Rutgers Newark: Faculty of Arts and Sciences

GRADUATE PROGRAM

MASTER'S EXAM READING LIST

Literature before 1660

Anonymous	Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1375).
Aristotle	Poetics.
Chaucer, Geoffrey	Selections from The Canterbury Tales (c. 1390): General Prologue; The Clerk's Tale; The Miller's Prologue and Tale; The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale; The Man of Law's Prologue and Tale; The Nun's Priest's Prologue and Tale; The Prioress's Prologue and Tale; Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1380).
Donne, John	"The Canonization," "The Extasie," "The Flea," "Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star," "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning"; Holy Sonnets: "At the Round Earth's Imagin'd Corners," "Death Be Not Proud," "Batter My Heart."
Herbert, George	Selections from The Temple (1633): "The Pilgrimage," "Easter Wings," "The Altar," "Redemption," "Time," "Death," "The Collar," "Love III."
Jonson, Ben	The Alchemist (1610, published 1612).
King James Bible	Genesis, Song of Solomon, Gospel of Luke, Gospel of John, I Corinthians, Revelation (translation published 1611).
Langland, William	The Vision of Piers Plowman (B text), passus 1-7 (c. 1360-90).
Milton, John	"L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" (c. 1631, published 1645); Lycidas (1637); Areopagitica (1644); Paradise Lost (1667-74).
More, Thomas	Utopia (1516).
Plato	Symposium.
Shakespeare, William	Henry IV, Part I (c. 1597); As You Like It (c. 1599); Othello (1604); King Lear (c. 1604); The Tempest (1610); Twelfth Night (c. 1601); Sonnets nos. 12, 15, 18, 55, 106, 130.
Spenser, Edmund	The Faerie Queene, Books 1 and 2 and "A Letter of the Author to Sir Walter Raleigh" (1590).

English and American Literature,
1660-1819

Austen, Jane	Pride and Prejudice (1813).
Behn, Aphra	Oroonoko (1688).
Blake, William	The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1790-93); selections from Songs of Innocence & Experience (1789-95): both Introductions, "The Echoing Green," "The Lamb," "The Little Black Boy," "The Tyger," both "Nurse's Songs," "London," "The Human Abstract." From Milton (1804): "And Did These Feet in Ancient Time."
Burney, Frances	Evelina (1778).
Byron, George Gordon, Lord	Don Juan, cantos 1 and 2 (1819).
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor	"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1798-1817); "Kubla Khan" (1816); Biographia Literaria (1817), chapters 13, 14, 17.
Congreve, William	The Way of the World (1700).
Defoe, Daniel	Moll Flanders (1722).
Equiano, Olaudah	The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1791).
Fielding, Henry	Joseph Andrews (1742).
Franklin, Benjamin	Autobiography (1793).
Johnson, Samuel	Rasselas (1759).
Keats, John	"On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," "On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again," "La Belle Dame sans Merci," "Lamia," "To Autumn," "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn"; letters to Benjamin Bailey (22 November 1817), John Hamilton Reynolds (3 May 1818), and George and Georgiana Keats (Feb.-May 1819).
Pope, Alexander	The Rape of the Lock (1712-14); "Moral Essay II, To a Lady: Of the Characters of Women" (1735).
Richardson, Samuel	Pamela (1740-41).
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft	Frankenstein (1818), with the Introduction of 1831.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe	"Adonais" (1821); A Defence of Poetry (1821, published 1840).
Swift, Jonathan	Gulliver's Travels (1726); "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift" (1739).
Wollstonecraft, Mary	A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).
Wordsworth, William	"My Heart Leaps Up," "Strange Fits of Passion," "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey," "The Solitary Reaper," "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," "The World Is Too Much with Us"; Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800).

