Reading List for
English Majors
This list is intended only as a general guide to significant
works of literature and writings on composition, not a
required reading list. Important selections or authors are
highlighted in red. The selections are arranged by historical
period and genre, not by the national origin of the authors.
You will find English, American, and Continental works
grouped together. Where the list says "selected
poems" or "selected stories," use an anthology
or ask a professor to help you choose some important ones.
All could help you prepare for graduate school or teaching
licensure.
How can this list help you? We suggest that you use the
Reading Guide in the following ways:
When you are taking a literature course, check this list to
see which of its selections are on your course syllabus. If a
work on the list is not included, particularly if it
is highlighted in bold, read it and talk with your
professor about the work outside of class. For major
areas that you do not cover in a class, use this list
selectively to fill in the gaps. (A professor who teaches in
the field would be happy to help you choose the most crucial
readings.)
During the fall semester of your senior year, literature
concentration majors will take the ETS test and English
Education majors will take the Praxis test, both of which
compare your knowledge of literature with national averages.
Use this list to help prepare for those tests, as well as for
the graduate school entrance exam, the GRE.
During the summers and after you graduate, use this list to
guide your continued reading in our culture's best known
literature.
PreClassical | Classical | Old
English | 13th Century | 14th Century | 15th
Century | 16th Century | 17th Century | 18th
Century | 19th Century | 20th Century | Composition
Gilgamesh (epic, c. 2500 BC,
Mesopotamia)
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Aeschylus, Oresteia
Aristotle, Poetics
Euripides, Medea
Homer, Iliad
Homer, Odyssey
Ovid, Metamorphoses
Plato, The Symposium
Ramayana (epic, c. 550 BC, India)
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
Virgil, Aeneid
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Beowulf
“The Battle of Maldon”
“The Dream of the Rood”
“The Seafarer”
“The Wanderer"
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Dante, The Divine Comedy
Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
"The General Prologue"
"The Wife of Bath's Tale"
"The Pardoner's Tale"
"The Nun's Priest's Tale"
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Petrarch, Sonnets
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Everyman
Malory, Morte Darthur
The Second Shepherds' Play
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Bacon, Essays
Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy
Machiavelli, The Prince
Marlowe, Doctor Faustus
"Tamburlaine"
Montaigne, Essays
More, Utopia
Sidney, Astrophil and Stella
Spenser, Faerie Queene, Book I
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Novel
Cervantes, Don
Quixote
Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress
Drama
Congreve, The Way of the World
Dryden, All for Love
Jonson, Volpone
Middleton, The Changeling
Shakespeare, Hamlet
The Tempest
Othello
Julius Caesar
Macbeth
King Lear
Romeo and Juliet
The Merchant of Venice
Henry IV (Part I)
Tourneur, The Revenger's Tragedy
Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
Poetry
Bradstreet, selections including:
"The Author to Her Book"
"To My Dear and Loving Husband"
"Here Follows Some Verses upon the Burning of Our
House"
Donne, "Holy Sonnets," selected
poems
Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel and
MacFlecknoe
Herbert, selected poems
Herrick, selected poems
Jonson, selected poems
Marvell, selected poems
Milton, Paradise Lost Books I-II, IV, IX,
XII
"Lycidas"
Shakespeare, selected poems and sonnets
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Novel
Austen, Emma
Pride and Prejudice
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Fielding, Tom Jones
Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield
Richardson, Pamela
Sterne, Tristram Shandy
Poetry
Goldsmith, "The Deserted
Village"
Gray, "Elegy: Written in a Country
Churchyard"
Johnson, "The Vanity of Human
Wishes"
Pope, "An Essay on Man,"
"An Essay on
Criticism"
"The Rape of the Lock"
Wheatley, "On Being Brought from Africa to
America"
"Thoughts on the Works of
Providence"
"To His Excellency General
Washington"
Drama
Gay, The Beggar's Opera
Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer
Sheridan, The Rivals
Other
Boswell, Life of Johnson
DeCrevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer
Edwards, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry
God"
Franklin, Autobiography
Johnson, Rasselas
Swift, Gulliver's
Travels
Voltaire, Candide
Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of
Women
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Novel
Bronte, C. Jane Eyre
Bronte, E. Wuthering Heights
Chopin, The Awakening
Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans or The
Pioneers
Davis, Life in the Iron Mills
Dickens, Bleak House
David Copperfield
Great Expectations
Hard Times
Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
Crime and Punishment or The Brothers
Karamazoz
Eliot, Middlemarch
The Mill on the Floss
Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles or Jude the
Obscure
Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter and selected short
stories
Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham
James, The Ambassadors or Portrait of a
Lady
Melville, Billy Budd
Moby Dick
Shelley, Frankenstein
Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
Thackeray, Vanity Fair
Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych
Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn
Wharton, House of Mirth or Age of Innocence
Short
Fiction
Hawthorne, selected stories
Irving, selected stories
Poe, selected stories
Guy de Maupassant, selected short stories, such as
"The Necklace"
Poetry
Arnold, "Dover Beach" and selected
poems
Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience
Bryant, "Thanatopsis," "To a
Waterfowl," "The Prairies"
Byron, Don Juan, and selected poems
Browning, R. "My Last
Duchess" and selected poems
Browning, E. Barrett, selections from Aurora
Leigh
Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner" and selected poems
Dickinson, selected poems, #49 "I
never lost as much but twice"
#214 "I taste a liquor never brewed--
#249 "Wild Nights--Wild Nights!"
