M.A. English Reading List

American Literature

Hannah Webster Foster	The Coquette
Ralph Waldo Emerson	"Nature," "The Divinity School Address"
Henry David Thoreau	From Walden: “Where I Lived and What I Lived for”
Nathaniel Hawthorne	Preface to The House of Seven Gables “Rappaccini’s Daughter”
Herman Melville	“Bartleby, the Scrivener” “Benito Cereno”
Harriet Jacobs	Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Walt Whitman	Preface to Leaves of Grass “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” “The Wound Dresser”
Emily Dickinson	167 “Success is counted sweetest” 269 “Wild Nights—Wild Nights!” 435 “Much Madness is divinest Sense” 340 “I Felt a Funeral in my Brain” 1129 “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant”
Mark Twain	“Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences”
Henry James	Daisy Miller
Robert Frost	“After Apple Picking” “The Death of the Hired Man” “Home Burial” “Mending Wall”
William Faulkner	“A Rose for Emily” “Barn Burning”
Ernest Hemingway	“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”
T. S. Eliot:	“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Langston Hughes	“The Weary Blues”; “Freedom Train” “I, Too” “Harlem”
Zora Neale Hurston	Their Eyes Were Watching God
James Baldwin	“Notes of a Native Son”
Allen Ginsberg	“Howl”
Sylvia Plath	“Daddy” “Cut” “Lady Lazarus”
Flannery O'Connor	“A Good Man is Hard to Find” “Good Country People” “Everything That Rises Must Converge”
Tim O'Brien	“The Things They Carried”
Amy Tan	The Joy Luck Club
August Wilson	Fences
Maxine Hong Kingston	"No Name Woman"
Leslie Marmon Silko	“Landscape, History, and Pueblo Imagination”
Sandra Cisneros	“Woman Hollering Creek”
Jhampa Lahiri	The Namesake
Natasha Tretheway	“White Lies” “Incident” “Enlightenment”

British Literature

Unknown	Beowulf
Geoffrey Chaucer	From The Canterbury Tales: “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” “The Miller’s Tale” “The Wife of Bath’s Tale”
William Shakespeare	Hamlet Twelfth Night
John Milton	From Paradise Lost: Book 1, II. 1-190 Book 3, II. 1-265 Book 9
Aphra Behn	Oroonoko
Jonathan Swift	From Gulliver’s Travels: Book 1 and 4
Jane Austen	Pride and Prejudice
Mary Wollstonecraft	From A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: Chapters 1, 2, and 13
William Wordsworth	“Preface” to Lyrical Ballads “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1882,” “Lines Composed a Few Miles from Tintern Abbey,” “The World is Too Much with Us”
John Keats	“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” “Ode to a Nightingale” “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning	From Aurora Leigh: First Book, Second Book, and Fifth Book
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley	Frankenstein
Charles Dickens	A Christmas Carol
Christina Rossetti	“Goblin Market”
Oscar Wilde	The Importance of Being Earnest
William Butler Yeats	“The Wild Swans at Coole" “Easter 1916,” “Sailing to Byzantium”
Wilfred Owen	“Anthem for Doomed Youth” “Dulce Et Decorum Est” “Disabled”
E. M. Forster	"The Road from Colonus"
James Joyce	“Eveline,” “The Dead”
Virginia Woolf	Mrs. Dalloway “The Death of a Moth”
Dylan Thomas	“Fern Hill”; “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London”
Samuel Beckett	Waiting for Godot
Doris Lessing	"To Room Nineteen"
Oliver Sacks	"The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat"
Kazuo Ishiguro	Never Let Me Go
Ian McEwan	Atonement
Zadie Smith	White Teeth

For a printable copy of the reading list, email Dr. Paola Gemme.