MA Reading List
Revised Spring 2011
Medieval:
1. Beowulf, trans. Seamus Heaney
2. Bede: Ecclesiastical History of the English Church and People (in translation)
3. Geoffrey Chaucer: from Canterbury Tales: “Knight’s Tale,” “Miller’s Tale,” “Wife of Bath’s
Prologue and Tale,” “Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale”
4. William Langland: from Piers Plowman: “Prologue,” “Passus I,” “ Passus V”
5. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. Marie Borroff
6. The Book of Margery Kempe
7. The York Crucifixion Play
8. 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;
selections from the sonnets: 20, 33, 55, 73, 116, 129, 130, 138, 144, 146, 147.
2. Sir Thomas More: Utopia
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 A-Maying”; John Donne: Holy Sonnets 10, 14, 18; “The Canonization,”
“The Flea,” Elegy 19.
7. John Milton: from Paradise Lost: Books 1-3.
Restoration & Eighteenth-Century British:
1. William Wycherley, George Etherege or Thomas Shadwell: The Country Wife, The Man of Mode
or The Woman Captain (or another Shadwell play)
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 other
selected poems
4. Susanna Centlivre, William Congreve and/or John Gay: A Bold Stroke for a Wife and The Way
of the World or 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 and other poems
8. Jonathan Swift: a book from Gulliver’s Travels, “A Modest Proposal” and selected poems
9. Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy
10. Various women novelists, including Haywood, Brooke, Inchbald, Burney and Austen
Nineteenth-Century British:
1. Wordsworth: Preface to Lyrical Ballads: The Subject and Language of Poetry, What is a Poet?
Emotion Recollected in Tranquility; “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”; Blake: “The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell,”; Keats: “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode: To A Nightingale,”;
Coleridge: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Kubla Khan,”; Shelley: “Song: To Men of
England”, “Mont Blanc”; Smith: “Written in the Church Yard at Middleton in Sussex”;
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)
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”; EdwardTaylor: “Upon
Wedlock and Death of Children,” “Huswifery, and “Prologue” from Preparatory Meditations;
Jonathan Edwards: “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”
2. Benjamin Franklin: from The Autobiography (selections included in the Norton Anthology): Part
One, Part Two.
3. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature or “Self-Reliance,” The American Scholar, The Divinity School
Address and “The Poet” or Henry David Thoreau: Walden.
4. Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter.
5. Melville: Moby-Dick.
6. Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
7. Emily Dickinson: (R.W. Franklin numbers): 225, 320, 341, 353, 359, 365, 367, 458, 656, 659,
706, 764, 895, 912.
8. Walt Whitman: “Song of Myself.”
9. Frederick Douglass: A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 1845 edition.
10. James: The Portrait of A Lady.
11. Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
12. One of the following: Sarah Orne Jewett: The Country of the Pointed Firs; Kate Chopin: The
Awakening; Edith Wharton: The Custom of the Country.
Note: we have discussed keeping Wharton on the 17-19th century list or whether to move
her to the 20th century. While an argument can be made either way, we’ve agreed to keep
her on this list.
20th and 21st-Century British:
1. Isaac Rosenberg: “Break of Day in the Trenches”; Seigfreid Sassoon: “The Rear-Guard,”
“The General”; Rupert Brooke: “The Soldier”; Wilfred Owen, “Anthem for Doomed
Youth,” “Dulce et Decorum Est,” “Miners,” “Strange Meeting,” “Futility,” “Disabled”; May
Wedderburn Cannan, from Grey Ghosts and Voices
2. One of the following: George Bernard Shaw: Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Man and
Superman, or Saint Joan; Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Ernest or John Millington Synge:
The Playboy of the Western World
3. William Butler Yeats: “The Wild Swans at Coole,” “Easter 1916,” “Sailing to
Byzantium,” “Among School Children,” “Lapis Lazuli”; T. S. Eliot: “The Waste Land”; D.
H. Lawrence: “Piano,” “Tortoise Shell,” “Tortoise Shout,” “Bavarian Gentians,” “Snake”
4. One of the following: E. M. Forster: A Passage to India or Howards End; Evelyn Waugh:
Brideshead Revisited or Graham Greene: The Power and the Glory or The Quiet American
5. James Joyce: The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Dubliners
6. W. H. Auden: “Musee des Beaux Arts,” “Spain 1937,” “Lullaby,” “In Memory of W. B
Yeats,” “Their Lonely Betters,“ “The Shield of Achilles”; Phillip Larkin: “Church Going,”
“MCMXIV,” “Talking in Bed,” “Ambulances,” “Sad Steps,” “The Explosion,” “Aubade”
7. Virginia Woolf: To The Lighthouse or Mrs. Dalloway
8. George Orwell: 1984 or Animal Farm
9. One of the following: Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea; A. S. Byatt, Possession; Jeanette
Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
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:
“Queen-Anne’s-Lace,” “Burning the Christmas Greens,” “Landscape with the Fall of
Icarus”
3. F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Winter Dreams,” “Babylon Revisited”: Ernest Hemingway: “The Snows
of Kilimanjaro,” “The Battler,” “The Capital of the World,” “In Another Country”
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 (by two different authors): Eugene O’Neill: Long Day’s Journey Into
Night; Arthur Miller: Death of A Salesman; Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire or The
Glass Menagerie
7. Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man
8. Toni Morrison: Beloved or The Bluest Eye
9. One of the following: 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
Linguistics
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.
O'Grady, William, John Archibald, Mark Arnoff, and Janie Rees-Miller. ContemporaryLinguistics:
An Introduction 5th ed. Boston: St. Martin's.
Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: William
Morrow, 1994.
de Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics. (either translation is fine)
Wolfram, Walt, and Natalie Schilling-Estes. American English: Dialects and Variation. Malden:
Blackwell, 1998.
Yavas, Mehmet. Applied English Phonology. Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2006.
One of these:
Huddleston, Rodney, and Geoffrey Pullum. A Student's Introduction to English Grammar.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005.
Klammer, Thomas, Muriel Schulz, and Angela della Volpe. Analyzing English Grammar. 5th ed.
Longman.
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. A Biography of the English Language. 2nd ed. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1996.
van Gelderen, Elly. A History of the English Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2006.
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
Gass, Susan, and Larry Selinker. Second Language Acquisition: An Introductory Course. 2nd ed.
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001.
or
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.