Prof. Dr. Ingo Berensmeyer
Vorschläge für Prüfungsthemen – aktualisierte Fassung
N.B. Für den literaturwissenschaftlichen Teil einer mündl. oder schriftlichen Prüfung benötigen
Sie i.d.R. DREI Themen (z.B. einen Autor, eine Epoche, eine Gattung), die sich thematisch
möglichst wenig überschneiden sollten. Wenn Sie sich z.B. für Shakespeare als Autor entscheiden,
können Sie die Renaissance nicht als Epochenthema nehmen. Ausnahme: Jane Austen +
Romanticism, da es hier trotz der zeitlichen Nähe so gut wie keine thematische Überschneidung
gibt.
ALLGEMEINE EMPFEHLUNGEN zur Prüfungsvorbereitung:
- eine britische Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte, z.B. Poplawski, Hg., English Literature in
Context (Cambridge UP, 2008); für amerikanistische Themen Zapf, Hg., Amerikanische
Literaturgeschichte (Metzler Verlag).
- eine Anthologie, in der Sie sich einen Überblick über die Primärliteratur einer Epoche
verschaffen können, z.B. die Norton Anthology of English Literature bzw. Norton Anth. of
American Literature; noch detaillierter sind die Blackwell Anthologies (z.B. Renaissance Drama)
- eine Übersicht über neuere Literaturtheorien und Methoden, z.B. Berensmeyer, Literary Theory
(Klett, 2009)
- für Shakespeare u. Renaissance das Shakespeare Handbuch (Hg. Ina Schabert) und der Norton
Shakespeare (Hg. Greenblatt)
- für ein Lyrikthema: Furniss/Bath, Reading Poetry (Longman)
- für ein Dramenthema: Pfister, Das Drama; Baumbach/Nünning, Introd. to the Study of Plays and
Drama
THEMENVORSCHLÄGE (Lektürelisten s.u.)
AUTOREN (alphab.)
Jane Austen
John Banville
Samuel Beckett
A S Byatt
Angela Carter
Daniel Defoe
Don DeLillo
Charles Dickens
John Dryden
George Eliot
Aldous Huxley
Kazuo Ishiguro
Henry James
James Joyce
Ian McEwan
Herman Melville
John Milton
Edgar Allan Poe
Thomas Pynchon
Will Self
William Shakespeare
Sir Philip Sidney
1
Laurence Sterne
Jonathan Swift
Alfred Lord Tennsyson
Anthony Trollope
Mark Twain
Oscar Wilde
Virginia Woolf
William Butler Yeats
EPOCHEN (chronolog.)
Medieval literature
The English Renaissance
Restoration literature
18th-century literature
Romanticism
Victorianism
Early 20th century / Modernism
The Lost Generation
English Postmodernism
American Postmodernism
Contemporary English literature (since 1990)
GATTUNGEN (chronolog.)
Elizabethan prose fiction
Renaissance poetry
Renaissance tragedy
Shakespeare's major tragedies
Shakespeare's major comedies
Shakespeare's histories
Shakespeare's problem plays
Metaphysical poetry
Sentimental fiction / novel of sensibility
18th-century novels
18th-century poetry
Romantic poetry
African-American slave narratives
19th-century novels
Victorian sensation fiction
Victorian social-problem novels
Victorian poetry
19th-century Gothic fiction
19th-century American short stories
Victorian/Edwardian children's and young adult fiction
Modernist novels
Modernist poetry
Postmodern English Novels
Postmodern American Fiction
Contemporary Irish poetry
2
Modern Irish drama
American Civil War fiction
Jewish American fiction
'OFFENE' THEMEN (nicht auf Gattung oder Epoche eindeutig festgelegt)
Early modern English women writers
The human body in early modern English literature and culture
Politics and literature in 17th century England
Contemporary literary theory
Trauma and mourning in contemporary fiction
Ireland/America
3
LEKTÜRELISTEN
I. AUTOREN (alphab.)
Jane Austen:
NB: Ein Bestseller-Thema, aber Vorsicht: Filme Gucken genügt nicht für die Prüfung! Hier empfiehlt sich die Wahl
eines Schwerpunkts, z.B. "money and marriage", "reading and writing" oder "tradition and modernity".
