Reading List
This reading list serves two functions: by grouping English literature into
periods and genres and requiring you to present specific groups at your
exams, it ensures that by the time you complete your studies you will have
encountered a wide range of texts. The works on which you are examined
are those analysed in courses and seminars; to extend your experience
beyond these texts and give you a better idea of the context in which they
were written and received, we require you to read other works for yourself
and be prepared to discuss them. This list offers examples of texts that you
might include in your programme. Your own reading list will comprise
works of your own choice, which your teachers will help you to make.
BA students (who started their studies in 2004 or 2005) will have to wait a
few days for their specific instructions, which will be printed here.
The following lines are for students doing the old licence.
At the level of the 1ST CERTIFICATE you must present three groups centred on
works you have studied in seminars and courses: one group from the
medieval period (groups 1–6) which is prepared in the IMLL seminar in
your second year, and two of groups 7 to 25, prepared in the explication de
texte seminars from your second semester onwards. Your modern texts
should include two different genres and two different centuries. (An essay
can compensate for lack of balance in this respect.)
NB
For the poetry and short story groups (9, 15, 17, 18, 21 and 24), you
will be examined on your seminar programme plus other authors of
your choice to a total of three.
The heading of each of the twenty-five groups specifies the number of
‘entries’ you have to take. (In most groups an ‘entry’ corresponds to an
author, with one or more works to read.) If you present group 22, for instance, having studied D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers in a seminar, you
must choose two more entries, making a total of three. You might take
Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent as your second entry (or another novel by
Conrad), and A. S. Byatt’s prize-winning novel, Possession, as your third
entry – or any other selection of authors and titles to a total of three.
The modern literature exam consists of analysis of a passage taken from
works or authors studied in the seminar you attended, and a general question or questions relating the works on your reading list to your seminar
text(s).*
* When signing on for the oral exams, indicate seminar texts with an asterisk.
The literature programme at the SECOND CERTIFICATE level is based on a reading list that each student draws up individually. The following titles are
offered as examples of texts that could be included. Your own reading list
will be made up of works of your own choice.
The reading list requirements for the OLD LICENCE are as follows:
Branche principale
1) Branche principale students presenting all three domaines of literature –
medieval, English and American – take twelve groups.
2) Branche principale students presenting linguistics as a domaine and only
two domaines of literature take nine groups.
Branche secondaire (and branche de soutien)
1) Students presenting two or three domaines of literature – medieval,
English and American – take nine groups.
2) Students presenting linguistics and at least one domaine of modern literature take seven groups.
3) Students who present only linguistics and medieval literature and have
no modern literature in their programme have a separate reading list
defined by agreement with their teachers.
The reading list is divided into four main periods: medieval; Elizabethan
and 17th century; Restoration and 18th century; 19th and 20th centuries.
Within each period, the following minimum requirements apply:
medieval:
two groups (three if English is your branche principale) provided that medieval is one of your chosen
domaines
Elizabethan & C17th: group 7 (Shakespeare) is required + one additional
group
Restoration & C18th: one group
C19th & C20th:
group 15 (Romantic Poetry) is required + one additional group.
The choice of any remaining groups is free.
In the three modern periods (Elizabethan to C19th & C20th), your reading
list may include anglophone writers of any nationality (English, Irish,
South African, Caribbean, American, Australian, etc.) regardless of the
domaine(s) you choose for your exam subjects.
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The heading of each of the twenty-five groups specifies the number of
‘entries’ you have to take. (In most groups an ‘entry’ corresponds to an
author, with one or more works to read.) In group 2, for example, you must
choose three entries; you might take ‘The Battle of Maldon’ as your first
entry, ‘The Wanderer ’ and ‘The Seafarer ’ as your second entry, and
‘Genesis B’ as your third entry.