#322 "There came a day a summer's
full,"
#405 "I heard a fly buzz--when I
died--"
#449 "I died for Beauty--"
#640 "I cannot live with You--"
#714 "My Life Had Stood--A Loaded
Gun"
#1732 "My life closed twice before its
close--
Emerson, "The Snow Storm," and selected
poems
Goethe, Faust, part I
Hopkins, selected poems
Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "The Eve
of St. Agnes" and selected poems
Poe, "The Raven" and selected poems
Shelley, selected poems
Tennyson, In Memoriam and selected poems
Whitman, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "Out
of the Cradle Endlessly
Rocking"
"Passage to India," "Song of
Myself,"
"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,"
and selected poems
Wordsworth, "The Prelude: Book I"
and
"Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern
Abbey"
"Michael," "Preface to Lyrical
Ballads and selected poems"
Drama
Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard or The
Sisters
Ibsen, Hedda Gabler, An Enemy of the People, or The
Doll's House
Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
Nonfiction
Apess, William, A Son of the Forest
Arnold, "The Functions of Criticism at the
Present Time"
Carlyle, Sartor Resartus
Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass
Emerson, "Nature" and selected
essays
Newman, The Idea of the University
Pater, "Introduction and Conclusion to Studies in
the History of the
Renaissance"
Thoreau, Walden, "Resistance to Civil
Government"
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Novel
Achebe, Things Fall Apart, Arrow of
God
Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaiden's Tale or Surfacing
(Canada)
Baldwin, Go Tell It on the
Mountain
Borges, Jorge Luis, selected short stories, such as
"The Garden of
Forking Parths" or "The Lottery in
Babylon" (Argentina)
Camus, Albert, The Outsider (France)
Cather, My Antonia or Song of the Lark
Coetzee, J. M., Life and Times of Michael K or Age of
Iron (South Africa)
Conard, Heart of Darkness
Erdrich, Louise, Love Machine
Ellison, Invisible Man
Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom, The
Bear, The Sound and the Fury
Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Forster, A Passage to India
Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman
Gordimer, A World of Strangers
Greene, The Quiet American, The Power and the Glory, or
The Heart
of the Matter
Hemingway, "The Nick Adams" stories,
*The Sun Also Rises
Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as A Young
Man
Dubliners, Ulysses
Kafka, Metamorphosis or The Trial
Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Lawrence, The Rainbow or Sons and
Lovers
Lessing, The Golden Notebook
Mann, Death in Venice
Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, or selected
stories
Marshall, Praise-Song for the Widow
Morrison, Beloved, or Song of Solomon
Narayan, R. K. The Painter of Signs or Malgudi Days
(short stories, India)
Orwell, 1984 and Animal Farm
Proust, Marcel, Swann's Way (France)
Sartre, Jean Paul, Nausea (France)
Silko, Ceremony
Woolf, V., To the Lighthouse
Wright, Native Son, The Outsider, or Black
Boy
Drama
Baraka, The Dutchman and the Slave
Beckett, Waiting for Godot
Brecht, The Good Woman of Sezuan, Three-Penny
Opera
Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun
Miller, Death of a Salesman
O'Neill, Long Day's Journey into
Night
Pinter, The Caretaker or The Dumb Waiter
Shaw, Mrs. Warren's Profession, Major Barbara, or
Arms and the Man
Soyinka, Kongi's Harvest
Stoppard, Travesties or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are
Dead
Williams, The Glass Menagerie or A Streetcar
Named Desire
Wilson, Piano Lesson
Poetry
Auden, selected poems
Bishop, selected poems
Brooks, selected poems
Dove, selected poems
Eliot, selected poems, "The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock,"
"The Waste Land"
Frost, selected poems, "Mending Wall,"
"The Death of the Hired Man"
Home Burial, "Birches," "Out,
Out--'," "Desert Places,"
"The Gift Outright"
Ginsberg, "Howl"
Hardy, selected poems
Heaney, selected poems
