Medieval
Beowulf
Wanderer
Battle of Maldon
Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People: “Account of the Poet Caedmon” and “The
Conversion of King Edwin”
The Dream of the Rood
Lyrics: “Western Wind,” “Summer Is Icumen In,” “Adam Lay Ybounden”
Ballads: “Edward, Edward,” “Sir Patrick Spens,” “Lord Randall”
Langland: Piers Plowman (Passus 18)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Chaucer: General Prologue, The Miller’s Prologue and Tale, The Wife of Bath’s Prologue,
Words of the Host to the Physician and Pardoner, Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale from
The Canterbury Tales; Troilus and Criseyde (to be read in Middle English)
Chaucer: Lyrics: “Truth” (“Balade of Bon Conseyl”) and “Complaint to His Purse”
Julian of Norwich: A Book of Showings, from Chapters 3, 4, 5, 7, 27, 58-61, 86 (Norton
Anthology selections)
Margery Kempe: The Book of Margery Kempe, from Chapters 1, 2, 11, 18, 28, 52, 76 (Norton
Anthology selections)
The Second Shepherds’ Play
Everyman
Malory: Morte Darthur, Caxton Books XX, XXI
Renaissance and Seventeenth Century
John Skelton: “The Tunning of Elinour Rumming,” “Phillip Sparrow”
Thomas Wyatt: “Whoso list to hunt,” “They flee from me,” “My lute, awake!,” “Mine own John
Poins”
Thomas More: Utopia
Sir Philip Sidney: Astrophil and Stella (Sonnets 1, 2, 5, 6, 15, 21, 31, 39, 41, 45, 49, 52, 53, 71,
74, 81)
Edmund Spenser: The Faerie Queene (“Letter to Raleigh” and Book I), Amoretti (Sonnets 1, 34,
37, 67, 68, 75, 79), Epithalamion
Christopher Marlowe: Doctor Faustus
William Shakespeare: Sonnets 3, 18, 20, 29, 30, 55, 60, 71, 73, 94, 116, 129, 130, 138, 144, 146
Shakespeare: Hamlet, King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1 Henry IV, Twelfth Night, The
Tempest
Mary Wroth: Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (Sonnets 1, 16, 39, 40, 68, 77, 103)
John Webster: The Duchess of Malfi
Ben Jonson: Volpone, “Song: To Celia,” “To the Memory of Shakespeare,” “Inviting a Friend
to Supper,” “To Penshurst,” “To Heaven,” “Ode to Cary and Morison”
John Donne: “The Good Morrow,” “The Sun Rising,” “The Indifferent,” “The Canonization,”
“The Flea,” “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” “The Ecstasy,” “Elegy 19,” “Good
Friday, 1613, Riding Westward,” Holy Sonnets 5, 7, 10, 14, Meditation 17
Robert Herrick: “Delight in Disorder,” “Corinna’s Going A-Maying,” “To the Virgins,” “Upon
Julia’s Clothes”
George Herbert: “Easter Wings,” “Prayer (1),” “Jordan (1),” “The Collar,” “The Pulley,” “Love
(3)”
Andrew Marvell: “To His Coy Mistress,” “The Garden,” Upon Appleton House
Francis Bacon: Essays (“Of Truth,” “Of Great Place,” “Of Superstition,” “Of Studies”)
Sir Thomas Browne: Religio Medici
John Milton: Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, Areopagitica, “Lycidas,” “L’Allegro,” “Il
Penseroso”
Restoration and Eighteenth Century
John Dryden: Mac Flecknoe, Absalom and Achitophel, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy
William Congreve: The Way of the World
Alexander Pope: Essay on Criticism, The Rape of the Lock, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: “The Lover: A Ballad”
Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels, “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift,” “A Modest Proposal”
John Gay: The Beggar’s Opera
Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
Henry Fielding: Tom Jones
Thomas Gray: “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton
College”
William Collins: “Ode on the Poetical Character,” “Ode to Evening”
Oliver Goldsmith: The Deserted Village
Samuel Johnson: Rasselas, The Vanity of Human Wishes, “Pope” and “Milton” from Lives of the
Poets
James Boswell: Life of Johnson (Hibbert’s Abridged Edition)
Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy
Robert Burns: “Address to the Deil,” “Holy Willie’s Prayer,” “Tam O’Shanter”
Nineteenth Century
William Blake: Songs of Innocence and Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
William Wordsworth: “Tintern Abbey,” “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” “Resolution and
Independence,” “Elegiac Stanzas,” Michael, The Prelude I-II, Preface to the Second
Edition of Lyrical Ballads
S. T. Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, “Kubla Khan,” “Frost at
Midnight,” “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” “Dejection: An Ode”
Lord Byron: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, III-IV, Manfred, Don Juan, I-IV
Sir Walter Scott: Waverley
P. B. Shelley: “Ode to the West Wind,” “The Cloud,” “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” “To a Sky-
