DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
2015-2016 Preliminary Reading Lists
The lists below show reading materials for a number of our first-year modules. All students in the
English department study Introduction to Literary Studies (except for those studying Creative Writing as
a joint honours programme with a subject other than English). The other modules that are core for you
depend on the programme on which you are enrolled.
For some of these texts, a particular edition is specified. Elsewhere, you should aim to use a scholarly
edition (one which includes an introduction and explanatory notes written by an academic). Oxford
World’s Classics, Penguin Classics, and Norton Critical Editions are all good quality series.
14072: Introduction to Literary Studies (Year-long)
 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
 Christina Rossetti, 'Goblin Market'
 Seamus Heaney, North
 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
 Michael Ondaatje,The English Patient
 Caryl Churchill, Top Girls
 Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
14105: English Landmark Texts (Year-long)
Essential reading (All need to be purchased. Please ensure you buy a scholarly edition: Penguin,
Oxford or Norton Critical Edition.)
 Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
 J.M. Barrie, Peter and Wendy (1911)
 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)
 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871)
 Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol (1843)
14108: Writing through Voice and Form (Semester 1)
You must buy and read the following books:
 Fenton, James An introduction to English poetry (2003)
 Lodge, David The art of fiction (2011)
 Padel, Ruth 52 ways of looking at a poem: a poem for every week of the year (2004)
14128: Introduction to Medieval English (Semester 1)
Recommended Primary Text (Essential Reading):
Most of the course’s required reading is included in the set anthology. We strongly recommend you
purchase a copy of this before the start of the module:
 Treharne, Elaine (ed), Old and Middle English c. 890-c.1450: An Anthology (Oxford, 2009).
For the first seminar, read The Battle of Maldon (included in this edition).
General Reading:
 MT Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307 (Oxford, 1993) [HD Z40 C5]
 Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature
(Cambridge, 2013) [eBook and PR 173 C1]
 David F Johnson and Elaine Treharne (eds), Readings in Medieval Texts: Interpreting Old and
Middle English Literature (Oxford, 2005) [PR 166 R2]
 Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: a handbook for visitors to the
fourteenth century (London, 2009) [HN 385 M8]
 Larry Scanlon, The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Literature 1100-1500 (Cambridge,
2009) [eBook or PR 255 C1]
14182: Introduction to English Poetry (Semester 1)
 Paul Keegan, The new Penguin book of English verse (2000)
 Edna Longley, The Bloodaxe book of 20th century poetry: from Britain and Ireland (2000)
 Shira Wolosky, The art of poetry: how to read a poem (2001)
14181: The Story of English (Semester 1)
Course Textbook - you should buy a copy of this book.
 AC Baugh & T Cable A History of the English Language, 6th Edition, Oxford, Routledge 2013. [This
is the course textbook and students on the module should buy a copy]
Essential Reading - Of which you may want to buy one or two:
 Robert McColl Millar, RL Trask Trask's historical linguistics (2015)
 Stephan Gramley The history of English: an introduction (2012)
 Jonathan Culpeper History of English (2005)
 Charles Laurence Barber, Joan C Beal, Philip A Shaw The English language: a historical
introduction (2012)
14191: American Literature Survey to World War One (Semester 1)
Essential Reading:
 Anne Bradstreet, selected poems (e-text of Works available via BJL catalogue)
 Washington Irving, ‘Rip Van Winkle’ and ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’
 Herman Melville, ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’
 Nathaniel Hawthorne, ‘Young Goodman Brown’ and ‘The Minister’s Black Veil’
 Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
 Emily Dickinson, selected poems (e-text of Poems available via BJL catalogue)
 Kate Chopin, The Awakening
Please choose print editions over Kindle editions for use in class. You can find cheap print editions of
all the texts on Amazon. Alternatively, all the texts (except for Chopin’s The Awakening) are included in
the Norton Anthology of American Literature Volume 1: Beginnings to 1865 (8th edition; volumes A & B).
14073: Introduction to English Renaissance Literature (Semester 2)
Essential reading:
Most of the set texts can be found in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 9th edition, ed. Stephen
Greenblatt, Volume B, ‘The Sixteenth Century and the Early Seventeenth Century’. The Norton
Anthology also includes a Supplemental Ebook (ww.norton.com/nael) with a wealth of additional texts
and useful guides. Do have a look.
You are required to read the whole of More’s Utopia and be prepared to discuss Book 1 in detail in
the first seminar session. Book 2 of Utopia will be the focus of the second seminar session. The text can
be found in the Norton Anthology. You may wish to consult the useful introduction and collection of
essays included in the Norton Critical Edition of Utopia (3rd edition), edited and with a revised
translation by George M. Logan (New York and London: Norton, 2011). Alternatively, Paul Turner’s
edition for Penguin Classics (2004; first published 1969) is highly readable. A note of caution if you opt
for Turner: his substitution of English names for the Latin ones used by More makes his version very
approachable; however, this may cause some confusion when you encounter the original names in
secondary sources, seminars and lectures, so you’ll need to keep the version in the Norton Anthology
close to hand. (The Norton edition provides English equivalents in the notes.)
Shakespeare’s The Tempest
The only text not available in either the Norton Anthology or on ebridge is Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
We recommend the Arden 3 edition, edited by Virginia Mason and Alden T. Vaughan (revised edition,
2011), which includes a useful introduction and appendices relevant to key issues raised on this module.
Alternatively, the New Cambridge edition, edited by David Lindley (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002) also contains a helpful introduction.
Joseph Swetnam and Rachel Speght
You are required to read and bring to the Redeeming Eve seminar (week 7) the extracts provided on
ebridge from Joseph Swetnam’s The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and unconstant women (1615),
and Rachel Speght’s A Mouzell for Melastomus [‘A Muzzle for Blackmouth’] (1617) and Certaine Quæres
to the Bayter of women (1617). The ebridge versions provide a much better account of these two texts
than the brief extracts included in the Norton Anthology. The Swetnam and Speght pamphlets can be
accessed in their entirety via Early English Books Online (EEBO) (http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home). You
will need to use your Athens password to access this resource off campus.
14107: Introduction to Modernist Fiction (Semester 2)
 Olive Schreiner, The story of an African farm (1998) Book suggested for student purchase - this is
the first novel we will be reading
 DH Lawrence 1913 Sons and Lovers (1995) Harmondsworth: Penguin.
 EM Forster 1924 A Passage to India (2005) London: Penguin.
 Jean Rhys 1934 Voyage in the Dark (2000) London: Penguin.
 Virginia Woolf 1927 Orlando: A Biography (2006) London: Penguin.
 Film (viewing mandatory, date TBA): Orlando (dir. Sally Potter, 1992)
14192: Modern American Literature Survey (Semester 2)
Suggested for student purchase:
 F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
 Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire
 Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
 Alice Walker, The Color Purple


August Wilson, Fences
Barry Brummett, Techniques of close reading
14626: Facts into Art: Making Nonfiction Come Alive (Semester 2)
Essential Reading:
 David Almond, Counting Stars, Hodder (2008)
 David Shields, The Thing about Life is that One Day You’ll be Dead, Penguin (2011)