Medieval
1. Old English Epic: Beowulf
2. Old English Poetry (3 entries)
‘The Battle of Maldon’
‘The Wanderer,’ ‘The Seafarer’
‘Caedmon’s Hymn,’ ‘The Dream of the Rood’
‘Genesis B’
3. Chaucer (1 entry)
Canterbury Tales: General Prologue, the Physician’s and Pardoner’s Tales
Canterbury Tales: The Miller’s, Reeve’s, Merchant’s and Shipman’s Tales
Canterbury Tales: The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, the Clerk’s and
Franklin’s Tales
The Parlement of Foules, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale from the Canterbury Tales
4. Medieval Romance (1 entry)
The Owl and the Nightingale
Havelok, Amys and Amylion
Sir Gawain and the Greene Knight
Sir Orfeo; Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, Books 1, 20 and 21
5. Religious and Polemic Literature (1 entry)
Piers Plowman, Prologue and Passus 1–7
Pearl
Julian of Norwich, A Revelation of Love
The Book of Margery Kempe
6. Medieval Drama (2 entries)
The Chester play of Noah, the Brome play of Abraham
The Wakefield Second Shepherds’ Play
Everyman
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Elizabethan and 17th century
7. Shakespeare (at the BA level: 2 plays plus Sonnet list)
MA: 3 plays, plus Sonnets 15, 18, 29, 30, 55, 73, 116, 129, 138, 146
8. Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (2 entries)
Marlowe, Dr. Faustus
Jonson, The Alchemist
Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
9. Renaissance Poetry (at the BA level: 3 entries; MA all)
Wyatt, ‘Madam, Withouten Many Words,’ ‘Whoso List to Hunt,’ ‘My Lute,
Awake,’ ‘They Flee from Me’
Donne, ‘Go and Catch a Falling Star,’ ‘The Canonization,’ ‘Valediction Forbidding Mourning,’ ‘The Sun Rising’
Jonson, ‘To Penshurst,’ ‘To the Memory of . . . Wm. Shakespeare,’ ‘On My
First Son’
Herbert, ‘The Collar,’ ‘Love’ (3), ‘The Flower,’ ‘Death’
10. Milton (1 entry)
Comus, ‘Lycidas,’ ‘How Soon Hath Time,’ ‘When I Consider,’ Samson Agonistes
Paradise Lost
Restoration and the 18th century
11. Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Comedy (3 entries)
Wycherley, The Country Wife
Congreve, The Way of the World
Gay, The Beggar’s Opera
Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer
Sheridan, School for Scandal
12. Eighteenth-Century Poetry (1 entry)
Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel (I), ‘MacFlecknoe’
Pope, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, Essay on Criticism, Rape of the Lock
Pope, The Dunciad
Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes, London
13. Eighteenth-Century Prose (1 entry)
Swift, A Tale of a Tub, Battle of the Books
Swift, A Modest Proposal, Gulliver’s Travels
Addison and Steele, selected Tatler and Spectator essays
Johnson, ‘Preface’ to Dictionary, ‘Preface to Shakespeare,’ ‘Lives of the Poets’
(Cowley, Milton)
Boswell, The Life of Johnson
Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France; Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of
the Rights of Women
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14. Eighteenth-Century Novel (1 entry)
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders
Richardson, Clarissa
Fielding, Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones
Sterne, Tristram Shandy, A Sentimental Journey
Burney, Evelina, Cecilia
Walpole, The Castle of Otranto; Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho
19th and 20th centuries
15. Romantic Poetry (at the BA level: 3 entries; MA: 5 entries)
Blake, ‘London,’ ‘The Tyger,’ ‘The Clod & the Pebble,’ ‘Holy Thursday’
Wordsworth, ‘Tintern Abbey,’ ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality,’ ‘Composed
upon Westminster Bridge,’ 1799 Prelude
Coleridge, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ ‘Kubla Khan,’ ‘Frost at
Midnight,’ ‘Dejection: an ode’
Byron, ‘Prisoner of Chillon,’ ‘Stanzas to the Po,’ ‘Don Juan’ Canto 1
Keats, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’
‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ ‘To Autumn’
Shelley, ‘The Triumph of Life,’ ‘Adonais,’ ‘Ode to the West Wind,’ ‘The
World’s Great Age Begins Anew’ (Chorus from Hellas )
16. Nineteenth-Century Prose (1 entry)
Hazlitt, De Quincey and Lamb (selections)
Arnold, ‘Wordsworth,’ ‘The Study of Poetry,’ ‘Literature and Science’
Mill, ‘What is Poetry?’ ‘On Liberty,’ Autobiography
Carlyle, The French Revolution (selections)
Ruskin, Modern Painters, The Stones of Venice (selections)