1. Sense and Sensibility
2. Pride and Prejudice
3. Mansfield Park
4. Emma
5. Northanger Abbey
6. Persuasion
Biography/Context: Jane Austen in Context, ed. Janet Todd; Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen; Duckworth: The
Improvement of the Estate; Knox-Shaw, Jane Austen and the Enlightenment; Cohn, "Transparent Minds" in McKeon,
Theory of the Novel (Johns Hopkins UP)
John Banville:
1. Birchwood
2. Dr Copernicus
3. Kepler
4. The Newton Letter
5. Mefisto
6. The Book of Evidence
7. Ghosts
8. Athena
Criticism: Berensmeyer, John Banville (Heidelberg 2000); Kenny, John Banville: Visions and Revisions
Samuel Beckett:
1. Plays: Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Happy Days, Play
2. Film and TV: Film, Quad (available online)
3. Prose: More Pricks than Kicks, Murphy, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said,
Worstwart Ho, Stirrings Still
4. Theory: Proust, Three Dialogues, "Dante Bruno Vico Joyce", "German Letter of 1937"
Biography/Context: James Knowlson, Damned to Fame; Cambridge Companion to Beckett; Childs, Modernism
A S Byatt:
1. The Virgin in the Garden
2. Still Life
3. Possession
4. Angels and Insects
5. Babel Tower
6. The Biographer's Tale
7. A Whistling Woman
Bio/Context: Richard Todd, A. S. Byatt (Writers and their Work) Hadley/Tredell: The Fiction of A. S. Byatt (Palgrave)
Angela Carter:
1. The Magic Toyshop
2. Heroes and Villains
3. The Passion of New Eve
4. The Sadeian Woman
5. The Bloody Chamber
6. The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
7. Nights at the Circus
8. Wise Children
Bio/Context: Sage, Angela Carter (Writers and their Work); Stoddart: Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus
(Routledge)
4
Don DeLillo
1. White Noise
2. Mao II
3. Underground
4. Cosmopolis
5. Falling Man
Contexts: Grabes, Einführung in die Literatur und Kunst der Postmoderne; Wolf, "Baseball, Garbage and the Bomb"
(Aufsatz)
Daniel Defoe
1. A Journal of the Plague Year
2. Robinson Crusoe
3. Moll Flanders
4. The True-Born Englishman
5. The Shortest Way with the Dissenters
6. An Essay upon Projects
Biography/Context: Max Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions; Cambridge Companion to Daniel Defoe
Charles Dickens
1. Oliver Twist
2. Hard Times
3. David Copperfield
4. Bleak House or Great Expectations
5. Our Mutual Friend
Biography/Context: P. Ackroyd, Dickens; Cambridge Companion to Dickens; Andrews, Dickens and His Performing
Selves
John Dryden
1. Astraea Redux
2. Annus Mirabilis
3. All for Love
4. Absalom and Achitophel
5. Religio Laici
6. The Hind and the Panther
7. Discourse concerning ... Satire
8. An Essay of Dramatick Poesy
Biography/Context: James Winn, John Dryden and His World; Cambridge Companion to John Dryden
George Eliot
1. Silas Marner
2. The Mill on the Floss
3. Middlemarch
4. Selected Essays (e.g. "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists")
5. Contexts: Nünning, Der engl. Roman des 19. Jhs.; Dennis, The Victorian Novel; Cambridge Companion to George
Eliot
Aldous Huxley
1. Point Counter Point
2. Brave New World
3. Eyeless in Gaza
4. The Doors of Perception
5. The Devils of Loudun
6. Island
Biography/Context: Sybille Bedford, Aldous Huxley; Childs, Modernism; Deery, Aldous Huxley and the Mysticism of
Science; Berensmeyer, "Zum Verhältnis von Rationalität und Mystik in der Literatur der Moderne" (Aufsatz)
Kazuo Ishiguro:
1. A Pale View of Hills
2. An Artist of the Floating World
3. The Remains of the Day
5
4. The Unconsoled
5. When We Were Orphans
6. Never Let Me Go
Criticism: Cynthia Wong, Kazuo Ishiguro (Writers and their Work)
Henry James:
1. The Portrait of a Lady
2. What Maisie Knew
3. The Ambassadors
4. The Golden Bowl
5. Short fiction: The Private Life, The Figure in the Carpet, In the Cage, The Turn of the Screw
Biography/Context: Cambridge Companion to Henry James; Palgrave Advances in Henry James Studies
James Joyce:
1. Dubliners
2. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
3. Ulysses
4. Finnegans Wake (extracts)
Biography/Context: Ellmann, James Joyce; Cambridge Companion to James Joyce; Attridge, Semicolonial Joyce
Ian McEwan:
1. The Cement Garden
2. Saturday
3. Amsterdam
4. Enduring Love
5. Atonement
6. On Chesil Beach
Criticism: Peter Childs, The Fiction of Ian McEwan (Reader's Guides to Essential Criticism)
Herman Melville:
1. Typee
2. Moby-Dick
3. Pierre, or the Ambiguities
4. "Hawthorne and His Mosses"
5. Shorter Fiction: Bartleby the Scrivener, Benito Cereno, Billy Budd
Biography/Context: Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work; Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville
John Milton:
1. Comus
2. Areopagitica
3. Of Education
4. Paradise Lost
5. Samson Agonistes
6. Poetry: L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, Lycidas, sonnet 18 On the Late Massacre in Piemont, sonnet 19 When I
Consider ..., sonnet 23 Methought I Saw...