Houseman, selected poems
Hughes, L., selected poems, "The Negro Speaks of
Rivers, "I, Too" "Mother to
Son, "Democracy"
Hughes, T., selected poems
Larkin, selected poems
Lawrence, selected poems
Lowell, "Skunk Hour" and selected
poems
Moore, "The Fish" and selected
poems
Owen, "Dulce et Decorum Est"
Plath, selected poems
Pound, "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" and selected
poems
Rich, "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers,"
"Diving into the Wreck," and selected
poems
Roethke, selected poems
Sexton, "All My Pretty Ones" and selected
poems
Smith, S., selected poems
Stevens, selected poems, "The Snow Man,
"Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock,"
"Sunday Morning," "Anecdote of the Jar,"
"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"
Thomas, "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good
Night"
Yeats, "Easter, 1916," "Among
Schoolchildren," "Sailing to
Byzantium,"
"Byzantium," "Under Ben
Fulben," and selected poems
Williams, selected poems, "Portrait of a
Lady," "Spring and All,"
"To Elsie," "The Red Wheelbarrow,"
"This Is Just to Say"
Essays and
Nonfiction
Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
Black Elk, Black Elk Speaks
Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual
Talent"
King, "Letter from Birmingham Jail"
Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain
Olsen, Silences
Orwell, "Politics and the English
Language"
Rich, On Lies, Secrets and Silence
Woolf, A Room of One's Own
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Writing
Elbow, Peter, Writing with
Power
Goldberg, Natalie, Writing Down the Bones
Murray, Donald, Shoptalk
Strunk and White, Elements of Style
Ueland, Brenda, If You Want to Write
Zinsser, William, On Writing Well
About the Field
of Composition and Rhetoric:
Bizzel, "Cognition, Convention, and
Certainty: What We Need To Know About Writing," PRE/TEXT
3 (Fall 1982)
Bereiter, Carl and Marlene Scardamalia, Psychology of
Written Composition
Bullock, Richard, and John Trimbur, ed. The Politics of
Writing Instruction: Postsecondary
Connors, Robert J., Lisa S. Ede, and Andrea Lunsford, eds.
Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern
Discourse
Corbett, Edward P. J., Classical Rhetoric for the Modern
Student
Covino, William A. The Art of Wondering: A Revisionist
Return to the History of Rhetoric
Flower and Hayes, "A Cognitive Process Theory of
Writing," College Composition and Communication
32(December 1981)
Hairston, "Diversity, Ideology and Teaching
Writing," College Composition and Communication 43 (May
1992)
Hillocks, George Jr., Research on Written
Communications
Lindemann, Erika L., A Rhetoric for Writing
Teachers
Lindemann, Erika and Gary Tate, eds., An Introduction to
Composition Studies
Macrorie, Ken, Telling Writing
Miller, Susan, Textual Carnivals: The Politics of
Composition
North, Stephen, The Making of Knowledge in Composition:
Portrait of an Emerging Field
Nystrand, Greed Wiemelt, "Where Did Composition Studies
Come From? An Intellectual History," Written
Communication 10 (July 1993).
Phelps, Louise Wetherbee, Composition as a Human
Science: Contribution to the Self-Understanding of a
Discipline
Rose, Mike, "The Language of Exclusion: Writing
Instruction at the University," College English 47
(April 1985)
Rose, Mike, Lives on the Boundary: The Struggles and
Achievements of America's Underprepared
About Teaching
Writing
Berlin, James. "Contemporary Composition:
The Major Pedagogical Theories." The Writing
Teacher's Sourcebook
Donovan, Timothy R. and Ben W. McClelland, Eds., Eight
Approaches to Teaching Composition
Emig, "Writing as a Mode of Learning," College
Composition and Communication
Harris, Janet Muriel, Teaching One-on-One: The Writing
Conference
Murray, Donald M., "Writing Process: How Writing Finds
Its Own
Meaning," Eight Approaches to Teaching
Composition
North, Stephen. "Revisiting the Idea of the Writing
Center." The Writing Center Journal
Shaughnessey, Mina. Errors and Expectations
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