MA Reading List 1
MA Reading List
Revised Spring 2014
Medieval:
1. Beowulf [any of the anthologized or trade translations (e.g., Longman’s, Norton, Penguin,
Everyman’s)—see Dr. Crofts if in doubt]
2. Battle of Maldon
3. Anglo-Saxon lyrics and shorter poems: “Wanderer,” “Seafarer,” “The Husband’s Message,”
“The Wife’s Lament,” “Deor”
4. Bede: History of the English Church and People, Book I; Book II chapters 12 & 13
5. Geoffrey Chaucer: from Canterbury Tales: “Knight’s Tale,” “Miller’s Tale,” “Wife of Bath’s
Prologue and Tale,” “Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale,” “Chaucer’s Retraction”
6. Middle English lyrics:

Chaucer: “To Adam Scrivein,” “Truth: Balade de Bon Conceyl,” “To Rosamunde,”
‘Complaint unto his Purse”

anonymous: “Cuckoo Song,” “What is he, this lordling, that cometh from the fight,”
“Westron Wind,” “Sunset on Calvary,” “Alison,” “Adam Lay Bound,” “Corpus Christi
Carol”
7. William Langland: from Piers Plowman B-text: “Prologue,” “Passus I,” “ Passus V”
8. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. Marie Borroff (recommended)
9. Marie de France, Lanval
10. The York Play of the Crucifixion
11. Sir Thomas Malory: from Le Morte D’Arthur (Vinaver) “The Tale of King Arthur,” “The tale of
Launcelot and Guinevere,” “The Most Piteous Tale of the Morte Darthur Saunz Guerdon”
Renaissance:
1. William Shakespeare: Two of the following: Measure for Measure; Hamlet; The Tempest; Henry
V; Twelfth Night; and selections from the sonnets: 20, 33, 55, 73, 116, 129, 130, 138, 144, 146,
147
2. Sir Thomas More: Utopia
MA Reading List 2
3. Sir Philip Sidney: An Apology for Poetry; Astrophel and Stella, 1, 2, 41
4. Edmund Spenser: The Faerie Queene, Book I
5. Mary Wroth: The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, Book I; from Pamphilia to Amphilanthus: 1,
16, 28, 39, 40, 68, 74
6. George Herbert: “The Collar,” “Love III,” “Easter Wings”; Ben Jonson: “Song: To Celia,” “To
Penshurst,” “On My First Son,” “On My First Daughter”; Robert Herrick: “The Argument of His
Book,” “Delight in Disorder,” “To the Virgins to Make Much of Time,” “Corinnna’s Going AMaying”; John Donne: Holy Sonnets 10, 14, 18; “The Canonization,” “The Flea,” Elegy 19
7. John Milton: from Paradise Lost: Books 1-3
8. Christopher Marlowe: Dr. Faustus and either Tamburlaine or The Jew of Malta
9. Thomas Kyd: The Spanish Tragedy
Restoration & Eighteenth-Century British:
1. William Wycherley, George Etherege or Thomas Shadwell: The Country Wife and The Man of
Mode or The Woman Captain or another Shadwell play, along with Collier’s “A Short View of
the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage”
2. Aphra Behn: The Rover (or another Behn play) and Oroonoko
3. Dryden: Marriage a la Mode (or another Dryden play), Absalom and Achitophel and selected
poems
4. Susanna Centlivre, William Congreve and John Gay: A Bold Stroke for a Wife, The Way of the
World and Beggar’s Opera
5. Daniel Defoe: Moll Flanders, Roxana or Robinson Crusoe
6. Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding: Pamela, Joseph Andrews and/or Tom Jones
7. Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock, Essay on Criticism or Essay on Man and other poems,
“Epistle to Arbuthnot” and Dunciad Bk. I
8. Jonathan Swift: a book from Gulliver’s Travels, “A Modest Proposal” and selected poems
9. Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy
10. Eighteenth-century women novelists, including Haywood, Brooke, Inchbald, Burney and
Austen
11. Samuel Johnson’s “Vanity of Human Wishes” and excerpts from Boswell’s Life of Johnson
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Nineteenth-Century British:
1. Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads: The Subject and Language of Poetry, What is a Poet?,
Emotion Recollected in Tranquility; “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”, The Prelude Bk I; Blake:
“The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”; Keats: “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “Ode: To A
Nightingale”; Coleridge: “Dejection, an Ode,” “Kubla Khan”; Shelley: “Ozymandias,” “Mont
Blanc”; Smith: “Written in the Church Yard at Middleton in Sussex,” “On Being Cautioned…”;
Barbauld: “The Mouse’s Petition”; Robinson: “January, 1794”
2. Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility
3. Charlotte Bronte and Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre
4. Charles Dickens: Great Expectations, Hard Times, or Oliver Twist
5. George Eliot: Middlemarch or Daniel Deronda
6. Tennyson: “Ulysses” from In Memoriam, sections, beginning through 15, 19, 21-30, 34, 35, 39,
47, 48, 50,54-59, 64-67, 70-72, 75, 78, 82-84, 86-89, 91, 93-96, 99, 103-109, 115, 118-121, 123,
124, 126, 127, 129-131, from “Epilogue” ll. 109-144; Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “Sonnets from
the Portuguese”: 22; from Aurora Leigh: Books 1, 2, and 5 (from Norton Anthology); Robert
Browning: “My Last Duchess,” “Fra Lippo Lippi,” “Andrea del Sarto”; Thomas Hardy: “I Look
Into My Glass,” “Channel Firing,” “The Convergence of the Twain”
7. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Women: Introduction, Chapter 2, from
Chapter 4 (Norton Anthology)