Biography/Context: Barbara K. Lewalski, Milton: A Critical Biography; Thomas Corns, A Companion to Milton
(Blackwell); Cambridge Companion to Milton
Edgar Allan Poe:
1. Berenicë
2. Ligeia
3. The Fall of the House of Usher
4. William Wilson
5. The Man of the Crowd
6. The Murders in the Rue Morgue
7. The Masque of the Red Death
8. The Tell-Tale Heart
9. The Purloined Letter
10. The Imp of the Perverse
11. The Cask of Amontillado
6
12. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
13. Poetry: "The Raven", "The City in the Sea", "The Sleeper", "To One in Paradise"
14. Essay: "Philosophy of Composition"
Biography/Context: Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe; Cambridge Introduction to Edgar Allan Poe
Thomas Pynchon
1. Slow Learner
2. The Crying of Lot 49
3. V
4. Gravity's Rainbow
5. Mason & Dixon
Context: Grabes, Einführung in die Literatur und Kunst der Postmoderne
Will Self
1. My Idea of Fun
2. The Quantity Theory of Insanity
3. Great Apes
4. How the Dead Live
5. Dorian
6. Psychogeographies
William Shakespeare
1. Comedies: The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream or Twelfth Night
2. Histories: Richard III, Richard II
3. Tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet or King Lear or Macbeth or Othello
4. Romance: The Winter's Tale or The Tempest
5. Poetry: Venus and Adonis, Sonnets: 1,2, 3, 15, 18, 20, 73, 85, 94, 116, 121, 129, 130
Recommended edition: The Norton Shakespeare
Biography/Context: The Norton Shakespeare; Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare; Schabert: Shakespeare-Handbuch;
Berensmeyer: Hamlet
Sir Philip Sidney
1. The Lady of May
2. Astrophil and Stella
3. The Old Arcadia
4. The Defence of Poesy
Biography/Context: Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue
Laurence Sterne
1. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
2. Sentimental Journey
Context: Iser, Sterne: Tristram Shandy; Keymer, Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne; Berensmeyer,
"Empfndsamkeit als Medienkonflikt" (Aufsatz); Todd, Sensibility
Jonathan Swift
1. A Description of the Morning
2. The Description of a City Shower
3. The Lady's Dressing Room
4. A Modest Proposal
5. Gulliver's Travels
6. Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift
7. A Tale of a Tub
Biography/Context: Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift
Alfred Lord Tennyson
1. In Memoriam
2. Idylls of the King
3. Selected shorter poems (e.g. The Kraken, Ulysses, Mariana, Tithonus, Tears Idle Tears, Crossing the Bar, The
Charge of the Light Brigade, The Lotus-Eaters, The Lady of Shalott)
Biography/Contexts: Martin, Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart; Francis: Tennyson: A Collection of Critical Essays
7
Anthony Trollope
1. The Warden
2. Barchester Towers
3. The Last Chronicle of Barset
4. He Knew He Was Right
5. The Way We Live Now
6. Autobiography
Context: Penguin Companion to Trollope; Nünning, Der englische Roman des 19. Jhs.; Dennis, The Victorian Novel
Mark Twain:
1. Selected Tales (e.g. "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County")
2. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
3. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
4. The Prince and the Pauper
5. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
6. Pudd'n'head Wilson
Bio/Context: Railton, Mark Twain (Blackwell); Fishkin, A Historical Guide to Mark Twain
Oscar Wilde:
1. Prose: The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, The Happy Prince, The Selfish Giant, The Portrait
of Mr W. H.; De Profundis
2. Plays: The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Windermere's Fan, An Ideal Husband, Salomé
3. Poetry: The Ballad of Reading Gaol
4. Essays: The Decay of Lying; Pen, Pencil and Poison; The Critic as Artist; The Truth of Masks
Edition: Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Collins 1994
Biography/Context: R. Ellman, Oscar Wilde; Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde
Virginia Woolf
1. Mrs Dalloway
2. To the Lighthouse
3. The Waves
4. Orlando
5. Between the Acts
6. A Room of One's Own
7. Selected Essays, e.g. "On Reading", "Modern Fiction", "Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown"
Goldman: The Cambridge Introd. to VW; Roe/Sellers: Cambridge Companion to VW; Childs, Modernism
William Butler Yeats:
1. Major poems, e.g. The Lake Isle of Innisfree, Easter 1916, Sailing to Byzantium, The Circus Animals' Desertion,
The Tower, Under Ben Bulben, The Second Coming
2. Plays: e.g. Kathleen Ni Houlihan, On Baile's Strand
3. A Vision
4. Autobiography
Biography/Context: Ellman: Yeats-The Man and the Masks; Jeffares, W. B. Yeats; Vendler, Our Secret Discipline:
Yeats and Lyric Form; Kiberd, Inventing Ireland
8
EPOCHEN (chronolog.)
