Universität Vechta
Lektürekanon – Anglistik/Amerikanistik
1. Britische Literaturen
1. Early Modern Period
1.1. Poetry:
- William Shakespeare (1564-1616): Sonnets 18*, 116*, 129, 130*, 142
- John Donne (1572-1631): ‘The Flea’, ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’, Holy Sonnets : 14*
- George Herbert (1593 – 1633): ‘Jordan’ (I)* and (II), ‘The Collar’, ‘Easter Wings’
1.2. Drama:
-William Shakespeare (1564-1616): Romeo and Juliet*, Hamlet*, Macbeth*, A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, As You Like It*, The Tempest
- Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593): Dr. Faustus
- Ben Jonson (1572-1637): Volpone, Bartholomew Fair
1.3. Prose:
-Thomas More (1477-1535): Utopia
-Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586): Arcadia
-Thomas Nashe (1567-1601): The Unfortunate Traveller
2. Restoration to 1800
2.1. Poetry:
-John Milton (1608-1674): ‘On his blindness*’, Paradise Lost Book 1 and 2
- Alexander Pope (1688-1744): ‘Windsor Forest’, Essay on Criticism, Essay on Man I,IV
- Thomas Gray (1716-1771): ‘An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’*
- Oliver Goldsmith (1730-1771): ‘The Deserted Village’
- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745): ‘ A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed’
- Robert Burns (1759-1796): ‘To a Mouse’, ‘For a’ That’, ‘Tam O’ Shanter’, ‘Holy Willie’
- John Dryden (1631-1700): ‘Mac Flecknoe’
- John Wilmot (Earl of Rochester) (1647-1680): ‘A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind’
2.2. Drama:
- William Wycherley (1641-1715): The Country Wife*
- William Congreve (1670- 1729): The Way of the World
- Aphra Behn (1640-1689): The Rover I
- Oliver Goldsmith (1730-1771): She Stoops to Conquer
- John Gay (1685-1732): The Beggar’s Opera
- R.B. Sheridan (1751-1816): The Rivals
2.3. Prose:
- John Bunyan (1628-1688): The Pilgrim’s Progress
- Daniel Defoe (1660-1731): Robinson Crusoe*, Moll Flanders
- Samuel Richardson (1689-1761): Pamela, Or Virtue Rewarded
- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745): A Tale of a Tub, A Modest Proposal, Gulliver’s Travels*
- Tobias Smollett (1721-1771): The Expeditions of Humphry Clinker
- Laurence Sterne (1713-1768): The Life and Opinion of Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey
- Henry Fielding (1707-1754): Tom Jones
3. Romanticism (1780-1830)
3.1. Poetry:
- William Blake (1757-1827): ‘The Chimney Sweeper’, ‘The Tyger*’, ‘London’*, ‘Jerusalem’
-William Wordsworth (1770-1850): ‘Tintern Abbey’*, ‘The Daffodils’*, ‘Nutting’, ‘Composed on
Westminster Bridge’, The Prelude I; The Excursion: ‘The Ruined Cottage’
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834): ‘The Eolian Harp’, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’*, ‘Kubla
Khan’, ‘Frost at Midnight’
- Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822): ‘To the West Wind’*, ‘To a Skylark’, ‘Ozymandias’*, ‘England in
1819’
- John Keats (1795-1821): ‘Ode to Melancholy’, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’*, ‘To
Autumn’*, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’
- George Gordon (Lord Byron) (1788-1824): Don Juan Canto 1 and 2, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
Canto 1 and 4
- Felicia Hemans (1793-1825): ‘The Homes of England’
3.2. Prose:
- M.G. Lewis (1775-1818): The Monk*
- W. Wordsworth (1770-1850): Preface to Lyrical Ballads*
- Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797): A Vindication of the Rights of Women
- Horace Walpole (1717-1757): The Castle of Otranto
- Mary Shelley (1797-1851): Frankenstein*
- Jane Austen (1775-1817): Northhanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice*
- Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832): Waverley
4. Victorian Period
4.1. Poetry:
- Matthew Arnold (1822-1888): ‘Dover Beach’*
- Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892): ‘Dark House’, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’
- Robert Browning (1812-1889): ‘My Last Duchess’
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861): ‘How do I love thee’
- Christina Rossetti (1830-1894): Goblin Market
- Thomas Hardy (1840-1928): ‘The Darkling Thrush’*
- James Thomson B.V. (1834-1882): ‘The City of Dreadful Night’ 1 / 14
- Algernon C. Swinburne (1837-1909): ‘Hymn to Proserpine’, ‘Ave Atque Vale’
4.2. Drama:
