English Studies – Master’s Comprehensive Exam Reading List

Classical Literature

- Odyssey – Books VI, VIII, IX, X, & XI (Homer)
- Oedipus the King (Sophocles)
- Genesis, Book of Job, & Luke (Bible)
- Gorgias & Phaedrus (Plato)
- Rhetorica – Books I & II (Aristotle)
- Institutes of Oratory – Book II (ch. 15-17), Book X (ch. 3), Book XII (ch. 1) (Quintilian)

Medieval Literature

- Inferno – Cantos 1-5, 11, 13, 19-22, 28-30, 32-34 (Dante)
- “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” (The Pearl Poet)
- from The Canterbury Tales:  “The General Prologue,” “The Pardoner’s Tale,” “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” “The Franklin’s Tale” (Geoffrey Chaucer)

Renaissance Literature

- Hamlet, Lear, Othello (Shakespeare)
- Sonnets: (Shakespeare)
- “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
- “A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted”
- “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”
- “Not marble nor the gilded monuments”
- “That time of year thou mayest in me behold”
- “Let me not to the marriage of true minds”
- “Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame”
- “My mistresses’ eyes are nothing like the sun”
- “When my love swears that she is made of truth”
- “Pour soul, the center of my sinful earth”

Restoration & 18th century British Literature

- Paradise Lost – Books 1-4, 7, 9, 10, 12 (John Milton)
- “A Modest Proposal” (Jonathan Swift)
- “The Rape of the Lock” (Alexander Pope)
- Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres – Lecture I (Hugh Blair)

British Romantic Literature

- Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
- Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
- Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
- Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)
- Songs of Innocence and Experience (William Blake)
- “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” (Wordsworth)
- Book I of 1805 Prelude (Wordsworth)
- The Lucy Poems (Wordsworth)
- “A Poet’s Epitaph” (Wordsworth)
- “Elegiac Stanzas” (Wordsworth)
- “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (Coleridge)
- “The Eolian Harp,” “Kubla Kahn,” “Cristabel,” “Frost at Midnight,” “Fears in Solitude,” “Dejection,” “To William Wordsworth,” chapter 1 of Biographia (Coleridge)

Victorian Literature

- Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)
- “My Last Duchess” (Robert Browning)
- “Soliloquy on the Spanish Cloister (Robert Browning)
- “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church” (Robert Browning)
- “Andrea del Sarto” (Robert Browning)
- “Fra Lippo Lippi” (Robert Browning)
- “Goblin Market” (Christina Rossetti)
- Sartor Resartus (Thomas Carlyle)
- Culture and Anarchy (Matthew Arnold)

19th century American Literature

- The Declaration of Independence (pre-19th century)
- Huckleberry Fin (Mark Twain)
- From Franklin Edition, poems: 5, 16, 71, 94, 369, 372, 426, 488, 533, 640 (Emily Dickinson)
- “Self-Reliance,” “The Poet,” & “American Scholar” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
- Walden & “Civil Disobedience” (Henry David Thoreau)
- The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
- “Song of Myself,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” & “When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer” (Walt Whitman)

20th century American Literature

- The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway)
- The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner)
- Death of a Salesman (Arthur Miller)
- The Glass Menagerie (Tennessee Williams)
- Long Day’s Journey into Night (Eugene O’Neill)
- “The Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (T.S. Eliot)
- The Linguistic Wars (Randy Allen Harris)

20th century British Literature

- Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
- A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce)
- Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)
- Waiting for Godot (Samuel Beckett)
- Saint Joan (G.B. Shaw)
- “The Second Coming,” “Leda and the Swan,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Among School Children,” & “The Circus Animal’s Desertion” (W.B Yeats)
- “Poem in October,” “The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower,” “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London,” “In my Craft or Sullen Art,” & “The Hunchback in the Park” (Dylan Thomas)
- “Politics and the English Language” (George Orwell)

(Tarleton State University Department of English & Languages, Graduate Faculty Spring 2009)

** Everything grayed out is something I’ve read!  I’ll be reading them all again, though, in prep for the comps.**

Kristyn’s graduate-reading-list book montage

Kristyn’s favorite books »