Medieval literature
1. Beowulf, trans. Seamus Heaney
2. Chaucer, sel. from Canterbury Tales (e.g. Prologue, The Knight's Tale, The Miller's Tale), Troilus and Criseyde
3. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
4. Texts in The Norton Anthology of English Literature (vol. A, The Middle Ages); Treharne, ed. Old and Middle
English (Blackwell); Michell: An Invitation to Old English and Anglo-Saxon England; Solopova/Lee: Key Concepts
in Medieval Literature; Solopova/Lee: The Keys of Middle-Earth
The English Renaissance
1. Poetry
Thomas Wyatt, "The long love", "Whoso list to hunt",
Henry Howard (Surrey), "Love, that doth reign", "So cruel prison"
Spenser: The Shepheardes Calender
Sidney: Astrophil and Stella
Marlowe: Hero and Leander
Shakespeare: Sonnets 1,2, 3, 15, 18, 20, 73, 85, 94, 116, 121, 129, 130
John Donne: The Canonization, Elegy 19
Isabella Whitney, The Copy of a Letter
Aemilia Lanyer: The Description of Cookham
2. Drama
Shakespeare: The Tempest
3. Prose
More: Utopia
Sidney: The Defence of Poesie
Contexts: Hattaway, A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture; Hattaway, Renaissance and
Reformations; Hadfield, The English Renaissance
Restoration literature
1. Poetry:
Dryden: Astraea Redux; Absalom and Achitophel
Milton, Paradise Lost (extracts)
Rochester: Satire against Reason and Mankind; Upon Nothing; The Imperfect Enjoyment
Katherine Philips: Orinda to Lucasia
Aphra Behn: The Disappointment
2. Drama:
Tuke: The Adventures of Five Hours
Wycherley: The Country Wife
Behn: The Rover
Congreve: The Way of the World
3. Prose:
Dryden, Of Dramatick Poesy
Samuel Pepys: Diary (extracts)
Hobbes, Leviathan (introduction and part II ch. 17)
Sources: Restoration Drama, ed. Womersley (Blackwell); Restoration Literature, ed. Paul Hammond (Oxford
Classics); Contexts: Parry, The Seventeenth-Century (Longman)
18th-century literature
1. Poetry:
Pope, The Rape of the Lock, Essay on Man
J. Swift, Description of the Morning, Description of a City Shower, Verses on the Death of Dr Swift
Gray, Elegy in a Country Church-yard, Ode on a Distant Prospect
Finch, Nocturnal Reverie
Cowper, The Task
Thomson, The Seasons
2. Drama:
Congreve: The Way of the World
Lillo: The London Merchant
9
Gay: The Beggar's Opera
Sheridan: The Rivals, The School for Scandal
3. Prose:
Johnson, Rasselas
Richardson, Pamela
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Fielding, Joseph Andrews
Sources: Nünning, Englische Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts
Romanticism
NB: Hier empfiehlt sich die Wahl eines Schwerpunkts, z.B. Natur u. Subjektivität ODER Literatur und Politik
1. Poetry
Blake: Songs of Innocence and Experience; London
Wordsworth: Tintern Abbey; The Idiot Boy; A slumber did my spirit seal; Ode: Intimations of Immortality
3. Charlotte Smith: Beachy Head
4. Coleridge: Rime of the Ancient Mariner; Dejection: An Ode
5. Shelley: Ozymandias; Mont Blanc: Ode to the West Wind; A Defence of Poetry
6. Keats: Ode to a Nightingale; Ode on a Grecian Urn
7. Byron: The Giaour
Prose:
Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France; On the Sublime and Beautiful
Austen, Sense and Sensibility
Shelley, Frankenstein
William Godwin: Caleb Williams
Scott, Waverley
Sources: Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu (Blackwell); contexts: Reinfandt, Englische Romantik; Stevens,
Romanticism
Victorianism
Poetry:
1. Christina Rossetti: Spring Quiet; Winter, My Secret
2. Barrett Browning: Sonnets from the Portuguese
3. Tennyson: Ulysses; Tears, Idle Tears; The Charge of the Light Brigade
4. Browning: Porphyria's Lover; My Last Duchess; The Bishop Orders His Tomb
5. Meredith: Modern Love (selection)
Prose:
1. Ch. Brontë, Jane Eyre
2. Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret
3. Gaskell, North and South
4. Dickens, Bleak House or Great Expecations
5. Eliot, Middlemarch
6. Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles or Jude the Obscure
Contexts: Nünning, Der engl. Roman des 19. Jahrhunderts; Dennis, The Victorian Novel
Early 20th century / Modernism
Prose:
1. James, The Ambassadors
2. Dorothy Richardson, Pilgrimage (1 novel in the series)
3. Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway; To the Lighthouse; The Waves; essay:"Modern Fiction"
4. Joyce: Ulysses
5. Beckett: Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable (choose one)
Poetry:
1. Yeats: Sailing to Byzantium; Among School Children; Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop
2. Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; The Waste Land; Four Quartets
3. Pound: "I Gather the Limbs of Osiris" (essay); In a Station of the Metro
4. Stevens: Idea of Order at Key West, The Poems of Our Climate
