DEPARTMENT OF HUMANITIES
Field of English Literature
READING LISTS: ACADEMIC YEAR 2007/8
READING AND PREPARATION FOR LEVEL II
EX203 Essays in Theory: an Introduction
(Semester One or Two) (Single Module)
You should purchase and read David Lodge’s 20th-Century Literary Criticism (Longman, 1972).
For the opening sessions of the module you should make sure you have read Lodge’s Introduction to the
anthology and T.S. Eliot’s essay ‘Tradition and the individual talent’ (pp71 - 77).
EX206 Caribbean Writing
Semester One (Single Module)
Caryl Phillips
Stewart Brown (ed)
George Lamming
Alison Donnell & Sarah Welsh (eds)
Cambridge
Caribbean New Wave
In the Castle of My Skin
The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature
EX209 Contemporary Fiction: Writing Back to History
Semester Two (Single Module)
LISTS WILL BE POSTED AT THE END OF SEMESTER ONE
EX215 Psychoanalysis, Sexuality and Writing
Semester Two (Single Module)
LISTS WILL BE POSTED AT THE END OF SEMESTER ONE
EX219 Crime Fiction
Semester Two (Single Module)
LISTS WILL BE POSTED AT THE END OF SEMESTER ONE
EX213 Renaissance, Revolution, Restoration: Literature 1580-1700
(Double Module)
Essential Purchases and Reading for Semesters 1 and 2
William Shakespeare, King Lear and As You Like It.
You should buy individual copies of the Shakespeare texts or work from a reliable Complete Works, such
as that edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford University Press). Second-hand copies of these
plays are readily available. You should try to read some further Shakespeare plays and attend relevant
productions or watch videos of Shakespeare’s drama. Christopher Hill’s The Century of Revolution is a
fine introduction to the history of the period
Simon Barker and Hilary Hinds, eds, The Routledge Anthology of Renaissance Drama (London,
Routledge), 2002, £15.99.
You should read the introduction to this volume and familiarise yourself with all the plays. Lectures will
focus on particular texts (The Changeling, Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Edward II, The Tragedy of Mariam
and you should read one comedy from the anthology for Week 8’s double seminar), but discussions and
assessment will be enhanced by a wider knowledge of the drama of the period. You should try to read
some further non-Shakespearean plays and attend relevant productions or watch videos of these plays.
For details of the anthology visit its website at:
http://www.routledge.com/textbooks/0415187346/
George Etherege, The Man of Mode, edited by John Barnard, New Mermaids, (A&C Black/WW Norton),
1988.
NB: This is a two-semester double module – details of the reading for Semester 2 will be issued later.
EX214 Restoration to the Romantics: The Long Eighteenth Century
(Double Module)
Aphra Behn, The Rover (New Mermaids)
Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The School for Scandal (New Mermaids)
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (World’s Classics)
Frances Burney, Evelina (World’s Classics)
As this is the century which first witnesses the rise of the novel, it is strongly recommended that you read the
texts listed below as ‘context’:
Daniel Defoe, Roxana (World’s Classics)
Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews (World’s Classics)
Samuel Richardson, Pamela (Penguin)
It would also be to your advantage to have read widely in the course poetry anthology:
David Fairer and Christine Gerrard (eds) Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (Blackwell)
General surveys of the period include:
Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (2000)
John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (1997)
N.B. The reading for semester two will be issued towards the end of the first semester.
EX218 Nineteenth-century American Writing
Semester One or Two (Single Module)
Many of the set texts will be taken from the Norton Anthology of American Literature,
Volume I. The new edition is the Seventh edition. Please prepare for the course by reading the introduction
to the Norton and as many as possible of the following texts. A full reading list will be distributed at the first
session. This will include a few additional purchases.
T Jefferson
‘Declaration of Independence’
J Hector St John De Crèvecoeur, ‘Letters from an American Farmer’
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Scarlet Letter
Walt Whitman
‘Song of Myself’
READING AND PREPARATION FOR LEVEL III
EX302
Modern Literary Theory
(Double Module)
Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh, eds., Modern Literary Theory: A Reader, London: Arnold, 4th edition, 2001.
