Reading list 2016
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ENG144
Literature, Culture and Society before 1900
Spring
2017
1500
28.11.2016
Books
Black, Jeremy. 2017. A History of the British Isles. Fourth edition. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN
9781137573605 (selections)
Jackson, Ashley. 2013. The British Empire: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University
Press. ISBN 9780199605415
Jenkins, Philip. 2012. A History of the United States. Fourth edition. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN
9780230282872 (selections)
Shakespeare, William. 2008. Macbeth. New Cambridge Shakespeare. Updated edition.
Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521680981
Shelley, Mary. 2008. Frankenstein (1818 text). Oxford World Classics. ISBN
9780199537150
Twain, Mark. 2008. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Oxford World Classics. ISBN
9780199536559
Compendium (available on Fronter)
Drama
William Davenant Macbeth; a tragedy (selections)
Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest
Poetry
William Blake “London”
George Gordon, Lord Byron “Prometheus,” “Canto 1 of The Corsair,” “Fragment from Don Juan” and
“She walks in beauty like the night”
Geoffrey Chaucer “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
Emily Dickinson 225 (“I’m ‘wife’ – I’ve finished that –”), 260 (“I’m Nobody! Who are you?”), 519
(“This is my letter to the World”) and 598 (“The Brain – is wider than the Sky –”) and 657 (“I
dwell in Possibility –”)
John Donne Holy Sonnet 18 (“Show me, dear Christ, …”)
John Dryden “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day”
John Keats “To Autumn”
John Milton Sonnet 19 “When I consider how my light is spent”
Edgar Allan Poe “The Raven”
William Shakespeare Sonnets 18 (“Shall I compare thee …”) and 116 (“Let me not to the marriage of
true minds”)
Percy Shelley “To Wordsworth” and “To a Singer”
Walt Whitman Sections 4 and 18 of “Starting from Paumanok” and “One’s-Self I Sing”
William Wordsworth “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” and “I wandered lonely as
a cloud”
Prose
The King James Bible, “Genesis,” chapters 1-3
United States Declaration of Independence
Declaration of Sentiments of the Seneca Falls Convention
Andrew Carnegie “The Gospel of Wealth”
Ralph Waldo Emerson “Introduction to Nature”
Olaudah Equiano (selections from) The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or
Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself
Margaret Fuller (selections from) “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men. Woman versus Women”
Washington Irving “Rip Van Winkle”
Abraham Lincoln “First Inaugural Presidential Address,” “Gettysburg Address” and “Second
Inaugural Presidential Address”
Herman Melville “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street”
2
John Stuart Mill (selections from) On Liberty and The Subjection of Women
Thomas Paine Common Sense
Emiline Pankhurst “Freedom or Death”
Edgar Allan Poe “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Black Cat” and “The Philosophy of
Composition”
Jonathan Swift “A Modest Proposal”
Henry David Thoreau (selections from) Walden, or Life in the Woods
John Winthrop “City Upon a Hill” (from A Model of Christian Charity)
Mary Wollstonecraft “Introduction to A Vindication of the Rights of Women”
Additional reading (texts you might find helpful, but do NOT have to buy)
M. H. Abrams and G. H. Harpham, A Glossary of Literary Terms. Tenth edition. Cengage
Learning Paperback/Heinle, 2012. ISBN 9780495906599
Michael Alexander, A History of English Literature. Third Edition. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
ISBN 9780230368316
Richard Gray, A History of American Literature. Second edition. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
ISBN 9781405192286
Additional viewing (films based on primary texts you might find helpful)
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Peter Hunt (dir.) (1986) Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, starring Jim Dale, Patrick Day and Lilian Gish
Frankenstein
Kenneth Branagh (dir.) (1994) Frankenstein, starring Kenneth Branagh, Robert De Niro and Helena
Bonham Carter
The Importance of Being Earnest
Oliver Parker (dir.) (2002) The Importance of Being Earnest, starring Rupert Everett and Colin Firth
Macbeth
3
Eve Best (dir.) (2014) Shakespeare's Globe on Screen: Macbeth, starring Joseph Millson and
Samantha Spiro
Rupert Goold (dir.) (2011) Macbeth, starring Patrick Stewart
Justin Kurzel (dir.) (2015). Macbeth, starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard
Roman Polanski (dir.) (1971) The Tragedy of Macbeth, starring Jon Finch and Francesca Annis
4