5. Auden: Musée des Beaux Arts; In Memory of W. B. Yeats
Contexts: Peter Childs, Modernism (Routledge); Smart, Modernism and After (Cambridge)
10
The 'Lost Generation'
1. Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, A Moveable Feast
2. John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer
3. Gertrude Stein: Three Lives; Tender Buttons; If I Told Him
4. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
5. Sherwood Anderson: Winesburg, Ohio
6. Djuna Barnes: Nightwood
Contexts: Cowley, Exile's Return; A Second Flowering; Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation
English Postmodernism
1. Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea
2. John Fowles: The French Lieutenant's Woman
3. Angela Carter: Nights at the Circus
4. B.S. Johnson: Christy Malry's Own Double Entry
5. A. S. Byatt: Angels and Insects
6. Sinclair (ed.): Conductors of Chaos
Brinton: Contemporary Poetry; Grabes, Einführung in die Literatur und Kunst der Moderne und Postmoderne
American Postmodernism
1. Nabokov, Pale Fire
2. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49; Gravity's Rainbow
3. Barthelme, Lost in the Funhouse
4. Dick, The Man in the High Castle; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
5. DeLillo, White Noise
6. Morrison, Beloved
7. Geyh, ed: Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology
Grabes, Einführung in die Literatur und Kunst der Moderne und Postmoderne; McHale, Postmodernist Fiction;
Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism
Contemporary English Literature (since 1990)
1. Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
2. Levy: Small Island
3. Hollinghurst: The Line of Beauty
4. McEwan: Saturday; Atonement
5. Barker, Regeneration
6. Smith, The Accidental
Brinton, Contemporary Poetry; Bickley, Contemporary Fiction
GATTUNGEN
Elizabethan prose fiction:
1. George Gascoigne, The Adventures of Master F. J.
2. John Lyly, Euphues
3. Robert Greene, Pandosto
4. Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller
5. Thomas Deloney, Jack of Newbury
6. Sir Philip Sidney, The Old Arcadia
Edition: 1-5 in An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction, ed. Paul Salzman (Oxford Classics); nr 6 also Oxford
Classics; Contexts: Sidney, Defence of Poesy
Renaissance poetry
1. John Skelton, "The Bowge of Court", "The Book of Philip Sparrow"
2. Thomas Wyatt, "The long love", "Whoso list to hunt", "They flee from me"
3. Henry Howard (Surrey), "Love, that doth reign", "So cruel prison"
4. Elizabeth I, "The doubt of future foes", "On Monsieur's Departure"
5. Spenser: The Shepheardes Calender, Amoretti, Epithalamion
6. Sidney: Astrophil and Stella; Defence of Poesie
7. Marlowe: Hero and Leander
11
8. Shakespeare: Sonnets 1,2, 3, 15, 18, 20, 73, 85, 94, 116, 121, 129, 130
9. John Donne: The Flea, The Canonization, Elegy 19
10. Marvell: To His Coy Mistress
11. Aemilia Lanyer: The Description of Cookham
12. Ben Jonson: To Penshurst
Renaissance tragedy
1. Thomas Kyd: The Spanish Tragedy
2. Arden of Faversham
3. Marlowe: Doctor Faustus
4. Shakespeare: Hamlet, King Lear
5. Webster: The Duchess of Malfi
6. Carey: The Tragedy of Mariam
Edition: Renaissance Drama, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Blackwell); Norton Shakespeare; use separate edition for Carey
Shakespeare's major tragedies
1. Romeo and Juliet
2. Julius Caesar
3. Hamlet
4. Othello
5. King Lear
6. Macbeth
7. Antony and Cleopatra
8. Coriolanus
Janette Dillon, Cambridge Intro. to Shakespeare's Tragedies
Shakespeare's major comedies
1. Two Gentlemen of Verona
2. Taming of the Shrew
3. Love's Labour's Lost
4. A Midsummer Night's Dream
5. Much Ado about Nothing
6. As You Like it
7. Twelfth Night
Cambridge Introd. to Shakespeare's Comedies
Shakespeare's histories
1. Henry VI (1, 2, 3)
2. Richard III
3. Richard II
4. Henry IV (1, 2)
5. Henry V
Iser, Genesis und Geltung: Shakespeares Historien
Shakespeare's problem plays
1. Troilus and Cressida
2. All's Well that Ends Well
3. Measure for Measure
4. The Merchant of Venice
Tillyard, Shakespeare's Problem Plays
Metaphysical poetry:
1. John Donne: The Flea, The Canonization, Air and Angels, Love's Alchemy, The Ecstasy, Elegy 19, Holy Sonnets,
Good Friday 1613, Hymn to God My God in My Sickness
2. George Herbert: Redemption, Easter Wings, Jordan (1), The Collar
3. Henry Vaughan: The World, They Are All Gone into the World of Light, Cock-Crowing
4. Richard Crashaw: I Am the Door, On the Wounds of Our Crucified Lord, In the Holy Nativity of Our Lord God
5. Andrew Marvell: To His Coy Mistress, The Mower Against Gardens, An Horatian Ode, Upon Appleton House
Sentimental fiction / novel of sensibility
12
1. Adam Smith: Theory of Moral Sentiments
2. Sarah Fielding: David Simple
3. Mackenzie: The Man of Feeling
