500 Comprehensive Exam Reading List
Spring & Fall 2012
British
1. Beowulf (transl., Seamus Heaney)
2. Marie de France: from the Lais: “Guigemar,” “Equitan,” “Bisclavret,” “Lanval”
3. Geoffrey Chaucer: from The Canterbury Tales:
• “The General Prologue”
• “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale”
• “The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale”
4. Christopher Marlowe: Doctor Faustus (A-Text), “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” (read
also Sir Walter Ralegh: “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd”)
5. William Shakespeare: As You Like It; Sonnets: 18, 20, 55, 73, 116, 130, 144
6. John Milton: Paradise Lost: Books 1 & 9; Sonnets:
• “How Soon Hath Time”
• “To the Lord General Cromwell”
• “Methought I Saw”
7. Aphra Behn: Oroonoko
8. William Congreve: The Way of the World
9. Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock
10. William Wordsworth: “Tintern Abbey,” Sonnets:
• “The World is Too Much with Us”
• “Mutability”
• “Scorn Not the Sonnet”
• “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802”
• “September 1st, 1802”
• “London, 1802”
11. Jane Austen: Pride & Prejudice
12. George Gordon, Lord Byron: The Giaour & from Don Juan, Dedication and Canto I
13. Alfred, Lord Tennyson: “The Lady of Shalott,” “Ulysses,” “Tithonus,” “Locksley Hall”
14. Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights
15. Christina Rossetti: “Goblin Market,” Sonnets: “After Death,” “Cobwebs,” “A Triad”
16. Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest
17. Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway
18. W. H. Auden:
• “As I Walked Out One Evening”
• “Stop All the Clocks”
• “Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love”
• “Musée des Beaux Arts”
• “September 1, 1939”
• “The More Loving One”
19. Caryl Churchill: Cloud Nine
20. Tom Stoppard: Arcadia
21. Andrea Levy: Small Island
American
1. Anne Bradstreet:
• “The Prologue”
• “The Author to Her Book”
• “Here Follows Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House”
• “In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet”
• “A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment”
2. Phillis Wheatley:
• “On Being Brought from Africa to America”
• “On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield”
• “To His Excellency General Washington”
• “To the University of Cambridge, in New England”
• “To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth”
3. Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography
4. Edgar Allan Poe: “Ligeia,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “William Wilson”
5. Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Self-Reliance”
6. Frederick Douglass: Narrative of the Life of a Slave
7. Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
8. Herman Melville: “Bartleby, the Scrivener”
9. Emily Dickinson:
• “I’m ‘wife’—I’ve finished that”
• “I taste a liquor never brewed”
• “I like a look of Agony
• “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain”
• “This World is not Conclusion”
• “It was not Death, for I stood up”
• “I started Early—Took my Dog”
• “I dwell in Possibility”
• “Much Madness is divinest Sense”
• “She rose to His Requirement—dropt”
• “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant”
10. Walt Whitman: Song of Myself (1881 Edition)
11. Henry James: The Turn of the Screw
12. Edith Wharton: The Age of Innocence
13. T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
14. William Faulkner: “A Rose for Emily”
15. F. Scott Fitzgerald: Tender Is the Night
16. Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God
17. Richard Wright: Native Son
18. Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire
19. Cathy Song:
• “The Youngest Daughter”
• “Beauty and Sadness”
• “Lost Sister”
• “Girl Powdering Her Neck”
• “The White Porch”
20. Toni Morrison: Beloved
21. August Wilson: The Piano Lesson
Theory
1. Sigmund Freud: “The Uncanny”
2. Gayle Rubin: “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex”
3. Judith Butler: “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and
Feminist Theory”
4. Kwame Anthony Appiah: “Race” in Critical Terms for Literary Study
5. Lois Tyson: Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide