2005 READING LIST

I. BRITISH LITERATURE

1) Geoffrey Chaucer, from The Canterbury Tales: "General Prologue," "Wife of Bath’s Prologue,"
"Wife of Bath’s Tale"

2) William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Sonnets 18, 130

3) John Donne, "The Canonization," "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning," "The Flea," "The Bait"

4) John Milton, Paradise Lost, Books 1, 2, 9

5) William Congreve, The Way of the World

6) William Wordsworth, "Tintern Abbey," "Sonnet: The World is Too Much With Us"

7) John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn"

8) Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

9) Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

10) Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

11)Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Ulysses," "The Lady of Shalott," "The Charge of the Light Brigade," "Locksley
Hall"

12) Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

13) James Joyce, Dubliners

14) W. B. Yeats, "Easter 1916," "Leda and the Swan," The Second Coming," "Among School Children," "Sailing to Byzantium"


15) W. H. Auden, "Musée des Beaux Arts," "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," "September 1, 1939," "In Praise of
Limestone"

16) Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

17) Seamus Heaney, "Digging," "Act of Union," "Personal Helicon," "Bogland," "The Tollund Man"

II. American Literature

1) Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature," "The Poet," "Self-Reliance"

2) Nathaniel Hawthorne, Scarlet Letter

3) Henry David Thoreau, Walden

4) Herman Melville, "Billy Budd," "Bartleby the Scrivener"

5) Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

6) Frederick Douglass, The Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass

7) Henry James, Portrait of a Lady

8) Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

9) Emily Dickinson, "I taste a liquor never brewed" [214], "The Soul selects her own Society" [303],
"After a great pain, a formal feeling comes" [341], "I heard a Fly buzz when I died" [465], "I’ve seen a
Dying Eye" [547], "Because I could not stop for Death" [712]

10) Kate Chopin, The Awakening

11) F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

12) William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

13) T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," The Waste Land

14) Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

15) Wallace Stevens, "Idea of Order at Key West," "Emperor of Ice Cream," "Sunday Morning"

16) Toni Morrison, Beloved

17) Sam Shepard, True West

18) Linda Hogan, Solar Storms

III. Critical/Theoretical Works

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

William Wordsworth, "Preface to Lyrical Ballads"

Henry James, "The Art of Fiction"

David Lodge, Nice Work

PDF copy of Prof. Madden's "Taking Notes" handout here.