4. Sterne: A Sentimental Journey
5. Goldsmith: The Vicar of Wakefield
6. Smollett: The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker
7. Austen: Sense and Sensibility
Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction; Berensmeyer, "Empfindsamkeit als Medienkonflikt" (Aufsatz)
18th-century novels:
1. Haywood: Fantomina
2. Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
3. Richardson: Pamela
4. Fielding: Shamela, Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones
5. Smollett: The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker
6. Johnson: Rasselas
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel; Hammond/Regan, Making the Novel
18th-century poetry:
1. Anne Finch: A Nocturnal Reverie
2. Pope: The Rape of the Lock
3. Swift: Description of a City Shower; The Lady's Dressing Room
4. Lady Wortley Montague: The Reasons that Induced Dr. Swift ...
5. James Thomson: The Seasons
6. William Collins: Ode to Evening
7. Thomas Gray: Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College; Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat; Elegy Written in a
Country Churchyard
8. Oliver Goldsmith: The Deserted Village
Sources: Nünning, Engl. Lit. des 18. Jhs.
Romantic poetry
1. Blake: Songs of Innocence and Experience
2. Wordsworth: Tintern Abbey; The Idiot Boy; A slumber did my spirit seal; Ode: Intimations of Immortality
3. Charlotte Smith: Beachy Head
4. Coleridge: Rime of the Ancient Mariner; Dejection: An Ode
5. Shelley: Ozymandias; Mont Blanc: Ode to the West Wind; A Defence of Poetry
6. Keats: Ode to a Nightingale; Ode on a Grecian Urn
7. Byron: The Giaour
Sources: Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu (Blackwell); contexts: Reinfandt, Englische Romantik; Stevens,
Romanticism
African-American Slave Narratives
1. Olaudah Equiano: Life of Olaudah Equiano
2. F. Douglass: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
3. H. Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
4. Ph. Wheatley, poems (e.g. "On Being Brought from Africa to America")
Sources: Horton/Horton, Slavery and the Making of American History (Oxford UP); Horton/Finzsch/Horton, Von
Benin nach Baltimore; Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; Gates, "Race," Writing and Difference
19th-century novels:
1. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus
2. Ch. Brontë, Jane Eyre
3. E. Brontë, Wuthering Heights
4. Thackery, Vanity Fair
5. Dickens, Bleak House
6. Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
7. Eliot, Middlemarch
8. Hardy, Jude the Obscure or Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Sources: Dennis, The Victorian Novel; Nünning, Der engl. Roman des 19. Jh.s
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Victorian sensationalism and sensation fiction
1. Anon.: The String of Pearls [Sweeney Todd]
2. Robert Browning: "Porphyria's Lover"
3. Ch. Brontë: Jane Eyre
4. Collins: The Woman in White
4. Braddon: Lady Audley's Secret
5. Wood: East Lynne
Context: Radford, Victorian Sensation Fiction
Victorian social-problem novels
1. Dickens, Hard Times
2. Gaskell, North and South
3. Disraeli, Sybil
4. Kingsley, Alton Locke
5. Eliot, Felix Holt
6. Carlyle, "Chartism"
7. The Communist Manifesto
Context: Norton critical edition of North and South; Josephine M. Guy, The Victorian Social-Problem Novel
19th-century Gothic fiction
1. Coleridge: Christabel
2. Shelley: Frankenstein
3. Hogg: Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
4. Anon., The String of Pearls [Sweeney Todd]
5. Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
6. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
7. Marsh: The Beetle
8. Stoker, Dracula
9. James, The Turn of the Screw
Botting, Gothic (Routledge)
Victorian poetry
1. Christina Rossetti: Spring Quiet; Winter, My Secret; Goblin Market
2. Barrett Browning: Sonnets from the Portuguese
3. Tennyson: The Kraken; Ulysses; Tears, Idle Tears; The Charge of the Light Brigade; Crossing the Bar; selections
from In Memoriam
4. Browning: Porphyria's Lover; My Last Duchess; The Bishop Orders His Tomb; Fra Lippo Lippi
5. Meredith: Modern Love (selection)
6. Arnold: Dover Beach
7. Hopkins: The Windhover; Pied Beauty; Binsey Poplars; Inversnaid
19th-century American short stories
1. Irving: Rip van Winkle
2. Hawthorne: Young Goodman Brown; My Kinsman Major Molineux
3. Melville: Benito Cereno; Bartleby the Scrivener
4. Poe: Ligeia; William Wilson; The Tell-Tale Heart; The Philosophy of Composition
5. Twain: The Notorious Jumping Frog
6. Chopin: Desiree's Baby; The Story of an Hour; The Storm
Ahrends: Die amerikanische Kurzgeschichte; Göller/Hoffmann, Die amerikan. Kurzgeschichte; Basseler/Nünning:
Handbook of the American Short Story (WVT, 2011)