8. Matthew Arnold: from “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (Norton Anthology);
from Culture and Anarchy: from Chapter 1, “Sweetness and Light,” from Chapter 2, “Doing As
One Likes,” from Chapter 5, “Porro Unum Est Necessarium” (Norton Anthology)
9. Burns’s “To a Mouse” or, “Song: For A’ That”
10. George Bernard Shaw: Mrs. Warren’s Profession and Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being
Earnest
17th-19th Century American:
1. Anne Bradstreet: “The Prologue,” “Contemplations,” “The Author to Her Book,” “Before the
Birth of One of Her Children,” “To Her Husband, Absent on Public Employment,” “In Memory
of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet,” “In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Anne
Bradstreet,” “On My Dear Grandchild Simon Bradstreet”; Edward Taylor: “Upon Wedlock and
Death of Children,” “Huswifery, and “Prologue” from Preparatory Meditations; and Mary
Rowlandson’s A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson
2. Benjamin Franklin: from The Autobiography (selections included in the Norton Anthology): Part
One, Part Two; and Jonathan Edwards: “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”
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3. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature and “Self-Reliance” and “The Poet” or Henry David Thoreau:
Walden
4. Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter and “Young Goodman Brown”; and Edgar Allan Poe: “The Fall of
the House of Usher,” “Ligeia,” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” or “The Purloined Letter”
5. Melville: Moby-Dick
6. Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Margaret Fuller: Woman in the Nineteenth Century
7. Emily Dickinson: (R.W. Franklin numbers): 225, 320, 341, 353, 359, 365, 367, 458, 656, 659, 706,
764, 895, 912; and Walt Whitman: “Song of Myself”
8. Either Frederick Douglass: A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 1845 edition or Harriet
Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
9. James: The Portrait of a Lady and “The Art of Fiction”
10. Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
11. One of the following: Sarah Orne Jewett: The Country of the Pointed Firs; Kate Chopin: The
Awakening; Edith Wharton: The Custom of the Country
20th and 21st-Century British:
1. Isaac Rosenberg: Selected Poems; Siegfried Sassoon: Selected Poems; Edward Thomas:
Selected Poems; Rupert Brooke: “The Soldier”; Wilfred Owen: Collected Poems; May
Wedderburn Cannan: Grey Ghosts and Voices; Rebecca West: The Return of the Soldier
2. Two of the following: Terrance Rattigan: The Winslow Boy; Harold Pinter: The Birthday Party;
John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger; Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot; Tom Stoppard:
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead; Caryl Churchill: Cloud Nine or Sarah Kane: Blasted
3. Virginia Woolf: To The Lighthouse or Mrs. Dalloway, “Modern Fiction,” A Room of One’s Own;
James Joyce: The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners; Joseph Conrad: Heart of
Darkness; D. H. Lawrence: Women in Love or The Rainbow
4. One of the following: E. M. Forster: A Passage to India or Howards End; Evelyn Waugh:
Brideshead Revisited or A Handful of Dust; Graham Greene: The Power and the Glory or Heart of
the Matter; Ford Madox Ford: The Good Soldier
5. One of the following: Doris Lessing: The Golden Notebook; John Fowles: The French
Lieutenant’s Woman; Muriel Spark: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
6. One of the following: George Orwell: 1984; Aldus Huxley: Brave New World; Anthony Burgess:
A Clockwork Orange
7. One of the following: A. S. Byatt, Possession; Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus; Jeanette
Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit or Written on the Body
MA Reading List 5
8. Be familiar with the major works of the following poets: William Butler Yeats, Patrick
Kavanagh, W. H. Auden, Philip Larkin, Dylan Thomas, R. S. Thomas, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill,
Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland
9. One of the following: Pat Barker: Regeneration; Salman Rushdie: Midnight’s Children; Ian
McEwan: Atonement; Graham Swift: Waterland; Martin Amis: Money; Kazuo Ishiguro: The
Remains of the Day
10. One of the following: Irvine Welsh: Trainspotting; Roddy Doyle: Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha;
Alasdair Gray: Lanark; Christopher Meredith, Shifts
11. One of the following: Zadie Smith: White Teeth; David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas; Ali Smith: Hotel
World; Julian Barnes: The Sense of an Ending; Monica Ali: Brick Lane
20th and 21st Century American:
1. Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie (University of Pennsylvania or Doubleday text)
2. Robert Frost: “Birches,” “Design,” “Directive”; Wallace Stevens: “Sunday Morning,” “Thirteen
Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” “Of Modern Poetry”; William Carlos Williams: “The Young
Housewife,” “To Elsie,” “The Red Wheelbarrow”; Langston Hughes: “The Weary Blues,” “The
