Nineteenth-Century British Literature Ph.D. Exam
Below are the reading lists for the Romantic and Victorian exams. Please note that this list is in
the process of being revised. New lists will come into effect for Spring 2009.
(Note: “representative” works may be found in the Norton and Longman anthologies of British
literature.)
Romantic Reading List
Primary Sources: Students will be expected to know the poets, novelists, and essayists and their
works listed below as well as a selection of six writers from the additional reading list.
Poets:
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Blake, William.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The Book of Thel, Jerusalem,
and representative poems
Byron, Lord George Gordon. “English Bards and Scottish Reviewers,” Manfred, Don
Juan, and representative poems
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Conversation poems, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, selections
from Biographia Literaria, and representative poems
Keats, John
Six great odes, four narratives, and selected poems
Shelley, Percy Bysshe Prometheus Unbound, “A Defense of Poetry,” and
representative poems
Wordsworth, William The Prelude, “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, and representative
poems
Novelists and Essayists:
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Shelley, Mary.
Hazlitt, William.
Frankenstein
Representative essays
Additional Readings:
In addition to the required primary sources listed above, select six options from the following:
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Austen, Jane
Burns, Robert
Clare, John
DeQuincey, Thomas
Hogg, James
Lamb, Charles
A major novel
Representative poems
Representative poems
Representative essays
Confessions of a Justified Sinner
Representative essays
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Peacock, Thomas Love Representative poems
Scott, Sir Walter
A major novel or major romance
Wordsworth, Dorothy
Journals
Secondary Sources:
Students should select ten to twelve of the following:
Abrams, M. H.
Ackroyd, Peter.
Barfield, Owen.
Bate, Walter Jackson.
Bloom, Harold.
Bowra, Maurice .
Brown, Nathaniel.
Bush, Douglas.
Chandler, James K.
Curran, Stuart.
Eaves, Morris.
Erdman, David.
Frye, Northrop.
Gaul, Marilyn.
Gill, Stephen.
Gleckner, Robert F.
and Gerald E. Enscoe, eds.
Hagstrum, Jean
Hartman, Geoffrey
Hogle, Jerrold.
Holmes, Richard.
Keach, William.
Kroeber, Karl.
Lowes, John Livingston.
Marchand, Leslie A.
McFarland, Thomas.
McGann, Jerome J.
Modiano, Raimonda.
Nicolson, Marjorie.
Perkins, David.
Praz, Mario.
Simpson, David.
The Mirror and the Lamp and/or Natural Supernaturalism
Blake: A Biography
Romanticism Comes of Age and/or What Coleridge Thought
From Classic to Romantic and/or John Keats
Shelley’s Mythmaking and/or The Visionary Company
The Romantic Imagination
Sexuality and Feminism in Shelley
Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry
Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics
Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis: The Maturing of an Epic Vision
William Blake’s Theory of Art
Blake: Prophet Against the Empire
Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake
Romanticism: The Human Context
William Wordsworth: A Life
Romanticism: Points of View, 2nd ed.
William Blake, Poet and Painter: An Introduction to the
Illuminated Verse
Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787-1814
Shelley’s Process: Radical Transference and the Development of
His Major Works
Coleridge: Early Visions and/or Shelley: The Pursuit
Shelley’s Style
British Romantic Art and/or Romantic Narrative Art
The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination
Byron: A Portrait
Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition
Fiery Dust: Byron’s Poetic Development and/or The Romantic
Ideology
Coleridge and the Concept of Nature
Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the
Aesthetics of the Infinite
The Quest for Permanence: The Symbolism of Wordsworth,
Shelley, and Keats
Romantic Agony
Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry
Solomon, Robert C.
Sperry, Stuart M.
Wasserman, Earl R.
Webb, Timothy.
Weiskel, Thomas.
Wellek, Rene.
Woodring, Carl
Wordsworth, Jonathan.
History and Human Nature: A Philosophical Review of
European Philosophy and Culture, 1750-1850
Keats: The Poet and/or Shelley’s Major Verse
Shelley: A Critical Reading
Shelley: A Voice Not Understood
The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology
of Transcendence
Confrontations: Studies in the Intellectual and Literary Relations
between Germany, England, and the United States
during the Nineteenth Century
Nature into Art: Cultural Transformations in Nineteenth-Century
Britain and/or Politics in English Romantic Poetry
The Borders of Vision and/or The Music of Humanity
Victorian
Primary Sources: Students will be expected to know the poets, novelists, and essayists and their
works listed below as well as a selection of six writers from the additional reading list.
Poets:
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Browning, Robert.
Tennyson, Lord Alfred .
The Ring and the Book and representative poems
Representative poems
Novelists:
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Brönte, Charlotte.
Brönte. Emily.
Dickens, Charles.
Eliot, George.
Hardy, Thomas.
Villette OR
Wuthering Heights
A major novel
A major novel
A major novel
Non-Fictional Prose Writers and Essayists:
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Arnold, Matthew
Carlyle, Thomas
Mill, John Stuart
Representative essays
Sartor Resartus and representative works
Representative essays
Additional Readings:
In addition to the required primary sources listed above, select six of the following options:
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Arnold, Matthew
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
Butler, Samuel
Carroll, Lewis
Representative poems
Representative poems
The Way of All Flesh
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the
Looking Glass
Darwin, Charles
Representative selections
Gaskell, Elizabeth
A major novel
Hopkins, Gerard Manley
Representative poems
Meredith, George
Modern Love or a major novel
Morris, William
Representative essays
Newman, John Henry, Cardinal Representative essays
Pater, Walter
Representative essays
Rossetti, Christina
Representative poems
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel
Representative poems
Ruskin, John
Selected essays
Swinburne, Algernon Charles Representative poems
Thackeray, William Makepeace A major novel
Trollope, Anthony
A major novel
Wilde, Oscar
The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Importance of Being
Earnest, and selected essays
Secondary Sources:
Students should select ten to twelve of the following:
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Allen, Walter.
Altick, Richard D.
Armstrong, Isobel.
Auerback, Nina .
Blake, Kathleen .
Brantlinger, Patrick.
Buckley, Jerome.
Christ, Carol T.
Gilbert, Sandra, and
Susan Gubar
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Hardy, Barbara
Holloway, John
Homans, Margaret
Hough, Graham
Houghton, Walter E.
The English Novel
The Presence of the Present and/or Victorian People and Ideas
The Major Victorian Poets
Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth
Love and the Woman Question in Victorian Literature
Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914
The Victorian Temper
Victorian and Modern Poetics
The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the
Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination and/or
Shakespeare’s Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets
Tellers and Listeners: The Victorian Imagination
The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument
Women Writers and Poetic Identity
The Last Romantics
The Victorian Frame of Mind
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Johnson, Edward
The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry: Sources of the Poetic
Imagination in Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold
Langbaum, Robert
The Poetry of Experience
Levine, George The Boundaries of Fiction: Carlyle, Macaulay, Newman and/or
The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from
Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley
Miller, J. Hillis The Disappearance of God and/or The Form of Victorian Fiction
Rose, Phyllis.
Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages
Showalter, Elaine.
A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists
 and/or Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle
Stevenson, Lionel.
The Pre-Raphaelite Poets
Strachey, Ray.
The Cause
Tillotson, Kathleen.
Novels of the 1840s
Williams, Raymond.
The English Novel: From Dickens to Lawrence
Wolfe, Virginia .
The Common Reader and/or A Room of One’s Own
4/97