Victorian / Edwardian children's and young adult fiction
1. Hughes, Tom Brown's School Days (Oxford ed.)
2. Kingsley, The Water Babies
3. Carroll, Alice in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass (Norton critical ed.)
4. Kipling, The Jungle Books (Oxford ed.)
5. Stevenson, Treasure Island
6. Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
7. Milne, Winnie the Pooh
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Contexts: Lukens, Critical Handbook of Children's Literature ; Bristow, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man's World;
Stringham, Empire's Children
Modernist novels
1. James, The Ambassadors
2. Ford, The Good Soldier
3. Dorothy Richardson, Pilgrimage (1 novel in the series)
4. Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway; To the Lighthouse; The Waves; essay:"Modern Fiction"
5. May Sinclair, The Life and Death of Harriet Frean
5. Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist; Ulysses
7. Beckett: Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable
Contexts: Peter Childs, Modernism (Routledge)
Modernist poetry
1. Vorticist Manifesto
2. Yeats: Sailing to Byzantium; Among School Children; Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop
3. Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; The Waste Land; Four Quartets
4. Pound: "I Gather the Limbs of Osiris"
5. Stevens: Idea of Order at Key West, The Poems of Our Climate
6. Stevie Smith: Our Bog is Dood; Not Waving but Drowning
7. Auden: Musée des Beaux Arts; In Memory of W. B. Yeats
Postmodern English novels
1. Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea
2. John Fowles: The French Lieutenant's Woman
3. B. S. Johnson: Christy Malry's Own Double Entry
4. Angela Carter: Nights at the Circus
5. A. S. Byatt: Angels and Insects
6. Kazuo Ishiguro: The Unconsoled
7. Julian Barnes: Flaubert's Parrot
8. Ali Smith: The Accidental
McHale, Postmodernist Fiction; Grabes, Einführung in die Literatur und Kunst der Moderne und Postmoderne;
Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism
Postmodern American Fiction
1. Nabokov, Pale Fire
2. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49; Gravity's Rainbow
3. Barthelme, Lost in the Funhouse
4. Dick, The Man in the High Castle; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
5. DeLillo, White Noise
6. Morrison, Beloved
7. Geyh, ed: Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology
Grabes, Einführung in die Literatur und Kunst der Moderne und Postmoderne; McHale, Postmodernist Fiction;
Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism
Contemporary Irish poetry
1. Patrick Kavanagh: Irish Poets Open Your Eyes
2. Thomas Kinsella: Wormwood, The Route of the Táin
3. John Montague: A Lost Tradition; A Grafted Tongue
4. Seamus Heaney: Digging; Bogland; Punishment; Casualty; Act of Union
5. Derek Mahon: A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford
6. Paul Durcan: Backside to the Wind; Before the Celtic Yoke; The Supper at Emmaus
7. Eavan Boland: Mise Eire; In Her Own Image; "Anorexic"; "Listen. This is the Noise of Myth"
8. Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill: Féar Suaithinseach (Marvellous Grass), Geasa (The Bond)
9. Paul Muldoon: Why Brownlee Left; Gathering Mushrooms; Aisling; Paul Klee: They're Biting; The Mudroom
Modern Irish drama
1. Yeats/Gregory: Kathleen Ni Houlihan
2. Synge: The Playboy of the Western World
3. O'Casey: Juno and the Paycock
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4. Behan: The Quare Fellow
5. Beckett: Krapp's Last Tape
6. Friel: Philadelphia, Here I Come; Translations
7. McDonagh: The Beauty Queen of Leenane
(all texts, except nr. 7, contained in Modern Irish Drama, ed. Harrington, Norton Critical Edition)