Negro Speaks of Rivers,” and “Harlem”; T.S. Eliot: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
3. F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Winter Dreams,” “Babylon Revisited,” The Great Gatsby; Ernest
Hemingway: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Battler,” “The Capital of the World,” “In
Another Country,” The Sun Also Rises
4. Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God
5. William Faulkner: one of the following: As I Lay Dying, The Sound and The Fury, or Light in
August
6. Two of the following: Eugene O’Neill: Long Day’s Journey Into Night; Arthur Miller: Death of A
Salesman or All My Sons; Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire or The Glass
Menagerie; Lorraine Hansberry: A Raisin in the Sun; Amiri Baraka: Dutchman; Sam Shepard:
True West; Suzan-Lori Park: Topdog/Underdog
7. Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man
8. Toni Morrison: Beloved or The Bluest Eye
9. One of the following authors: Leslie Marmon Silko: Ceremony; Sherman Alexie: “The
Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor,” This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,”
“Every Little Hurricane,” “13/16,” “How to Write the Great American Indian Novel,” and
“Evolution”; Louise Erdrich: Love Medicine
10. Robert Lowell: “For the Union Dead,” “Skunk Hour”; Elizabeth Bishop: “One Art,” “First
Death in Nova Scotia,” “ The Armadillo,” “The Waiting Room”; James Dickey, “Cherrylog
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Road,” “The Firebombing”; James Wright: “A Blessing,” “Lying in a Hammock at William
Duffy’s Farm, in Pine Island, Minnesota”; Sylvia Plath: “Ariel,” “Daddy”; Allen Ginsberg: “Howl”
11. Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses, Blood Meridian, or Suttree
12. Harriette Arnow: The Dollmaker or James Still: River of Earth
Linguistics
1: General Linguistics
One of these three:
Finnegan Edward. Language: Its Structure and Use, 6th edition. Boston, MA: Wadsworth
Cengage Learning, 2012
O'Grady, William, John Archibald, Mark Aronoff, and Janie Rees-Miller. Contemporary
Linguistics: An Introduction, 5th ed. Boston: St. Martin's
Stewart, Thomas, and Nathan Vaillette, eds. Language files: Materials for an Introduction to
Language and Linguistics, 8th edition. Dept. of Linguistics, The Ohio State University, 2001
and all of the following:
Honda, Maya, and Wayne O’Neil. Thinking Linguistically: A Scientific Approach to Language.
Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008
Jackendoff, Ray. Patterns in the Mind: Language and Human Nature. New York: BasicBooks,
1994
Labov, William. "The Social Stratification of (r) in New York City Department Stores."
Sociolinguistic Patterns, Ed. William Labov. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania Press, 1972. 43-69
Milroy, James, and Lesley Milroy. "Linguistic Change, Social Network, and Speaker
Innovation." Journal of Linguistics 21 (1985): 339-84
Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: William
Morrow, 1994
Pinker, Steven. Words and Rules. New York: Perennial, 1998
de Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics (either translation is fine)
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Wolfram, Walt, and Natalie Schilling-Estes. American English: Dialects and Variation. Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 1998
Yavas, Mehmet. Applied English Phonology, 2nd edition. Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2006
2: Grammar
One of these:
Huddleston, Rodney, and Geoffrey Pullum. A Student's Introduction to English Grammar.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005
Klammer, Thomas, Muriel Schulz, and Angela della Volpe. Analyzing English Grammar, 5th ed.
New York: Longman, 2007
3: History of English
One of these:
Baugh, Albert, and Thomas Cable. History of the English Language. 5th ed. Upper Saddle River,
NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002
Fennel, Barbara. A History of English: A Sociolinguistic Approach. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001
Millward, Celia, and Mary Hayes. A Biography of the English Language. 3rd ed. Fort Worth:
Cengage Learning, 2011
van Gelderen, Elly. A History of the English Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2006
Algeo, John: The Origins and Development of the English Language, 6th edition . Boston, MA:
Wadswoth, Cengage Learning, 2010
4: Applied Linguistics
Either
Eckert, Penelope, and Sally McConnell-Ginet. Language and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2003
or
Brutt-Grifler, Janina. World English: A Study of its Development. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters,
2002
or
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Gass, Susan, and Larry Selinker. Second Language Acquisition: An Introductory Course. 2nd ed.
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001
or both of these:
Clark, Herbert, and Eve Clark. Psychology and Language: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics.
New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977
and
Berko-Gleason, Jean, and Nan Bernstein Ratner, Eds. Psycholinguistics. 2nd ed. Fort Worth,
Texas: Harcourt Brace, 1998