phd reading list english literature

Graduate Reading List

Graduate – current – reading lists.

19th-Century American Literature

• 19th-Century American Literature – Hueth (Fall 2021)
• Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature, 1848-1914 – Driben (Fall 2021)
• Long 19 th Century in American Literature – Herrera (Fall 2021)
• American Literature 1820 – 1920  – Swanson (Spring 2021)
• 19th-Century American Literature, 1825-1900  – Lee (Spring 2019)
• 19th-Century American Literature, 1848-1914  – Valenzuela (Fall 2018)
•   U.S. Literature 1820-1880  – Delchamps (Fall 2017)
•   19th-Century American Literature – Fosbury (Fall 2016)
•   19th-Century American Literature – Lopez (Fall 2016)
•   19th-Century American Literature – Febo (Spring 2016)
•   19th-Century American Literature – Lew (Winter 2016)
•   American Literature 1780-1880 – Messner (Spring 2015)
•   19th-Century American Literature – Smith, R. (Fall 2014)
•   American Literature, 1780-1890 – Beck (Fall 2014)
•   American Literature, 1782-1896 – Rosson (Fall 2014)
•   19th-Century American Literature – Sommers (Fall 2014)
•   19th-Century American Literature – Wingate (Fall 2014)
•   19th-Century American – Chon (Spring 2014)
•   19th-Century American – Horvath (Winter 2014)
•   19th-Century American – Clark (Spring 2013)
•   19th-Century American – Gallagher (Spring 2013)
•   19th-Century American – Lang (Spring 2013)
•   19th-Century American – Charles (Fall 2012)
•   19th-Century American – Couch (Fall 2012)
•   American Literature 1800-1890 – Reed (2010)
•   19th-Century American – Henton (Fall 2009)
•   19th-Century American – JohnsonA (Spring 2009)
•   19th-Century American – Moore (Spring 2009)
•   19th-Century American – Nahm (Spring 2009)
•   19th-Century American – Escobar (Winter 2009)
•   19th-Century American – Webster (Winter 2009)
•   19th-Century American – Gardner (Fall 2008)
• 19th-Century American – Department

20th Century British & Irish Literature

• Anglophone Modernism – Meagher (Spring 2023)
• Modernism – Webster (Spring 2022)
• 20th Century British and Anglophone – Wang (Spring 2021)
• 20th Century British and Irish Fiction – Ridder (Spring 2021)
• 20th/21st British and Irish Literature – Tanaka (Spring 2020)
• 20th/21st British and Irish Literature – Kern (Fall 2017)
•   British Literature, 1899-Present – Cardon (Fall 2017)
•   20th-Century British Literature – Benson (Summer 2017)
•   Post-1945 Anglophone Literature – Lee, J. (Fall 2015)
•   Early 20th-Century British Literature – Rainwater (Spring 2015)
•   20th-Century British and Anglophone Literature – Shin (Winter 2015)
•   20th-Century British / Postcolonial – Zhang (Fall 2014)
•   20th-Century British and Anglophone Literature – Calder (Summer 2014)
•   20th-Century British and Anglophone Literature – Jin (Fall 2013)
•   20th-Century British Literature – Kim (Fall 2013)
•   20th-Century British and Anglophone Literature – Nance (Fall 2013)
•   20th-Century British and Anglophone Literature – Miller (Spring 2013)
•   20th-Century British and Anglophone Literature – Walle (Fall 2012)
•   20th-Century British and Irish Postcolonial – Mack (Fall 2011)
•   20th-Century British and Anglophone Literature – Wong (Spring 2011)
•   20th-Century British – Ardam (Fall 2010)
•   U.K. 1900-2009 – Schmidt ( Fall 2010)
•   20th-Century British & Postcolonial – Fickle (Summer 2010)
•   20th-Century British & Irish – Williford (Summer 2010)
•   20th-Century British & Anglophone – Chatterjee (Spring 2010)
•   (Early) 20th-Century British & Irish – Caughey (Spring 2010)
•   20th-Century British & Irish – Camara (Fall 2009)
•   20th-Century British, Irish & Anglophone – O’Kelly (Fall 2009)
•   20th-Century British – Pulizzi (Summer 2009)
•   20th-Century British & Anglophone – Pizzo (Spring 2009)
• 20th-Century British & Anglophone – Department

African American Literature

• 20th Century African American Literature – Prucha (Winter 2022)
• Black Womanist Literature – Elliott-Newton (Spring 2022)
•   20th Century African American Literature – Prucha (Winter 2022)
•  20th C. Black Literature (1899-1990s) – Pittman (Winter 2021)
•   African American – Mendoza (Winter 2019)
•   African American – Sommers (Fall 2014)
•   African American – Warren (Spring 2012)
•   African American – Underwood (Winter 2012)
•   African American – Mack (Fall 2011)
•  African American – HarrisD (Spring 2009)
• African American – Department 

American Women’s Literature

• American Women – Henton (Fall 2009)  
• American Women – Department

Asian American Literatre

•   Asian Diaspora Literature – Cai (Fall 2015)
•   Asian-American Literature – Toy (Spring 2015)
•   Asian-American Literature – Tran (Spring 2013)
•   Asian American Alternative Genres – Fickle (Summer 2010)
•   Asian American Literature – Department 

British Women’s Literature

*Required Critical Text

Robyn Warhol, ed.   Feminisms   (rev. ed.)

*Kempe, Margery (c. 1373-c. 1438).    The Book of Margery Kempe.   Ed. S. B. Meech and H. E. Allen.  Early English Text Society (autobiography)

*Norwich, Julian of.    Revelations of Divine Love

Renaissance and Restoration

*Behn, Aphra.    Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave; The Rover   (drama)

*Cary, Elizabeth.    The Tragedie of Mariam, Faire Queene of Jewry

*Finch, Anne, Countess of Winchilsea.  Poems in Rogers anthology

*Lanyer, Aemelia.    Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum

*Wroth, Lady Mary.    The Countess of Montgomerie’s Urania   and sonnets

Eighteenth-Century Women Writers

*Burney, Frances.    Evelina   or   The Wanderer

*Lennox, Charlotte.    The Female Quixote

*Manley, Delarivier.    The New Atalantis

*Radcliffe, Ann.    The Italian

*Scott, Sarah.    Millenium Hall   or   Sir George Ellison

*Wheatley, Phillis.    Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral   (1773)

*Wollstonecraft, Mary.    The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria   and selections from   A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Nineteenth-Century

*Austen, Jane.    Pride and Prejudice   or   Emma   or   Mansfield Park

*Baillie, Joanna.    Count Basil   or   De Montfort

*Barrett Browning, Elizabeth.    Aurora Leigh   and “The Cry of the Children,” “To George Sand: A Desire,” “To George Sand: A Recognition,” “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point,” “Sonnets from the Portuguese,” “Mother and Poet”

*Brontë, Charlotte.    Jane Eyre   or   Villette

*Brontë, Emily.    Wuthering Heights

*Edgeworth, Maria.    Belinda   or   The Absentee

*Eliot, George.    Middlemarch

*Gaskell, Elizabeth.    North and South

*Hemans, Felicia.    Siege of Valencia   and “Properzia Rossi”; “Casabianca,” “The Homes of England,” “Graves of a Household,” “Evening Prayer, at a Girls’ School,” “Woman and Fame”

*Prince, Mary.    The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave

*Rosetti, Christina.  “Goblin Market,” “The Prince’s Progress,” “Song [When I am dead, my dearest],” “In an Artist’s Studio,” “Up-Hill,” “The Convent Threshold,” “Remember,” “Winter Rain,” “My Dream,” “Winter: My Secret,” “A Better Resurrection,” “The Lowest Room,” “A Birthday”

*Shelley, Mary.    Frankenstein   (1818 edition)

Twentieth-Century

*Brittain, Vera.  Testament of Youth

*Carter, Angela.    Nights at the Circus   and “The Bloody Chamber”

*Emecheta, Buchi.    Second Class Citizen

*Hall, Radclyffe.    Well of Loneliness

*Lessing, Doris.    The Golden Notebook

*Rhys, Jean.    Wide Sargasso Sea

*Winterson, Jeanette.    Passion

*Woolf, Virginia.    Mrs. Dalloway   or   To the Lighthouse; A Room of One’s Own

Recommended Theory and CriticismAbraham, Julie.  “History as Explanation: Writing About Lesbian Writing, or ‘Are Girls Necessary?’” in   Left Politics and the Literary Profession .  Eds. Lennard J. Davis and M. Bella Mirabella (New York: Columbia UP, 1990): 254-83.

Barrett, Michele.    Women’s Oppression Today , Ch. 1

Ballaster, Ros.    Seductive Fictions: Women’s Amatory Fiction 1684-1740

Barratt, Alexandra.  “Introduction,”   Women’s Writing in Middle English

de Beauvoir, Simone.    The Second Sex   (selections)

Bennett, Paula.  “Critical Clitoridectomy,”    Signs   (1992)

Butler, Judith.  “Subversive Bodily Acts” in   Gender Trouble ; “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism’” in   Feminists Theorize the Political , ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott

Castle, Terry.    The Apparitional Lesbian

Chodorow, Nancy.    The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender , Ch. 5

Christian, Barbara.  “The Race for Theory”

Ebert, Teresa.    Ludic Feminism and After , Chs. 1 and 2

Felski, Rita.    Beyond Feminist Aesthetics   (selections)

Ferguson, Margaret, ed.    Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe   (with Maureen Quillian and Nancy Vickers, eds.)

Fraser, Nancy.  “What’s Critical about Critical Theory?  The Case of Habermas and Gender” in   Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory

Gallagher, Catherine.    Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace 1670-1820

Gilbert, Sandra, ed.   The Madwoman in the Attic   (with Susan Gubar, ed.)

Gilligan, Carol.  “In a Different Voice: Women’s Conceptions of Self and Morality,” in   The Future of Difference   Eisenstein and Jardine, eds.

Hall, Catherine, ed.    Family Fortunes   (with Leonore Davidoff, ed.)

Haraway, Donna.  “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”

Hobby, Elaine.    Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing 1649-88

Irigaray, Luce.    The Sex Which Is Not One

Julia Kristeva.    Desire in Language , ch. 5 [the concept of the semiotic]

de Lauretis, Lauretis, ed.   Technologies of Gender,   Ch. 1

Lewalksi, Barbara Kiefer.    Writing Women in Jacobean England

Minh-ha, Trinh.    Woman, Native, Other: Writing, Postcoloniality, and Feminism

Mirza, Heidi Safia, ed.    Black British Feminism , Introduction

Mellor, Anne, ed.    Romanticism and Gender

Mohanty, Chandra.  “Under Western Eyes”

Moi, Toril.    Sexual/Textual Politics

Spivak, Gayatri.  “Three Women’s Texts”; “Can the Subaltern Speak” in   Wedge   7 (1985)

Weedon, Chris.    Feminism and Postructuralist Theory

Wittig, Monique.  “One Is Not Born a Woman,”  “The Straight Mind”

April, 1998

Celtic Literature

Myles Dillon, ed.    Serglige Con Culainn   (Dublin, 1953)

———-, ed.    Stories from the Acallam   (Dublin 1970)

Elizabeth Gray, ed. and trans.    Cath Maige Tuired   (Naas, 1983)

Kenneth Jackson, ed. and trans.    Aislinge Meic Conglinne   (Dublin 1990)

Gerard Murphy, ed. and trans.    Early Irish Lyrics   (Oxford 1956)

Nessa Ní Shéaghdha, ed. and trans.    Tóraigheacht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne   (Dublin, 1967)

Cecile O’Rahilly, ed. and trans.    Táin Bó Cúalnge from the Book of Leinster   (Dublin, 1967)

———-, ed. and trans.    Táin Bó Cúailnge:  Recension I   (Dublin, 1976)

Rudolf Thurneysen, ed. and trans.     Scéla Muicce Meic Dathó   (Dublin, 1935)

Rachel Bromwich, ed. and trans .  Dafydd ap Gwilym:  A Selection of Poems   (Llandysul, 1982)

———-, ed. and trans.    Trioedd Ynys Prydain   (Cardiff, 1961)

A. O. H. Jarman, ed.    The Gododdin   (Llandysul, 1988)

Thomas Parry, ed.    Oxford Book of Welsh Verse   (Oxford, 1962)

Derick Thomson, ed.    Branwen uerch Lyr   (Dublin, 1961)

R. L. Thomson, ed.    Owein   (Dublin, 1968)

———-, ed.    Pwyll Pendeuic Dyfet   (Dublin, 1957)

Ifor Williams and J. E. C. Williams, eds.    Poems of Taliesin   (Dublin, 1968)

Secondary Texts

James Carney.    Studies in Irish Literature and History   (Dublin, 1955)

Robin Flower.    The Irish Tradition   (Oxford, 1947)

Kathleen Hughes.    Early Christian Ireland   (Cornell, 1972)

J. F. Kenney.    The Sources for the Early History of Ireland I:  Ecclesiastical   (New York, 1927)

Kim McCone.    Pagan Past and Christian Present   (Maynooth, 1990)

Rachel Bromwich.    Aspects of the Poetry of Dafydd ap Gwilym   (Cardiff, 1986)

A. O. H. Jarman and others,   A Guide to Welsh Literature, I   (Swansea, 1976)

Brynley Roberts, ed.    Early Welsh Poetry:  Studies in the Book of Aneirin   (Aberystwyth, 1988)

Ifor Williams.    The Beginnings of Welsh Poetry   (Cardiff, 1972)

J. E. C. Williams.    The Poets of the Welsh Princes   (Cardiff, 1978)

January, 1992

Chicana/o Literature

• 20th Century Chicanx/Latinx Literature – Olivares (Spring 2022)
• 20 th -Century Latinx Literature – Herrera (Fall 2021)
• Chicano/a Literature 1940-2019 – Garcia (Spring 2020)
• Chicanx/Latinx Literature – Lopez (Fall 2016)
• Chicana/o – Escobar (Winter 09)
• Chicana/o – Department

Comparative Ethnic American Literature

•  Contemporary Multiethnic Literature – Prucha (Winter 2022)
•  Comp. Ethnic American – Smith, R. (Fall 2014)
•   Comp. Ethnic American – Nahm (Spring 2009)
•   Comp. Ethnic American – Department
•   Drama – M. Smith (Fall 2012)

Early 17th-Century British Literature

• 17th-C.: Queer Undercurrents, Classical Receptions – Forest (Spring 2023)
• 17th-Century British Literature – Wu (Spring 2021)
• 17th-Century Literature – Bonnici (Spring 2017)
•   17th-Century Literature – Del Balzo (Spring 2015)
•   Early 17th-Century – Hedlin (Fall 2014)
•   17th-Century – M. Smith (Fall 2012)
•   Earlier 17th-Century British Literature – Tung (Winter 2012)
•   Earlier 17th-Century British Literature – O’Sullivan (Fall 2011)
•   Earlier 17th-Century British Literature – Gottlieb (Fall 2010)
•   17th-Century British Literature – Hernandez (Summer 2010)
•   Early 17th-Century British Literature – Department

Early American Literature

• Early U.S. Literature, 1770-1865 – Driben (Fall 2021)
• Early American Literature, 1770-1865 – Valenzuela (Fall 2018)
• Early American – Fosbury (Fall 2016)
•   Early American – Sommers (Fall 2014)
•   Early American – Wingate (Fall 2014)
•   Early American – Gallagher (Spring 2013)
•   Early American – Couch (Fall 2012)
•   Early American – Reed (Fall 2010)
•   Early American – Henton (Fall 2009)
•   Early American – JohnsonA (Spring 2009)
•   Early American – Webster (Winter 2009)
•   Early American – Gardner (Fall 2008)
•   Early American – Department

Early 20th-Century American Literature

• American Literature 1900-45 – Martinez (Winter 2022)
• American Literature 1880 to 1945 / Narratology – Ridder (Spring 2021)
• American Literature 1885 to 1945 – Solis (Fall 2020)
• American Literature 1900 to 1945 – Meng (Spring 2020)
• American Literature 1906 to 1969 – Garcia (Spring 2020)
• American Literature 1880 to 1945 – Robins (Winter 2020)
• Early 20th-Century U.S. Literature – Mendoza (Winter 2019)
•   U.S. Literature 1880-1945 – Delchamps (Fall 2017)
•   20th-Century American Literature 1900-1945 – Lopez (Fall 2016)
•   Early 20th-Century American Literature – Lew (Winter 2016)
•   American Literature 1880-1945 – Kincade (Fall 2015)
•   Early 20th-Century American Literature – Toy (Spring 2015)
•   American Literature 1880-1945 – Messner (Spring 2015)
•   American Literature 1850-1945 – Zirulnik (Spring 2015)
•   American Literature 1850-1945 – Youn (Winter 2015)
•   American Literature, 1890-1945 – Beck (Fall 2014)
•   Early 20th-Century American Literature – Horvath (Winter 2014)
•   American Literature, 1865-1945 – Mehlman (Fall 2013)
•   Early 20th-Century American (and Whitman and Dickinson) – Nance (Fall 2013)
•   Early 20th-Century American: 1890-1945 – Newman (Fall 2013)
•   American Literature, 1865-1945 – Ocher (Fall 2013)
•   Early 20th-Century American Literature – Gallagher (Spring 2013)
•   Early 20th-Century American Literature – Miller (Spring 2013)
•   American Literature, 1865-1945 – Clark (Spring 2013)
•   American Literature, 1865-1945 – Tran (Spring 2013)
•   American Literature, 1890-1945 – Lang (Winter 2013)
•   Early 20th-Century American – Medrano (Fall 2012)
•  American Literature 1895-1945 – Ravid (Spring 2012)
•  Early20th-Century American – Underwood (Winter 2012)
•  American Literature (1st Half of 20th-Century) – Mack (Fall 2011)
•   American Literature 1865-1945 – Hudson (Winter 2011)
•   Early 20th-Century American Literature – Mendelman (Winter 2011)
•   American Literature 1890-1930 – Reed (Fall 2010)
•   American Literature 1900-1945 – Ardam (Fall 2010)
•   American Literature 1900-1945 – Schmidt (Fall 2010)
•   American 1890-1945 – Cassarino (Summer 2010)
•   Early 20th-Century American – Waldo (Spring 2010)
•   Early 20th-Century American – Caughey (Spring 2010)
•   American Literature 1890-1945 – Emery (Winter 2010)
•   Early 20th-Century American – HarrisD (Spring 2009)
•   Early 20th-Century American – JohnsonA (Spring 2009)
•   Early 20th-Century American – Moore (Spring 2009)
•   Early 20th-Century American – Nahm (Spring 2009)
•   Early 20th-Century American – Escobar (Winter 2009)
•   Early 20th-Century American – Department

Electronic Literature

• New Media, Aesthetic Theory, and Internet Practice – Acosta (Spring 2020)
• New Media – Hudson (Winter 2011)  
• Electronic Literature – Department

Folklore & Mythology

•   Folklore and Mythology – Bonnici (Spring 2017)
•   Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy – Voronca (Spring 2015)
•   Classical Mythology – Burdorff (Summer 2011)
•   Folklore and Mythology – Departmet

History of the English Language

• History of English Language – Bellairs (Fall 2019)
• History of English Language – ER (Fall 2008)  
• History of English Language – Department

Jewish American Literature

• Jewish American Literature – Department

Later 20th/21st Century American Literature

• American Literature 1945-post – Martinez (Winter 2022)
• 20th/21st Century American Literature – Kim (Spring 2022)
• American Fiction 1920 – present – Swanson (Spring 2021)
• Post 1945 American Literature – Solis (Fall 2020)
• Post 1945 American Literature – Whittell (Spring 2020)
• Post 1945 American – Meng (Spring 2020)
• 20/21 American – Tanaka (Spring 2020)
• American Fiction 1950 to present – Robins (Winter 2020)
• 20/21st Century U.S. Literature – Lee (Spring 2019)
• Later 20th-Century U.S. Literature – Mendoza (Winter 2019)
• North American 20th/21st Century – Kern (Fall 2017)
• 20th-C. North American: Form, Space & Place, Travel – Macgregor (Spring 2016)
• 20th-Century American Literatures of Technology – Hegel (Winter 2016)
• Post-1945 Anglophone Speculative Fiction (Winter 2016)
• American Literature, Post-1945 – Kincade (Fall 2015)
• Later 20th Century American Literature – Shin (Winter 2015)
• American Literature 1945-Present – Youn (Winter 2015)
• Later 20th-Century American Literature – Zhang (Fall 2014)
• Post-1945 American Literature – Calder (Summer 2014)
• 20th-Century American Literature – Chon (Spring 2014)
• 20th-Century American Fiction – Conley (Fall 2013)
• 20th-Century American Literature – Donig (Fall 2013)
• 20th-Century American Literature – Jin (Fall 2013)
• American Literature Post-1945 – Mehlman (Fall 2013)
• Post-1945 American Literature – Nance (Fall 2013)
• Post-1945 American Literature – Newman (Fall 2013)
• American Literature 1945-Present – Ocher (Fall 2013)
• Post-1945 American Literature – Miller (Spring 2013)
• Later 20th-Century American – Tran (Spring 2013)
• American 1945-Present – Lang (Winter 2013)
• Later 20th-Century American – Medrano (Fall 2012)
• American Literature 1945-Present – Ravid (Spring 2012)
• Later 20th-Century American – Warren (Spring 2012)
• Later 20th-Century American – Underwood (Winter 2012)
• American 1945-Present – Hudson (Winter 2011)
• Later 20th-Century American – Mendelman (Winter 2011)
• American 1945-Present – Ardam (Fall 2010)
• American 1946-2009 – Schmidt (Fall 2010)
• Post-War American – Fickle (Summer 2010)
• American 1945-Present – Cassarino (Summer 2010)
• Later 20th-Century American – Waldo (Spring 2010)
• American Literary Narrative Since 1945 – Emery (Winter 2010)
• Post-1940 American – O’Kelly (Fall 2009)
• Post-1940 American – Pulizzi (Summer 2009)
• Later 20th-Century American – HarrisD (Spring 2009)
• Later 20th-Century American – Department

Lesbian, Bisexual & Gay Literature

• 20th-C. Anglophone & Queer Lit. – Landau (Spring 2008)  
• Lesbian, Bisexual & Gay Literature – Department

Literary Theory

• Philosophy and Theory – Forest (Spring 2023)
• Race, Performance, and (Queer) Feeling – Prucha (Winter 2022)
• Radical Speculative Aesthetics: Race, Queerness, and Performance – Martinez (Winter 2022)
• Critique and the Project of Reason after Kant – Webster (Spring 2022)
• New Media Theory – Olivares (Spring 2022)
• Theory: Emobdiment, Affect, Ecology – Kim (Spring 2022)
• Interpretation and Embodiment – Bischoff (Spring 2022)
• Affect Theory – Hueth (Fall 2021)
• Aesthetic Theory – Wang (Spring 2021)
• Critical Texts – Happe (Winter 2020).
• Theory of History – Jaime (Fall 2019)
• Theory: Affect and Embodiment Ishikawa – (Summer 2019)
• Transatlantic Realisms” 1880-Present Stanford (Fall 2018)
• Disability Studies – Delchamps (Fall 2017)
• Queer Theory and Literature, 1913-Present – Cardon (Fall 2017)
• Visual Culture and Critical Theory – Lew (Winter 2016)
• Theories of Narrative and Media – Kincade (Fall 2015)
• Transhistorical Feminist Theories of Embodiment – Cai (Fall 2015)
• Queer Theory, Marlowe to Wilde (1590-1890) – Del Balzo (Spring 2015)
• Philosophy and Science of Linguistic Style – Messner (Spring 2015)
• Queer Theory – Shin (Winter 2015)
• Theory: Narrative Realism – Youn (Winter 2015)
• Theory: The Idea of Natural History – Calder (Summer 2014)
• Theory: Form – Chon (Spring 2014)
• Narrative Theory – Horvath (Winter 2014)
• Theories of History and Memory – Adler (Fall 2013)
• Theories of Representation – Donig (Fall 2013)
• Literary Theory – Ravid (Spring 2012)
• Embodiment Critical Theory – Mendelman (Winter 2011)
• Literary Theory – Gender & Sexuality – Gottlieb (Fall 2010)
• Captivity Narratives – Moyer (Fall 2010)
• Enlightenment Theory – Hernandez (Summer 2010)
• Literary Theory & Aesthetics – Williford (Summer 2010)
• The Subject/Subjectivity – Chatterjee (Spring 2010)
• Literary Theory – Camara (Fall 2009)
• Critical Theory & Visual Culture – O’Kelly (Fall 2009)
• Materialist Thought & Literature 1620-1895 – Wang (Spring 2009)
• Literary Theory – Department

Literature & Science

• Philosophy of Science / Literary History of Consciousness – Cook (Summer 2018)
• Ideas of the Natural – Francis (Fall 2017)
• Transatlantic Literature and Bioscience – Cai (Fall 2015)
• Literature, Science and Technology – Toy (Spring 2015)
• Technology and Literature, 1818-Present – Conley (Fall 2013)
• Science and Literature – Jin (Fall 2013)
• 19th-Century Science and Literature – Wilhelm (Spring 2013)
• Literature & Technology – Emery (Winter 2010)
• Literature & Science – Pulizzi (Summer 2009)
• Literature & Science – Department

Middle English Literature

• Medieval Literature – Birke (Fall 2023)
• Medieval – Moscati (Spring 2023)
• Medieval Literature – Torres (Spring 2022)
• Medieval Literature – Elliott-Newton (Spring 2022)
• Medieval Literature – Bischoff (Spring 2022)
• Medieval Literature – Sharrah (Winter 2020)
• Travel and Cultural Contact in the Middle Ages – Kello (Fall 2019)
• History and Time in the Later Middle Ages – Jaime (Fall 2019)
• England and the Late Middle Ages – Bellairs (Fall 2019)
• Comparative Medieval Literatures: Geopolitics and the Mongol Empire – Ishikawa (Summer 2019)
• Medieval Literature c400-1500: Multilingual, Multicultural England (Ishikawa Summer 2019)
• Medieval Literature – King (Winter 2018)
• Medieval Literature – Francis (Fall 2017)
• Medieval Literature – Wagner (Spring 2016)
• Medieval Literature – Shaub (Spring 2015)
• Origins of and Influence on English Romance – Hill (Fall 2014)
• Medieval Literature – Verini (Spring 2014)
• Devotion in Post-Conquest Medieval England – Verini (Spring 2014)
• Medieval Literature – Adler (Fall 2013)
• Women, Death and the Body in the Middle Ages – Burdorff (Summer 2011)
• Middle English – ER (Fall 2008)
• Middle English – Torres (Spring 2008)
• Middle English – Department

Native American Literature

• Native American Literature – Department
• Contemporary Autotheory/Autofiction – Forest (Spring 2023)
• 18th Century British Literature and History of the Novel – Hoegberg (Spring 2021)
• The Novel – Stanford (Fall 2018)
• The Novel – Benson (Summer 2017)
• The British Novel (1678-1925) – Truxaw (Spring 2016)
• The English and Anglophone Novel – Macgregor (Spring 2016)
• The Novel – Zirulnik (Spring 2015)
• The Novel – Mehlman (Fall 2013)
• Evolution of the Novel Form – Ocher (Fall 2013)
• British Novel: 1688-1903 – Couch (Fall 2012)
• The Model Novel (1731-1922) – Caughey (Spring 2010)
• The Novel – Moore (Spring 2009)
• The Novel – Webster (Winter 2009)
• The Novel (Long 18th- & 19th-C.) – Richstad (Spring 2008)
• The Novel- Department

Old English Literature

•   Old English Literature – King (Winter 2018)
•   Canonical and Emerging Canons of Medieval, Anglo-Saxon & Middle English Literature – Hill (Fall 2014)
•   Anglo-Saxon Literature – Adler (Fall 2013)
•   Medieval – Moyer (Fall 2010)
•   Medieval – ER (Fall 2008)
• Old English Literature- Department

Other Genres and Categories

• Transatlantic Whiteness – Early Modern to c19 – Birke (Fall 2023)
• Late Antique & Classical – Moscati (Spring 2023)
• Contemporary Multiethnic Literature – Prucha (Winter 2022)
• Race, Performance, and (Queer) Feeling – Prucha (Winter 2022)
• 20th-Century Speculative Fiction – Hueth (Fall 2021)
• SciFi and the Fantastic – Driben (Fall 2021)
• Race and Performance Studies – Herrera (Fall 2021)
• Architecture, Urbanism, and Narrative – Hoegberg (Spring 2021)
• American Environmental Literature – Swanson (Spring 2021)
• Film Theory and History – Ridder (Spring 2021)
• Literature of Anglophone Christianity – Wu (Spring 2021)
• Science Fiction – Pittman (Winter 2021)
• Race & Embodiment – Solis (Fall 2020)
• Urban Humanities – Whittell (Spring 2020)
• Race & Aesthetics – Meng (Spring 2020)
• Mobility Literature – Garcia (Spring 2020)
• Environmental Narratives – Tanaka (Spring 2020)
• Transnational Literature – Sharrah (Winter 2020)
• American Environmental Literature – Robins (Winter 2020)
• Gender, Sensibility, and Satire in the 18th Century – Lu (Spring 2019)
•  Urban Humanities – Spies (Spring 2019)
•   The Romance Tradition in Literature – King (Winter 2018)
•   History of Reading and Reading Communities – Kern (Fall 2017)
•   Global Narratives of the Environment – Azubuko-Udah (Fall 2017)
•   Transportation and Literature – Fosbury (Fall 2016)
•   Modernism (Translantic, circa 1900-1956) – Vignola (Spring 2016)
•   Poetry of the Long Nineteenth-Century (Transatlantic Poetry) – Febo (Spring 2016)
•   Data, Visualization, Algorithms, Non-Linear Narrative – Hegel (Winter 2016)
•   Transatlantic Modernist Literature and Urban Experience – Lee, J. (Fall 2015)
•   Race in America to 1900 – Wingate (Fall 2014)
•   Children’s Literature – Shih (Winter 2014)
•   Monstrosity – Zhang (Fall 2014)
• Poetry: Ecocriticism and Environmentalism – Lee (Spring 2019)
• Poetry & Poetics of Desire 1500-Present – Hedlin (Fall 2014)
• Poetry – Hedlin (Fall 2014)
• Historical Poetics (18th & 19th C. Transatlantic) – Rosson (Fall 2014)
• Poetry and Poetics – Harkness (Spring 2013)
• Prospective American Poetry since 1912 – O’Sullivan (Fall 2011)
• Poetry exclusive of  Earlier 17th-c and 20th-c American – O’Sullivan (Fall 2011)
• Poetry – Morphew (Summer 2010)
• Poetry – Cassarino (Summer 2010)
• British Poetry, Stuart through Victorian – Torres (Spring 2008)
• Poetry – Department

Postcolonial Studies

• The Postcolonial Novel – Meagher (Spring 2023)
• 20th Century Caribbean/ British Literature – Olivares (Spring 2022)
• 20th/21st Century Postcolonial Literature – Kim (Spring 2022)
• 20th-21st C. Postcolonial Literature (1950-present) – Pittman (Winter 2021)
•   Postcolonial Literature, 1935-Present – Cardon (Fall 2017)
•   Anglophone African Literature 20th and 21st C – Azubuko-Udah (Fall 2017)
•   Postcolonial Literatures – Azubuko-Udah (Fall 2017)
•   Contemporary Postcolonial Studies – Macgregor (Spring 2016)
•   Contemporary Postcolonial – Dembowitz (Fall 2015)
•   Postcolonial Studies – Smith, R. (Fall 2014)
•   Postcolonial Literature, 1950-Present – Conley (Fall 2013)
•   Post 1945 Anglophone Literature – Donig (Fall 2013)
•   Pre-Post-Colonial 20th Century – Clark (Spring 2013)
•   Postcolonial – Medrano (Fall 2012)
•   Colonial/Postcolonial – Soni (Spring 2012)
•   Later 20th-Century Pacific Literature – Warren (Spring 2012)
•   North American Contact Zones – Waldo (Spring 2010)
•   Modern Transnational Anglophone Fiction – Landau (Spring 2008)
• Postcolonial Studies- Department

Renaissance Literature

• Queerness and Race in Early Modern Literature – Moscati (Spring 2023)
• 17th Century Literature – Torres (Spring 2022)
• 16th Century Literature – Torres (Spring 2022)
• Early Modern English Drama – Elliott-Newton (Spring 2022)
• Early Modern Literature – Bischoff (Spring 2022)
• 16th Century British Literature – Wu (Spring 2021)
• Early Modern – Acosta (Spring 2020)
• 16th and 17th Century Literature – Sharrah (Winter 2020)
• Tudor-Stuart Drama – Kello (Fall 2019)
• Early Modern Epic, Travel, and Empire – Kello (Fall 2019)
• Early Modern – Jaime (Fall 2019)
• England and the Renaissance – Bellairs (Fall 2019)
• Renaissance – Francis (Fall 2017)
• 16th-Century – Bonnici (Spring 2017)
• 16th-Century – Wagner (Spring 2016)
• 17th-Century – Wagner (Spring 2016)
• 16th-Century – Hedlin (Fall 2014)
• 16th-Century – Verini (Spring 2014)
• 17th-Century – Harkness (Spring 2013)
• 16th-Century – Harkness (Spring 2013)
• 16th-Century – M. Smith (Fall 2012)
• 16th-Century – Burdorff (Summer 2011)
• Renaissance (16th-Century) – Gottlieb (Fall 2010)
• Renaissance – Moyer (Fall 2010)
• Renaissance – Morphew (Summer 2010)
• Renaissance – Torres (Spring 2008)
• Renaissance- Department

Restoration and 18th-Century Literature

• 18th-Century Literature – Happe (Winter 2020)
• Restoration and 18th-Century Literature – Spies (Spring 2019)
•   Restoration and 18th-Century British Literature – Thulin (Winter 2019)
•   18th-Century British Literature – Cook (Summer 2018)
•   18th-Century British Literature – Dembowitz (Fall 2015)
•   Restoration & 18th-Century Literature – Shaub (Spring 2015)
•   18th-Century Literature – Del Balzo (Spring 2015)
•   Restoration & 18th-Century Literature – Hall (Fall 2014)
•   Restoration & 18th-Century Literature – Rosson (Fall 2014)
•   Restoration & 18th-Century Literature – Reeves (Spring 2014)
•   Adapting Shakespeare: The Restoration & 18th-Century – Reeves (Spring 2014)
•   Restoration & 18th-Century Literature – Kim (Fall 2013)
•   18th-Century Literature – Charles (Fall 2012)
•   Restoration and 18th-Century – Walle (Fall 2012)
•   Restoration and 18th-Century – Soni (Spring 2012)
•   Restoration and 18th-Century – Tung (Winter 2012)
•   18th-Century – Callander (Fall 2011)
•   18th-Century – Hollander (Fall 2011)
•   18th-Century – Milsom (Fall 2011)
•   18th-Century – Nicholson (Fall 2011)
•   Restoration & 18th-Century – Hernandez (Summer 2010)
•   18th-Century – Wang (Spring 2009)
•   Restoration & 18th-Century – Newman (Winter 2009)
•   Restoration & 18th-Century – Raisanen (Spring 2008)
•   Restoration & 18th-Century – Richstad (Spring 2008)
•  Restoration & 18th-Century – Department
• Rhetoric – Department (HTML)

Romantic Literature

• 19th-Century European Precursors to Modernism – Meagher (Spring 2023)
• Political Romanticism – Webster (Spring 2022)
• British Romanticism – Whittell (Spring 2020)
• British Romanticism – Lu (Spring 2019)
• Romanticism – Spies (Spring 2019)
•   Romanticism – Thulin (Winter 2019)
•   Romanticism – Vignola (Spring 2016)
•   Romantic Literature – Truxaw (Spring 2016)
•   19th-Century British Literature – Febo (Spring 2016)
•   19th-Century British Literature – Lee, J. (Fall 2015)
•   British Romanticism – Dembowitz (Fall 2015)
•   19th-Century British Literature – Shaub (Spring 2015)
•   Romantic Literature – Voronca (Spring 2015)
•   Romantic Literature – Rainwater (Spring 2015)
•   Romantic Literature – Hall (Fall 2014)
•   Romantic Literature – Reeves (Spring 2014)
•   Romantic Literature – Shih (Winter 2014)
•   19th-Century British Literature/Romantic & Victorian – Kim (Fall 2013)
•   Romantic Literature – Wilhelm (Spring 2013)
•   Romantic Literature – Walle (Fall 2012)
•   Romanticism – Callander (Fall 2011)
•   Romanticm – Milsom (Fall 2011)
•   Romanticism – Nicholson (Fall 2011)
•   Fiction, Serialization, and the Periodical Press ca. 1820-1920 – Wong (Spring 2011)
•   Romanticism – Morphew (Summer 2010)
•   Romanticism – Wang (Spring 2009)
•   Romanticism – Newman (Winter 2009)
•   Romanticism – Raisanen (Spring 2008)
• Romantic Literature – Department

Victorian Literature

• Victorian Literature – Birke (Fall 2023)
• 19th Century British Literature and History of the Novel – Hoegberg (Spring 2021)
• 19th Century British Literature, Empire, and Race – Wang (Spring 2021)
• Late 19th Century Aestheticism and Decadence – Acosta (Spring 2020)
• 19th Century Prose – Happe (Winter 2020)
• Victorian Literature – Lu (Spring 2019)
•  Victorian Literature – Thulin (Winter 2019)
•   Victorian Literature – Cook (Summer 2018)
•   Victorian Literature – Benson (Summer 2017)
•   Victorian Literature – Vignola (Spring 2016)
•   Victorian Literature – Truxaw (Spring 2016)
•   Victorian Literature – Voronca (Spring 2015)
•   Victorian Literature – Rainwater (Spring 2015)
•   Victorian Literature – Hall (Fall 2014)
•   Victorian Literature – Shih (Winter 2014)
•   Victorian Literature – Wilhelm (Spring 2013)
•   19th-Century British – Charles (Fall 2012)
•   Victorian – Soni (Spring 2012)
•   Victorian – Hollander (Fall 2011)
•   Victorian – Milsom (Fall 2011)
•   Victorian – Nicholson (Fall 2011)
•   Victorian – Wong (Spring 2011)
•   Victorian – Williford (Summer 2010)
•   Victorian – Chatterjee (Spring 2010)
•   Victorian – Camara (Fall 2009)
•   Victorian – Pizzo (Spring 2009)
•   Victorian – Newman (Winter 2009)
•   Victorian – Gardner (Fall 2008)
•   Victorian – Raisanen (Spring 2008)
•   Victorian – Richstad (Spring 2008)
•   Victorian – Department

Visual Culture

•   Emerging Media and Print Cultures – Valenzuela (Fall 2018)
•   Cinema and Postwar Fiction – Zirulnik (Spring 2015)
•   Cultures of Print – Beck (Fall 2014)
•   Critical Theory & Visual Culture – O’Kelly (Fall 2009)
•   Visual Culture – Pizzo (Spring 2009)
•   Visual Culture – Department

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50 Book List

Download: Ph.D. Qualifying "50-Book" Exam Book List

Table of Contents

Early modern.

18th-Century

18th-Century British

Colonial - 18th-Century American

19th Century

19th Century American

Romanticism

19th-century british / victorian.

20th-Century

20th- & 21st-Century American

20th- & 21st-Century British & Irish

Contemporary Poetry & Poetics

Postcolonial Studies

Comics & graphic novels.

Cinema & Media Studies

(grouped by century, in alphabetical order of author's last name)

* indicates that selections of the work should be chosen in consultation with committee

Sixth Century List  

• Gildas,  On the Ruin of Britain  (Latin, 540s)

Eighth Century List

• "Caedmon's Hymn" (Old English, circa mid-7th century) and Books 1, 2, and 4 of Bede's  Ecclesiastical History  (Latin, 731)

Ninth Century List

• Asser's  Life of King Alfred  (Latin, 893) and Alfred's Preface to Gregory the Great's  Pastoral Care  (Old English, 890s)

Tenth Century List

• Battle poetry:  The Battle of Brunanburh  (Old English, 937) and  The Battle of Maldon  (Old English, 991)
• Beowulf  (Old English, MS c. 1000)
• Biblical and Visionary:  The Dream of the Rood  (Old English, MS  950-1000 ),  Genesis A  (Old English, MS  960-1000 ),  Judith  (Old English, MS  950-1050 )
• Hagiography: Cynewulf’s  Elene  (Old English, MS  950-1000 ), Aelfric’s  Life of Edmund  and  Life of Eugenia  (Old English, c. 990-1002)
• The Exeter Book miscellany (Old English, MS 940): selected riddles (Williamson ed. nos. 7, 8, 14, 15, 25, 26, 29, 32, 44, 47, 60) and elegies ( Deor ,  The Seafarer ,  The Wanderer , and  The Wife's Lament ).

Eleventh Century List

• The Tain-Bo-Cuailgne  (Irish, MS 1000s, use Kinsella translation).
• Wulfstan's  Sermon to the English  (Old English, 1010-1016, in Treharne, ed. Old and Middle English: An Anthology )
• Song of Roland  (Old French, circa 1125, use translated Penguin Classics edition) 

Twelfth Century List

• Geoffrey of Monmouth,  History of the Kings of Britain  (Latin, 1136).
• Gerald of Wales,  The Journey through Wales  and  The Description of Wales  (Latin, 1190s). OR  Topography of Ireland  (Latin, 1188) and  Conquest of Ireland  (Latin, 1189)
• Layamon,  The Brut  (Middle English, 1150-1200, use Mason ed. of  Arthurian Chronicles ) *
• Marie de France,  Lais  (Anglo-Norman, circa 1155-1170, use Shoaf Translation)
• The Life of Christina of Markyate (Latin, circa mid- to late-twelfth century, use Penguin Translation)

Thirteenth Century List

• Ancrene Wisse  (Middle English, circa 1230).
• Geoffrey of Vinsauf,  Poetria Nova  (Latin, circa 1210, in Murphy, ed., Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts )
• Egils saga Skallagrímssonar  (Old Norse, circa 1240)
• Havelok the Dane  (Middle English, 1290s),  King Horn  (Middle English, c. 1225), and  Sir Orfeo  (Middle English, early 1300s).
• Middle English debate poems:  The Owl and the Nightingale  (c. 1200-1215) and  Winner and Waster  (circa 1350).

Fourteenth Century List

• Geoffrey Chaucer's dream visions:  The Book of the Duchess ,  The Parliament of Fowls , and  The House of Fame  (Middle English, 1370s-1380s).
• Geoffrey Chaucer,  Troilus and Criseyde  (Middle English, 1380s).
• Geoffrey Chaucer, selections from  Canterbury Tales (Middle English, 1387-1400): either Fragments 1-4 (General Prologue, Knight, Miller, Reeve, Cook, Man of Law, Wife of Bath, Friar, Summoner, Clerk, Merchant) or Fragments 5-9 (Squire, Franklin, Physician, Pardoner, Shipman, Prioress, Sir Thopas, Melibee, Monk, Nun's Priest, Second Nun, Canon's Yeoman, Manciple, Parson's Prologue, and Chaucer's Retraction) (Middle English, 1390s). Make sure to read all relevant head- and endlinks. Alternatively, read the tales conveniently available in the edition of Kolve and Olson (Norton)--9 of the best-known tales.
• "Cleanness and Patience" (Middle English, late-fourteenth century, use  The Complete Works of the Pearl Poet , ed Andrew, Waldron, Peterson; trans. Finch)
• Richard Rolle,  Meditations on the Passion  (Middle English, circa 1300-49).
• John Gower, selections from the  Confessio Amantis : Prologue, Books 1, 2, 7, 8, and the Epilogue (Middle English, 1390s).
• Julian of Norwich, the Short Text of  Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love  (Middle English, circa 1393, use Penguin Translation).
• William Langland, selections from  Piers Plowman  (Middle English, circa late-fourtheenth century): either the  Visio  (Prologue-Passus 7) or the  Vita  (Passus 8-21) of the B-Text. Students may substitute the  Visio  (Prologue-Passus 9) or the  Vita  (Passus 10-22) of the C-Text instead (1370s). You may use the Pearsall anthology published by Blackwells.
• Lollard writings: "Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards," "Confession of Hawisia Moone," "Prologue to the Wycliffite Bible, Chapter Fifteen," "Epistola Santhanae ad Cleros," "A Tretis on Miraclis Pleying," and "Church and State" (various dates, use the Hudson edition).
• Selected Middle English lyrics: Luria and Hoffman ed. nos. 6 ("Foweles in the frith"), 77 ("I have a gentil cok"), 80 ("Hogyn cam to bowers dore"), 81 ("We ben chapmen light of fote"), 82 ("In al this warld nis a merier life"), 90 ("May no man slepe in youre halle"), 138 ("Maiden in the mor lay"), 178 (Geoffrey Chaucer, "Lak of Stedfastnesse"), 181 ("I sing of a maiden"), 182 ("Salve Regina"), 190 ("Now goth sonne under wod"), 197 ("A God and yet a man?"), and 198 ("As I lay upon a night") (various dates).
• The Mabinogion  (Welsh, MS 1375-1425).
• The Alliterative  Morte Arthure  (Middle English, circa 1400). You may use the Pearsall anthology published by Blackwells.
• Pearl  (Middle English, circa 1385).
• The Travels of Sir John Mandeville  (Middle English, circa 1375).
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight  (Middle English, circa 1385).

Fifteenth Century List

• The Castle of Perseverance  (Middle English, Middle English, circa 1405-25).
• Corpus Christi plays: York  Creation and Fall of Lucifer , Chester  Noah's Flood , Brome  Abraham and Isaac , Wakefield  Second Shepherd's Play , Wakefield  Herod the Great , N-Town  Woman Taken in Adultery , York  Crucifixion , and Wakefield  Last Judgment  (Middle English, circa 1375-1570s).
• Robert Henryson,  The Testament of Cresseid  and "The Taill of the Wolf and the Wedder" (Middle Scots, before 1505).
• Thomas Hoccleve, "La Male Regle de T. Hoccleue" (Middle English, 1406) and Series : "Complaint" and "Dialog" (Middle English, 1421-1422). You may use the Pearsall anthology published by Blackwells. *
• Margery Kempe,  The Book of Margery Kempe  (Middle English, circa 1436). You may read this text in the Penguin translation.
• John Lydgate,  The Complaynt of a Lovers Lyfe  and  The Temple of Glas  (c. 1400-10). You may use the Pearsall anthology published by Blackwells.
• Thomas Malory, selections from  Le Morte d'Arthur : Books 1-4, 18-19, and 20-21 of the Caxton edition (1485). Students may substitue Books 1, 7, and 8 of the Winchester MS instead (Middle English, circa 1470).
• Morality plays:  Everyman  (Middle English, circa 1510-25),  Mankind  (Middle English, 1465-70), and  Wisdom  (Middle English, 1460-65).
• Saints' plays: The Digby  Mary Magdalene  and the Croxton  Play of the Sacrament  (Middle English, 1475-1500).
• William Thorpe,  Testimony  (Middle English, 1407, selections found in Hudson, ed. Selections from English Wycliffite Writings )
• The Paston Letters  (Middle English, 1422-1509, use Norman Davis, Ed : Oxford World Classics)
• Christine de Pisan, The Book of the City of Ladies  (French, 1405), (in Selected Writings , ed. Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Brownlee)
• Roger Ascham,  The Scholemaster  (1570)
• Francis Bacon,  Essays  (1625)
• Aphra Behn, selected poetry (1684): “The Golden Age”; “On a Juniper Tree”; “The Disappointment”; “To Fair Clorinda, Who Made Love to Me, Imagined More than Woman; “The Willing Mistress”; “A Letter to the Brother of the Pen in Tribulation”; “The Dream”; "Song (On Her Loving Two Equally”; “The Counsel”
• Aphra Behn,  Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave (1688)
• Thomas Browne,  Religio Medici  (1643)
• Thomas Browne,  Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial  (1658)
• Thomas Carew, poetry: "The Spring"; “A Rapture”; “Mediocrity in Love Rejected”; “To A.L. Persuasions to Love" (various dates)
• Elizabeth Cary,  Tragedie of Mariam  (1613)
• Baldassare Castiglione,  The Courtier , in translation by Thomas Hoby (1561)
• Margaret Cavendish,  The Blazing World  (1666)
• Margaret Cavendish,  The Convent of Pleasure  (1668)
• Richard Crashaw, selected poetry: “The Flaming Heart”; “A Hymn Saint Teresa”; “The Tear”; “Christ Crucified”; “The Weeper” (various dates)
• Thomas Dekker,  The Shoemaker's Holiday  (1599)
• Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton,  The Roaring Girl  (1611)
• John Donne,  Holy Sonnets  (circa 1615-1631)
• John Donne,  Songs and Sonnets  (circa 1595-1631)
• John Donne, Satires and Elegies (circa 1595-1631)
• Elizabeth I,  Poems and Speeches to Parliament *
• John Ford,  'Tis Pity She's a Whore  (1633)
• John Foxe,  Acts and Monuments  (1563) *
• Philip Gosson,  The School of Abuse  (1579) or Philip Stubbes,  The Anatomy of Abuses  (1579)
• George Herbert,  The Temple  (1633)
• Robert Herrick,  Hesperides  (1648)
• Thomas Heywood,  The Fair Maid of the West 1 and 2  (1631)
• Thomas Heywood,  Apology for Actors  (1612)
• Thomas Heywood,  Four Prentices of London  (1594)
• Ben Jonson,  Masque of Blackness  (1605), Masque of Beauty  (1608), Gypsies Metamorphosed  (1621)
• Ben Jonson,  Volpone  (1606)
• Ben Jonson,  Alchemist  (1612)
• Ben Jonson,  Epicoene  (1616)
• Ben Jonson, selected poetry: “Inviting a Friend to Supper”; “To Penshurst”; “An Ode to Himself”; “On My First Son”; “On My First Daughter”; “To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of that Pair, Sir Lucius Carey and Sir Henry Morrison”; “To the Reader”; “To Lucy, Countess of Bedford, with John Donne's Satires”; “To Sir Robert Wroth” (c. 1598-1637)
• Amelia Lanyer,  Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum  and “To Cooke-ham” (1611)
• Ann Lok, “A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner” (1560)
• John Lyly,  Gallathea  (1592)
• Christopher Marlowe,  Tamburlaine  (1587-8)
• Christopher Marlowe,  Jew of Malta  (1589)
• Christopher Marlowe,  Doctor Faustus  (1592)
• Christopher Marlowe,  Edward II  (1594)
• Andrew Marvell, selected poetry: “The Garden”; “The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn”; “Upon Appleton House”; “To His Coy Mistress”; “Bermudas”; “The Picture of Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers”; “The Mower Against the Gardens”; “Damon the Mower”; “The Mower’s Song”; “The Mower against the Glo-worms”; “The Last Instructions to a Painter” (c. 1650-1667)
• Philip Massinger,  The Renegado  (1624)
• Thomas Middleton,  Women Beware Women  (1657)
• Thomas Middleton,  Revenger’s Tragedy  (1607)
• Thomas Middleton,  The Changeling  (1622)
• John Milton,  Areopagitica  (1644)
• John Milton, Paradise Lost  (1667)
• John Milton, Sonnets (c. 1630-1667)
• Michel de Montaigne, selections from  Essais  (1595), in Florio translation: "The Apology of Raymond Sebond," "Of Experience," "Of Cannibals" (1603)
• Thomas More,  Utopia  (1516)
• Thomas Nash, "Unfortunate Traveller, or The Life of Jack Wilton" (1594)
• Katherine Phillips, selected poetry: “Friendship’s Mystery”; “In Defense of Declared Friendship”; “Friendship”; “A Friend”; “A Dialogue of Friendship Multiplied”; “Rosania”; “To Mrs Mary Aubrey”; “Rosania’s Marriage”; “Philoclea’s Parting”; “To My Excellent Lucasia”; “On Rosania’s Apostacy, and Lucasia’s Friendship”; “To the Exellent Anne Owen”; “To the Lady E. Boyle”; “To Celimena”; “Lucasia, Rosania, and Orinda parting at a Fountain”; “Orinda to Lucasia”; “Rosania to Lucasia”; “To Antenor at Parting” (c. 1650-1664)
• Hester Pulter, selected poetry: “Upon the Death of my Dear and Lovely Daughter, Jane Pulter”; “Tell Me No More”; “Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined”;  “The Garden, Or the Contention of Flowers”; “Aurora” [1 and 2]; “Universal Dissolution”; “To Astraea”; “Pardon Me, My Dearest Love”; “Of a Young Lady at Oxford”; “A Dialogue between Two Sisters” (c. 1640-1660)
• Hester Pulter, The Unfortunate Florinda  (circa 1655-1662)
• Querelle des femmes  texts:  Hic Mulier/Haec Vir  tracts (1620); Jane Anger, "Her protection for women" (1589); Joseph Swetnam, “The arraignement of lewde, idle, froward and unconstant women" (1615); Rachel Speght,  A Mouzell for Melastomus  (1617);  Swetnam the Woman-Hater Arraigned by Women  (1620)
• William Shakespeare,  Richard II  (1595)
• William Shakespeare,  Midsummer Night’s Dream  (1595
• William Shakespeare,  Merchant of Venice  (1598)
• William Shakespeare , Twelfth Night  (1601)
• William Shakespeare,  Othello  (1604)
• William Shakespeare , King Lear  (1605)
• William Shakespeare,  Antony and Cleopatra  (1608)
• William Shakespeare, Sonnets  (1609)
• Philip Sidney,  Astrophil and Stella  (1591)
• Philip Sidney,  The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia  (1593)
• Philip Sidney,  The Defence of Poesy  (1595)
• John Skelton, selected poetry: "Manerly Margery Mylk and Ale," "Phyllyp Sparowe" (c.1505-07), "To mystress Margaret Hussey" (from The Garland of Laurel, 1523), and "The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng" (c. 1517)
• John Skelton, Song and Sonnets  ("Tottell's Miscellany") (1557)
• Edmund Spenser,  The Faerie Queene , at least 3 books (1590)
• Edmund Spenser,  Amoretti  and  Epithalamium  (1595)
• Edmund Spenser,  A   View of the Present State of Ireland  (1596)
• Henry Vaughan, selected poetry from  Silex Scintillans I  (1650) and  Silex Scintillans II  (1685): "Regeneration"; "The Search"; "Vanity of Spirit"; "The Retreate"; "Silence and stealth of dayes"; "The Tempest"; "The World"; "I walked the other daye"; "They are all gone into the world of light"
• John Webster,  The White Devil  (1612)
• John Webster,  The Duchess of Malfi  (1623)
• Isabella Whitney,  Will and Testament  (1573)
• Mary Wroth,  Pamphilia to Amphilantus  (1621)
• Mary Wroth, Urania, Book One  (1621)
• John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, selected poetry: “The Imperfect Enjoyment”; “The Disabled Debauche”; “A Satire Against Reason and Mankind”; “Artemeza in the Town to Chloe in the Country”; “Fair Chloris in a Pigsty Lay”; “Against Constancy”; “Love and Life”; “A Ramble in Saint James’ Park”; “A Satire on King Charles II” (c. 1665-1678)
• Early modern race readings:  Race in Early Modern England :  A Documentary Companion , ed. Ania Loomba and Jonathan Burton *
• Travel narrative selections: Bartolome de las Casas  The Spanish Colony  (London, William Brome,1583); Walter Raleigh, "Discovery of Guiana" (1596); Thomas Harriot, "Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia"; John Smith, "True Relation of Such Occurrences of Note..."; Nicolas de Nicolay (1517-1583),  The Navigations...made into Turkey  (London: Thomas Dawson, 1585); Leo Africanus,  History of Africa , trans. Pory (1600)
• Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, selections from  The Spectator  (nb: these are VERY short essays): 1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 26, 34, 50, 57, 66, 69, 81, 88, 106, 108, 109, 112, 113, 117, 119, 122, 130, 132, 137, 174, 189, 251, 261, 182, 203, 266, 276, 324, 335, 454, 517, 519
• Mary Astell,  Reflections Upon Marriage  (1700) and 1706 “Preface”
• Anna Barbauld,  Poems  (1773)
• Jane Barker,  The Galesia Trilogy, Part 1  (i.e., “Love Intrigues”; 1719), and “Selected Manuscript Poems." Use Carol Shiner Wilson edition (Oxford).
• William Beckford,  Vathek  (1782-French, 1786-English)
• Aphra Behn,  Oroonoko  (1688)
• Aphra Behn, The Rover  (1677-81)
• Aphra Behn, Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister  (1684-87)
• James Boswell,  Life of Johnson ( abridged) (1791)
• John Bunyan,  The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part I  (1678)
• Edmund Burke , A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful  (1756)
• Fanny Burney,  Evelina  (1778)
• Mary, Lady Chudleigh, “The Ladies Defence” (1700), “To the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty” (the poem, not the dedication), “On the Death of his Highness the Duke of Glocester”, “To the Ladies”, “The Inquiry”, “On the Death of My Honoured Mother”, Essays in Prose and Verse: “Of Knowledge, To the Ladies”, “Of Friendship”, “Of Solitude”
• John Cleland,  Fanny Hill  (1748)
• George Coleman, the Younger,  Inkle and Yarico  (1787)
• William Congreve,  The Way of the World  (1700)
• William Cowper , “ The Task”,  “Expostulation,” “Conversation”, “Retirement”, and “The Castaway” (1785)
• Ottabah Cugoano,  Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery  (1757)
• Daniel Defoe,  Moll Flanders  (1722)
• Daniel Defoe,   Robinson Crusoe  (1719)
• John Dryden,  All For Love  (1678)
• John Dryden, “Absalom and Achitophel” (1681) “Mac Flecknoe” (1684); “To the Pious Memory of ... Mrs. Anne Killigrew” (1685); “To The Duchess of Ormode,” “Astraea Redux” (1660) “An Essay of Dramatic Poesy”(1688), “A “Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire” (1693); “Preface” to The Fables (1699)
• Olaudah Equiano,  The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African  (1789)
• Henry Fielding,  Joseph Andrews  (1742) and  Tom Jones  (1749)
• Sarah Fielding,  David Simple  (1744)
• Anne Finch, selections from Miscellany Poems (1713): “Introduction,” “The Apology,” “On Myself,” “The Bird and the Arras,” “The Spleen,” “To the Nightingale,” ”A Nocturnal Reverie,” and “A Supplication for the Joys of Heaven,” “Adam Pos’d”
• John Gay,  The Beggar’s Opera  (1728)
• Oliver Goldsmith,  The Vicar of Wakefield  (1766)
• Oliver Goldsmith,  She Stoops to Conquer  (1773)
• Thomas Gray, “The Bard”, “The Progress of Poesy”. : Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”,”Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat”, “Elegy Written in a County Church Yard,” “Sonnet on the Death of Richard West”
• William Collins, “Ode to Fear”, “Ode on the Poetical Character”, “Ode to Evening”, “An Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland”
• Eliza Haywood,  Love in Excess  (1719) and  Fantomina  (1725)
• Samuel Johnson, Rasselas (1759), “Preface” to Shakespeare (1765); “Preface to The Dictionary (1755); selections from the Rambler (1750-52) including 2, 3, 4, 14, 18, 21, 23, 37, 47, 58, 60, 63, 77, 134, 144, 154, 155, 160, 185, 196, 208; Lives of the Most Eminent Poets, Milton, Gray (1779-81)
• Charlotte Lennox,  The Female Quixote  (1752)
• George Lillo,  The London Merchant  (1731)
• Edward Long,  The History of Jamaica  (1774)
• Henry Mackenzie,  The Man of Feeling  (1771)
• Dean Mahomet , The Travels of Dean Mahomet: An Eighteenth Century Journey Through India  (1793)
• Delarivier Manley,  The New Atalantis  (1709) and  The Power of Love  (1720)
• Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,  Turkish Embassy Letters  (1716-18), “Court poems by a Lady of Quality” (1716), “Eclogues”(1747)
• Thomas Otway,  Venice Preserved  (1682)
• Thomas Paine , The Rights of Man  (1791) alongside Edmund Burke,  Reflection on the Revolution in France  (1790)
• Alexander Pope (I), “An Essay on Criticism” (1711); “Rape of the Lock”(1714); “Windsor Forest” (1713); “An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” (1735); “Moral Essays” (1731-35)
• Samuel Richardson,  Pamela  (1740-41)
• Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (1747-48) (abridged edition acceptable)
• John Wilmot Rochester, selected poems: “The Imperfect Enjoyment,” “Of Nothing,” “A Satire Against Reason and Mankind” (1675), “Signior Dildo” alongside Aphra Behn, “Love Armed,” “The Disapointment,” “On Desire,” “On Her Loving Two Equally,” and “to the Fair Clarinda.”
• Elizabeth Singer Rowe,  Friendship in Death  (1728)
• Christopher Smart,  Jubilate Agno  (1739) and  Song to David  (1763)
• Thomas Sheridan,  The School for Scandal ( 1777)
• Sir Hans Sloane , Natural history of Jamaica  (1707, 1725)
• Tobias Smollett,  The Expedition of Humphry Clinker  (1771)
• Laurence Sterne,  Tristram Shandy  (1760-67)
• Laurence Sterne, Sentimental Journey  (1768)
• Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub (1704), Drapier’s Letters (1721), Gulliver’s Travels (1726), “A Modest Proposal” (1729); “An Argument Against the Abolishing of Christianity”, and Selected Poems
• James Thomson,  The Seasons  (1726)
• John Vanbrugh, “The Provok’d Wife” (1697)
• Horace Walpole,  The Castle of Otranto  (1764) and  The Mysterious Mother  (1768)
• William Wycherley,  The Country Wife ( 1671)  

Colonial to Eighteenth Century American

• The Antinomian Controversy, 1636-1638: A Documentary History , ed. David Hall, second edition, 1990
• William Bradford,  Of Plymouth Plantation  (c. 1630-50; 1856)
• Anne Bradstreet,  Several Poems  (1678)
• The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico , ed. Miguel Leon-Portillo, expanded and updated edition, 1992 (c. 16th century)
• Charles Brockden Brown,  Wieland ;  or The Transformation. An American Tale  (1798)
• Christopher Columbus,  The Four Voyages,  ed. J.M. Cohen, 1969  ( c. late 15th and early 16th century)
• Constitution of the United States (1787)
• J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur,  Letters from an American Farmer  (1782)
• Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca,  The Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca  (1542)
• Bernal Diaz del Castillo,  True History of the Conquest of New Spain  (c.1568-85; 1632)
• John Danforth, "A Brief Recognition of New Englands Errand into the Wilderness" (1670)
• Declaration of Independence (1776)
• Jonathan Edwards, selected writings: "The Spider Letter" (1723); "Personal Narrative" (c. 1739); "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (1741), "Freedom of the Will" (1754)
• Hannah Foster,  The Coquette ;  or The History of Eliza Wharton; A Novel; Founded on Fact  (1797)
• Benjamin Franklin,  The Autobiography  (c. 1771-1790; 1868)
• Briton Hammon,  A Narrative of the Uncomon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, A Negro Man  (1760)
• Thomas Jefferson,  Notes on the State of Virginia  (1787)
• John Marrant,  A Narrative of the Lord's Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black  (1785)
• Cotton Mather,  intro. to Magnalia Christi Americana  (1702)
• Tom Paine,  Common Sense  (1776)
• Mary Rowlandson,  The Sovereignty and Goodness of God  (1682)
• Susana Rowson,  Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth  (1791)
• Susana Rowson, Slaves in Algiers, or  A Struggle for Freedom  (1794)
• Phillis Wheatley,  Poems on Various Subjects  and  Religious and Moral  (1773)
• Roger Williams,  A Key into the Language of America  (1643)
• John Winthrop, "A Modell of Christian Charity" (1630)

19th-Century American

• Henry Adams,  The Education of Henry Adams  (1907)
• Louisa May Alcott,  Little Women  (1868-69)
• William Apess, "The Experiences of Five Christian Indians; or An Indian's Looking-Glass for the White Man" (1833); and "Eulogy on King Philip" (1836)
• Black Hawk,  Life of Black Hawk  (1833)
• William Wells Brown,  Clotel , or  The President's Daughter  (1853)
• Abraham Cahan,  Yekl ,  A Tale of the New York Ghetto  (1896)
• Charles Chesnutt,  The Marrow of Tradition  (1901)
• Charles Chesnutt, Conjure Woman (1899)
• Kate Chopin,  The Awakening  (1899)
• James Fenimore Cooper,  Pioneers  (1823)
• Stephen Crane,  The Red Badge of Courage  (1895)
• Martin Delany,  Blake , or  The Huts of America  (1859-62)
• Emily Dickinson, selected poetry: "Papa above!" (61); "One dignity delays for all" (98); "Faith is a fine invention" (185); "I taste a liquor never brewed" (214); "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers" (216); "Wild Nights--Wild Nights!" (249); "`Hope' is a thing with feathers--" (254); "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain" (280); "The Soul selects her own Society--" (303); "There came a Day at Summer's full" (322); "A Bird came down the Walk--" (328); "After great pain, a formal feeling comes--" (341); "Much Madness is divinest sense--" (435); "This is my letter to the World" (441); "This was a Poet--it is That" (448); "I died for Beauty--but was scarce" (449); "It was not Death, for I stood up" (510); "I started Early--Took my Dog--" (520); "Mine--by the Right of White Election" (528); "Publication--is the Auction" (709); "Because I could not stop for Death" (712); "My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun" (754); "It is an honorable Thought" (946); "The Bible is an antique Volume--" (1545); "Apparently with no surprise" (1624)
• Frederick Douglass,  Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave  (1845)
• Theodore Dreiser,  Sister Carrie  (1900; the text derived from the first edition, NOT the so-called "restored" Pennsylvania Edition)
• Paul Laurence Dunbar,  Lyrics of a Lowly Life  (1896)
• Black Elk,  Black Elk Speaks  (1932)
• Ralph Waldo Emerson, selected writings: "Nature" (1836), "The American Scholar" (1837), "The Divinity School Address" (1838), "Experience" (1844), "The Poet" (1844)
• Fanny Fern,  Ruth Hall  and Other Writings, ed. Joyce W. Warren (Rutgers UP)
• Mary Wilkins Freeman,  A New England Nun and Other Stories  (1891)
• Margaret Fuller,  Woman in the 19th Century  (1845)
• Frances Harper,  Iola Leroy , or  Shadows Uplifted  (1892)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne,  The Scarlet Letter  (1850)
• William Dean Howells,  A Hazard of New Fortunes  (1890)
• Washington Irving,  The Sketch Book  (1820)
• Harriet Jacobs,  Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl  (1861)
• Henry James,  The Ambassadors  (1903)
• Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady  (1881)
• Sarah Orne Jewett,  Country of the Pointed Firs  (1896)
• Emma Lazarus, selected poetry: “In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport”, “The New Colossus”, “1492”, “The Crowing of the Red Cock”, “In Exile”, “The New Year”, “Venus of the Louvre” (1867-1876)
• Abraham Lincoln, selected speeches: "House Divided" (1858), "Address at Cooper Institute" (1860), "First Inaugural Address" (1861), "Emancipation Proclamation" (1863), "Gettysburg Address" (1863), "Second Inaugural Address" (1865)
• George Lippard,  The Quaker City , or the  Monks of Monk Hall  (1843-44)
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,  The Song of Hiawatha  (1855)
• Herman Melville,  Moby Dick  (1851)
• Herman Melville, selected writings: “The Encantadas”, “Shiloh”, “The Swamp Angel”, “The Martyr”, and “The House-Top.”
• Frank Norris,  McTeague  (1899)
• Edgar Allan Poe, selections from  Fall of the House of Usher and Other Works:  “The Raven”, “Ulalume”, “Annabel Lee”, “The Philosophy of Composition”, “The Imp of the Perverse”, “The Man of the Crowd”, “The Purloined Letter”, “The Gold-Bug”, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1831-1849)
• Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton,  The Squatter  and the  Don  (1885)
• Jane Johnstone Schoolcraft, Poems (Robert Dale Parker, ed.  The sound the stars make rushing through the sky: The writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft ) (circa 1840)
• Catherine Maria Sedgwick,  Hope Leslie  (1827)
• E. D. E. N. Southworth,  The Hidden Hand  (1859)
• Harriet Beecher Stowe,  Uncle Tom's Cabin  (1852)
• Henry David Thoreau,  Walden  (1854) and "Resistance to Civil Government [Civil Disobedience]" (1849)
• Mark Twain,  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  (1885)
• David Walker,  David Walker's Appeal, In Four Articles, Together With a Preamble, To The Coloured Citizens Of The World, But in Particular, And Very Expressly, To Those of The United States of America  (1829)
• Walt Whitman,  Leaves of Grass , selected poems (1891 edition): "Song of Myself," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," "When I Heard at the Close of the Day," "A March in the Ranks Hard Prest," and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd."
• Harriet Wilson,  Our Nig  (1856)
• Anon.,  The Woman of Colour  (1808)
• Jane Austen,  Mansfield Park  (1814)
• Jane Austen,  Emma  (1816)
• Jane Austen,  Persuasion  (1818)
• Robert Bage,  Hermsprong; or, Man as He Is Not  (1796)
• Joanna Baillie,  A series of Plays...on the Passions  (1798-1812)
• John Bell, ed .  The British Album  (1790)
• Anna Barbauld,  Epistle to William Wilberforce  (1793)
• Anna Barbauld,  An Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (1792), Sins of the Fathers, Sins of the Nation (1795), and Eighteen Hundred and Eleven  (1812)
• William Blake,  Songs of Innocence and of Experience  (1789; 1794),  Book of Thel  (1789),  Visions of the Daughters of Albion  (1793)
• William Blake,  Marriage of Heaven and Hell  (1790),  America  (1793),  Europe  (1794),  Book of Urizen  (1794)
• William Blake,  Milton  (1804)
• Edmund Burke,  Reflections on the Revolution in France  (1790)
• Edmund Burke, "Speech on Mr. Fox's East India Bill," and "Thoughts and Details on Scarcity" (1800)
• Robert Burns, selected poetry: “To a Mouse”, “To a Louse”, “The Holy Fair”, “To a Mountain-Daisy”, ”John Barleycorn, A Ballad”, “Epistle to J.L***k, an Old Scottish Bard”, “Epistle to Davie, a Brother Poet”, “Holy Willie’s Prayer”, “Address to the Unco Guid”, “Address to the Deil”, “Songs: ‘It was upon a Lammas night’, “Green Grow the Rushes”, “John Anderson, My Jo,” “Ae Fond Kiss”, “A Red, Red Rose”, “Afton Water”, “Ye Banks and Braes”, “Open the Door To Me, Oh” (1785)
• Hannah Cowley,  The Runaway  (1776),  The Belle's Stratagem  (1781),  A Bold Stroke for a Husband  (1783), and  A Day in Turkey  (1791)
• George Gordon Byron,  Childe Harold's Pilgrimage  (1812-1818)
• George Gordon Byron , The Giaour  (1813)  and The Corsair  (1814)
• George Gordon Byron,   Don Juan  (1819-1824)
• George Gordon Byron, Manfred  (1817),  Cain  (1821), and  Sardanapalus  (1821)
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge,  Fears in Solitude, with France , an  Ode and Frost at Midnight  (1798),  Remorse  (1813),  Christabel ,  Kubla Khan , and  the Pains of Sleep  (1816)
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge,  Sybilline Leaves  (1817)
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge,  Biographia Literaria  (1817)
• Erasmus Darwin,  The Loves of the  Plants (1789)
• Thomas DeQuincey,  Confessions of an English Opium Eater  (1822 or 1856)
• Maria Edgeworth,  Castle Rackrent  (1800) and  Ennui  (1809)
• Maria Edgeworth, Belinda  (1801)
• Olaudah Equiano,  Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or, Gustavaus Vassa, the African  (1789)
• Susan Ferrier,  Marriage  (1818)
• William Godwin,  Political Justice  (1793)
• William Godwin,  Caleb Williams  (1794)
• William Hazlitt,  The Spirit of the Age  (1825)
• Felicia Hemans,  Records of Women  (1828)
• Elizabeth Inchbald,  A Mogul Tale  (1784),  Such Things Are  (1788 ), Everyone Has His Fault  (1793), and  Lovers' Vows  (1798)
• Elizabeth Inchbald,  A Simple Story  (1791)
• Francis Jeffrey,  Edinburgh Review , Volume 1 (1802) and William Gifford,  Quarterly Review,  Volume 1 (1809)
• John Keats , Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and other Poems  (1820)
• Charles Lamb,  Essays of Elia  (1821)
• Matthew Lewis,  The Monk  (1796) and  The Castle Spectre  (1797)
• John Malthus,  An Essay on Population  (1798)
• Hannah More , Strictures on Female Education  (1798)
• Amelia Opie,  Adeline Mowbray: The Mother and Daughter  (1804)
• Sydney Owenson,  The Wild Irish Girl  (1806)
• Thomas Paine,  The Rights of Man  (1792)
• Ann Radcliffe,  The Mysteries of Udolpho  (1794)
• Ann Radcliffe,  The Italian  (1797)
• Mary Robinson,  Poems  (1791) and  Memoirs  (1801)
• Mary Robinson,  Walsingham  (1798)
• Mary Robinson,  Lyrical Tales  (1800)
• Walter Scott,  The Lay of the Last Minstrel  (1805) and  Marmion  (1808)
• Walter Scott,  Waverley  (1814)
• Walter Scott,  A Tale of Old Mortality  (1816)
• Mary Shelley,  Frankenstein ( 1818)
• Mary Shelley,  Valperga  (1823)
• Percy Bysshe Shelley,  The Cenci  (1819) alongside Charles Robert Maturin,  Bertram  (1816)
• Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound and other Poems  (1820)
• Percy Bysshe Shelley,  Adonais  (1821), "The Triumph of Life" (1824) and "A Defence of Poetry" (1821)
• Charlotte Smith,  Elegiac Sonnets  (1784)
• Charlotte Smith,  Desmond  (1792)
• Charlotte Smith,  The Emigrants  (1793),  Beachy Head and other Poems  (1807)
• Robert Southey,  Poems  (1799)
• Robert Southey,  Thalabathe Destroyer  (1801)
• The Anti-Jacobin, or, Weekly Examiner  (1797-8)
• Helen Maria Williams,  Poems  (1786) and  Reflections on the Revolution in France  (1790)
• Mary Wollstonecraft,  A Vindication of the Rights of Woman  (1792)
• Mary Wollstonecraft,  Mary: A Fiction  (1787) and  Maria; Or the Wrongs of Woman  (1798)
• William Wordsworth,  Lyrical Ballads  (1798 and 1800)
• William Wordsworth, The Prelude ( 1799-1805; pub. 1850)

(in alphabetical order according to author's last name)

• Matthew Arnold, selected essays and poems: “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” "Memorial Verses" (1850), "To Marguerite -- Continued" (1852); "The Buried Life" (1852); "Empedocles on Etna" (1852); "The Scholar-Gypsy" (1853); Preface to  Poems  (1853); "Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse" (1855); "Dover Beach" (1867); "On the Study of Poetry" (1880)
• Mary Elizabeth Braddon,  Lady Audley's Secret  (1862)
• Charlotte Bronte,  Villette  (1853)
• Emily Bronte,  Wuthering Heights  (1847)
• Elizabeth Barrrett Browning,  Aurora Leigh  (1857)
• Robert Browning, selected poems: "Porphyria's Lover" (1842), "My Last Duchess" (1842). "The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church" (1845), "Love Among the Ruins" (1855), "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" (1855), "Fra Lippo Lippi" (1855), "The Last Ride Together" (1855), "Andrea del Sarto" (1855), "Two in the Campagna" (1855). "A Grammarian's Funeral" (1855), "Cleon" (1855), "Caliban Upon Setebos" (1864)
• Thomas Carlyle, "On History" (1830) and  On Heroes and Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History  (1841)
• Lewis Carroll,  Alice's Adventures in Wonderland  (1865)
• Lewis Carroll,  Through the Looking Glass  (1872)
• Wilkie Collins,  The Woman in White  (1859-1860)
• Wilkie Collins,  The Moonstone  (1868)
• Charles Darwin,  On the Origin of Species  (1859)
• Charles Dickens,  Dombey and Son  (1848)
• Charles Dickens, Bleak House  (1852)
• George Eliot,  The Mill on the Floss  (1860)
• George Eliot,  Middlemarch  (1871-72)
• Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx,  T he German Ideology: Preface and Part One  (1845-6)
• Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx,  Manifesto of the Communist Party  (1848)
• Elizabeth Gaskell,  Mary Barton  (1848)
• Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South  (1854–55)
• W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan,  Patience ,  or Bunthorne's Bride  (1881)
• W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, Ruddigore, or the Witch's Curse  (1887)
• George Gissing,  New Grub Street  (1891)
• Sarah Grand,  The Heavenly Twins  (1893) and "The New Aspect of the Woman Question" (1894)
• H. Rider Haggard,  She  (1885)
• H. Rider Haggard,  King Solomon’s Mines  (1886)
• Thomas Hardy,  Tess of the d'Urbervilles  (1891)
• Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure  (1895)
• Gerard Manly Hopkins, "The Wreck of the Deutschland", "God's Grandeur", "The Windhover", "Pied Beauty", "Spring and Fall", "[Carrion Comfort]". "I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day" (all pub. posth. 1918)
• Mary Kingsley,  Travels in West Africa  (1897)
• Rudyard Kipling,  Kim  (1901)
• Karl Marx, from  Capital Volume I  (1867, English edition 1887): Chapter One: “The Commodity,” Chapter Six: “The Sale and Purchase of Labour Power,” Chapter Ten: “The Working Day,” and Chapter Twenty-Six: “The Secret of Primitive Accumulation”
• Henry Mayhew,  London Labour and the London Poor  (1861-62; use Penguin ed.) *
• J. S. Mill, "What is Poetry?" (1833);  On Liberty  (1859);  The Subjection of Women  (1869)
• William Morris,  News from Nowhere  (1890)
• Walter Pater,  Studies in the History of The Renaissance  (1873)
• Arthur Wing Pinero,  The Second Mrs. Tanqueray  (1894)
• Arthur Wing Pinero, Trelawny of the "Wells"  (1899)
• Mary Prince,  The History of Mary Prince  (1831)
• Christina Rossetti, "Goblin Market" (1862); "Song ('When I am Dead, My Dearest')" (1862), "Up-Hill" (1862), "Winter: My Secret" (1862), "Sleeping at Last" (1896),  Speaking Likeness  (1874)
• John Ruskin, from  Modern Painters II  (1846): "The Imaginative Faculty" from  The Stones of Venice II  (1853): "The Nature of Gothic"; from  Modern Painters III  (1856):   "Of the Pathetic Fallacy"; “The Work of Iron” (1858) and “The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century” (1884)
• Mary Seacole,  Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands  (1857)
• Olive Schreiner,  The Story of an African Farm  (1883)
• George Bernard Shaw,  Mrs. Warren's Profession  (1898); selections from dramatic criticism
• Robert Louis Stevenson,  The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde  (1886)
• Bram Stoker,  Dracula  (1897)
• Algernon Charles Swinburne, selected poems: "Faustine" (1862); Choruses from  Atalanta in Calydon  (1865): "When the hounds of spring" and "Before the beginning of years"; "Laus Veneris" (1866); "The Triumph of Time" (1866); "Itylus" (1866); "Hymn to Proserpine" (1866); "Ave atque Vale" (1868); "Hertha" (1871); "To Walt Whitman in America" (1871)
• Alfred Tennyson,  In Memoriam  (1850),  Idylls of the King  (1859-74)
• William Makepeace Thackeray,  Vanity Fair  (1847-48)
• Anthony Trollope,  Can You Forgive Her?  (1864-5)
• Anthony Trollope,  The Way We Live Now  (1874-75)
• Oscar Wilde,  The Picture of Dorian Gray  (1890)
• Oscar Wilde,  Lady Windemere's Fan  (1892)
• Oscar Wilde,  A Woman of No Importance  (1893)
• Oscar Wilde,  Salome  (1893)
• Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband  (1895)
• Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest  (1895)
• Ellen Wood,  East Lynne  (1860-1)

20th- & 21st- Century American

ASAM indicates that the work is part of the Asian American literary tradition

AFAM indicates that the work is part of the African American literary tradition

LATX indicates that the work is part of the Latinx literary tradition

INDG indicates that the work is part of the indigenous American literary tradition

• Kathy Acker,  Blood and Guts in High School  (1984)
• Sherwood Anderson,  Winesburg, Ohio  (1919)
• Isaac Asimov,  Foundation  (1951)
• Gloria Anzaldua,  Borderlands  (1987), LATX
• Margaret Atwood,  The Handmaid’s Tale  (1985)
• James Baldwin,  Go Tell it on the Mountain  (1953), AFAM
• Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones),  The Dutchman  (1964), AFAM
• Paul Beatty,  The Sellout  (2015), AFAM
• Carlos Bulosan,  America is in the Heart  (1946), ASAM
• William S. Burroughs,  Naked Lunch  (1959)
• Octavia Butler,  Kindred  (1979), AFAM
• Willa Cather,  My Antonia  (1918)
• Theresa Hak Kyung Cha,  Dictee  (1982), ASAM
• Michael Chabon,  The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay  (2000)
• Sandra Cisneros,  The House on Mango Street , LATX
• Leonard Cohen,  Beautiful Losers  (1966)
• Samuel R. Delany,  Dhalgren  (1975)
• Don De Lillo,  White Noise  (1985)
• Don De Lillo,  Underworld  (1997)
• Junot Diaz,  The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao  (2007), LATX
• John Dos Passos,  The Big Money  (1936)
• W. E. B. DuBois,  The Souls of Black Folk  (1903), AFAM
• Jennifer Egan,  A Visit from the Goon Squad  (2010)
• Bret Easton Ellis,  American Psycho  (1991)
• Ralph Ellison,  Invisible Man  (1952), AFAM
• Louise Erdrich,  Tracks  (1988), INDG
• William Faulkner,  Go Down, Moses  (1942)
• F. Scott Fitzgerald,  The Great Gatsby  (1925)
• Jonathan Franzen,  The Corrections  (2001)
• Jonathan Franzen,  Freedom  (2010)
• William Gibson,  Neuromancer  (1984)
• William Gibson,  Pattern Recognition  (2003)
• Ernest Hemingway,  The Sun Also Rises  (1924)
• Frank Herbert,  Dune  (1965)
• Sheila Heti,  How Should a Person Be?  (2010)
• Patricia Highsmith,  The Price of Salt  (1952)
• Zora Neale Hurston,  Their Eyes Were Watching God  (1937), AFAM
• William James, selected lectures and essays: “The Stream of Thought”, “Association”, “The Perception of Time” (all 1890) “A World of Pure Experience” (1904), and “What Pragmatism Means” (1907).
• James Weldon Johnson,  The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man  (1912), AFAM
• Jack Kerouac,  On the Road  (1957)
• Jack Kerouac,  Visions of Cody  (1959; 1972)
• Ken Kesey,  One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest  (1962)
• Maxine Hong Kingston,  The Woman Warrior  (1976), ASAM
• Tony Kushner,  Angels in America  (1992)
• Nella Larsen,  Passing  (1929), AFAM
• Nella Larsen,  Quicksand  (1928), AFAM
• Chang-Rae Lee,  Native Speaker  (1995), ASAM
• Ben Lerner,  10:04  (2014)
• Patricia Lockwood,  No One is Talking About This  (2021)
• Audre Lorde,  Zami  (1982), AFAM
• Emily St-John Mandel,  Station Eleven  (2014)
• Cormac McCarthy,  Blood Meridian  (1985)
• Claude McKay,  Home to Harlem  (1928);  Banjo  (1929), AFAM
• Arthur Miller,  Death of a Salesman  (1949)
• Henry Miller,  Tropic of Cancer  (1934; 1961 in US)
• Henry Miller,  The Air-Conditioned Nightmare  (1945)
• N. Scott Momaday,  House Made of Dawn  (1968), INDG
• Cherrie Moraga,  Loving in the War Years: lo que nunca paso por sus labios  (1983; 2000), LATX
• Toni Morrison,  Beloved  (1987), AFAM
• Vladimir Nabokov,  Lolita  (1955)
• Maggie Nelson,  The Argonauts  (2015)
• Tim O’Brien,  The Things They Carried  (1990)
• Flannery O'Connor,  A Good Man is Hard to Find  (1955)
• John Okada,  No-No Boy  (1979), ASAM
• Eugene O'Neill,  Long Day's Journey Into Night  (1956)
• Ann Petry,  The Street  (1946), AFAM
• Richard Powers,  Galatea 2.2  (1995)
• Richard Powers,  The Overstory  (2019)
• Thomas Pynchon,  The Crying of Lot 49  (1966)
• Ishmael Reed,  Mumbo Jumbo  (1972), AFAM
• Marilynne Robinson,  Gilead  (2005)
• Phillip Roth,  The Human Stain  (1995)
• George Saunders,  Lincoln in the Bardo  (2017)
• Leslie Marmom Silko,  Ceremony  (1977), INDG
• Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton),  Mrs. Spring Fragrance  (1912), ASAM
• Art Spiegelman,  Maus  and  Maus II  (1986-91)
• Gertrude Stein,  Three Lives  (1909)
• John Steinbeck,  The Grapes of Wrath  (1939)
• Hunter S. Thompson,  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas  (1971)
• John Kennedy Toole,  A Confederacy of Dunces  (1980)
• Jean Toomer,  Cane  (1923), AFAM
• Helena Maria Viramontes,  The Moths and Other Stories  (1995), LATX
• David Foster Wallace,  Infinite Jest  (1996)
• James Welch,  Fools Crow  (1986), INDG
• Nathanael West,  The Day of the Locust  (1939)
• Edith Wharton,  The House of Mirth  (1905)
• Colson Whitehead,  The Intuitionist  (1999)
• Colson Whitehead,  The Underground Railroad  (2016)
• Tennessee Williams,  A Streetcar Named Desire  (1947)
• August Wilson,  Piano Lesson  (1990), AFAM
• Richard Wright,  Native Son  (1940), AFAM
• Tomás Rivera,  And the Earth Did Not Devour Him / …y no se le tragó la tierra  (1971), LATX
• Charles Yu,  How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe: A Novel  (2011), ASAM

* indicates that a different work by the same author may be substituted

• Kingsley Amis,  Lucky Jim  (1954)
• Monica Ali,  Brick Lane  (2003) *
• Margaret Atwood,  The Handmaid's Tale  (1986)
• Pat Barkeer,  The Silence of the Girls  (2018) *
• Samuel Beckett,  Molloy (1951)
• Samuel Beckett,  Waiting for Godot  (1952)
• Anna Burns,  Milkman  (2018)
• Angela Carter,  The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories  (1979)
• Caryl Churchill,  Top Girls  (1984)
• Joseph Conrad,  Lord Jim  (1900)
• Joseph Conrad,  Heart of Darkness  (1902)
• Ford Madox Ford,  The Good Soldier  (1915)
• E. M. Forster,  A Passage to India  (1924)
• Radcliffe Hall,  The Well of Loneliness  (1928)
• Alan Hollinghurst,  The Line of Beauty  (2004) *
• Kazuo Ishiguro,  Never Let Me Go  (2005)
• Kazuo Ishiguro,  Remains of the Day  (1989)
• James Joyce,  Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man  (1915)
• James Joyce,  Ulysses  (1922)
• Hari Kunzru, Gods Without Men  (2011) *
• D. H. Lawrence,  Women in Love  (1918)
• John Le Carré,  Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy  (1974)
• Doris Lessing,  The Golden Notebook  (1966)
• Hilary Mantel,  Wolf Hall  (2009)
• Ian McEwan,  On Chesil Beach  (2007) *
• George Orwell,  1984  (1949)
• Caryl Phillips,  Crossing the River (1993) *
• Harold Pinter,  The Birthday Party  (1957)
• Zia Hyder Rahman,  In the Light of What We Know  (2014) *
• Jean Rhys,  Wide Sargasso Sea  (1966)
• Sally Rooney,  Normal People
• Salman Rushdie,  The Satanic Verses  (1989)
• Samuel Selvon,  The Lonely Londoners  (1956)
• Kamila Shamsie,  Home Fire  (2017)
• George Bernard Shaw,  Man & Superman  (1903)
• Ali Smith,  How to be Both  (2014)
• Zadie Smith,  White Teeth  (2000)
• John Synge,  Playboy of the Western World  (1907)
• Evelyn Waugh,  Decline and Fall  (1929)
• Jeanette Winterson,  Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit  (1989)
• Virginia Woolf,  A Room of One's Own  (1929)
• Virginia Woolf,  Mrs. Dalloway  (1922)

 Contemporary Poetry & Poetics 

(in chronological order of original publication date)

• W. B. Yeats,  Selected Poems  (2015, originally published 1889 - 1939)
• T.S. Eliot,  Collected Poems 1909-1962  (1965) *
• Ezra Pound,  Personae  (1909)
• Amy Lowell,  Selected Poems,  American Poets Project (2004, originally written 1910-1925)
• Claude McKay,  Selected Poems of Claude McKay  (1953, written 1912-1948)
• Robert Frost,  North of Boston  (1914)
• Gertrude Stein,  Tender Buttons  (1914)
• Ezra Pound,  Pisan Cantos  (1915-1962)
• Mina Loy,  Songs to Johannes  (1917), see  https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/loy/poem_loy_Songs_to_Joannes.html#loy_joannes_notes_intro )
• Lola Ridge, "The Ghetto" in  The Ghetto and Other Poems   (1918)
• Charles Reznikoff,  The Complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff (1918-1975)  (2015)*
• Louis Zukofsky,  Selected Poems,  American Poets Project (2006, originally published 1922-1978)
• Jean Toomer,  Cane  (1923)
• William Carlos Williams,  Spring and All  (1923)
• Langston Hughes,  Collected Poems of Langston Hughes  (1994, originally published 1926-1964)
• Laura Riding,  The Laura (Riding) Jackson Reader  (2005, originally written 1926-1976) *
• James Weldon Johnson, God's Trombones (1927)
• Kenneth Fearing,  Selected Poems,  American Poets Project (2004, originally published 1928-1943)
• Lorine Niedecker,  Lorine Niedecker: Collected Works  (2002, originally published 1928-1952) *
• Hart Crane,  The Bridge  (1930)
• Charles Reznikoff,  Testimony  (1934)
• Muriel Rukeyser,  Theory of Flight  (1935)
• Muriel Rukeyser,  Selected Poems,  American Poets Project (2004, originally published 1935-1976)
• Jackson Mac Low,  Representative Works, 1938-1955  (1986) *
• Muriel Rukeyser,  U.S. 1  (1938)
• Frank O'Hara,  Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara  (1995, poems originally published in 1940s) *
• Wallace Stevens, “Ideas of Order at Key West” (1936), "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” (1950), and "The Noble Rider and the Sounds of Words" (1942)
• H.D.,  Trilogy  (1944-1946)
• Charles Olson,  Collected Poems of Charles Olson  (1987, originally published 1949-1969)*
• Langston Hughes,   Montage of a Dream Deferred   (1951)
• Jackson Mac Low,  Doings: assorted performance pieces 1955/2002  (2005)
• Allen Ginsberg,  Howl and other Poems  (1956)
• William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams (1939-1962) (1986) *
• William Carlos Williams, Paterson (1946-1948)
• Hugh MacDiarmid,  Selected Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid  (1954)
• Hugh MacDiarmid,  Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle  (1956)
• Frank O'Hara, "Personism: A Manifesto" in The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara  (1959)
• Gwendolyn Brooks,  The Bean Eaters  (1960)
• Bob Kaufman, "Jail Poems" in Beatitude Anthology (1960)
• Robert Creeley,  For Love  (1962)
• Frank O'Hara,  Lunch Poems  (1964)
• Lucille Clifton,  The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton   (1965-2010) (2015)*
• Jack Spicer,  Language  in  My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer  (2008, originally published 1965)
• Melvin Tolson,  Harlem Gallery  (1965) 
• John Ashbery,  Rivers and Mountains  (1966)
• Basil Bunting,  Briggflatts  (1966)
• Adrienne Rich, On Lies in  On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978  (1979)
• Adrienne Rich,  Secrets and Silence  in  On Lies, Secrets, and Silence : Selected Prose, 1966-1978  (1979)
• Robert Creeley,  Words  (1967)
• George Oppen,  Of Being Numerous  (1968)
• Gwendolyn Brooks,  Riot  (1969)
• Robert Creeley,   Pieces  (1969)
• Robert Hayden, Words in the Mourning Time (1970)
• Jackson Mac Low,  Stanzas for Iris Lezak  (1971)
• John Ashbery,  Three Poems ( 1972)
• Adrienne Rich,  Diving into the Wreck  (1973)
• John Ashbery,  Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror  (1975)
• Robert Hayden,  Angle of Ascent  (1975)
• John Ashbery,  Double Dream of Spring  (1976)
• Lyn Hejinian,  My Life  (1980)
• James Schuyler,  The Morning of the Poem  (1980)
• Carolyn Forché,  The Country Between Us  (1981)
• Sterling Brown,  The Collected Poems of Sterling Brown  (1983) *
• Elizabeth Alexander, The Venus Hottentot (1825) (1990)
• John Ashbery,  Flow Chart (1991)
• Susan Howe,  My Emily Dickinson  (1985)
• Barbara Guest,  Defensive Rapture  (1993)
• Yusef Komunyakaa,  Neon Vernacular  (1993)
• Eavan Boland,  In a Time of Violence  (1995)
• Barbara Guest,  Fair Realism  (1995)
• Lynda Hull,  The Only World  (1995)
• Sascha Feinstein,  Misterioso  (2000)
• Harryette Mullen,  Sleeping with the Dictionary  (2002)
• Tyehimba Jess,  Leadbelly  (2004)
• Terrance Hayes,  Wind in a Box  (2006)
• M. NourbeSe Philip,  Zong!  (2008)
• Julie Carr,  100 Notes on Violence  (2010)
• Nikki Finney,  Head Off & Split: Poems  (2011)
• Tim Seibles,  Fast Animal  (2012)
• Evie Shockley,  The New Black  (2012)
• Tracy K. Smith,  Life on Mars  (2012)
• Jordan Abel,  The Place of Scraps  (2013)
• Caroline Bergvall,  Drift  (2014)
• Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive: After the End of the World  (2018)
• Divya Victor, Curb  (2021)
• Ezra Pound, “A Retrospect” in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound  (1918)
• Gertrude Stein, "Composition as Explanation" (1926)
• Louis Zukofsky, "An Objective" in  Prepositions+: The Collected Critical Essays  (2000, originally published in 1931)
• Charles Olson, "Projective Verse" in  The Collected Poems of Charles Olson  (1987, originally published in 1950)
• Robert Creeley, "Was that a Real Poem or Did You Just Make It Up?" in  Collected Essays ,  A Quick Graph  (1974)

Literary Works  (in chronological order of publication date, with region noted)

• Rudyard Kipling,  Kim  (1901), India
• Joseph Conrad,  Heart of Darkness  (1902), Africa
• Rabindranath Tagore,  The Home and the World  (1916), South Asia
• E M Forster,  A Passage to India  (1924), South Asia
• Patricia Galvão,  Industrial Park  (1933), Latin America
• Raja Rao,  Kanthapura  (1938), South Asia
• José María Arguedas,  Yawar Fiesta  (1941), Latin America
• Alejo Carpentier,  The Kingdom of This World  (1949), Latin America
• George Lamming,  In the Castle of My Skin  (1950), Caribbean
• Samuel Selvon,  The Lonely Londoners  (1956), Caribbean
• Rosario Castellanos,  The Nine Guardians: A Novel  (1957), Latin America
• Chinua Achebe,  Things Fall Apart  (1959), Africa
• Ousmane Sembène,  God’s Bits of Wood  (1962), Africa
• Jean Rhys,  Wide Sargasso Sea  (1966), Caribbean
• V. S. Naipaul,  A House for Mr. Biswas  (1967), South Asia / Caribbean
• Ayi Kwei Armah,  The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born  (1968), Africa
• Aimé Césaire,  A Tempest  (1969), Caribbean
• Tayeb Salih,  Season of Migration to the North  (1969), Africa
• Bessie Head,  A Question of Power  (1974), Africa
• Wole Soyinka , Death and the King's Horseman  (1975), Africa
• Raj Anand,  Coolie  (1976), India
• Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona,  The Island  (1976), Africa
• Ama Ata Aidoo,  Our Sister Killjoy  (1977), Africa
• Ngūgī wa Thiong’o,  Petals of Blood  (1977), Africa
• Domitila Barrios de Chúngara with Moema Viezzer,  Let Me Speak! Testimony of Domitila, a Woman of the Bolivian Mines  (1978), Latin America
• Buchi Emecheta,  The Joys of Motherhood  (1979), Africa
• J. M. Coetzee,  Waiting for the Barbarians  (1980), Africa
• Mariama Bâ,  So Long a Letter  (1981), Africa
• Brian Friel,  Translations  (1981), Ireland
• Nadine Gordimer , July's People  (1981), Africa
• Salman Rushdie,  Midnight’s Children  (1981), South Asia
• Keri Hulme,  The Bone People  (1983), New Zealand
• Nawal El Saadawi,  Woman at Point Zero  (1983), North Africa
• Ken Saro Wiwa,  Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English  (1985), Africa
• Michelle Cliff,  No Telephone to Heaven  (1987), Caribbean
• Tsitsi Dangarembga,  Nervous Conditions  (1988), Africa
• Amitav Ghosh,  Shadow Lines  (1988), South Asia
• Jamaica Kincaid,  A Small Place  (1988), Caribbean
• Bapsi Sidhwa,  Cracking India  (1988), South Asia
• Mario Vargas Llosa,  The Storyteller  (1989), Latin America
• Claribel Alegría and Darwin Flakoll,  The Death of Somoza  (1990), Latin America
• Derek Walcott,  Omeros  (1990), Caribbean
• Ben Okri,  The Famished Road  (1991), Africa
• Hanif Kureishi,  My Son the Fanatic  (1994), South Asia
• Shyam Selvadurai,  Funny Boy  (1994), South Asia
• Mahasweta Devi,  Imaginary Maps: Three Stories  (1995), South Asia
• Zakes Mda,  Ways of Dying  (1995), Africa
• Arundhati Roy,  The God of Small Things  (1998), South Asia
• J. M. Coetzee,  Disgrace  (1999) [Africa]
• Edwidge Danticat,  The Farming of Bones  (1999), Caribbean
• Arundhati Roy,  The Algebra of Infinite Justice  (2001), South Asia
• Teju Cole,  Every Day Is for the Thief  (2007), Africa
• Aravind Adiga,  The White Tiger: A Novel  (2008), South Asia
• Amitav Ghosh,  Sea of Poppies  (2008), South Asia
• Urmila Pawar,  The Weave of my Life: A Dalit Woman’s Memoirs  (2009), South Asia
• Yashpal,  This is Not that Dawn  (2010), South Asia
• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,  Americanah  (2014), Africa
• NoViolet Bulawayo,  We Need New Names  (2014), Africa
• Yaa Gyasi,  Homegoing  (2016), Africa
• Maaza Mengiste,  The Shadow King  (2019), Africa

Readings/Theory  (grouped by region, in chronological order according to original publication date)

South Asia / Middle East

• M. K. Gandhi,  Hind Swaraj  (1909)
• B. R. Ambedkar,  The Annihilation of Caste  (1936)
• Jawaharlal Nehru,  The Discovery of India  (1946)
• Edward Said,  Orientalism  (1979)
• Salman Rushdie,  Imaginary Homelands  (2002)
• Ranajit Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India” in  Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History and Society  (1982)
• Partha Chatterjee,  Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World  (1986)
• Binyavanga Wainaina, “How to Write about Africa” in  How to Write about Africa  (2022, originally published in 2005)
• Sharmila Rege,  Writing Caste, Writing Gender  (2006)

Latin America

• José Carlos Mariátegui , Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality  (1928)
• Che Guevara,  Socialism and Man in Cuba  (1965)
• Roberto Schwarz,  Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture  (1992)
• Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, "Founding Statement" in  Boundary2 20.3  (Autumn 1993)
• Neil Larsen,  Reading North by South  (1995)
• C. L. R. James,  The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution  (1938)
• Aimé Césaire,  A Discourse on Colonialism  (1950)
• Frantz Fanon,  Black Skin, White Masks  (1952)
• Frantz Fanon,  A Dying Colonialism  (1959)
• Frantz Fanon,  The Wretched of the Earth  (1961)
• Édouard Glissant,  Caribbean Discourse  (1981)
• Léopold Sédar Senghor, "Negritude: A Humanism of the Twentieth Century" in  Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader  (1994, originally published in French in 1966)
• Ngūgī wa Thiong’o,  Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature  (1986)
• Roberto Fernández Retamar,  Caliban and Other Essays  (1989)

Multi-Regional

• Amilcar Cabral,  The Weapon of Theory  (1966)
• Benedict Anderson,  Imagined Communities, Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism  (1983)
• Aijaz Ahmad,  In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literature  (1992)
• Edward Said,  Culture and Imperialism  (1993)
• Urvashi Butalia,  The Other Side of Silence  (1998)
• E. San Juan Jr.,  Beyond Postcolonial Theory  (1998)
• Rob Nixon,  Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor  (2011)
• Mary Louise Pratt,  Planetary Longings  (2022)

(in chronological order of publication date)

• Rodolphe Töpffer,  The Adventures of Obadiah   Oldbuck ( 1837)
• Rudolph Dirks,  The Katzenjammer Kids  (1897-1913)
• Winsor McCay,  Little Nemo in Slumberland  (1905-1914)
• George Herriman,  Krazy Kat  (1914-1944) *
• Early superhero comics (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman) (1938-1945) *
• Charles M. Schulz,  Peanuts  strip (1950-2000) *
• R. Crumb, Collected Works (1967- ) *
• Mad  Magazine (Al Feldstein, ed., 1952-1985) *
• Keiji Nakazawa,  Barefoot Gen  series (1973-1987)
• Osamu Tezuka,  Black Jack  series (1973-1983)
• Harvey Pekar,  American Splendor  (1976-2008)
• Will Eisner,  A Contract with God  (1978)
• Art Spiegelman,  MAUS , Vols I and II (1980-1992)
• Frank Miller,  Batman: The Dark Knight Returns  (1986)
• Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons,  Watchmen  (1986-1987)
• Lynda Barry,  The Good Times are Killing Me  (1988)
• Lynda Barry,  One Hundred Demons  (2002)
• Neil Gaiman,  The Sandman  (1989-1996)
• Scott McCloud,  Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art  (1993)
• Daniel Clowes,  Ghost World  (1995)
• Marjane Satrapi,  The Complete Persepolis  (2000)
• Chris Ware,  Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth  (2000)
• Joe Sacco,  Palestine  (2001)
• Joe Sacco,  Footnotes in Gaza  (2009)
• Phoebe Gloeckner,  The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures  (2002)
• Craig Thompson,  Blankets: An Illustrated Novel  (2003)
• Charles Burns,  Black Hole  (2005)
• Alison Bechdel,  Fun   Home: A Family Tragicomic  (2006)
• Shaun Tan,  The Arrival  (2006)
• David B.,  Epileptic  (2006)
• Gene Luen Yang,  American Born Chinese  (2006)
• Ulli Lust,  Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life  (2008)
• Gabrielle Bell,  The Voyeurs  (2012)
• John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, Nate Powell,  March  Vols I, II, and III (2013-2017)
• Adrian Tomine,  Killing and Dying  (2015)
• Ben Passmore,  Your Black Friend and Other Strangers  (2016)
• Emil Ferris,  My Favorite Thing is Monsters  (2017)
• John Jennings & Stacey Robinson, Tony Medina,  I am Alfonso Jones  (2017)
• Victoria Lomasko,  Other Russias  (2017)
• Thi Bui,  The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir  (2017)
• John Jennings & Damian Duffy,  Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation  (2018)
• Nick Drnaso,  Sabrina  (2018)

Cinema and Media Studies 

Films  (in chronological order of release date)

• Auguste Lumière and Louis Lumière, Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory (1895) and Arrival of a Train at a Station (1895)
• George Méliès, A Trip to the Moon (1902)
• Edwin S. Porter, The Great Train Robbery (1903)
• D. W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation (1915)
• Oscar Micheaux, Within Our Gates (1920)
• Robert J. Flaherty, Nanook of the North (1922)
• Sergei Eisenstein, The Battleship Potemkin (1925)
• Buster Keaton, The General (1926)
• F. W. Murnau, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)
• Dziga Vertov, Man with the Movie Camera (1929)
• Fritz Lang, M (1931)
• Frank Capra, It Happened One Night (1934)
• Charlie Chaplin, Modern Times (1936)
• Jean Renoir, The Grand Illusion (1937)
• Orson Welles, Citizen Kane (1941)
• Maya Deren and Alexandr Hackenschmied, Meshes of the Afternoo n (1943)
• Laurence Olivier, Henry V (1944)
• Roberto Rossellini, Rome, Open City (1945)
• Howard Hawks, The Big Sleep (1946)
• Akira Kurosawa, Rashomon (1950)
• Stanley Donen, Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
• Satyajit Ray, Pather Panchali (1955)
• John Ford, The Searchers (1956)
• Alain Resnais, Hiroshima mon Amour (1959)
• Alfred Hitchcock, Vertigo (1958)
• Ritwick Ghatak, Meghe Dakha Tara (1960)
• Jean-Luc Godard, Contempt (1963)
• Federico Fellini, 8 1/2 (1963)
• Albert Maysles and David Maysles, Gimme Shelter (1970)
• Francis Ford Coppola, The Godfather (1972)
• Djibril Diop Mambéty, Touki Bouki (1973)
• M. S. Sathyu, Garm Hava (1973)
• Shyam Benegal, Ankur (1974)
• Ousmane Sembène, Xala (1975)
• Martin Scorsese, Taxi Driver (1976)
• R. W. Fassbinder, The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978)
• Aparna Sen, 36 Chowringhee Lane (1981)
• María Luisa Bemberg, Camila (1984)
• Agnès Varda, Vagabond (1985)
• Stephen Frears, My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)
• David Lynch, Blue Velvet (1986)
• John Woo, A Better Tomorrow (1986)
• John Lasseter, Luxo Jr. (1986)
• Claire Denis, Chocolat (1988)
• Mira Nair, Salaam Bombay! (1988)
• Spike Lee, Do the Right Thing (1989)
• Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust (1991)
• Zhang Yimou, Raise the Red Lantern (1991)
• Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Nargess (1992)
• Djibril Diop Mambéty, Hyènes (1992)
• Jane Campion, The Piano (1993)
• Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction (1994)
• Deepa Mehta, Elements trilogy (1996-2005)
• Abbas Kiarostami, Taste of Cherry (1997)
• Hayao Miyazaki, Princess Mononoke (1997)
• Lucrecia Martel, The Swamp (2001)
• Abderrahmane Sissako, Bamako (2006)
• Jia Zhangke, Platform (2000)
• Jia Zhangke, Still Life (2006)
• Florian Thalhofer, Planet Galata: A Bridge in Istanbul (2010)
• Hito Steyerl, In Free Fall (2010)
• Harun Farocki,  Parallel I-IV  (2012-14)
• Steve McQueen, 12 Years a Slave (2013)
• Kelly Reichardt, Certain Women (2016)
• Nonny de la Peña, Out of Exile: Daniel’s Story (2017) 

Readings/Theory (in chronological order of original publication date)

• Hugo Münsterberg, "Why We Go to the Movies" in  Cosmopolitan  60.1   (Dec 1915)
• Béla Balázs, "The Close-Up" in  Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory: Visible Man and the Spirit of Film  (2010, originally published in French in 1924)
• Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in  Illuminations: Essays and Reflections  (1968, originally published in German in 1935)
• Sergei Eisenstein, "Dickens, Griffith, and Film Today" in  Film Form: Essays in Film Theory  (1949, originally published in Russian in 1944)
• Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" in  Dialect of the Enlightenment  (1989, originally published in German in 1944)
• Alexandre Astruc, "The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera-Stylo" in  Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology (2014, originally published in French in 1948)
• André Bazin, "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema" in  What is Cinema ? Essays Selected and Translated by Hugh Gray (2004, originally published in French in early 1950s)
• Siegfried Kracauer, "The Establishment of Physical Existence" in  Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality  (1965, originally published in German in 1960)
• Maya Deren, "Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality" in  Daedalus  89.1   (Winter 1960)
• Marshall McLuhan,  Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man  (1964) *
• Jean-Louis Baudry, "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus" in  Film Quarterly  28.2 (Winter 1974-1975, originally published in French in 1970)
• Laura Mulvey, " Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema " in Screen 16.3 (Autumn 1975)
• Richard Dyer, "Entertainment and Utopia" in  Only Entertainment  (1977)
• Richard Dyer, "Stars as Types" and "Stars as Images" in  Stars  (1979)
• Giles Deleuze,  Cinema 1: The Movement Image (1986, originally published in French in 1983) *
• Rick Altman, "A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre" in  Cinema Journal  23.2 (Spring 1984)
• David Bordwell, "Art-Cinema Narration" in  Narration in the Fiction Film  (1985)
• Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde" in  Wide Angle  8.3-4 (1986)
• Bill Nichols, "Documentary Modes of Representation" in Representing Reality  (1991)
• Lynn Spigel,  Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America  (1992) *
• Robert Stam and Ella Shohat,  Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media  (1994) *
• Manthia Diawara,   "Black American Cinema: the New Realism" in  Cinemas of the Black Diaspora: Diversity, Dependence, and Oppositionality (1995)
• Henry Jenkins, "From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Further Reflections" in  New Media: Theories of Practices of Digitexuality  (2003)
• Peter Wollen, "The Auteur Theory: Michael Curtiz, and Casablanca" in  Authorship and Film  (2003)
• Mary Ann Doane, "Information, Crisis, and Catastrophe" in  New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (2005)
• Linda Hutcheon,  Theory of Adaptation  (2006) *
• John Thornton Caldwell,  Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television  (2008) *
• John Durham Peters,  The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media  (2015) *
• Patricia White, Women's Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms  (2015) *
• Lev Manovich, "What is Digital Cinema?" in  Post-Cimena: Theorizing 21st-Century Film  (2016)
• Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt,  Queer Cinema in the World  (2016) *

Secondary Menu

• Best Practices Exams & Reading Lists

This guide was prepared by GEA Representatives Rachel Gevlin and Chris Huebner in collaboration with fellow graduate students with the intention of demystifying the process of assembling a committee and preparing for exams.

Initial Questions to Ask Advisor and Committee Members

• What do you believe the reading year is for? Am I reading to gain comprehension of the field, to prepare for writing my first chapter, or to “explore” areas?
• How often should we meet? How often should I meet with other committee members? When do I need to start thinking concretely about a dissertation topic?
• What method/theory do you admire? What writers /critics do you like as a model? (This is a question that you could ask your advisor as well as a general question to consider yourself)

Constructing Lists

• How should I build my lists? Should I start big and cut? Should I start small and add?
• Is each list the domain of one advisor? Should my committee members collaborate to construct lists?
• What should the balance of prose/poetry/visual media be (for applicable projects)?
• How general/canonical should my lists be? How specific should they be to my own interests or to the specific “niche” of my project?
• How closely should my minor lists relate to each other? How closely should my minor lists relate to my major list?
• Should secondary texts be on primary lists (and vice versa)? If so, what should the ratio be?
• Should minor lists have sections?
• Do you have general formatting preferences for my lists? (Citations, numbering, ordering chronologically/alphabetically, etc.)

How to Handle Reading

• How should I prioritize which texts to start reading? What are the 20 most important?
• How closely should I be reading each text?
• How should I read? For argument? For factual or historical background?
• As I read through my lists, should I produce any writing?

Preparing for Exams

• What is the procedure for oral exams? What should I prepare? Who starts? Will there be times when I will be asked to leave the room? Is it acceptable to take notes or record audio during the exam?
• Who will draft the questions, and will I have any input in what they are?
• How much ‘quizzing’ on small details (dates, character names, etc.) from the texts will there be? Am I likely to be asked questions about texts that aren’t on my lists?
• What types of questions should I expect? i.e. Will I be asked to give a survey of a period? Will each question entail making an argument? Will I be expected to respond to specific critics?
• How many questions will there be? Different advisors have different expectations, but the general outline (from the handbook) is the following: “The major exam is typically scheduled first. The format is usually to answer 2 or 3 questions from a choice of between 4 to 6 questions. For the minor exam, the format is usually to answer 1 or 2 on each minor field (2-4 in total) from between 4 and 6 questions.”
• In my oral exam, should I have an answer prepared for every question that was asked on the written exams, or only for those that I answered in writing?
• What kind of feedback can I expect after my exams are completed?
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Comparative Literature

Reading lists.

• Graduate Program

British with American Literature

• Shakespeare
• Renaissance poetry
• Renaissance drama
• British and American prose of the 17th and 18th century (Bacon, Behn, Bunyan, Burton, Mather, Swift, Franklin, Edwards)
• British and American poetry of the 17th and 18th century (Bradstreet, Dryden, Taylor, Pope, Johnson, Freneau, Wheatley)
• 18th-century novel (Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Smollett)
• British Romantic poetry (Blake, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth)
• British Victorian poetry (Arnold, the Brownings, Hopkins, Swinburne, Tennyson)
• 19th-century British novel (Austen, Brontës, Eliot, Dickens, Hardy)
• historical novel (Scott, Cather, Cooper)
• 19th-century American poetry (Dickinson, Longfellow, Whitman)
• 19th-century American prose (Douglass, Emerson, Poe, Thoreau)
• 19th-century American novel (Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, Twain)
• African American literature of the Harlem Renaissance and up to the Civil Rights era (Baldwin, Ellison, Hughes, Hurston, Schuyler, Wright)
• Late 19 th - and early 20 th -century American novel (Crane, Dreiser, James, London, Wharton)
• Literature of the American South (Chopin, Faulkner, Welty, O’Connor, Southern Agrarians)
• modernist novels (Dos Passos, Hemingway, Joyce, Woolf)
• modernist poetry (Eliot, Frost, Pound, Stein, Stevens, Yeats)
• drama of the 20th and 21st century (Albee, Beckett, Miller, O’Neill, Pinter, Shaw, Williams)
• post-WW2 American fiction (Barthelme, DeLillo, Ellison, Gaddis, Morrison, Nabokov, Pynchon, Reed, Wright)
• post-WW2 British and American poetry
• post-WW2 global Anglophone fiction (Achebe, Coetzee, Ishiguro, Kincaid, Naipaul, Rhys, Rushdie)
• literary criticism (Arnold, Carlyle, Du Bois, Eliot, Johnson, Morrison, Warren)

French Literature

• La Chanson de Roland
• Selections from Chrétien de Troyes, Marie de France & Villon 
• Rabelais & Montaigne
• Selected poetry of Ronsard, DuBellay, Scève, Labé   
• Pascal & Madame de Lafayette
• Montesquieu
• Selected works by Charrière, Graffigny, Gouges, Staël
• Hugo and/or Sand
• Stendhal and/or Zola
• Selected poetry of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé
• Proust & Beckett
• Gide and/or Camus and/or Céline
• selected modern poetry, such as Apollinaire, Breton, Éluard, Ponge, Césaire, Senghor, Bonnefoy ,  Hocquard, Roubaud, Deguy   
• Césaire, “Discours sur le colonialisme”; Fanon,  Peau noire, masques blancs ;Chamoiseau et al, “Éloge de la créolité”; and literary works selected from among the following authors: Condé, Chamoiseau, Pineau, Schwarz-Bart, Ollivier, Laferrière  
• Laâbi, “Réalités et dilemmes de la culture nationale I & II”; Haddad, “Les Zéros tournent en rond”; Memmi,  Portrait du colonisé, précédé du portrait du colonisateur ;   and works selected from among the following authors:  Kateb Yacine, Chraïbi, Djebar, Ben Jelloun, Kane, Mariama Bâ, Camara Laye, Sembène, Kourouma  
• selected works of mid-century & contemporary French fiction, such as Duras, Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet, Perec, Modiano, Le Clézio, Michon, Quignard, Toussaint, Redonnet, Cixous, Chevillard, Bon, Guibert, Rouaud, Ernaux, Houellebecq, NDiaye, Darrieussecq, Sebbar  
• selected critical/ philosophical texts, such as Bataille, Beauvoir, Sartre, Lévi-Strauss, Blanchot, Barthes, Fanon, Foucault, Irigaray, Derrida, Deleuze, Glissant, and Mernissi.

British Literature

• Old and Middle English Literature ( Beowulf , Langland,  The Seafarer ,  Sir Gawain and the Green Knight )
• early modern drama (Jonson, Kyd, Marlowe, Middleton, Webster)
• early modern poetry (Crashaw, Donne, Herbert, Jonson, Marvell, Marlowe, Sidney, Skelton, Vaughan, Wyatt)
• early modern prose (Bacon, Burton, Browne, Donne, More, Nashe, Tyndale)
• verse satire (Dryden, Johnson, Pope)
• Restoration and 18th-century prose and drama (Addison, Behn, Bunyan, Dryden, Johnson, Sheridan, Steele, Wycherley)
• Romantic-period novel (Austen, Scott, Mary Shelley)
• early Romantic poetry (Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth)
• later Romantic poetry (Byron, Keats, Percy Shelley)
• Victorian novel (Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, Trollope)
• Victorian poetry (Arnold, the Brownings, Hopkins, Swinburne, Tennyson)
• Victorian prose (Carlyle, Newman, Pater, Ruskin)
• later Victorian and Edwardian novel (Hardy, James, Conrad)
• modernist novel (Joyce, Forster, Lawrence, Woolf)
• modernist poetry (Eliot, Pound, Stein, Yeats)
• British and American drama of the 20th and 21st century (Albee, Beckett, Miller, O’Neill, Pinter, Shaw, Williams)
• post-WW2 British and American fiction
• post-WW2 global Anglophone fiction of the 20th and 21st century (Achebe, Coetzee, Kincaid, Naipaul, Rhys, Rushdie, Soyinka)
• literary criticism (Arnold, Burke, Coleridge, Dryden, Eliot, Johnson, Jonson, Sidney)

Latin and Greek

• Augustine,  Confessions
• Julius Caesar
• elegy (Ovid, Tibullus, Propertius)
• epic  (Ennius, Lucan, Statius)
• epigram (Martial, Ausonius)
• epistles (Cicero, Pliny)
• historiography  (Ammianus Marcellinus, Sallust, Suetonius)
• literary criticism (Cicero, Horace, Quintilian)
• oratory (Cicero)
• Ovid,  Metamorphoses
• philosophy (Cicero, Seneca)
• Republican comedy (Plautus and Terence)
• satire (Juvenal, Lucilius, Persius)
• Senecan drama
• Virgil,  Aeneid
• Virgil,  Eclogues
• Virgil,  Georgics
• Apollonius of Rhodes
• comedy (Aristophanes and Menander)
• Demosthenes
• elegiac and iambic verse
• epigram (Greek Anthology)
• epinician poetry (Bacchylides, Pindar)
• hymns (Homeric hymns, Callimachus)
• Homer,  Iliad
• Homer,  Odyssey
• lyric verse (Alcaeus, Alcman, Sappho, etc.)
• New Testament
• oratory (Hyperides, Isocrates, Lysias, etc.)
• romance (Longus, etc.)

Spanish Literature

• Anon., Poema de Mío Cid
• Anon., Romancero tradicional and Juan Ruiz, Arcipreste de Hita, Libro de buen amor
• Anon., Lazarillo de Tormes
• Cristóbal Colón
• Bartolomé de las Casas
• Spanish Renaissance (Garcilaso de la Vega, Santa Teresa de Jesús, Fray Luis de León)
• El Inca Garcilaso or Guamán Pomo de Ayala
• Miguel de Cervantes
• Baroque poetry (Luís de Góngora, Francisco de Quevedo)
• Golden Age Drama (Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca)
• Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
• Spanish Enlightenment (José Cadalso, José Espronceda, Mariano José de Larra, Benito Feijóo, Joseph Blanco White)
• The nineteenth-century Spanish novel (Benito Perez Galdós, Emilia Pardo, Bazán, Leopoldo Alas “Clarín”)
• Domingo Faustino Sarmiento
• Latin American foundations (Andrés Bello, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, José Marmol, José Martí de Heredia, Manuel de Jesús Galván, Ricardo Palma, Jorge Isaacs, Clorinda Matto de Turner)
• Latin American Modernist poetry and prose
• Generación del 98
• Federico García Lorca
• Jorge Luis Borges
• Selected poetry of the Latin American avant-garde (Vicente Huidobro, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, César Vallejo, Gabriela Mistral)
• The Latin American novel of the early twentieth century (Mariano Azuela, Rómulo Gallegos, José Eustasio Rivera, Roberto Arlt, Teresa de la Parra, María Luisa Bombal, José María Arguedas)
• Foundations of “Magical Realism” (Alejo Carpentier, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Juan Rulfo)
• The Latin American “Boom” generation (Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, Manuel Puig, Gabriel García Márquez, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, José Donoso, Elena Garro)
• Post-war Spanish narrative (Juan Goytisolo, Ana María Matute, Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, Camilo José Cela, Carmen Laforet, Carmen Martín Gaite, Javier Marías)
• Post-1969 Latin American narrative (Reinaldo Arenas, Diamela Eltit, Luis Rafael Sánchez, Guillermo Cabrera Infante,  Ricardo Piglia, Roberto Bolaño, Carmen Boullosa, Cristina Rivera Garza)

Brazilian Literature

• Gregório de Matos
• Tomás Antônio Gonzaga
• Basílio da Gama
• Gonçalves Dias
• Castro Alves
• Manuel Antônio de Almeida
• José de Alencar
• Sousândrade
• Aluísio Azevedo
• Machado de Assis
• Olavo Bilac
• Cruz e Souza
• Euclides da Cunha
• Lima Barreto
• Manuel Bandeira
• Oswald de Andrade
• Mário de Andrade
• Graciliano Ramos
• José Lins do Rego
• Rachel de Queiroz
• Carlos Drummond de Andrade
• João Guimarães Rosa
• Clarice Lispector
• Jorge Amado
• João Cabral de Melo Neto
• Lygia Fagundes Telles
• Nélida Piñon
• João Ubaldo Ribeiro
• Moacyr Scliar
• Sérgio Sant'Anna

Portuguese Literature

• Poesia Trovadoresca (Cantigas de Amor, Cantigas de Amigo, Cantigas de Escárnio e Mal dizer)
• Fernão Lopes
• Gil Vicente
• Luís de Camões
• Antônio Vieira
• Poetas Barrocos (selections from D. Francisco Manuel de Melo, António Barbosa e Sóror Violante do Céu)
• Almeida Garrett
• Camilo Castelo Branco
• Júlio Dinis
• Eça de Queiroz
• Cesário Verde
• Antero de Quental
• Camilo Pessanha
• Florbela Espanca
• Fernando Pessoa
• Miguel Torga
• Manuel da Fonseca
• Vergílio Ferreira
• Agustina Bessa-Luís
• Jorge de Sena
• José Rodrigues Miguéis
• Vitorino Nemésio
• José Cardoso Pires
• Eugénio de Andrade
• Sophia de Mello Breyner
• José Saramago
• Lídia Jorge
• António Lobo Antunes

German Literature

• Nibelungenlied; selections from Walter von der Vogelweide; Tristan or Parzival  
•  Selected Baroque poetry including Opitz and Gryphius
• Selected Baroque drama including Gryphius and Lohenstein
• Grimmelshausen
• Lessing and Mendelssohn
• Kant and Herder
• Selections from idealist philosophers (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel)
• F. Schlegel and Novalis
• Tieck, Brentano, and A. v. Arnim
• Droste-Hülshoff
• Stifter and Keller
• Hauptmann and Wedekind
• George and Hofmannsthal
• Benn, Lasker-Schüler, and Trakl
• Selected modern poetry including Celan and Bachmann

Italian Literature

• Machiavelli/Lorenzo de’Medici
• Resistance literature: Pavese, Fenoglio, Elio Vittorini

Arabic Literature

• The  mu‘allaqat
• Qur’an, hadith, and sirah
• Umayyad poetry and prose
• Abu Tammam & al-Buhturi
• al-Mutanabbi
• Abu al-‘Ala’ al-Ma‘arri
• Poetry of al-Andalus
• Alf layla wa-layla
• Selected  maqamat
• Medieval Arabic anthologies
• Mamluk and early Ottoman literature
• Selected neo-classical poetry including Barudi, Shawqi
• Selected prose of the Nahdah including Muwaylihi
• Romantic Poetry in the Mashriq and the Mahjar
• Mid-century Iraqi poetry including al-Mala’ikah, al-Sayyab
• Commitment/Iltizam
• Pioneers in Egypt: Yahya Haqqi, Taha Husayn, Tawfiq al-Hakim
• Later Egyptian fiction: Naguib Mahfouz, Yusuf Idris, Sonallah Ibrahim
• Palestinian Literature after the Nakbah
• The Shi‘r group in Lebanon
• Fiction and poetry after 1967
• Lebanese Civil War Fiction
• The novel in the Maghreb

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Graduate Reading List and Headnotes

Reading lists.

• 19C & 20C Industrial and Environmental Fiction
• OREILLY_Reading List C 20th ce Anglo-Amer Drama
• Science Fiction
• New Media Studies
• Rhetorical Ecologies
• Affect Theory and Embodiment
• Global Capitalist Development list
• OREILLY Reading List B Narrative Theory Mod
• Phenomenology

Time Period

• 19&20C American Fiction list
• 20th 21st C American Novel
• American Fiction 1865-1995
• OREILLY_Reading LIST A Anglo-Amer Mod Novel
• Post-1945 American Literature
• OREILLY List C Head Notes_20th ce Anglo-Amer Drama
• Rhetorical Ecology
• Global Capitalist Development Headnote & List
• OREILLY _ List B Head Notes Theory Narrative Mod Novel
• OREILLY - List A Head Notes_Modernist Novel Narrative Theory
• 19&20C American Fiction
• 20th 21st C American Novels
• OREILLY - List A Head Notes_Anglo-Amer Modernist Novel

1. Can I send this out to anyone? 

Yes, This is supposed to be a resource for any PhD Student to use, and so long as they do not destroy or delete any of the materials that have been freely shared by the generosity of other graduate students, they are welcome to this resource 

2. Can I add my material to this drive?

YES PLEASE. This is intended to be a living document that can be passed down to our colleagues and future incoming PhD students who need some examples of how different people have organized their lists and what material they are looking at. 

Drive Link -  https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xjlTV1yEJf6SWpQ7Q2OxR1ai8gj-M0td?usp=sharing

3. Is this an official department list? 

No. This is a grad student led list that is available for graduate students. The majority of the lists were created by individual graduate students and shared by them. How they have constructed each list was up to the graduate students themselves and are here to serve as an example. It is by no means an official How To list.  

HOW TO USE 

Reading list .

Please clearly title your file and anonymize your file name into your list title. If there are already pre-existing lists with the same name, please add a number at the end. Ex: for me it was 20th 21st C American Lit, Science Fiction, and Affect Theory.  Please identify where each of your ABC list belongs and place them in each corresponding folder of Time Period, Genre, Theory, or Misc Ex: mine (seen above) went into Time Period, Genre, and Theory respectively. 

Please title your headnotes files the same name you have titled your Reading List file so it will correlate easily.  Please identify where each of your headnotes went in the Reading List folder and place them accordingly. 

Contact English

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Ph.d. in literature.

Our PhD students are involved in a range of interdisciplinary and public initiatives. For example, some affiliate with interdisciplinary  Designated Emphases ; others have received grants to create  podcasts , convene interdisciplinary  working groups , or organize and annual graduate student conferences . Each year one student participates in a year-long exchange program with the  Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies  in Mainz, Germany; some have worked as Graduate Assistants and researchers for research centers such as the  Medieval and Early Modern Studies Program , the experimental media  Modlab , and the university’s  Datalab .

Students graduate with the qualitative and quantitative skills necessary for professional research and teaching in English, as well as extensive pedagogical training and a range of teaching experience that includes writing and composition, as well as designing and teaching Introduction to Literature courses. Our Alumni Directory  includes titles of recent dissertations, as well as information about the diverse careers for which the PhD has helped prepare our graduates. There is an option to complete an MA in literature , but it is not a stand-alone program.

Questions? Contact:

Aaron Barstow Graduate Program Coordinator, Ph.D. Program in Literature [email protected]   (530) 752-2738 Pronouns: he/they

Admissions / Online Application

Degree requirements for the Ph.D. program   (links to more details) include 50 units of coursework with at least 44 units taken for a letter grade, proficiency in one foreign language proficiency before degree conferral, preliminary and qualifying examinations, and a dissertation. In addition, there are also opportunities for students to pursue a Designated Emphasis and gain teaching experience.

Coursework Requirements

2 Core Courses (8 units)

• English 200: Introduction to Graduate Studies (taken as Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory)
• One survey course in literary theory (Critical Theory 200A or 200C taken for a grade).

1 Workshop (2 units)

• English 288: Prospectus Workshop (taken as Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory); students may petition to complete this course independently with a Prospectus Adviser.

10 Graduate-level Seminars (40 units)

• All courses must be taken for a grade.
• Five courses must satisfy the breadth requirement (see below).
• Five courses will be comprised of electives (see below).
• Students may count one undergraduate 100-level course as one of their ten required courses.
• Aside from ENL 200, no course graded Satisfactory-Unsatisfactory may count as one of the twelve required seminars. Independent and group studies may not be taken for a grade.

13 Total Graduate Courses (50 units; 44 units taken for a grade)  Additionally, students who enter the Ph.D. program without a MA degree can earn one en route to the Ph.D. degree.

The English Ph.D. requires a reading knowledge of one foreign language before completing the degree; it is not an admissions requirement. This could be satisfied through previous or current coursework or an exam. Any of the following demonstrates proficiency:

Completion within the past eight years of 3 semester-length, or 4 quarter-length courses in a foreign language at the undergraduate level. Students must earn a passing grade, but courses may be taken on a Pass/No Pass basis.

Students may take the Placement Test offered by the UC Davis Language Center , testing out of the language at the intermediate level.

A Pass in the language exam offered in the English Department at the beginning of Fall or Spring quarter each year.

The breadth requirements must be fulfilled by coursework in the Department of English or coursework taught by English Department faculty.  Five courses (of the total 40 units above) will satisfy this requirement. Students must complete two Earlier Period courses, and two Later Period courses, and one Focus course. 

Earlier Period Courses Pre-1800; or Pre-1865 if the course focus is on American literature

Later Period Courses post-1800; or post-1865 if the course focus is on American literature

Focus Course Interdisciplinary, Identity, Genre, Other National, Method, Theory

Faculty and/or the Graduate Advisor may choose to designate a course as fulfilling more than one category, but students may use the course to fulfill only one requirement. For instance, a student could use a course on women in Early Modern literature to satisfy the Earlier Period requirement, or the Focus (Identity) requirement, but not both. A student could use a course on Cold War Drama to satisfy the Later Period requirement or the Focus (Genre) requirement, but not both.

The electives requirement can be fulfilled by actual offered seminars inside or outside the English Department.  Five elective courses will satisfy degree requirements. UWP 390 is acceptable as one of the electives. Also, be aware 299s are ungraded but still count towards overall units. With the approval of the Graduate Adviser, students may also enroll in a graduate class at another University of California campus through the Intercampus Exchange Program .

Students who enter the Ph.D. program with MA coursework from another institution may petition the Graduate Adviser for a Course Waiver up to three of the twelve required seminars; each approved petition will reduce the number of required courses by one. Students may not reduce their coursework to fewer than nine seminars.

Students holding an MA may also petition the Graduate Adviser for course relief for up to five of the breadth requirements; each approved petition allows the student to substitute elective courses. ENL 200 may not be waived or relieved.

For each waiver or relief request, students must submit to the English Graduate Office a Course Waiver or Relief Request form (available in the office) along with the syllabus from the course and the student's seminar paper.

Graduate students may participate in a Designated Emphasis (DE) , a specialization that might include a new method of inquiry or an important field of application which is related to two or more existing Ph.D. programs. The DE is awarded in conjunction with the Ph.D. degree and is signified by a transcript notation; for example, “Ph.D. in Literature with a Designated Emphasis in Native American Studies.”  More information .

In the Spring Quarter of the second year or Fall Quarter of the third year of graduate study, students take a Preliminary Examination in two historical fields and one focus field. Three faculty members conduct the oral examination, each representing one of the fields. Prior to taking the Preliminary Examination, students must have completed the following:

Introduction to Graduate Studies (ENL200)

Survey of Literary Theory (CRI200A or CRI200C)

Four of five Breadth Requirements

Four of five Elective Requirements

Additionally, students select one focus field. A student may devise her/his own focus list in collaboration with two faculty members or, as is more common, choose one from among the following:

Black Studies

Critical Theory

Disability Studies

Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities

Film Studies

Media Technologies

Performance Studies

Postcolonial Theory

Psychoanalysis

Queer Feminisms

Queer Theories

Race and Ethnicity Studies

Science and Literature

Science Fiction

English 299 (Independent Study) is ordinarily used the quarters before the Preliminary Examination to prepare for the oral  examination and is graded Satisfactory-Unsatisfactory. Students may register for ENL 299 under the Graduate Advisor or a faculty member in the field of their exam for the quarter(s) they intend to study.

In the event that the student does not pass the exam, the exam chair will report the decision to the Graduate Adviser, who will work with the committee to decide whether the student should be given a chance to retake the exam (no less than six months later) or whether the student should be dismissed from the program. The Graduate Adviser will report this final decision to the student within 72 hours of the exam’s conclusion.

Any remaining requirements after taking the Preliminary Examination must be completed before scheduling the Qualifying Examination.

Students will select two historical fields from among the following list.   Students who would like to do non-consecutive historical fields need to get prior approval from the Graduate Adviser.  These lists and additional helpful documents can be accessed via our box folder "Preliminary Exam" in the English Graduate Program file.

The Qualifying Examination  happens as early as the spring of the third year and should be taken no later than the spring of the fourth year . The reading list for this exam, which is conducted orally, is constructed by the student in consultation with his or her three-person dissertation committee. When making their lists, students may consult the standard lists for preliminary exams available on the department's Box site. If the student has elected a designated emphasis (DE), materials from that field should also be incorporated into the Qualifying Exam reading list.

Graduate Studies requires the Qualifying Examination Application (GS319) to be submitted at least 30 days prior the the scheduled exam date.

Qualifying Examination Committee  The student, in consultation with their Prospectus Adviser and, if needed, the Graduate Adviser, nominates  four   faculty to serve on the Qualifying Examination Committee: 

• The three proposed Dissertation Committee members 
• One member must be from outside the English graduate program (this may be a member of the Dissertation Committee). 

The QE Committee is responsible for administering the exam. Neither the “Prospectus Adviser” nor the Dissertation Director (in many, though not all, cases these will be same) may be the chair of the QE Committee. Students with a designated emphasis (DE) must include one faculty member affiliated with the DE on both their qualifying and dissertation committee. DE paperwork must be approved before the QE application is submitted. The exam will focus on the Prospectus and the Qualifying Exam reading list. The bibliography of the prospectus will normally overlap substantially with the Qualifying Exam reading list.

The Qualifying Exam Report (GS343) must be submitted withing 72 hours of the exam. Upon successful completion, students receive the Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Plan B (GS321) .

If you are disabled, you are entitled to accommodations for all requirements of the program you’re enrolled in, a process formally handled by the Student Disability Center . We recommend starting the process of coordinating with the SDC early in your graduate school journey, as it can take time for the Center to process information.  We must work with the SDC to implement your accommodations for your exams.  Please indicate your need for accommodations to us as soon as possible, so we can include the Center in our exam scheduling process.  Please notify us by the fourth week of the quarter in which you intend to sit the exam.

The dissertation must be an original work of scholarship and/or interpretation. It may be critical, bibliographical, historical, or biographical in its subject. Students work with a dissertation director and consult with two official readers as well as with other faculty knowledgeable about the project. A dditional details . 

Visit the Health Advisories website for the latest vaccination and mask information and to Report a Case.

Questions about FAFSA and CADAA?

Visit our Financial Aid and Scholarship Office for updated information, workshops and FAQs.

Department of English and Comparative Literature

Reading List

The MFA Comprehensive Exam requires students to write three essays: two in the primary and one in the secondary genre. For the exam you should be prepared to cite approximately 8 works in the primary (approximately 4 per essay) and 4 works in the secondary. In order to be prepared for a variety of essay prompts, students should read widely in both genres—certainly more than the 12 works from the reading lists you will cite on your exam, perhaps 35-50 works or authors. In consultation with their thesis directors, students will devise a personalized list consisting of selections from the lists below as well as additional works of comparable literary quality that they find pertinent to their writing and/or scholarship.

You will confer with your adviser several times during the semester prior to taking the exam to develop your final version of your reading list. Only works on this personalized, advisor-approved list may be cited on the exam.

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Americanah.

Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio.

Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale.

Babel, Isaac. Red Cavalry.

Baldwin, James. Giovanni’s Room; “Sonny’s Blues.”

Bambara, Toni Cade. Gorilla, My Love.

Barth, John. Lost in the Funhouse.

Barthelme, Donald. 60 Stories.

Beatty, Paul, The Sellout.

Bellow, Saul. Herzog; Seize the Day.

Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths.

Bronte, Charlotte, Jane Eyre.

Butler, Octavia, Kindred.

Calvino, Italo. Cosmicomics.

Carter, Angela. The Bloody Chamber; Wise Children.

Carver, Raymond. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

Cheever, John. Stories of John Cheever.

Chekhov, Anton. Anton Chekhov’s Short Stories.

Coetzee, J.M. Waiting for The Barbarians.

Coover, Robert. Pricksongs and Descants.

Danticat, Edwidge. The Farming of the Bones.

DeLillo, Don. White Noise.

Diaz, Junot. Drown.

Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations.

Doctorow, E.L. Ragtime.

Ducornet, Rikki. The Jade Cabinet.

Egan, Jennifer. A Visit from the Goon Squad.

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man.

Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine; LaRose.

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom; As I Lay Dying.

Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary.

Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Gaitskill, Mary. Bad Behavior.

Gibson, William. Neuromancer.

Gordimer, Nadine. July’s People.

Hamson, Knut. Hunger.

Hemingway, Ernest. The Collected Stories.

Hurston, Zora Neale, Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go.

James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady.

James, Marlon. The Book of Night Women.

Johnson, Denis. Jesus’ Son.

Jones, Edward P. All Aunt Hagar’s Children; The Known World.

Joyce, James, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses.

Kafka, Franz. In the Penal Colony; The Metamorphosis.

Lahiri, Jhumpa. Interpreter of Maladies.

Lalami, Laila. The Moor’s Account.

Lee, Chang-Rae. Native Speaker.

LeGuin, Ursula. The Left Hand of Darkness; The Wind’s Twelve Quarters

Li, Yiyun. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.

Lispector, Clarice. The Hour of the Star.

Malamud, Bernard. The Magic Barrel.

Marcom, Micheline Aharonian. Three apples fell from heaven.

McBride, James. The Good Lord Bird.

McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian; The Road.

McCullers, Carson. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

McPherson, James Alan. Hue and Cry.

Mitchell, David. Cloud Atlas.

Moore, Lorrie. Birds of America.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved; Song of Solomon.

Mosley, Walter. Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned.

Mueenuddin, Daniyal. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders.

Munro, Alice. Selected Stories.

Murakami, Haruki. The Elephant Vanishes; The Wind-up Bird Chronicles.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita.

Naylor, Gloria. The Women of Brewster Place.

Nguyen, Viet Thanh. The Sympathizer.

O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried.

O’Connor, Flannery. Complete Stories.

Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient.

Paley, Grace. Collected Stories.

Papadiamantis, Alexandros. The Murderess.

Phillips, Jayne Anne. Black Tickets.

Poe, Edgar Allan. Selected Short Stories.

Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49.

Robinson, Marilynne. Housekeeping.

Roth, Philip. Portnoy’s Complaint.

Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children.

Russell, Karen. St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.

Saramago, José. Blindness.

Saunders, George. Civilwarland in Bad Decline.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis. The Collected Stories.

Smith, Zadie. On Beauty.

Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath.

Stoker, Bram. Dracula.

Strout, Elizabeth. Olive Kitteridge.

Tartt, Donna. The Secret History.

Thuy, Le Thi Diem. The Gangster We Are All Looking For.

Toole, John Kennedy. A Confederacy of Dunces.

Ward, Jesmyn. Salvage the Bones.

Wells, H.G. Time Machine; The War of the Worlds.

Welty, Eudora, Collected Stories.

West, Nathanael. Miss Lonelyhearts.

Wharton, Edith. Age of Innocence.

Whitehead, Colson. The Intuitionist.

Wideman, John Edgar. Sent For You Yesterday.

Williams, Joy. The Quick and the Dead.

Woolf, Virginia, Mrs. Dalloway.

Wright, Richard. Native Son.

Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire.

Ackerman, Diane, A Natural History of the Senses.

Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Saint Augustine. Confessions.

Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son.

Beah, Ishmael. A Long Way Gone.

Berry, Wendel. Recollected Essays.

Bryson, Bill. A Walk in the Woods.

Capote, Truman, In Cold Blood.

Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring.

Cofe, Judith Ortiz, Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood.

Conroy, Frank. Stop-Time.

Conway, Jill Ker. The Road from Coorain.

Didion, Joan, Slouching toward Bethlehem, The White Album, The Year of Magical Thinking.

Dillard, Annie, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, An American Childhood.

Eggers, Dave. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

Ehrenreich, Barbara. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

Ehrlich, Gretel. The Solace of Open Spaces.

Fadiman, Anne. The Spirit Catches you and You Fall Down, At Large and At Small.

Grann, David. Killers of the Flower Moon.

Haley, Alex, and Malcolm X. The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast.

Hersey, John. Hiroshima.

Hillenbrand, Laura, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption.

Hubbell, Sue. A Country Year: Living the Questions.

Karr, Mary, Liar's Club: A Memoir.

Kincaid, Jamaica. My Brother, A Small Place.

Kingsolver, Barbara, High Tide in Tucson.

Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior.

Krakauer, Jon. Into Thin Air.

Least Heat Moon, William. Blue Highways.

Lewis, C.S. Surprised by Joy.

Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac.

Lopez, Barry, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape.

Macdonald, Helen. H is for Hawk.

Markham, Beryl. West with the Night.

Matthiessen, Peter. The Snow Leopard.

McBride, James. The Color of Water.

McCourt, Frank, Angela's Ashes.

McFee, John. Coming into the Country.

Mailer, Norman, The Armies of the Night.

Muir, John. Mountains of California.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory.

Noah, Trevor. Born a Crime.

Norris, Kathleen. Dakota: A Spiritual Geography.

Orwell, George. A Collection of Essays.

Pirzig,Robert. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Rodriguez, Richard. Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez.

Sarton, May. Journal of a Solitude.

Sedaris, David. Me Talk Pretty One Day.

Smith, Patti. Just Kids.

Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays.

Stegner, Wallace, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs.

Stein, Gertrude, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

Steinbeck, John. Travels with Charley, The Log from the Sea of Cortez.

Styron, William, Darkness Visible.

Terkel, Studs. Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression.

Thomas, Lewis. The Lives of a Cell

Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

Wallace, David Foster, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and  Arguments

Welty, Eudora. One Writer’s Beginnings.

White, E.B. Essays of E. B. White.

Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns.

Williams, Terry Tempest. Refuge: An Unnatural History of Time and Place.

Wolfe, Tom, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff.

Wolff, Tobias, This Boy's Life.

Wolff, Virginia, A Room of One's Own.

Wright, Richard. Black Boy

Ai. Vice: New and Selected Poems.

Ali, Agha Shahid Rae. Partly: New and Selected Poems 2001 - 2015.

Aamons, A. R. Selected Poems.

Armantrout, Rae. Partly: New and Selected Poems 2001 - 2015.

Ashbery, John. Selected Poetry.

Auden, W.H. Selected Poems.

Balakian, Peter. Ozone Journal.

Berryman, John. Selected Poems.

Bidart, Frank. Half Light: Collected Poems 1965 - 2016.

Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems, 1927-1979.

Bukowski, Charles. Essential Bukowski Poetry.

Chin, Marilyn. Portrait of Self as Nation: New and Selected Poems.

Clifton, Lucille. Collected Poems.

Collins, Billy. Sailing Alone Around the Room, New and Selected Poems.

Crane, Hart. Ed. Marc Simon. The Complete Poems.

Creeley, Robert. Selected Poems.

Cullen, Countee. Collected Poems.

Dickinson, Emily. Selected Poems.

Doty, Mark. Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems.

Dove, Rita. Selected Poems.

Dunn, Stephen, New and Selected Poems.

Edson, Russell. The Tunnel: Selected Poems of Russell Edson.

Eliot, T. S. Selected Poems.

Frost, Robert. Selected Poems.

Gilbert, Jack. Collected Poems.

Ginsberg, Allen. Selected Poetry: 1947-1995.

Gioia, Dana. 99 Poems: New and Selected.

Hacker, Marilyn. Selected Poems: 1965 - 1990.

Harjo, Joy. How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems 1975 - 2002.

Hass, Robert. The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems.

Hayes, Terrance. American Sonnets for My Once and Future Assassin.

Herrera, Juan Felipe. Half the World in Light: New and Selected Poems.

Hughes, Langston. Selected Poems.

Hugo, Richard. Making Certain It Goes On: Collected Poems.

Jackson, Major. Roll Deep: Poems.

Jeffers, Robinson. The Wild God of the World:An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers.

Justice, Donald. Collected Poems.

Kinnell, Galway. New Selected Poems.

Kizer, Carolyn. Cool, Calm, and Collected.

Koch, Kenneth. Selected Poems.

Komunyakaa, Yusef. Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems.

Kyger, Joanne. As Ever: Selected Poems.

Lee, Li-Young, Behind My Eyes.

Levertov, Denise. Collected Poems.

Levine, Philip. New Selected Poems.Lowell, Robert. Selected Poems.

Long Soldier, Layli. Whereas: Poems.

Major, Clarence. From Now On: New and Selected Poems.

Merrill, James. Selected Poems: 1946-1985.

Merwin, W. S. Migration: New and Selected Poems.

Milosz, Czeslaw. The Collected Poems, 1931-1987.

Moore, Marianne. Complete Poems.

O'Hara, Frank. The Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara.

Philips, Carl. Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986 - 2006.

Plath, Sylvia. Collected Poems.

Pound, Ezra. New Selected Poems and Translations.

Rankine, Claudia. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric.

Rexroth, Kenneth. Complete Poems.

Rich, Adrienne. Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose, Norton Critical Edition.

Roethke, Theodore. The Collected Poems.

Rukeyser, Muriel. Selected Poems.

Simic, Charles. New and Selected Poems.

Smith, Tracy K. Life On Mars: Poems.

Snyder, Gary. No Nature: New and Selected Poems.

Soto, Gary. New and Selected Poems.

Stafford, William. The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems.

Stern, Gerald. This Time: New and Selected Poems.

Stevens, Wallace. The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems.

Tate, James. Selected Poems.

Trethewey, Natasha. Monument: Poems New and Selected.

Whalen, Philip. Selected Poems.

Whitman, Walt. Selected Poems.

Williams, William Carlos. Selected Poems.

Wright, James. Above the River: Complete Poems.

Vuong, Ocean. Night Sky With Exit Wounds.

Yeats, William Butler. Collected Poems.

Young, Kevin. Blue Laws: Collected and Uncollected Poems 1995 - 2015.

Playwriting/Screenwriting

Albee, Edward. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

Beckett, Waiting for Godot.

Brecht, Bertolt. The Good Woman of Setzuan.

Chekhov, Anton. The Cherry Orchard.

Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun.

Ibsen, Henrik. Ghosts.

Ionesco, Eugene. The Bald Soprano.

Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman.

Molière. Tartuffe.

O'Neill, Eugene. Long Day's Journey into Night.

Pinter, Harold. The Birthday Party.

Reza, Yasmina. Art.

Sartre, Jean Paul. No Exit.

Shaw, George Bernard. Candida.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley. The School for Scandal.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet.

Sophocles. Oedipus Rex.

Stoppard, Tom. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

Valdez, Luis. Zoot Suit.

Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Earnest.

Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire.Valdez, Luis. Zoot Suit.

Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie.

Wilson, August. Joe Turner's Come and Gone.

All About Eve.

The Bicycle Thief

Casablanca.

Citizen Kane.

The Grapes of Wrath.

North by Northwest.Rear Window.

Rules of the Game.

Seven Samurai.

Singin' in the Rain.

Stagecoach.

Wild Strawberries.

Overview of PhD Program

Program description.

The English and Comparative Literature Department at UNC-Chapel Hill fosters insightful and imaginative thinking, with the goal of producing excellent scholars and teachers. Our department offers a wide-ranging Ph.D. program, engaging in all historical periods and across several key areas of critical study. We also cater to research interests in both literature and film. The graduate program trains students to become specialists in fields of their own making by guiding them through the various stages of the program, and by offering rigorous coaching when they enter the academic job market.

Our renowned faculty work across a range of fields, engaging in interdisciplinary scholarship and showcasing a diverse set of critical approaches within the discipline. They publish widely and make themselves accessible to their students at the same time. Exceptional mentoring is a hallmark of our program. These relationships assure that as students gain historical breadth in their study of literature or film, they also hone the highly-developed skills in scholarship and criticism necessary for innovative work in their chosen specialized fields.

Course of Study

Prospective and current students will find below a detailed breakdown of the course of study for the PhD in English Literature at UNC. Those with further questions should contact the Director of Graduate Studies, Dr. Kim Stern ( [email protected] ), or the Director of Graduate Admissions, Dr. Taylor Cowdery ( [email protected] ).

Areas of Scholarly Specialization: PhD students in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC specialize in a certain area of research expertise, determined partly by the period of literary history in which the student works (e.g., Renaissance literature, twentieth-century American literature, and so on) and party by the theoretical approach or genre-characteristics of the literature they study (e.g., rhetoric and composition, modern poetry, queer theory, the digital humanities, and so on). Prospective students may want to check the department faculty page (online here ) to make sure that there are faculty in the department who specialize in the area of study that they aim to pursue.

Advising Relationships: Students in the PhD program at UNC-Chapel Hill will forge their closest relationships with a faculty advisor (or advisors). Usually, that advisor will serve as the director of the student’s PhD dissertation: she, he, or they will be the primary point of contact for the student, will guide them in the early stages of their research, and will provide written and oral feedback on their dissertation throughout the writing process. In deciding whether or not UNC is right for them, prospective students may want to reach out to individual faculty members specializing in the student’s area to determine whether or not they would be a good fit for a working relationship.

Elements of the Degree: The PhD in English at UNC-Chapel Hill is a roughly 5-year program that involves several stages.

• Stage One: Students will begin (in years one, two, and part of three) by completing graduate course work. Each student must complete twelve courses, eight of which must be graduate seminars (which require a 20-25 page seminar paper) at a minimum, and four of which may be lower-level graduate courses (which do not necessarily require a 20-25 page paper).
• Stage Two: After completing coursework, graduate students will study for and pass their PhD Qualifying examinations. In preparation for these exams, the student will develop a reading list in consultation with their committee. The PhD examinations consist of two written tests: A Field Examination and a Focus Examination. The Field Exam is designed to cover breadth, to follow a historical trajectory, and to demonstrate a broad knowledge of field(s) that will be relevant to the student’s future work in the field. The Focus Exam allows students to delve into a particular question or set of questions pertinent to his or her doctoral research. Following the written examinations, graduate students will also take an oral examination designed to test the student’s knowledge of the texts listed on their reading lists.
• Stage Three: Once the student has passed the fields exam, the student will compose a prospectus (a document that may vary in length, but that is often 10-15 pages) which will outline the student’s proposed dissertation topic. Provided that the prospectus is approved by their dissertation committee (which will be comprised of their advisor and four other faculty members), the student will then write a dissertation. The dissertation may vary in format and length, but it often consists of four chapters plus an introduction and a conclusion. It is usually at least 80,000 words in length and is often longer.
• Stage Four: Once the dissertation is complete, the student will submit it to their dissertation committee. The committee will then determine whether it meets the standards of the department. If it does, the dissertation will be accepted, and the doctoral degree will be conferred.

Teaching: Graduate students will teach two courses per semester (usually two sections of ENGL 105 or 105i, a writing course, or a section of ENGL 105 and a discussion section for some other course) while they pursue their doctoral degree. Depending upon their educational level (either an undergraduate BA or a graduate MA) at the time of their admission, some students may work in the DLC (or Digital Literacy Lab) for their first year before they begin teaching in the fall of their second year.

Doctoral Funding

All students are fully funded in our program; some with research fellowships, most with teaching fellowships. Typically, graduate students will teach two courses per semester (usually two sections of ENGL 105 or 105i, a writing course, or a section of ENGL 105 and a discussion section for some other course) while they pursue their doctoral degree. Depending upon their educational level (either an undergraduate BA or a graduate MA) at the time of their admission, some students may work in the DLC (or Digital Literacy Lab) for their first year before they begin teaching in the fall of their second year.

Job Placement

Our job placement program provides yet another forum for learning how to hone skills as a scholar with the aid of fellow students and faculty. All graduate students are expected to participate in a professionalization seminar in their first year and in a job-market seminar during the years they are seeking employment, whether in academia or in some other sector. While the majority of our graduates pursue careers in academia, a good number seek other opportunities as well, and the department actively supports them.

Prospective applicants should be aware that the academic job market is very challenging at the present time. This means that any student who aims to pursue a PhD in English Literature, whether at UNC or elsewhere, must be willing to accept the considerable risk, and even the likelihood, that they will not obtain a tenure-track job. That said, many UNC graduates do obtain tenure-track positions, and others have gone on to successful careers as secondary school teachers, non-tenure-track lecturers at universities and colleges, and in other fields (including the non-profit sector, the financial sector, the law, and others). One former student in our program became a business strategist at Google, some have pursued careers in library services, while others have taken teaching positions at local private prep schools. The department does not yet track career outcomes for its graduates, but we are currently in the process of gathering that information.

Admissions Information

Admission to the PhD program at UNC is determined by the GAC (or Graduate Admissions Committee), on which a rotating set of roughly eight or nine English and Comparative Literature faculty members serve each year. All admissions decisions are determined collectively, by the entire committee, and not by individual faculty members.

Please note that it is the policy of the department not to comment upon student candidacies or their application materials before the official review of applications has begun. Information about what a prospective student will need to submit with their application can be found here .

Intellectual and Cultural Community

Our graduate students are also vital to department life, taking leadership roles in our Critical Speaker Series, participating actively in the lectures and seminars held here—and attending the many social events that enhance our intellectual life. Graduate students have multiple opportunities to share their work and refine their professional skills at department colloquia, workshops, and reading groups, including the interdisciplinary medieval and early modern studies colloquium . Chapel Hill is a sunny, beautiful university town, with a very reasonable cost of living and a wealth of libraries, bookstores, historical sites, theaters, music venues, restaurants, and nearby peer institutions. Students here belong to a thriving intellectual community, partly owing to our proximity to the National Humanities Center, North Carolina State University, and Duke University. In addition to the work they do here at UNC, our students regularly perform archival work, attend conferences and symposia, and collaborate with students at these neighboring institutions. Faculty and graduate students in our department also work frequently with our colleagues at King’s College, London, with whom UNC has an official partnership. Graduate study at UNC thus launches graduate students outward from this idyllic Southern setting, positioning them to reach past our borders, producing an expertise defined both locally and globally.

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MA Orals List -- American Literature

MA Orals Reading List -- American Literature

(revised fall 2007)

After you have decided on a period (American Literature to 1865, American Literature 1800-1912, or American Literature since 1855), choose ten of the numbered selections from that period's list. Your choices should reflect both the chronological and generic range within the period. At the same time, your selections should be guided by some principle of organization; this can simply be to discuss the traditionally canonical works, but you can also choose to emphasize some particular area of interest (such as a genre or a literary movement within your period; African-American issues; women authors; popular literature; and so on). After you have made your preliminary choices, you should consult with one of the members of the American Area Committee. He or she will approve your list and help you decide on two critical works suggested by the list below and reflecting your period as well as particular interests.

American Literature to 1865

• Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation
• "The Prologue"
• "Contemplations"
• "The Flesh and the Spirit"
• "Before the Birth of One of Her Children"
• "To My Dear and Loving Husband"
• "In Reference to Her Children"
• "Upon the Burning of Our House"
• "To My Dear Children"
• Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana (Book I; Lives of Bradford, Winthrop, Phips)
• "Sacramental Meditations" Series 1, numbers 1-12; Series 2, numbers 6 and 12
• "God's Determinations Touching His Elect"
• "Huswifery"
• Byrd, History of the Dividing Line
• "Personal Narrative"
• "Narrative of the Surprising Conversions"
• "The Nature of True Virtue"
• "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"
• "A Divine and Supernatural Light"
• The Autobiography
• "The Way to Wealth"
• Woolman, Journal of John Woolman
• Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral
• Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer
• Ashbridge, An Account of the Life of Elizabeth Ashbridge
• The Federalist (numbers 1-10)
• "Rip Van Winkle"
• "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"
• A History of New York, By Diedrich Knickerbocker
• Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, The Autobiography
• "The Philosophy of Composition"
• "The Poetic Principle"
• "The Pit and the Pendulum"
• "The Fall of the House of Usher"
• "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"
• "The Purloined Letter"
• "The Masque of the Red Death"
• "The American Scholar"
• "The Divinity School Address"
• "Self-Reliance"
• "Napoleon, or The Man of the World"
• "Montaigne, or The Skeptic"
• "Each and All"
• "Concord Hymn"
• "The Problem"
• "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience"
• The Scarlet Letter or "Tales of the Province House"
• "Young Goodman Brown"
• "My Kinsman, Major Molineux"
• "The Birthmark"
• "The Artist of the Beautiful"
• "The Minister's Black Veil"
• "Roger Malvin's Burial"
• Moby-Dick or "Bartleby the Scrivener"
• "Benito Cereno"
• "The Encantadas"
• "Billy Budd"
• Brown, Wieland
• Cooper, The Pioneers or The Pilot or Satanstoe
• Leaves of Grass , 1855 edition, or Leaves of Grass, 1860 edition
• Memories of President Lincoln
• Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
• Linda Brent, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
• Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African
• Lee, The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee
• Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
• Brown, Clotel
• Prescott, The Conquest of Mexico

American Literature 1800-1912

• C. B. Brown, Wieland or Edgar Huntly
• Irving, The Sketch-Book
• Cooper, The Pioneers or The Last of the Mohicans
• "Thanatopsis"
• "Inscription for an Entrance to a Wood"
• "To a Waterfowl"
• "A Psalm to Life"
• "The Village Blacksmith"
• "My Lost Youth"
• "The Cross of Snow"
• "Massachusetts to Virginia"
• "Maud Muller"
• "Old Ironsides,"
• "The Chambered Nautilus"
• "Experience"
• two to four additional essays or poems
• "William Wilson"
• "The Tell-Tale Heart"
• four additional tales or poems
• The Scarlet Letter (with "The Custom-House") or "My Kinsman, Major Molineux"
• "Rappaccini's Daughter"
• "Ethan Brand"
• two to four additional tales
• Lowell, A Fable for Critics
• Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century
• Thoreau, Walden
• Melville, Moby-Dick
• Parkman, LaSalle and the Discovery of the Great West or Montcalm and Wolfe
• The Portrait of a Lady or "Daisy Miller"
• "The Aspern Papers"
• "The Real Thing"
• "The Turn of the Screw"
• "The Beast in the Jungle"
• two additional tales
• W. W. Brown, Clotel
• Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1855 edition, or Leaves of Grass, 1892 edition
• Dickinson, a selection of thirty-five to forty representative poems
• Cable, The Grandissimes
• Sport of the Gods
• six to ten selected poems
• The Red Badge of Courage
• "The Open Boat"
• "The Blue Hotel"
• Howells, A Modern Instance or The Rise of Silas Lapham
• Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs
• Chopin, The Awakening
• Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman
• Wharton, The House of Mirth or The Age of Innocence
• Dreiser, Sister Carrie
• Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
• Robinson, Captain Craig and Other Poems or a selection of twenty-five representative poems
• Frost, North of Boston
• DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk
• Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

American Literature since 1855

• Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1855 edition, or Leaves of Grass , 1892 edition
• Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Life on the Mississippi
• James, The Portrait of a Lady or The Ambassadors
• Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham
• Crane , The Red Badge of  Courage
• Robinson, Captain Craig and Other Poems, or a selection of twenty-five representative poems
• Stein, Three Lives
• Pound, Personae, or a sequence of  ten to fourteen selected cantos
• Stevens, Harmonium
• Eliot, Selected Poems 1910-1935
• Williams, Al Que Quiere! or Paterson
• Hughes, a selection of  twenty-five representative poems
• Cather, My Antonia
• Toomer, Cane
• O'Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night
• Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
• Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises or In Our Time
• Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury or Light in August or Absalom, Absalom!
• Moore, Selected Poems (1935)
• Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
• Dos Passos, one novel from the U.S.A. trilogy
• Miller, Tropic of Capricorn
• Wright, Uncle Tom's Children or Native Son
• Brooks, a selection of twenty to twenty-five representative poems
• Tolson, Harlem Gallery
• Hayden, a selection of twenty to twenty-five representative poems
• Larsen, Passing and Quicksand
• Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men or A Death in the Family
• Ellison, Invisible Man
• Roethke, a selection of  twenty-five representative poems
• Bishop, a selection of twenty-five representative poems
• Berryman, a selection of  twenty-five representative poems
• Lowell, Lord Weary's Castle or Life Studies
• Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire
• Miller, Death of a Salesman
• O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find
• Nabokov, Lolita or Pale Fire
• Ginsberg, Howl
• Bellow, Henderson the Rain King
• Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun
• Updike, Rabbit, Run
• Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
• Plath, Ariel
• Baraka, Dutchman or twenty-five representative poems
• Pynchon, Crying of Lot 49 or Gravity’s Rainbow or Vineland
• Shepard, Buried Child
• Silko, Ceremony
• Delillo, White Noise or Underworld
• Morrison, Sula or Beloved
• Wilson, Fences
• McCarthy, Blood Meridian
• Kingston, The Woman Warrior
• Roth, American Pastoral or The Human Stain
• Ammons, Sphere: The Form of a Motion or a selection of twenty-five representative poems
• Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror or a selection of twenty-five representative poems
• Merwin, The Lice or a selection of twenty-five representative poems
• Rich, Diving into the Wreck or a selection of twenty-five representative poems
• Howe, a selection of twenty-five representative poems
• Bernstein, a selection of twenty-five representative poems

Recommended Critical Works

Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad

Phillip Gura, A Glimpse of Sion's Glory: Puritan Racicalism in New England 1620-1660

Jill Lepore: In The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity

Michael Warner, Letters of the Republic

Laurel Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale

Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims:The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority

Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word

Julia Stern, The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel

Richard Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in 19th-Century America

Anna Brickhouse, Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere.