- George B. Shaw (1856-1950): Pygmalion
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900): The Importance of Being Earnest*
4.3. Prose:
- Emily Bronte (1818-1848): Wuthering Heights*
- Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855): Jane Eyre*
- William M. Thackeray (1811-1863): Vanity Fair
- Charles Dickens (1812-1870): David Copperfield*, Great Expectations, Bleak House
- Lewis Carroll (1832-1898): Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
- George Eliot (1819-1889): The Mill on the Floss*, Middlemarch
- R.L. Stevenson (1850-1894): The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
- George Gissing (1857-1903): New Grub Street
- Thomas Hardy (1840-1928): Tess of the d’Urbervilles*; Jude, the Obscure
- H.G. Wells (1866-1946): The Time Machine*
- Joseph Conrad (1857-1924): The Heart of Darkness
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900): The Picture of Dorian Gray*
- Bram Stoker (1847-1912): Dracula*
- Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936): The Jungle Book
- Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930): A Study in Scarlet
- John Ruskin (1819-1900): Modern Painters
5. Modernism
5.1. Poetry:
-T.S. Eliot (1888-1965): ‘The Lovesong of J.Alfred Prufrock’*, The Waste Land
- W.B. Yeats (1865-1939): ‘Sailing to Byzantium’*, ‘Under Ben Bulben’
- Wilfred Owen (1893-1918): ‘Dulce et decorum est’
- W.H. Auden (1907-1973): ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’*, ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’
- Dylan Thomas (1914-1953): ‘Do Not Go Gently into that Good Night’,’ Fern Hill ’, ‘In my Craft and
Sullen Art’
5.2. Drama:
- J.S. Synge (1871-1909): The Playboy of the Western World
- Sean O’ Casey (1880-1964): The Shadow of a Gunman, Cock-A-Doodle-Dandy
- George B. Shaw (1856-1950), Pygmalion*
5.3. Prose:
- D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930): Sons and Lovers*, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
- J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) The Hobbit
- James Joyce (1882-1941): Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners*, Ulysses
- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963): Brave New World*
- Virginia Woolf (1882-1941): To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway
- Lytton Strachey (1880-1932): Eminent Victorians
6. Post ‘45
6.1. Poetry:
- Philip Larkin (1922-1985): ‘Church Going;’* ‘High Windows’
- Thom Gunn (1929-2004): ‘Considering the Snails’, ‘My Sad Captains’
- Ted Hughes (1930-1998): ‘Daffodils’, ‘Hawk Roosting’
- Seamus Heaney (b. 1939): ‘Digging’
- Stevie Smith (1902-1971): ‘Not waving, but drowning’, ‘Thoughts about a Person from Porlock’
- Norman Mac Caig (1910-1996): ‘The Basking Shark’, ‘Sea Change’, ‘See what you’ve done’
- Edwin Morgan (1920-2010): ‘King Billy’, ‘The Glasgow Sonnets’
- Carol Anne Duffy (b. 1955): ‘Salome;’ ‘Mrs Midas’
-R.S. Thomas (1913-2000): ‘Reservoirs’, ‘Self Portrait’
6.2. Drama:
- Samuel Beckett (1906-1989): Waiting for Godot*, Endgame
- John Osborne (1929-1994): Look Back in Anger*
- Harold Pinter (1930-2008): The Birthday Party*; The Caretaker
- Edward Bond (b.1934): Saved
- Tom Stoppard (b.1937): Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
- Joe Orton (1933-1967): Loot!
- Peter Shaffer (b.1926): Amadeus
- Caryl Churchhill (b.1938): Top Girls
- Brendan Behan (1923-1964): The Quare Fellow; The Hostage
- Mark Ravenhill (b.1966): Shopping and F***ing
6.3. Prose:
- George Orwell (1903-1950): Nineteen Eighty-Four*; Animal Farm; Keep the Aspidistra Flying
- C.S. Lewis (1898-1963): The Narnia Series
- Alan Sillitoe (1928-2010): Saturday Night & Sunday Morning
- Malcolm Bradbury (1932-2000): Eating People Is Wrong
- Julian Barnes (b. 1946): Flaubert’s Parrot; Arthur & George
- Jeanette Winterson (b. 1959): Oranges Are not the Only Fruit
- David Lodge (b. 1935): Nice Work
- Kazuo Ishiguro (b. 1954): The Remains of the Day
- A.S. Byatt (b. 1936): Possession
- Ian Mc Ewan (b.1948): Atonement*
- Edna O’ Brien (b.193o): A Pagan Place
- Salman Rushdie (b. 1947): Midnight’s Children
- Muriel Spark (1918-2006): The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
- Hugo Hamilton (b.1953): The Speckled People
- Sarah Waters (b.1966) Fingersmith
- J.K. Rowling (b.1965): The Harry Potter Series
II. Amerikanische Literatur
1. Revolutionary Period/18th century
1.1.
