udolpho, A Romance; Interspersed with Some Pieces of Poetry (1794)
———, A Journey made in the Summer of 1794 through Holland and the Western Frontiers of
Germany, with a Return down the Rhine, to which are Added Observations during a Tour to the
Lakes of Lancashire, Westmoreland and Cumberland (1795)
———, The Italian, Or the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797)
———, Gaston de Blondeville (1826)
———, St. Alban’s Abbey: A Metrical Tale (1826)
———, “On the Supernatural in Poetry” (essay, 1826)
———, The Poetical Works of Anne [sic] Radcliffe, vol. 1-3. (1833-34)
Secondary Sources
- Books (alpha by author)
Cottom, Daniel, The Civilized Imagination: A Study of Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, and Sir
Walter Scott (1985)
Dekker, George, The Fictions of Romantic Tourism: Radcliffe, Scott, and Mary Shelley (2005)
Gamer, Michael, Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon-Formation. (2000)
Johnson, Claudia, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s;
Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (1995)
McIntyre, Clara, Ann Radcliffe in Relation to Her Time (1920)
Miles, Robert, Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress (1995)
Murray, E. B., Ann Radcliffe (1972)
Norton, Rictor, Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe (1999)
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Rogers, Deborah D., The Critical Response to Ann Radcliffe (1993)
---, Ann Radcliffe: A Bio-Bibliography (1996)
Ware, Malcolm, Sublimity in the Novels of Ann Radcliffe: A Study of the Influence upon Her
Craft of Edmund Burke’s Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful.
(1963)
- Articles (alpha by author)
Battaglia, Beatrice, “The Pieces of Poetry in Ann Radcliffe’s the Mysteries of Udolpho.” In
Romantic Women Poets: Genre and Gender. Eds. Lilla Maria Crisafulli and Cecilia Pietropoli.
New York: Rodopi, 2007.
Blackwell, Mark R., “The Gothic: Moving in the World of Novels.” In A Concise Companion to
the Restoration and Eighteenth Century. Ed. Cynthia Wall.
Chaplin, Sue, “Romance and Sedition in the 1790s: Radcliffe’s The Italian and the Terrorist
Text.” Romanticism, 7, no. 2 (2001), 177-90.
Cooper, Andrew L., “The Role of Danger in the Critical Evaluation of The Monk and The
Mysteries of Udolpho.” In Gothic Studies 8/2.
Horrocks, Ingrid, “‘Her Ideas Re-arranged Themselves’: Re-membering Poetry in Radcliffe.” In
Studies in Romanticism 47 (Winter 2008).
---, “More than a Gravestone: Caleb Williams, Udolpho, and the Politics of the Gothic.” In
Studies in the Novel 39.1 (Spring 2007).
Kilgour, Maggie, “From Here to Here: Radcliffe’s Plot of Female Development” in The Rise of
the Gothic Novel (1995).
Lewis, Jayne, “‘No Colour of Language’: Radcliffe’s Aesthetic Unbound.” Eighteenth Century
Studies 39.3 (2006): 377-90.
Mackenzie, Scott R., “An Englishwoman’s Workhouse Is Her Castle: Poor Management and
Gothic Fiction in the 1790s.” ELH 74 (2007): 681-705.
McMillan, Dorothy, “The Secrets of Ann Radcliffe’s English Travels” in Romantic
Geographies: Discourses of Travel, 1775-1844. Ed. Amanda Gilroy (2000).
Orestano, Francesca, “Picturesque, a Transformation: William Gilpin’s Aesthetics and Ann
Radcliffe’s Visual Imagination.” Textus XVIII (2005): 39-60.
Perkins, Pam, “John Moore, Ann Radcliffe and the Gothic Vision of Italy.” Gothic Studies 8/1.
Saglia, Diego, “Looking at the Other: Cultural Difference and the Traveller’s Gaze in The
Italian.” In Studies in the Novel (1996).
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Sedgwick, Eve“The Character in the Veil: Images of the Surface in the Gothic Novel” in PMLA
(1981).
Shapira, Yael, “Where the Bodies Are Hidden: Ann Radcliffe’s ‘Delicate’ Gothic.” In
Eighteenth-Century Fiction 18.4 (Summer 2006).
Tooley, Brenda, “Gothic Utopia: Heretical Sanctuary in Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian.” In Gender
and Utopia in the Eighteenth Century: Essays in English and French Utopian Writing. Eds.
Nicole Pohl and Brenda Tooley.
Townshend, Dale, “Gothic Visions, Romantic Acoustics.” In Gothic Technologies: Visuality and
the Romantic Era (2005).
Watt, James, “First Poetess of Romantic Fiction: Ann Radcliffe” in Contesting the Gothic:
Fiction, Genre, and Cultural Conflict, 1764-1832 (1999).
 Special Topic 
Romantic Bodies in Motion:
Exploring Performativity and Experiences of the Body in Romantic and Digital Texts
(Requirements: 20-30 works, primary or secondary)
Examiners: Paul Youngquist, Professor of English, Associate Chair of Graduate Studies; Lori
Emerson, Assistant Professor of English
Primary Sources
Austin, J. L., How to Do Things with Words (1955/pub 1962)
Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the
Beautiful (1757)
Butler, Judith, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997)
Deleuze and Guatarri, Anti-Oedipus (1972)
Derrida, Jacques, “Signature, Event, Context” (1972/trans 1977)
Feher, Michel, et al., eds. Fragments for a History of the Human Body, part 2
Foucault, Michel, “Neitzsche, Genealogy, History” (1971)
Gilpin, William, Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching
Landscape: To Which Is Added a Poem, on Landscape Painting (1792)
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Grosz, Elizabeth, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (1994)
Hayles, N. Katherine, How We Became Post-human (1999)
Hansen, Mark, Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media (2006)
Kant, Emmanuel, Critique of Judgment (1781, 1790)
Kirschenbaum, Matthew, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (2008)
Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982)
Locke, John, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)
Massumi, Brian, Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002)
McCarty, Willard, Humanities Computing (2005)
Stafford, Barbara Maria, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and
Medicine (1993)
Secondary Sources
Dick, Alexander, and Angela Esterhammer, eds. Spheres of Action: Speech and Performance in
Romantic Culture (2009)
Foster, Gwendolyn, Troping the Body: Gender, Etiquette, and Performance (2000)
Gilroy, Amanda, Romantic Geographies: Discourses of Travel, 1775-1844 (2000)
Heydt-Stevenson, Jill, Austen’s Unbecoming Conjunctions: Subversive Laughter, Embodied
History (2005)
Porter, Roy, and Marie Mulvey Roberts, Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century (1996)
Younquist, Paul, Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism (2003)
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