Lark,” Adonais, “Mont Blanc”
John Keats: Odes (“Nightingale,” “Grecian Urn,” “Melancholy”), Sonnets (“Chapman’s
Homer,” “Bright Star,” “When I Have Fears”), The Eve of St. Agnes, “To Autumn”
William Hazlitt: “On Gusto,” “My First Acquaintance with Poets”
Charles Lamb: “Old China,” “Dream Children”
Thomas De Quincey: “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice
Thomas Carlyle: Sartor Resartus
Lord Tennyson: “The Lady of Shalott,” “The Lotos-Eaters,” “Ulysses,” “Tithonus,” “Locksley
Hall,” In Memoriam
Robert Browning: “My Last Duchess,” “Andrea del Sarto,” “Fra Lippo Lippi,” “The Bishop
Orders His Tomb,” “‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,’” “Abt Vogler”
E. B. Browning: Sonnets from the Portuguese (21, 22, 32, 43), Aurora Leigh, Books 1, 2, 5
John Ruskin: “The Roots of Honor” from Unto This Last, “The Nature of Gothic” from The
Stones of Venice
Matthew Arnold: “Memorial Verses,” “The Scholar Gypsy,” “Dover Beach,” “Stanzas from the
Grande Chartreuse,” “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” “The Study of
Poetry”
A. C. Swinburne: “Hymn to Proserpine,” “The Garden of Proserpine,” “The Triumph of Time”
Christina Rossetti: “Goblin Market”
G. M. Hopkins: “God’s Grandeur,” “The Windhover,” “Pied Beauty,” “Spring and Fall,”
“Carrion Comfort,” “No Worst, There Is None,” “I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not
Day,” “Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord”
Lewis Carroll: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights
Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre
Charles Dickens: Great Expectations
George Eliot: Middlemarch
Anthony Trollope: Barchester Towers
W. M. Thackeray: Vanity Fair
Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest
Twentieth Century
Thomas Hardy: “Hap,” “The Darkling Thrush,” “The Convergence of the Twain,”
“Neutral Tones,” “Channel Firing”
W. B. Yeats: “The Stolen Child,” “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” “Adam’s Curse,” “September
1913,” “The Wild Swans at Coole,” “Easter 1916,” “The Second Coming,” “Sailing to
Byzantium,” “Leda and the Swan,” “Among School Children,” “Byzantium,” “A Prayer
for My Daughter,” “Long-Legged Fly,” “Lapis Lazuli,” “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,”
“Under Ben Bulben”
Wilfred Owen: “Dulce et Decorum Est,” “Strange Meeting,” “Disabled”
D. H. Lawrence: “Piano,” “Snake,” “Bavarian Gentians,” “The Ship of Death”
W. H. Auden: “Musee des Beaux Arts,” “Lullaby,” “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” “In Praise of
Limestone,” “The Shield of Achilles”
Dylan Thomas: “The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower,” “Do Not Go
Gentle into That Good Night,” “A Refusal to Mourn...,” “Fern Hill”
Philip Larkin: “Church Going,” “High Windows”
Ted Hughes: “Pike,” “Examination at the Womb-Door,” “Theology”
Seamus Heaney: “Digging,” “Punishment,” “The Strand at Lough Beg”
G. B. Shaw: Arms and the Man
Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot
J. M. Synge: The Playboy of the Western World
James Joyce: “Araby,” “The Dead,” A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness
D. H. Lawrence: Women in Love
Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse
E. M. Forster: A Passage to India
Harold Pinter: The Homecoming
Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Derek Walcott: “As John to Patmos,” “A Far Cry from Africa,” “Ruins of a Great House,”
“North and South”
Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart
Salman Rushdie: Satanic Verses
American Literature Prior to 1860
American Indian Myths and Tales: Pima story of the creation and flood; Winnebago trickster
cycle (Norton Anthology selections)
William Bradford: Of Plymouth Plantation (Norton Anthology selections)
John Winthrop: “A Model of Christian Charity”
Mary Rowlandson: Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration
Anne Bradstreet: “To My Dear and Loving Husband,” “Before the Birth of One of Her
Children,” “In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet,” “In Memory of My
Dear Grandchild Anne Bradstreet,” “On My Dear Grandchild Simon Bradstreet”
Edward Taylor: selections from the Preparatory Meditations, including “Prologue,” First
Series—22, Second Series—26
Jonathan Edwards: “Personal Narrative,” “A Divine and Supernatural Light,” “Sinners in the
Hands of an Angry God”
Benjamin Franklin: Autobiography, Books I & II
Phillis Wheatley: “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” “To His Excellency General
Washington”
St. Jean de Crevecoeur: “What Is an American?”