Poetry:
-
Philip Freneau (1752-1832): ‘Indian Burying Ground’
-
Joel Barlow (1754-1812): ‘The Hasty Pudding’
2. 19th century
-
2.1. Poetry:
William C. Bryant (1794-1878): ‘To a Waterfowl’, ‘Thanatopsis’, ‘The Prairies’
-
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849): ‘The Raven;’* ‘Annabel Lee’
-
Henry W. Longfellow (1807-1882): ‘A Psalm of Life’
-
Walt Whitman (1819-1899): ‘Song of Myself’, ‘There Was a Child Went Forth’, ‘Crossing Brooklyn
Ferry’, ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’
-
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886): ‘I Felt a Funeral in my Brain’, ‘Because I Could not Stop for Death’
-
2.2. Prose
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864): The Scarlet Letter*; The House of the Seven Gables; My
Kinsman, Mr. Molineux
-
James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851): The Pioneers
-
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882): Nature; The American Scholar
-
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849): The Fall of the House of Usher*; The Murders in the Rue Morgue;
The Masque of the Red Death; The Philosophy of Composition*; The Poetic Principle
-
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862): Walden
-
Herman Melville (1819-1891): Bartleby, the Scrivener*; Moby Dick; Billy Budd- Sailor
-
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896): Uncle Tom’s Cabin
-
Mark Twain (1835-1910): The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn*; The Innocents Abroad
-
William Dean Howells (1837-1920): The Rise of Silas Lapham
-
Henry James (1843-1916): The Turn of the Screw ; The Bostonians
-
Stephen Crane (1871-1900): The Red Badge of Courage
3. 20th century I (1900-1945)
3.1. Poetry:
-
Robert Frost (1874-1963): ‘The Vantage Point’, ‘The Road Not Taken’, ‘Stopping by Woods on a
Snowy Evening’
-
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955): ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, ‘Sunday Morning’
-
W.C. Williams (1883-1963): ‘To a Solitary Disciple’, ‘Spring and All,’ ‘Young Sycamore’
-
Ezra Pound (1885-1972): ‘In a Station of the Metro’, ‘How to Read’, ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberly’*
3.2. Drama:
Eugene O’ Neill (1888-1953): Emperor Jones*; The Hairy Ape
Elmer Rice (1892-1967): The Adding Machine
Thornton Wilder (1897-1975): Our Town
Clifford Odets (1906-1963): Waiting for Lefty
3.3. Prose:
Edith Wharton (1862-1937): The Age of Innocence
Frank Norris (1870-1902): McTeague*
Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945): The Financier
Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951): Babbitt
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940): The Great Gatsby*
John Dos Passos (1896-1970): Manhattan Transfer
William Faulkner (1897-1962): The Sound and the Fury
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961): The Sun Also Rises; A Farewell to Arms*
John Steinbeck (1902-1968): Grapes of Wrath; Of Mice and Men
4. 20th century II (1945 – today)
4.1. Poetry:
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997): ‘Howl’, ‘A Supermarkt in California’
Adrienne Rich (b. 1929): ‘Storm Warnings’, ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, ‘Diving into the
Wreck’, ‘Rape’
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963): ‘Lady Lazarus’, ‘Ariel’, ‘Daddy’
4.2. Drama
Tennessee Williams (1911-1983): The Glass Menagerie; A Streetcar Named Desire*; Cat on a Hot
Tin Roof
Arthur Miller (1915-2005): Death of a Salesman*; The Crucible
Edward Albee (b. 1928) : Who is Afraid of Virginia Woolf?*
Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965): Raisin in the Sun
Sam Shepard (b. 1943): Buried Child
Tony Kushner (b.1956): Angels in America
4.3. Prose:
Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977): Lolita
Jerome D. Salinger (1919-2010): The Catcher in the Rye*
Jack Kerouac (1922-1969): On the Road
Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007): Slaughterhouse Five
Joseph Heller (1923-1999): Catch 22
Norman Mailer (1923-2007): The Naked and the Dead
Truman Capote (1924-1984): In Cold Blood
Tom Wolfe (b. 1931): Bonfire of the Vanities
Donald Barthelme (1931-1989): Snow White
Margaret Atwood (b.1939): The Mad Addam Trilogy
Toni Morrison (b. 1931): Beloved*
John Updike (1931-2009): Couples
Philipp Roth (b. 1933): The Human Stain; The Dying Animal
Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937): The Crying of Lot ’49; Gravity’s Rainbow
Paul Auster (b. 1947): New York Trilogy
T.C. Boyle (b.1948): The Tortilla Curtain
Don DeLillo (b. 1936): White Noise; Underworld; Point Omega
Jonathan Franzen (b. 1959): Corrections; Freedom
G.R.R. Martin (b.1948): A Song of Fire and Ice