READING LIST
Exam Requirements:
The exam is divided into two sections. The first part will deal with literature discussed in the
lecture you attended. The second part will cover a selection of key literary texts from the 15th
to the 20th century. These works go beyond the scope of the lecture and are on your individual
reading list.
Your reading list should consist of 20 works of fiction, drama and poetry, as well as 12
short stories. You should make sure that all the works on the core list are also on your
reading list. The remaining works should be selected from the lists on pages 4-6 if not
mentioned otherwise. You should also include a balance of works from each literary period
(From Shakespeare to the end of the 20th century, including Irish and Postcolonial literature).
To enrol for the exam you must leave a copy of your reading list with one of the secretaries.
This should be done at least two weeks before the day of the exam. Please also write your
name, email, and telephone number on the reading list so that if any problems arise you can
be contacted.
In addition to dealing with each individual work on your list in detail, you should also be
aware of the historical and literary context. Therefore, the following text, which is available in
the STUDIA, is recommended: Barnard, Robert. A Short History of English Literature.
Oxford: Blackwell, 1984.
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CORE READING LIST
FICTION:
Daniel Defoe
Robinson Crusoe
Jonathan Swift
Gulliver’s Travels
Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice
Charles Dickens
Hard Times
Charlotte Brontë
Jane Eyre
Emily Brontë
Wuthering Heights
Thomas Hardy
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness
E.M. Forster
A Passage to India
Aldous Huxley
Brave New World
Jean Rhys
Wide Sargasso Sea
Chinua Achebe
Things Fall Apart
DRAMA:
William Shakespeare
Hamlet
The Merchant of Venice
The Tempest
William Congreve
The Way of the World
John Gay
The Beggar’s Opera
Oscar Wilde
The Importance of Being Earnest
John Millington Synge
The Playboy of the Western World
Sean O’Casey
Juno and the Peacock
George Bernard Shaw
Pygmalion
Samuel Beckett
Waiting for Godot
Tom Stoppard
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
John Osborne
Look Back in Anger
Brian Friel
Translations
Caryl Churchill
Top Girls
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POETRY:
William Shakespeare
Sonnet 18, Sonnet 130
John Donne
“The Sun Rising”
John Dryden
“A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day”
William Blake
“The Lamb”, “The Tyger”
William Wordsworth
“I wandered lonely as a cloud”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
John Keats
“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”
Percy Bysshe Shelley
“Ozymandias”
Robert Browning
“My Last Duchess”
Mathew Arnold
“Dover Beach”
Gerard Manley Hopkins
“The Windhover”
William Butler Yeats
“The Lake Isle of Innisfree”
T. S. Eliot
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Ted Hughes
“Hawk Roosting”
Seamus Heaney
“Digging”
SHORT STORIES & ESSAYS:
Copies of the seven short stories below are available in the secretaries’ office
H.G. Wells
“The Country of the Blind”
James Joyce
“The Dead”
Virginia Woolf
“Kew Gardens”
D.H. Lawrence
“Fanny and Annie”
Nadine Gordimer
“Town and Country Lovers”
Katherine Mansfield
“The Garden Party”
Salman Rushdie
“The New Empire Within Britain”
Other short stories can be found in: Dolley, Christopher, ed. The Penguin Book of English
Short Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.
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TEXTS TO BE SELECTED AND ADDED
TO YOUR READING LIST
ENGLISH DRAMA:
Christopher Marlowe
William Shakespeare
Ben Johnson
Aphra Behn
Richard Steele
Henry Fielding
Richard Cumberland
Oliver Goldsmith
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Thomas Morton
Dion Boucicault
J.M. Barrie
George Bernard Shaw
Tom Stoppard
T. S. Eliot
Harold Pinter
Brian Friel
Peter Shaffer
Athol Fugard
Brendan Behan
Hanif Kureishi
Dr. Faustus
Othello
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Romeo and Juliet
King Lear
Volpone
The Rover
The Conscious Lovers
The Author’s Farce
The West Indian
She Stoops to Conquer
The School for Scandal
Speed the Plough
The Colleen Bawn
The Admirable Crichton
St. Joan,
Mrs Warren’s Profession,
Arms and the Man
Travesties
Murder in the Cathedral
The Dumb Waiter
Philadelphia, Here I Come,
The Freedom of the City
Amadeus
Sizwe Bansi is Dead
The Hostage
My Beautiful Laundrette
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ENGLISH FICTION:
16th Century:
Thomas More
Sir Philip Sidney
Thomas Nashe
Utopia
Aracdia
The Unfortunate Traveller
17th Century and Early 18th Century:
John Bunyan
The Pilgrim’s Progress
Aphra Behn
Oroonokoo
Daniel Defoe
Moll Flanders,
Mid-18th Century
Samuel Richardson
Henry Fielding
Pamela I and II,
Clarissa
Shamela, Joseph Andrews,
Tom Jones
Second Half of the 18th Century:
Samuel Johnson
Laurence Sterne
Horace Walpole
Fanny Burney
Rasselas
Tristram Shandy
The Castle of Otranto
Evelina
19th Century:
Mary Shelley
Jane Austen
Sir Walter Scott
Frankenstein
Emma
Ivanhoe
20th Century:
James Joyce
Virginia Woolf
D.H. Lawrence
George Orwell
Graham Greene
William Golding
Muriel Spark
Thomas Keneally
Salman Rushdie
David Lodge
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
Ulysses
Mrs Dalloway
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
1984
The Power and the Glory
Lord of the Flies,
The Inheritors
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith,
Schindler’s List
Midnight’s Children
Small World
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ENGLISH POETRY:
Bartholomew Griffin
Sir Philip Sidney
Christopher Marlowe
William Shakespeare
John Donne
George Herbert
John Milton
Andrew Marvell
Aphra Behn
Jonathan Swift
Alexander Pope
James Thomson
Oliver Goldsmith
Thomas Gray
Anna Barbauld
William Blake
William Wordsworth
Percy Bysshe Shelley
John Keats
Alfred Tennyson
Christina Rossetti
Rudyard Kipling
Thomas Hardy
Wilfred Owen
D. H. Lawrence
W. H. Auden
Dylan Thomas
Philip Larkin
Silvia Plath
James McAuley
Derek Walcott
Margaret Atwood
Kath Walker/Oodgeroo
“My Lady’s hair is threads of beaten gold”
Sonnet 1 from Astrophel and Stella
“The Passionate Shepherd to his Love” (plus parody)
Sonnet 116, 129
“Death, be not proud”
“The Collar”
Paradise Lost (excerpts),
“To His Blindness”
“To His Coy Mistress”
“The Willing Mistress”
“A Description of a City Shower”
from An Essay on Criticism,
from An Essay on Man, “Windsor Forest”
“Ode: Rule Britannia”
from “The Deserted Village” v 1-96
“Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard”
“The Rights of Woman”
“Introduction” to Songs of Innocence,
“Composed upon Westminster Bridge”,
“My heart leaps up”
“Ozymandius”,
“Ode to the West Wind”
“To Autumn”, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
“Ulysses”
“Winter: My Secret”
“The White Man’s Burden”
“The Convergence of the Twain”
“Anthem for doomed Youth”
“Snake”
“In Memory of W. B. Yeats”
“Fern Hill”
“Church Going”
“Daddy”
“Terra Australis”
“A Far Cry from Africa”
“This Is a Photograph of Me”
“No More Boomerang”
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