Washington Irving: “Rip Van Winkle”
James Fenimore Cooper: The Pioneers
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature, “The American Scholar,” “The Divinity School Address”
Henry David Thoreau: Walden, “Civil Disobedience”
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter, “Young Goodman Brown,” “My Kinsman, Major
Molineux,” “The Minister’s Black Veil”
Edgar Allan Poe: “The Black Cat,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Fall of the House of
Usher,” “The Philosophy of Composition,” “To Helen,” “The Raven,” “Israfel”
Frederick Douglass: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
Harriet Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Chapters 1, 7, 10, 14, 21, 41
Herman Melville: Moby-Dick, “Bartleby the Scrivener,” “The House-Top,” “The Maldive
Shark,” Billy Budd
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: “My Lost Youth,” “The Arsenal at Springfield,” “The Fire of
Driftwood,” “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport”
Walt Whitman: Song of Myself, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” “Out of the
Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “The Wound Dresser”
1860 to Present
Mark Twain: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Emily Dickinson: poems numbered 67, 125, 130, 214, 258, 280, 303, 328, 341, 435, 448, 449,
465, 632, 657, 712, 754, 986, 1071, 1129, 1732
Henry James: Portrait of a Lady, “Daisy Miller,” “The Beast in the Jungle”
Sarah Orne Jewett: “A White Heron,” “The Foreigner”
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: “A New England Nun,” “The Revolt of Mother”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: “The Yellow Wallpaper”
Booker T. Washington: Up From Slavery, Chapters I, XIV
W. E. B. Dubois: The Souls of Black Folk, Chapters I, III
Stephen Crane: The Red Badge of Courage, “The Open Boat,” “The Blue Hotel,” “The Bride
Comes to Yellow Sky”
Kate Chopin: The Awakening
Edith Wharton: The Age of Innocence
Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie
Willa Cather: “Neighbour Rosicky”
Robert Frost: “After Apple-Picking,” “Home Burial,” “Birches,” “Design,” “Desert Places,”
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
T. S. Eliot: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” The Waste Land, “Tradition and the
Individual Talent”
Ezra Pound: “In a Station of the Metro,” “To Whistler, American,” “A Pact,” “Portrait d’une
Femme,” “The River-Merchant’s Wife,” Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
William Carlos Williams: “Spring and All,” “The Red Wheelbarrow,” “This Is Just To Say,”
“The Widow’s Lament in Springtime,” “The Dance,” “Tract,” “The Yachts,” “To Elsie”
Wallace Stevens: “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” “Sunday Morning,” “Anecdote of the Jar,”
“The Snow Man,” “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman,” “The Emperor of Ice Cream,”
“The Idea of Order at Key West,” “Of Modern Poetry”
Langston Hughes: “Theme for English B,” “Epilogue (I, too, sing America),” “Harlem”
Hart Crane: The Bridge
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises, “Hills Like White Elephants,” “The Short Happy Life
of Francis Macomber”
William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury, “A Rose for Emily,” “Barn Burning,” “The Old
People”
Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God
Eugene O'Neill: Long Day’s Journey into Night
Eudora Welty: “A Worn Path,” “Petrified Man”
Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire
Flannery O'Connor: “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “Good Country People,” “Revelation,”
“Everything That Rises Must Converge,” “Parker’s Back”
Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man
Robert Lowell: “The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket,” “Skunk Hour,” “For the Union Dead,”
Allen Ginsberg: “Howl”
Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman
Elizabeth Bishop: “The Fish,” “Questions of Travel,” “The Armadillo,” “In the Waiting Room,”
“Crusoe in England”
Richard Wright: Native Son
James Baldwin: “Sonny’s Blues”
Toni Morrison: Beloved
Joyce Carol Oates: “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been”
John Updike: “A & P”
Philip Roth: “The Conversion of the Jews,” “Defender of the Faith”
Sylvia Plath: “Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus”
N. Scott Momaday: The Way to Rainy Mountain
Leslie Marmon Silko: Ceremony
Louise Erdrich: “Fleur”
Don DeLillo: White Noise
rev. 4/05