Jon Cook, Poetry in Theory, An Anthology, 1900-2000, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
Summer Reading: Students will benefit from reading as widely in the anthologies as they can, but the
following essays will be studied in semester one:
W. B. Yeats, ‘The Symbolism of Poetry’, Edward Thomas, ‘Robert Frost’ and Ezra Pound, ‘A Retrospect’
Sigmund Freud, Introductory lectures, Jacques Lacan, 'The Mirror Stage'
I A Richards, ‘Science and Poetry’, and F. R. Leavis, ‘New Bearings in English Poetry’
Ferdinand de Saussure Reading from Course in General Linguistics , Viktor Shlovsky, ‘Art as Technique’
Roman Jakobson: ‘Linguistics and Poetics’ and Juliet Kristeva, ‘The Ethics of Linguistics’
Martin Heidegger, ‘Three Lectures on Poetry’, Robert Frost, ‘The Figure a Poem Makes’
M. M. Bakhtin, ‘Discourse on the Novel’, Lodge ‘Analysis and Interpretation of the Realist Text’
EX311
Postcolonial Literature
(Double Module)
V S Naipaul
Ben Okri
Zadie Smith
Bill Ashcroft et al (eds)
Wilson Harris
The Enigma of Arrival
The Famished Road
White Teeth
The Postcolonial Studies Reader (Routledge)
Palace of the Peacock
PLEASE AWAIT FURTHER CONFIRMATION – I WILL E-MAIL ALL OF THOSE REGISTERED ON THE
MODULE WHEN I HAVE THE FINAL LIST.
This is a selection of the texts to be studied during the course. The first texts to be studied are likely to be the
Naipaul, Okri and Smith. Information about further reading will be available at the first session.
EX314 Explorations in Nineteenth-century Writing
(Double Module)
*Students must read the first three novels before the start of the course:
Semester One:
*Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
*George Eliot,The Mill on the Floss
*Charlotte Bronte, Villette
Semester Two
Thomas Hardy, Satires of Circumstance, in The Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy (Wordsworth Poetry
Library)
Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders
Ménie Muriel Dowie, Gallia (Everyman Paperback
George Gissing, The Odd Women
Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out
EX315 American Literature Since 1900
(Double Module)
Texts to be purchased for Semester One:
Baym, et al (eds)
Edith Wharton
F Scott Fitzgerald
Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume 2 (7th ed)
Ethan Frome
The Great Gatsby
Please aim to read the following over the summer vacation - this reading covers the first six weeks of
Semester One.
Introduction and Harlem Renaissance (L. Hughes; C. Cullen; C McKay; Zora Neale Hurston) Norton
Anthology
Edith Wharton
Ethan Frome
Willa Cather
‘Neighbour Rosicky’
F Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby
Ernest Hemingway
‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’, Norton Anthology
EX316 English Prose and Poetry since 1900
(Semester One)
James Joyce
Joseph Conrad
E M Forster
T S Eliot
D H Lawrence
May Sinclair
Virginia Woolf
George Orwell
Christopher Isherwood
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Heart of Darkness
Howards End
Selected Poems (especially The Waste Land)
The Virgin and the Gypsy
The Life and Death of Harriett Frean
To The Lighthouse
Coming Up for Air
Goodbye to Berlin
This is the order in which the text will be studied. You are strongly advised to read the novels the Joyce,
Conrad and Forster before the start of the semester.
EX316 (Semester Two)
Options will be announced during Semester One.
LISTS WILL BE POSTED AT THE END OF SEMESTER ONE
EX324 Postmodernism: Subject to Sex
(Semester Two, Single Module)
LISTS WILL BE POSTED AT THE END OF SEMESTER ONE
EX325 North American Women’s Writing
(Semester One, Single Module)
Margaret Atwood Alias Grace
Sarah Orne Jewett The Country of the Pointed Firs
Students may also wish to read the following book for context: Elaine Showalter, Sister's Choice
(1991) (In Learning Centre)