Philip Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel

Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860

Stephen Railton, Authorship and Audience: Literary Performance in the American Renaissance

Deborah McDowell and Arnold Rampersad, Slavery and the Literary Imagination

Eric Lott, Love and Theft

Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body

Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance

Cheryl Walker, Indian Nation: Native American Literature

Paul Gilroy, Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness

Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America

Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace

Donald Pizer, Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature 



Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature 


Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, Cultures of U.S. Imperialism 


Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism

Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism

Marjorie Perloff, The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition.

Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian-American Cultural Politics

Wai-Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time

PhD Program in English Language and Literature

The department enrolls an average of ten PhD students each year. Our small size allows us to offer a generous financial support package. We also offer a large and diverse graduate faculty with competence in a wide range of literary, theoretical and cultural fields. Each student chooses a special committee that works closely along side the student to design a course of study within the very broad framework established by the department. The program is extremely flexible in regard to course selection, the design of examinations and the election of minor subjects of concentration outside the department. English PhD students pursuing interdisciplinary research may include on their special committees faculty members from related fields such as comparative literature, medieval studies, Romance studies, German studies, history, classics, women’s studies, linguistics, theatre and performing arts, government, philosophy, and film and video studies.

The PhD candidate is normally expected to complete six or seven one-semester courses for credit in the first year of residence and a total of six or seven more in the second and third years. The program of any doctoral candidate’s formal and informal study, whatever his or her particular interests, should be comprehensive enough to ensure familiarity with:

• The authors and works that have been the most influential in determining the course of English, American, and related literatures
• The theory and criticism of literature, and the relations between literature and other disciplines
• Concerns and tools of literary and cultural history such as textual criticism, study of genre, source, and influence as well as wider issues of cultural production and historical and social contexts that bear on literature

Areas in which students may have major or minor concentrations include African-American literature, American literature to 1865, American literature after 1865, American studies (a joint program with the field of history), colonial and postcolonial literatures, cultural studies, dramatic literature, English poetry, the English Renaissance to 1660, lesbian, bisexual and gay literary studies, literary criticism and theory, the nineteenth century, Old and Middle English, prose fiction, the Restoration and the eighteenth century, the twentieth century, and women's literature.

By the time a doctoral candidate enters the fourth semester of graduate study, the special committee must decide whether he or she is qualified to proceed toward the PhD. Students are required to pass their Advancement to Candidacy Examination before their fourth year of study, prior to the dissertation.

PhD Program specifics can be viewed here: PhD Timeline PhD Procedural Guide

Special Committee

Every graduate student selects a special committee of faculty advisors who work intensively with the student in selecting courses and preparing and revising the dissertation. The committee is comprised of at least three Cornell faculty members: a chair, and typically two minor members usually from the English department, but very often representing an interdisciplinary field. The university system of special committees allows students to design their own courses of study within a broad framework established by the department, and it encourages a close working relationship between professors and students, promoting freedom and flexibility in the pursuit of the graduate degree. The special committee for each student guides and supervises all academic work and assesses progress in a series of meetings with the students.

At Cornell, teaching is considered an integral part of training in academia. The field requires a carefully supervised teaching experience of at least one year for every doctoral candidate as part of the program requirements. The Department of English, in conjunction with the  John S. Knight Institute for Writing  in the Disciplines, offers excellent training for beginning teachers and varied and interesting teaching in the university-wide First-Year Writing Program. The courses are writing-intensive and may fall under such general rubrics as “Portraits of the Self,” “American Literature and Culture,” “Shakespeare,” and “Cultural Studies,” among others. A graduate student may also serve as a teaching assistant for an undergraduate lecture course taught by a member of the Department of English faculty.

Language Requirements

Each student and special committee will decide what work in foreign language is most appropriate for a student’s graduate program and scholarly interests. Some students’ doctoral programs require extensive knowledge of a single foreign language and literature; others require reading ability in two or more foreign languages. A student may be asked to demonstrate competence in foreign languages by presenting the undergraduate record, taking additional courses in foreign languages and literature, or translating and discussing documents related to the student’s work. Students are also normally expected to provide evidence of having studied the English language through courses in Old English, the history of the English language, grammatical analysis or the application of linguistic study to metrics or to literary criticism. Several departments at Cornell offer pertinent courses in such subjects as descriptive linguistics, psycholinguistics and the philosophy of language.

All PhD degree candidates are guaranteed five years of funding (including a stipend , a full tuition fellowship and student health insurance):

• A first-year non-teaching fellowship
• Two years of teaching assistantships
• A fourth-year non-teaching fellowship for the dissertation writing year
• A fifth-year teaching assistantship
• Summer support for four years, including a first-year summer teaching assistantship, linked to a teachers’ training program at the Knight Institute. Summer residency in Ithaca is required.

Students have also successfully competed for Buttrick-Crippen Fellowship, Society for the Humanities Fellowships, American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), Shin Yong-Jin Graduate Fellowships, Provost’s Diversity Fellowships, fellowships in recognition of excellence in teaching, and grants from the Graduate School to help with the cost of travel to scholarly conferences and research collections.

Admission & Application Procedures

The application for Fall 2024 admission will open on September 15, 2023 and close at 11:59pm EST on December 1, 2023.

Our application process reflects the field’s commitment to considering the whole person and their potential to contribute to our scholarly community.  Applicants will be evaluated on the basis of academic preparation (e.g., performance in relevant courses, completion of substantive, independent research project). An applicant’s critical and creative potential will be considered: applicants should demonstrate interest in extensive research and writing and include a writing sample that reveals a capacity to argue persuasively, demonstrate the ability to synthesize a broad range of materials, as well as offer fresh insights into a problem or text. The committee will also consider whether an applicant demonstrates a commitment to inclusion, equity, and diversity and offers a substantive explanation for why study at Cornell is especially compelling (e.g., a discussion of faculty research and foci). Admissions committees will consider the entire application carefully, including statements and critical writing, as well as transcripts, letters of recommendation, and a resume/cv (if provided). Please view the requirements and procedures listed below, if you are interested in being considered for our PhD in English Language and Literature program.

Eligibility: Applicants must currently have, or expect to have, at least a BA or BS (or the equivalent) in any field before matriculation. International students, please verify degree equivalency here . Applicants are not required to meet a specified GPA minimum.

To Apply: All applications and supplemental materials must be submitted online through the Graduate School application system . While completing your application, you may save and edit your data. Once you click submit, your application will be closed for changes. Please proofread your materials carefully. Once you pay and click submit, you will not be able to make any changes or revisions.

Deadline: December 1st, 11:59pm EST.  This deadline is firm. No applications, additional materials, or revisions will be accepted after the deadline.

PhD Program Application Requirements Checklist

• Academic Statement of Purpose Please describe (within 1000 words) in detail the substantive research questions you are interested in pursuing during your graduate studies and why they are significant. Additionally, make sure to include information about any training or research experience that you believe has prepared you for our program. You should also identify specific faculty members whose research interests align with your own specific questions.  Note that the identification of faculty is important; you would be well advised to read selected faculty’s recent scholarship so that you can explain why you wish to study with them. Do not rely on the courses they teach.  Please refrain from contacting individual faculty prior to receiving an offer of admission.
• Personal Statement Please describe (within 1000 words) how your personal background and experiences influenced your decision to pursue a graduate degree and the research you wish to conduct.  Explain, for example the meaning and purpose of the PhD in the context of your personal history and future aspirations.  Please note that we will pay additional attention to candidates who identify substantial reasons to obtain a PhD beyond the pursuit of an academic position. Additionally, provide insight into your potential to contribute to a community of inclusion, belonging, and respect where scholars representing diverse backgrounds, perspectives, abilities, and experiences can learn (productively and positively) together.
• Critical Writing Sample Your academic writing sample must be between 3,000 and 7,500 words (12-30 pages), typed and double-spaced. We accept excerpts from longer works, or a combination of shorter works.
• Three Letters of Recommendation We require 3 letters of recommendation.  At the time of application, you will be allowed to enter up to 4 recommenders in the system.  Your application will be considered “Complete” when we have received at least 3 letters of recommendation.   Letters of recommendation are due December 1 . Please select three people who best know you and your work. Submitting additional letters will not enhance your application. In the recommendation section of the application, you must include the email address of each recommender. After you save the information (and before you pay/submit), the application system will automatically generate a recommendation request email to your recommender with instructions for submitting the letter electronically. If your letters are stored with a credential service such as Interfolio, please use their Online Application Delivery feature and input the email address assigned to your stored document, rather than that of your recommender’s. The electronic files will be attached to your application when they are received and will not require the letter of recommendation cover page.
• Transcripts Scan transcripts from each institution you have attended, or are currently attending, and upload into the academic information section of the application. Be sure to remove your social security number from all documents prior to scanning. Please do not send paper copies of your transcripts. If you are subsequently admitted and accept, the Graduate School will require an official paper transcript from your degree-awarding institution prior to matriculation.
• English Language Proficiency Requirement All applicants must provide proof of English language proficiency. For more information, please view the  Graduate School’s English Language Requirement .
• GRE General Test and GRE Subject Test are NO LONGER REQUIRED, effective starting with the 2019 application In March 2019, the faculty of English voted overwhelmingly to eliminate all GRE requirements (both general and subject test) for application to the PhD program in English. GRE scores are not good predictors of success or failure in a PhD program in English, and the uncertain predictive value of the GRE exam is far outweighed by the toll it takes on student diversity. For many applicants the cost of preparing for and taking the exam is prohibitively expensive, and the exam is not globally accessible. Requiring the exam narrows our applicant pool at precisely the moment we should be creating bigger pipelines into higher education. We need the strength of a diverse community in order to pursue the English Department’s larger mission: to direct the force of language toward large and small acts of learning, alliance, imagination, and justice.

General Information for All Applicants

Application Fee: Visit the Graduate School for information regarding application fees, payment options, and fee waivers .

Document Identification: Please do not put your social security number on any documents.

Status Inquiries:  Once you submit your application, you will receive a confirmation email. You will also be able to check the completion status of your application in your account. If vital sections of your application are missing, we will notify you via email after the Dec. 1 deadline and allow you ample time to provide the missing materials. Please do not inquire about the status of your application.

Credential/Application Assessments:  The Admission Review Committee members are unable to review application materials or applicant credentials prior to official application submission. Once the committee has reviewed applications and made admissions decisions, they will not discuss the results or make any recommendations for improving the strength of an applicant’s credentials. Applicants looking for feedback are advised to consult with their undergraduate advisor or someone else who knows them and their work.

Review Process:  Application review begins after the submission deadline. Notification of admissions decisions will be made by email by the end of February.

Connecting with Faculty and/or Students: Unfortunately, due to the volume of inquiries we receive, faculty and current students are not available to correspond with potential applicants prior to an offer of admission. Applicants who are offered admission will have the opportunity to meet faculty and students to have their questions answered prior to accepting. Staff and faculty are also not able to pre-assess potential applicant’s work outside of the formal application process. Please email [email protected] instead, if you have questions.

Visiting: The department does not offer pre-admission visits or interviews. Admitted applicants will be invited to visit the department, attend graduate seminars and meet with faculty and students before making the decision to enroll.

Transfer Credits:  Students matriculating with an MA degree may, at the discretion of the Director of Graduate Studies, receive credit for up to two courses once they begin our program.

For Further Information

Contact [email protected]

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PhD opportunities

Discover our PhD opportunities. We offer flexible modes of study designed to fit your needs.

Why study with us

Join a vibrant community and work alongside a thriving group of postdoctoral researchers who recently completed their PhDs.

Fees and funding

The University allocates around 150 entry awards each year in PhD studentships and bursaries, so there are many ways to access PhD funding.

How we support you

You'll receive support from the Department of English Literature and the Doctoral and Researcher College, the University's hub for all doctoral activity.

Meet our experts

Our research

The English Literature Department pursues internationally recognised research across the historical spectrum.

Life in the Department

As a postgraduate research student in the Department of English Literature at Reading, you will be part of a large and vibrant community.

Take the next step

• How to Apply
• Get a prospectus
• Ask us a question
• Learn about the Doctoral and Researcher College

• Schools & departments

English Literature PhD

Awards: PhD

Study modes: Part-time

Funding opportunities

Programme website: English Literature

Upcoming Introduction to Postgraduate Study and Research events

Join us online on the 19th June or 26th June to learn more about studying and researching at Edinburgh.

Choose your event and register

Research profile

Doctorate-level study is an opportunity to expand upon your interests and expertise in a community that really values research; and to make an original, positive contribution to learning in literature and related fields.

As the oldest department of English Literature in the UK, based in one of the largest and most diverse Schools in the University of Edinburgh, we are the ideal place for PhD study.

Our interdisciplinary environment brings together specialists in all periods and genres of literature and literary analysis.

Research excellence

Based on our performance in the latest Research Excellence Framework (REF), over 90 per cent of our research and impact is classed as world-leading and internationally excellent by Research Professional. 69 per cent is graded at the world-leading level – the highest of REF’s four categories.

In Times Higher Education's REF analysis, English at Edinburgh is ranked fifth in the UK (out of more than 90 institutions) for:

• the overall quality of our publications and other outputs
• the impact of our research on people’s lives
• our supportive research environment

Given the breadth and depth of our expertise, we are able to support students wishing to develop research projects in any field of Anglophone literary studies. These include American studies, literary and critical theory, the history of the book, gender and sexuality studies, and global Anglophone literatures - where our specialisms include Pacific, African, South Asian, and African-American writing.

We have particular strengths in each of the main periods of English and Scottish Literature:

• Renaissance/early modern
• Enlightenment
• 21st century
• Contemporary

Emergent research themes in the department include the digital humanities, the economic humanities, the environmental humanities and literature and medicine.

• Explore our range of research centres, networks and projects in English and Scottish Literature

Working with colleagues elsewhere in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, and across the wider University, we are able to support PhD theses crossing boundaries between disciplines and/or languages.

• Be inspired by the range of PhD research in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures

Over the course of your PhD, you’ll be expected to complete an original body of work under the expert guidance of your supervisors leading to a dissertation of usually between 80,000 and 100,000 words.

You will be awarded your doctorate if your thesis is judged to be of an appropriate standard, and your research makes a definite contribution to knowledge.

• Read our pre-application guidance on writing a PhD research proposal

Go beyond the books

Beyond the Books is a podcast from the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures (LLC) that gives you a behind-the-scenes look at research and the people who make it happen.

Listen to a mix of PhD, early career and established researchers talk about their journey to and through academia and about their current and recent research.

• Browse Beyond the Books episodes and hear our research community talk about their work

Programme structure

Find out more about compulsory and optional courses.

We link to the latest information available. Please note that this may be for a previous academic year and should be considered indicative.

Training and support

Between the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures (LLC), the Careers Service, and the Institute for Academic Development (IAD), you’ll find a range of programmes and resources to help you develop your postgraduate skills.

You will also have access to the University’s fantastic libraries, collections and worldwide strategic partnerships.

Part of a community

As part of our research community, you will be immersed in a world of knowledge exchange, with lots of opportunities to share ideas, learning and creative work.

Activities range from talks by visiting speakers and work-in-progress seminars, to reading groups, conferences, workshops, performances, online journals and forums, many of which are led by PhD candidates.

Highlights include student reading for the James Tait Black Prizes, Britain's oldest literary awards which typically involve reading submissions across fiction and biography and advising the judges on the shortlists.

• Read an interview with 2022 James Tait Black reader, Céleste Callen

Our graduates tell us that they value the friendliness of the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures (LLC), the connections they make here and the in-depth guidance they receive from our staff, who are published experts in their field.

A UNESCO World City of Literature, Edinburgh is a remarkable place to study, write, publish, discuss and perform prose, poetry and drama.

Take a PhD with us and you will be based in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures (LLC) in the historic centre of this world-leading festival city.

You will have access to the University’s many literary treasures. These include the libraries of:

• William Drummond
• Lewis Grassic Gibbon
• Hugh MacDiarmid
• Norman MacCaig

The Centre for Research Collections holds the W.H. Auden collection; the Corson Collection of works by and about Sir Walter Scott; and the Ramage collection of poetry pamphlets.

It also holds a truly exceptional collection of early Shakespeare quartos and other early modern printed plays put together by the 19th century Shakespearean James Halliwell-Phillipps, the correspondence of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (the focus of one of the major editorial projects in Victorian studies of the last half-century), and the extensive Laing collection of medieval and early modern manuscripts, as well as letters and papers by - and relating to - authors including:

• Christopher Isherwood
• Rudyard Kipling
• John Middleton Murry
• Walter de la Mare
• George Mackay Brown
• Compton Mackenzie

Many of the University's Special Collections are digitised and available online from our excellent Resource Centre, Computing Labs, and dedicated PhD study space in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures (LLC).

Look inside the PhD study space in LLC

In the city

Our buildings are close to the National Library of Scotland (where collections include the Bute Collection of early modern English drama and the John Murray Archive), Edinburgh Central Library, Scottish Poetry Library, Scottish Storytelling Centre, Writers’ Museum and a fantastic range of publishing houses, bookshops, and theatres.

We have strong links with the Edinburgh International Book Festival, which annually welcomes around 1,000 authors to our literary city.

Entry requirements

These entry requirements are for the 2024/25 academic year and requirements for future academic years may differ. Entry requirements for the 2025/26 academic year will be published on 1 Oct 2024.

A UK masters, or its international equivalent, with a mark of at least 65% in your English literature dissertation of at least 10,000 words.

If your masters programme did not include a dissertation or included a dissertation that was unmarked or less than 10,000 words, you will be expected to produce an exceptional research proposal and personal statement to show your ability to undertake research at the level required by this programme.

International qualifications

Check whether your international qualifications meet our general entry requirements:

• Entry requirements by country
• English language requirements

Regardless of your nationality or country of residence, you must demonstrate a level of English language competency at a level that will enable you to succeed in your studies.

English language tests

We accept the following English language qualifications at the grades specified:

• IELTS Academic: total 7.0 with at least 6.5 in each component. We do not accept IELTS One Skill Retake to meet our English language requirements.
• TOEFL-iBT (including Home Edition): total 100 with at least 23 in each component. We do not accept TOEFL MyBest Score to meet our English language requirements.
• C1 Advanced ( CAE ) / C2 Proficiency ( CPE ): total 185 with at least 176 in each component.
• Trinity ISE : ISE III with passes in all four components.
• PTE Academic: total 70 with at least 62 in each component.

Your English language qualification must be no more than three and a half years old from the start date of the programme you are applying to study, unless you are using IELTS , TOEFL, Trinity ISE or PTE , in which case it must be no more than two years old.

Degrees taught and assessed in English

We also accept an undergraduate or postgraduate degree that has been taught and assessed in English in a majority English speaking country, as defined by UK Visas and Immigration:

• UKVI list of majority English speaking countries

We also accept a degree that has been taught and assessed in English from a university on our list of approved universities in non-majority English speaking countries (non-MESC).

• Approved universities in non-MESC

If you are not a national of a majority English speaking country, then your degree must be no more than five years old* at the beginning of your programme of study. (*Revised 05 March 2024 to extend degree validity to five years.)

Find out more about our language requirements:

Fees and costs

Scholarships and funding, featured funding.

There are a number of scholarship schemes available to eligible candidates on this PhD programme, including awards from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Please be advised that many scholarships have more than one application stage, and early deadlines.

• Find out more about scholarships in literatures, languages and cultures

Other funding opportunities

Search for scholarships and funding opportunities:

• Search for funding

Further information

• Phone: +44 (0)131 650 4086
• Contact: [email protected]
• School of Literatures, Languages & Cultures
• 50 George Square
• Central Campus
• Programme: English Literature
• School: Literatures, Languages & Cultures
• College: Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences

Select your programme and preferred start date to begin your application.

PhD English Literature - 6 Years (Part-time)

Application deadlines.

Due to high demand, the school operates a number of selection deadlines. We will make a small number of offers to the most outstanding candidates on an ongoing basis, but hold the majority of applications until the next published selection deadline when we will offer a proportion of the places available to applicants selected through a competitive process.

Deadlines for applicants applying to study in 2024/25:

• How to apply

You must submit two references with your application.

The online application process involves the completion of a web form and the submission of supporting documents.

For a PhD programme, you should include:

• a sample of written work of about 3,000 words (this can be a previous piece of work from an undergraduate or masters degree)
• a research proposal - a detailed description of what you hope to achieve and how
• Pre-application guidance

Before you formally apply for this PhD, you should look at the pre-application information and guidance on the programme website.

This will help you decide if this programme is right for you, and help us gain a clearer picture of what you hope to achieve.

The guidance will also give you practical advice for writing your research proposal – one of the most important parts of your application.

Find out more about the general application process for postgraduate programmes:

PhD Program

The English Department will begin reviewing completed MA applications on January 1, 2024 and will continue to accept them until the March 15, 2024 deadline

BU PhD Program Profile metrics

Requirements for the PhD

In the PhD Program, students move toward specialization in a particular area of study. The requirements include:

• Sixteen graduate-level courses, including a required eight courses taken in the first year.
• A successful review by the Graduate Committee upon completion of the first year.
• Demonstration of a reading knowledge of one foreign language at an advanced level or two foreign languages at an intermediate level – including one language completed as part of the first year.
• Completion of a Qualifying Oral Examination
• Submission and approval of a Dissertation Prospectus
• Completion and defense of a Ph.D. dissertation

Please note that successful completion of requirements in the first year earns each Ph.D. student an M.A. degree as a matter of course.

Satisfactory Academic Progress for PhD Students

The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Department of English guarantee five full years (12 months each) of financial support for PhD students who maintain Satisfactory Academic Progress . This support will be in the form of Teaching Fellowships or Graduate Fellowships. All requirements for the doctorate, including dissertation, must be completed within seven years (exceptions require a petition to GRS). A leave of absence of up to two semesters is permitted for appropriate cause.

Given these time constraints, students should work closely with their advisers and dissertation readers to devise an efficient schedule for meeting all benchmarks. Faculty and students share responsibility for adhering closely to this schedule.

The following achievements are required to maintain Satisfactory Academic Progress:

Students must maintain a GPA of 3.0 or higher, have no more than 2 failing grades (lower than B- or an incomplete grade older than 12 months), and pass qualifying exams and other milestones on the following recommended schedule:

Year 1:      Eight graduate courses – for the M.A. degree / first foreign language requirement.

Year 2:      Continue course work and study toward the completion of the language requirement.

Year 3:     Complete course work and language requirements. In the fall of the third year, students take the pro-seminar (EN794 A1), in which they develop their Qualifying Oral Examination rationale and reading list, and form an oral exam committee.

Year 4:      Fall: Students should take the Qualifying Exam early in the Fall semester.

Spring: Prospectus submitted and dissertation writing begins.

Years 5+ : Dissertation.

Additional departmental details regarding all stages of the degree can be found in the graduate handbook

For GRS college policies and general information please see the Graduate Bulletin

Robert Chodat, Director of Graduate Studies

Yale Department of Classics

Ph.D Reading Lists

Ancient History

Classical Philology Greek reading list for students entering 2018 and earlier

Classical Philology Greek reading list for students entering 2019 and later

Classical Philology Latin

Philosophy and Classics Joint Program (Classics Track)

Philosophy and Classics Joint Program (Philosophy Track)