English Major Reading List

English Major Reading List

Consider this a basic list of titles and authors you should be familiar with as you proceed with your education.

You should also get a good, brief overview of world literature (I strongly recommend The Reader's Companion to World Literature by Lillian Herlands Hornstein), that lists authors and provides book synopses and other information. It'll help familiarize the names and themes of various writers (and make you sound more intelligent at cocktail parties - or beer blasts).

I recently discovered two books I wish I had as an undergraduate -- A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature by Wilfred L. Guerin (and those erstwhile companions) et al. Published by Norton, it takes a core set of readings -- Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," Shakespeare's Hamlet, Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," and Walker's "Everyday Use" -- and illustrates different ways of reading them. This is a perfect introduction to literary criticism -- and well written to boot.

The second text is Lois Tyson's Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide , which explains several contemporary approaches to literature (psychoanalytic, Marxist, feminist, etc.) and, most importantly, lists a series of questions each type of critics asks.

Two reference books you should have on your shelf are Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia -- handy for quick reminders of dates, names, and works -- and Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Brewer's is that odd book you turn to find the meaning of such phrases as "I have seen the white elephant."

A caveat: this is a decidedly Eurocentric list (sorry, I'm just not as well versed in other literatures)

Greek Literature
The Iliad Use the recent translation by Robert Fagles
The Odyssey
Oedipus Rex

Roman Literature
Ovid The Metamorphoses (try recent translations of each )
VirgilThe Aeneid

Medieval
Beowulf
Chaucer Canterbury Tales
Malory Morte Darthur: the Passing of Arthur (just as interesting as all the movies)
Dante The Inferno

17th Century
Shakespeare's Sonnets: 12, 18, 29, 55, 71, 73, 104, 106, 116, 129, 130, 144; Hamlet, King Lear,
Othello, Macbeth, Richard II, Richard III, Henry the Fourth Part One, Love's Labour's Lost, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, The Tempest

18th Century
Selections from John Donne's poetry, especially "Go and Catch a Falling Star" and "Batter My Heart, Three Person'd God"

A good source for "canonical" poems is a book entitled The Major Poets. A kind of "Greatest Hits" of poetry, it's a great book to have on your shelf.

Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe (You'll be surprised how good this is after all you've heard about it)
John Milton Paradise Lost (Why is it always more interesting to read about evil?)
Laurence Sterne Tristam Shandy (a hilarious -- in a both dry and bawdy way -- book)
Jonathan Swift Gulliver's Travels
Henry Fielding Tom Jones (Long, but a great tale)
Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote (long but a great read)
Voltaire, Candide (Short but a great read)

Romantics (late 18th early 195h Centuries):
William Blake Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth Lyrical Ballads
John Keats, Selections of his poetry
Mary Shelly Frankenstein (a great book)

19th Century
Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, Bleak House
William Thackeray Vanity Fair
George Eliot Middlemarch
Emily Bronte Wuthering Heights
Charlotte Bronte Jane Eyre
Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now
Thomas Hardy Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure
Selections of Alfred Tennyson and Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach"
Walt Whitman's 1855 Leaves of Grass
Emily Dickinson's poetry
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Nathaniel Hawthorne Scarlet Letter
Edgar Allan Poe Tales
Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays
Henry David Thoreau Walden (a great book)
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Frederick Douglass Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Tom's Cabin
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Stephen Crane Red Badge of Courage , "The Open Boat"
Sherwood Anderson Winesburg, Ohio
Stendahl The Red and the Black
Honoré Balzac Pere Girot
Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary
Gogol The Overcoat
Fyodor Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment

20th Century
Franz Kafka The Metamorphosis , "The Penal Colony," "The Hunger Artist"
Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness
Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse , Mrs. Dalloway
James Joyce Ulysses , Dubliners
William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury , As I Lay Dying
F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby
Poetry of William Butler Yeats, esp. "The Second Coming," "Sailing to Byzantium," "Leda and the Swan," "Among School Children," "Crazy Jane Talks to the Bishop," "Lapis Lazuli" "The Circus Animals' Desertion"
Poetry of T.S. Eliot, esp. "The Waste Land," "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "The Hollow Men"
Poetry of William Carlos Williams
Poetry of Robert Frost
Poetry of Marianne Moore
Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop
Ralph Ellison The Invisible Man
Samuel Becket Waiting for Godot (Much better in performance -- try to watch a video)
Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie
Arthur Miller Death of a Salesman
Jorge Luis Borges Labyrinths
Gabriel Garcia Marquez One Hundred Years of Solitude
William Gibson, Neuromancer
Albert Camus, The Stranger
Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Buci Emecheta, The Joys of Motherhood
Ngugi Wa Thiongo, Petals of Blood
Salmon Rushdie Midnight's Children