LITERATURE/READING LIST EXAM
The exam is divided into two parts not necessarily to be taken on the same day.
The first part is a written test on the material covered in whichever of my lectures you have
chosen to attend. (Currently this is only the lecture “English Book Culture” held in SS 2008.)
This exam will be in the first and last weeks of term as announced on my notice board.
The second part is an oral examination on works of literature which you are required to select
from the reading list and according to the guidelines stated below. Please note that to pass
the exam you will have
-
to have read all the texts on your reading list
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to be able to describe their thematic as well as their formal features
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to have a sound understanding of the historical contexts within which the works
were produced
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to know how to place authors within that context on the basis of their
political/ideological standpoints, their views on art and literature, their main
thematic interests and concerns, their affinities to other contemporaries, and/or
the lives they led.
Guidelines on how to compose your reading list:
Preliminary remark: These guidelines are meant to help you compose a reading list which,
instead of forcing us to accomplish the well-nigh impossible Herculean task of covering the
entire canon of English literature in a single exam, allows you to specialise on a number of
periods in the history of English Literature. You are expected to exhibit “mastery” of these,
i.e. by showing that you can explain the predominance of certain genres, ideas, styles, tastes
etc., identify contemporaries correctly and reconstruct the main political, economic, social,
and cultural developments and events that influenced them.
Please compile your reading list gathering at least 240 points according to the following
scale, which is merely to do some justice to the different lengths of individual texts, not
however, to their complexity, let alone their aesthetic value:
novels: 15 points each
plays: 10 points each
short stories no longer than 15 pages: 5 points each
short stories longer than 15 pages: 10 points each
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essays: 10 points each
poems: 5 points each1
Make sure that the number of points gathered for texts from one period does not exceed 60.
In other words, you must pick texts from at least four of the eight different periods .
Enrolment
For the written test (on the lecture part of the exam), please register/enrol with our secretary.
To arrange a date for the oral exam and discuss your reading list with me, please come and
see me personally.
I. Middle Ages
“Caedmon’s Hymn”
Riddle 26 from the Exeter Manuscript
“Chaucer's Wordes Unto Adam His Own Scriveyne”
Geoffrey Chaucer
“Prologue” to The Canterbury Tales
“The Tale of Sir Thopas” from The Canterbury Tales
II. Renaissance
Sir Philip Sidney
Sonnet LXXI: “Who Will in Fairest Book”
Edmund Spenser
Sonnet LXXV: “One day I wrote her name upon the strand”
Christopher Marlow
Dr. Faustus
William Shakespeare
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
The Tempest
Romeo and Juliet
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With the exception of S.T. Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner”.
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A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The Taming of the Shrew
Othello
Macbeth
King Lear
Anthony and Cleopatra
Sonnets:
XXVII: “Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed”
XLIII: “When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see”
XLVII: “Betwixt mine eye and heart a league is took”
LIX: “If there be nothing new, but that which is”
LXXXV: “My tongue-tied Muse in manners holds her still”
LIV: “O! how much more doth beauty beauteous seem”
XLII: “That thou hast her, it is not all my grief”
John Donne
“The Sun Rising”
Andrew Marvell
“To his Coy Mistress”
John Milton
“On his Blindness”
III. Restoration – Augustan Age
William Congreve
The Way of the World
Love for Love
Aphra Behn
The Rover
Daniel Defoe
Robinson Crusoe
Moll Flanders
A Journal of the Plague Year