American Civil War fiction
1. DeForest, Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (Penguin ed.)
2. Stephen Crane: The Red Badge of Courage (Norton critical ed.)
3. D.W. Griffith: The Birth of a Nation (film)
4. Margaret Mitchell: Gone with the Wind
5. Ward Moore: Bring the Jubilee
6. Robert Olmstead: Coal Black Horse
7. Dara Horn: All Other Nights
Context: Ken Burns, The Civil War (PBS TV, DVD)
Jewish American fiction
1. Henry Roth: Call it Sleep
2. Philip Roth: The Ghost Writer
3. Jonathan Safran Foer: Everything is Illuminated
4. Foer: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
5. Nicole Krauss: The History of Love
6. Dara Horn: The World to Come
7. Michael Chabon, The Final Solution
Contexts: Chametzky/Felstiner: Jewish American Literature (introd.), Codde, The Jewish American Novel; Kramer:
Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature; Wade, Jewish American Literature Since 1945; LaCapra,
Representing the Holocaust + Writing History, Writing Trauma; Whitehead, Trauma Fiction
'OFFENE' THEMEN
Early modern English women writers
1. Isabella Whitney: The Copy of a Letter; A Sweet Nosegay
2. Elizabeth I: The Doubt of Future Foes; On Monsieur's Departure
3. Mary Sidney Herbert, selection from the Psalms
4. Mary Wroth, selection from Urania; Pamphilia to Amphilantus
5. Rachel Speght, A Muzzle for Melastomus
6. Aemilia Lanyer, Description of Cookham; sel. from Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum
7. Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedy of Mariam
8. Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World
9. Katherine Philips: Orinda to Lucasia
10. Aphra Behn: Love-Letters from a Nobleman to His Sister (vol. 1); The Rover; Oroonoko; The Disappointment
The human body in early modern English literature and culture
1. Sir Thomas Elyot: The Castle of Helthe
2. Spenser: from The Faerie Queene (book II, Castle of Alma)
3. Shakespeare: Richard II; Hamlet; selected sonnets
4. Marvell: Upon Appleton House
5. Hobbes: Leviathan (Introduction)
Context: C. Marshall, "Cosmology and the Body", Concise Companion to English Renaissance Literature. ed. Donna
B. Hamilton (Blackwell, 2006); Kantorowicz, Ernst H.: from The King's Two Bodies. A Study in Mediaeval Political
Theology. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957. Introd. and ch. 2; Winny, James, ed.: The Frame of Order. An Outline of
Elizabethan Belief taken from Treatises of the Late Sixteenth Century. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1957. 89-103,
54-72; Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body. Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage. Chicago 2004.
Politics and literature in 17th century England
1. Milton: Areopagitica; Paradise Lost (book I and II)
2. Davenant: Preface to Gondibert
3. Hobbes: Answer to the Preface; Elements of Law; Leviathan (selection)
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4. Dryden: Astraea Redux; Absalom and Achitophel
5. Tuke: Adventures of Five Hours
6. Otway: Venice Preserv'd
7. Locke: Second Treatise on Government
8. Congreve: The Way of the World
Texts: 5, 6 and 8 in Womersley (ed.), Restoration Drama. Contexts: Cambridge Companion to Eng Lit 1650-1740; G.
Parry, The Seventeenth Century (Longman)
Contemporary literary theory
Choose two (or more) theoretical approaches and sample text(s)
1. Formalism / New Criticism
2. Structuralism
3. Social and political theories (Marxism, sociology of literature, systems theory)
4. Psychoanalysis
5. Reader response
6. Deconstruction
7. Discourse Analysis / New Historicism
8. Feminism, gender studies, queer theory
9. Postcolonial theory
10. Ecocriticism
Reading: Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory; Hans Bertens, Literary Theory: The Basics
Trauma and mourning in contemporary fiction
1. Graham Swift: Out of This World, Last Orders
2. Pat Barker: Regeneration; Double Vision
3. A L Kennedy: Day
4. Ian McEwan: Enduring Love; Atonement
5. Nicole Krauss: The History of Love
6. Jonathan Safran Foer: Everything is Illuminated; Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Background reading: C. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience (1996); D. LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001).
Ireland/America
Poetry:
Seamus Heaney, "Bogland"
Cathal O'Searcaigh, "Do Jack Kerouac"
Paul Muldoon, "The Mudroom"
Drama:
J. M. Synge: The Playboy of the Western World
Brian Friel: Philadelphia, Here I Come
McDonagh: The Beauty Queen of Leenane
Prose:
Frank McCourt: Angela's Ashes
Film:
John Ford: The Quiet Man
Jim Sheridan: The Field
Martin Scorsese: Gangs of New York
Context: Luke Gibbons, "Synge, Country and Western" in Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture (1996); Noel
Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (1995, repr. 2009)
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