Emerson, ‘Nature,’ ‘Self-Reliance,’ ‘The Oversoul,’ ‘Experience’
Thoreau, Walden
17. Victorian Poetry (all; at the BA level: 3 entries5 entries)
Tennyson, ‘The Lady of Shalott,’ ‘Ulysses,’ ‘Morte d’Arthur,’ ‘Maud’
Browning, ‘My Last Duchess,’ ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,’
‘Love Among the Ruins’
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘How do I love thee?’ ‘Mother and Poet,’ ‘A
Year’s Spinning’
Arnold, ‘Dover Beach,’ ‘The Buried Life’
Hopkins, ‘God’s Grandeur,’ ‘The Windhover,’ ‘Spring and Fall,’ ‘Terrible
Sonnets’
18. Nineteenth-Century American Poetry (at the BA level: 3 entries; MA all)
Poe, ‘The Raven,’ ‘To Helen,’ ‘The City in the Sea,’ ‘Annabel Lee’
Emily Dickinson, ‘There’s a certain Slant of light,’ ‘After great pain,’ ‘I started early,’ ‘Because I could not stop for Death,’ ‘As imperceptibly as Grief ’
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Whitman, ‘Song of Myself ’ (selections, for instance 1–5 & 52), ‘When Lilacs
Last in the Dooryard Bloomed,’ ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’
19. Nineteenth-Century Novel (2 entries)
Scott, Waverley
Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Melville, Moby Dick
Thackeray, Vanity Fair
Dickens, Great Expectations
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
Henry James, Portrait of a Lady
Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
20. The Short Story (3 entries)
Poe, ‘Ligeia,’ ‘The Purloined Letter’ ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’
Hawthorne, ‘Young Goodman Brown,’ ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter,’ ‘The
Minister’s Black Veil’
James, ‘The Figure in the Carpet,’ ‘The Real Thing,’ ‘The Beast in the Jungle’
Joyce, ‘The Sisters,’ ‘Araby,’ ‘The Dead’
Mansfield, ‘Daughters of the Late Colonel,’ ‘Bliss,’ ‘Je ne Parle pas Français’
Lawrence, ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums,’ ‘The Horse-Dealer ’s Daughter,’
‘The Prussian Officer’
Faulkner, ‘The Bear,’ ‘Barn Burning,’ ‘A Rose for Emily’
Hemingway, ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro,’ ‘Big Two-Hearted River,’ ‘Cat in
the Rain’
21. Modern Poetry (at the BA level: 3 entries; MA: 4 entries)
Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock,’ ‘The Waste Land,’ ‘The Hollow
Men’
Pound, ‘I Make a Pact With You, Walt Whitman,’ ‘In a Station of the Metro,’
‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’
Yeats, ‘Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop,’ ‘Leda and the Swan,’ ‘Sailing to
Byzantium’
Frost, ‘Stopping By Woods,’ ‘Once by the Pacific,’ ‘Design’
Stevens, ‘Sunday Morning,’ ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,’ ‘The
Idea of Order at Key West’
Williams, ‘Spring and All,’ ‘Burning the Christmas Greens,’ ‘Landscape with
the Fall of Icarus’
Auden, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats,’ ‘Musée des Beaux Arts,’ ‘The Shield of
Achilles’
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22. Twentieth-Century Novel (3 entries)
Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Beckett, Malone Dies
Morrison, Song of Solomon
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
Carter, Wise Children
Byatt, Possession
23. Modern Drama (3 entries)
Miller, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible
Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Zoo Story
Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Windermere’s Fan
Beckett, Waiting For Godot, Endgame
Pinter, The Caretaker, The Homecoming
Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Travesties
24. Post-war Poetry (at the BA level: 3 entries; MA: 4 entries)
Plath, ‘Daddy,’ ‘Lady Lazarus,’ ‘Edge’
Berryman, ‘Homage to Mistress Bradstreet,’ Dream Songs 1, 14
Lowell, ‘The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,’ ‘For the Union Dead,’ ‘Night
Sweat’
Merrill, ‘Lost in Translation,’ ‘An Urban Convalescence,’ Mirabell’s Books of
Number (selection)
Larkin, ‘Church Going,’ ‘MCMXIV,’ ‘High Windows’
Walcott, ‘A Far Cry from Africa,’ ‘The Glory Trumpeter,’ Omeros (selection)
Hill, ‘September Song,’ Mercian Hymns 6 & 7
Heaney, ‘Station Island,’ ‘Digging,’ ‘Punishment,’ ‘Exile Runes’
25. Open Category (3 entries)
Works not classifiable under the above headings, such as science or detective
fiction, autobiographies, literary theory, screenplays, etc.
(List last revised September 2003)
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