English and American Literature,
1820-1900

Brontë, Charlotte	Villette (1853).
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett	Sonnets from the Portuguese (1845-47, published 1850);"To George Sand: A Desire" and "To George Sand: A Recognition" (1844); "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" (1846, published 1848); Aurora Leigh (1853-56, published 1856), books 1, 2, 3, 5; "A Curse for a Nation" (1860).
Browning, Robert	"Porphyria's Lover" (1836); "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" (1846); "My Last Duchess" (1846).
Carlyle, Thomas	From Sartor Resartus (1834): "The Everlasting No," "Centre of Indifference," "The Everlasting Yea," "Natural Supernaturalism;" from Past and Present (1843): "Midas," "Captains of Industry."
Chopin, Kate	The Awakening (1899).
Crane, Stephen	"The Open Boat" (1898); "The Pace of Youth" (1898); "The Monster" (1899).
Dickens, Charles	Great Expectations (1860-61).
Dickinson, Emily	Any twenty poems.
Douglass, Frederick	Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845 version).
Hawthorne, Nathaniel	"My Kinsman, Major Molineux" (1832); "The Minister's Black Veil" (1836);"The Maypole of Merry Mount" (1836); "Rappacini's Daughter" (1844).
Hopkins, Gerard Manley	Poems, 1876-89: "God's Grandeur," "Spring," "Pied Beauty," "Hurrahing in Harvest," "The Windhover," "Spring and Fall," "As Kingfishers Catch Fire," "(Carrion Comfort)," "No Worst, There Is None," "To Seem the Stranger Lies My Lot, My Life," "My Own Heart Let Me Have More Pity On," "Tom's Garland," "That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire," "To R.B."
Martí, José	"Our America" (1891); "The Truth about the United States" (1894); "Coney Island" (1881); "Brooklyn Bridge" (1883); "War Diaries" (1895).
Melville, Herman	"Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" (1853); "Benito Cereno" (1855); Billy Budd, Sailor (1891, published 1924).
Mill, John Stuart	On Liberty (1859); On the Subjection of Women (1860, published 1869).
Rossetti, Christina	Goblin Market (1862): "When I Am Dead, My Dearest," "A Triad," "In an Artist's Studio," "A Birthday," "Winter: My Secret," "In the Bleak Midwinter."
Tennyson, Alfred Lord	"The Lady of Shalott" (1832, published 1842); "Ulysses" (1833, published 1842); In Memoriam A.H.H. (1833-50, published 1850).
Thoreau, Henry David	"Civil Disobedience" (1849).
Twain, Mark	A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889).
Whitman, Walt	"Song of Myself" (1882); 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass.

Literature since 1900

Achebe, Chinua	Things Fall Apart (1959).
Atwood, Margaret	The Handmaid's Tale (1985); from Second Words (1982): "An End to Audience?" (1980); "Amnesty International: An Address" (1981).
Colón, Jesus	A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches (1982).
Conrad, Joseph	Heart of Darkness (1902).
Eliot, T. S.	The Waste Land (1922); "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1922).
Faulkner, William	Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
Frost, Robert	"Home Burial," "After Apple Picking," "Neither Far Out," "Design," "Mending Wall," "The Oven Bird," "Never Again Would Birds' Song."
Greene, Graham	The Quiet American (1955).
Hughes, Langston	"The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "Negro," "Dream Variations," "I, Too," "The Weary Blues," "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," "Bad Luck Card," "Johannesburg Mines," "Come to the Waldorf-Astoria," "The English," "Drum," "Goodbye Christ," "The Same," "Air Raid over Harlem," "Big Meeting," "When the Negro Was in Vogue," "Freedom Train," "Harlem," "Thank You, Ma'm," "Radioactive Red Caps" (1921-61).
Joyce, James	A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914-15).
Lessing, Doris	The Golden Notebook (1962).
Miller, Arthur	The Crucible (1953).
Morrison, Toni	Beloved (1987).
Naipaul, V. S.	A House for Mr. Biswas (1961).
O'Brien, Tim	In the Lake of the Woods (1994).
Plath Sylvia	From Ariel (1965): "Lady Lazarus," "Cut," "Ariel," "The Applicant," "Death & Co.," "Daddy," "Balloons," "Kindness," "Edge," "Words."
Stevens, Wallace	"Sunday Morning," "The Idea of Order at Key West," "The Snow Man," "Peter Quince at the Clavier," "Of Modern Poetry," "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction."
Thiong'o, Ngugi wa	Petals of Blood (1977).
Vonnegut, Kurt	Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).
Woolf, Virginia	Mrs. Dalloway (1925).
Yamamoto, Hisaye	Seventeen Syllables (1988).
Yeats, William Butler	The Tower (1928).

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MASTER'S EXAM READING LIST

English and American Literature, 1660-1819

English and American Literature, 1820-1900

Literature since 1900

English and American Literature,
1660-1819

English and American Literature,
1820-1900