Jonathan Swift
Gulliver’s Travels
Oliver Goldsmith
She Stoops to Conquer
Brinsley Sheridan
School for Scandal
Alexander Pope
“Ode on Solitude”
Thomas Gray
“An Elegy Written on a Country Graveyard”
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IV. Romantic Period
Mary Robinson
“January, 1795”
Mary Shelley
Frankenstein
Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice
Emma
S.T. Coleridge
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
“Kubla Khan”
William Blake
“The Lamb”,
“The Tyger”,
“The Poison Tree”
“London”
William Wordsworth
“I wandered lonely as a cloud”
“The Mad Mother”
“Old Man Travelling”
“Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”
“Composed Upon Westminster Bridge”
Lord Byron
“Soitude”
“She Walks in Beauty”
John Keats
“Ode on a Grecian Urn”
“To Autumn”
“La Belle Dame sens Merci”
Percy Bysshe Shelley
“Ozymandias”
“England in 1819”
Thomas De Quincey
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
V. Victorianism
Charlotte Brontë
Jane Eyre
Emily Brontë
Wuthering Heights
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Charles Dickens
Our Mutual Friend
Great Expectations
“The Madman’s Manuscript”
Thomas Hardy
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Jude the Obscure
George Eliot
The Mill on the Floss
Middlemarch
Silas Marner
Wilkie Collins
The Woman in White
Robert Browning
“My Last Duchess”
“Porphyria’s Lover”
Alfred Tennyson
“The Lady of Shalott”
Mathew Arnold
“Dover Beach”
Robert Louis Stevenson
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Importance of Being Earnest
VI. Modernism & earlier 20th century
George Bernard Shaw
Pygmalion
Arms and the Man
Candida
Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness
The Secret Agent
Virginia Woolf
Mrs Dalloway
To the Lighthouse
A Room of One’s Own
“Kew Gardens”
James Joyce
“The Dead”
The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man
Yeats
“The Second Coming”
D.H. Lawrence
“The Snake”
Elizabeth Bowen
“Look at All Those Roses”
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“Daffodils”
Katherine Mansfield
“Miss Brill”
“The Garden Party”
Dylan Thomas
“The Hunchback in the Park”
T.S. Eliot
The Cocktail Party
W.H. Auden
“Lullaby”
“Musée des Beaux Arts”
VII. 20th century & postmodernism
Samuel Beckett
Waiting for Godot
Krapp’s Last Tape
John Osborne
Look Back in Anger
Shelagh Delaney
A Taste of Honey
Alan Ayckbourne
Bedroom Farce
Tom Stoppard
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
After Magritte
Trevor Griffiths
The Comedians
Peter Shaffer
Amadeus
Caryl Churchill
Top Girls
Sarah Kane
Blasted
Ted Hughes
“Crow Goes Hunting”
Seamus Heaney
“Digging”
Philip Larkin
“High Windows”
“Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album”
Doris Lessing*
The Grass Is Singing
The Fifth Child
“To Room Nineteen”
William Golding
Lord of the Flies
The Inheritors
Angela Carter
Heroes and Villains
George Orwell
“Shooting an Elephant”
“Inside the Whale”
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Timothy Mo*
Sour Sweet
Hanif Kureishi*
Black Album
“My Son the Fanatic”
Andrea Levy*
Small Island
Zadie Smith*
White Teeth
* may also be understood as postcolonial writers
VIII. Postcolonial Writing
Chinua Achebe
Things Fall Apart
Ngugi wa Thinog’o
Wizard of Crow
J.M. Coetzee
Waiting for the Barbarians
Rohinton Mistri
A Fine Balance
Salman Rushdie
Midnight’s Children
Essays from Imaginary Homelands
Arundathi Roy
God of Small Things
Michael Ondaatje
In the Skin of a Lion
Joy Kogawa
Obasan
Patricia Grace
Potiki
Sally Morgan
My Place
David Malouf
Remembering Babylon
Witi Ihimaera
“The Whale”
“This Life is Weary
Thomas King
“The One of Coyote Going West”
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
“The Headless Horseman”
“My Last Duchess”
Robert Kroetsch
“Stone Hammer Poem”
Mbulelo Mzamane
“My Cousin Comes to Jo’burg”
Nadine Gordimer
“Six Feet of the Country”
Ama Ata Aidoo
“The Message”
Derek Walcott
“A Far Cry from Africa”
Michael Ondaatje
“The Cinnamon Peeler”
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Patrick Fernando
“The Fisherman Mourned by His Wife”
Sujata Bhatt
“A Different History”
Jayanta Mahapatra
“Grandfather”
Kath Walker
“We Are Going”
James Mcauley
“Terra Australis”
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