Literature Before 1660
Anonymous – Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1375)
Aristotle – Poetics (c. 335 BC)
Bacon, Francis – The New Atlantis (1624; English Version 1627)
Chaucer, Geoffrey – Canterbury Tales: The General Prologue, The Miller’s Prologue and Tale, The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, The Man of Law’s Prologue and Tale, The Nun’s Priest’s Prologue and Tale, The Prioress’s Prologue and Tale (c. 1380)
Donne, John – “The Canonization”, “The Extasie”, “The Flea”, “Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star”, “A Valediction: Forbidden Mourning”. Holy Sonnets: “At the Round Earth’s Imagin’d Corners”, “Death Be Not Proud”, “Batter My Heart” (Most published posthumously in 1633)
King James Bible – Genesis, Song of Solomon, I Corinthians, Revelation
Langland, William – The Vision of Piers Plowman (B text), passus 1-7 (c. 1360-1390)
Kempe, Margery – The Book of Margery Kempe (1438)
Marlowe, Christopher – Edward II (c. 1593)
Milton, John – Paradise Lost books 1-4, 9, 10 (1667); L’Allegro, Il Penseroso (c. 1631); Lycidas (1637)
More, Thomas – Utopia (1516)
Plato – Republic, book 10 (c. 380 BC)
Shakespeare, William – Henry IV part 1 (1597), As You Like It (1599), King Lear (1604), The Tempest (1610), Sonnets 12, 15, 18, 55, 106, 130
Spenser, Edmund – Faerie Queene book 1, and “A Letter of the Author to Sir Walter Raleigh” (1590-96).
English and American Literature, 1660-1800
Behn, Aphra – Oroonoko (1688)
Blake, William – The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93)
Defoe, Daniel – Robinson Crusoe (1722)
Fielding, Henry – Joseph Andrews (1742)
Franklin, Benjamin - Autobiography (1793)
Johnson, Samuel – Rasselas (1759), Rambler no. 4 and 60 (1750)
Pope, Alexander – The Rape of the Lock (1712-14)
Richardson, Samuel – Pamela (1740)
Swift, Johnathan – Gullivers Travels (1726), “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift” (1739)
Wheatley, Phillis – Selections from Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1722): “To Maecenas”, “To The University of Cambridge, In New England”, “On Being Brought from Africa to America”, “On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield”, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence”, “To S.M., a Young African Painter, on Seeing his Works”, “To His Excellency George Washington”
Wollstonecraft, Mary - A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792)
English and American Literature 1800-1900
Arnold, Matthew - “Dover Beach” (written c. 1851, published 1867); “The Buried Life”
(1852); “Empedocles on Etna” (1852).
Austen, Jane – Emma (1815)
Browning, Robert - “Porphyria’s Lover” (1836); “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister”
(1846); “My Last Duchess” (1846); “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower
Came” (1855).
Byron, George Gordon, Lord – Don Juan, cantos 1 and 2 (1819)
Carlyle, Thomas - Selections from Sartor Resartus (1834): “The Everlasting No,” “Centre
of Indifference,” “The Everlasting Yea,” “Natural Supernaturalism.”
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor – The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798-1817), Kubla Khan (1816), Biographia Literaria (1817) chapters 13, 14, 17.
Crane, Stephen - “The Open Boat” (1898); “The Pace of Youth” (1898); “The Monster”
(1899).
Dickens, Charles - Great Expectations (1860–61).
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845 version).
Hopkins, Gerard Manley - Poems, 1876–89: “God’s Grandeur,” “Spring,” “Pied Beauty,”
“Hurrahing in Harvest,” “The Windhover,” “Spring and Fall,” “As
Kingfishers Catch Fire,” “(Carrion Comfort),” “No Worst, There Is
None,” “To Seem the Stranger Lies My Lot, My Life,” “My Own
Heart Let Me Have More Pity On,” “Tom’s Garland,” “That Nature
Is a Heraclitean Fire,” “To R.B.”
Keats, John - “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (1816); “On Sitting Down
to Read King Lear Once Again” (written 1818, published 1837); “La
Belle Dame sans Merci” (1820); “Ode on Melancholy” (written 1819,
published 1820).
Marti, Jose - “Our America” (1891); “The Truth about the United States” (1894);
“Coney Island” (1881).
Melville, Herman - “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” (1853); “Benito
Cereno” (1855).
Mill, John Stuart - On the Subjection of Women (written 1860, published 1869).
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein (the 1818 text), with the Introduction of 1831.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe - “Ode to the West Wind” (1819); “Adonais” (1821).
Tennyson, Alfred Lord - “The Lady of Shalott” (written 1832, published 1842); “Ulysses”
(written 1833, published 1842).
Thoreau, Henry David – “Civil Disobedience” (1849).
Twain, Mark - A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889).
Whitman, Walt - “Song of Myself” (1882); 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass.
Wordsworth, William - “My Heart Leaps Up,” “Strange Fits of Passion,” “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,”
“Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” “The World Is Too Much with Us”; Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800).
Literature Since 1900
Achebe, Chinua – Things Fall Apart (1959).
Anzaldua, Gloria - Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987).
Atwood, Margaret - The Handmaid’s Tale (1985); selections from Second Words (1982):
“Amnesty International: An Address,” “An End to Audience?”
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot (written 1948–49, published 1953).
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness (1902).
Eliot, T.S. - The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915); “Tradition and the
Individual Talent” (1922).
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man (1953).
Faulkner, William - Absalom, Absalom! (1936).
Frost, Robert - “Home Burial,” “After Apple Picking,” “Neither Far Out,” “Design,”
“Mending Wall,” “The Oven Bird,” “Never Again Would Birds’
Song.”
Greene, Graham - The Quiet American (1955).
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms (1929).
Hughes, Langston - “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “Negro,” “Dream Variations,” “I,
Too,” “The Weary Blues,” “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain,” “Bad Luck Card,” “Johannesburg Mines,”
“Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria,” “The English,” “Drum,”
“Goodbye Christ,” “The Same,” “Air Raid over Harlem,” “Big
Meeting,” “When the Negro Was in Vogue,” “Freedom Train,”
“Harlem,” “Thank You, Ma’m,” “Radioactive Red Caps” (1921–61).
Miller, Arthur – The Crucible (1953).
Morrison, Toni – The Song of Solomon (1977).
Naipaul, V.S. – A Bend in the River (1961).
Plath, Sylvia - Selections from Ariel (1965): “Lady Lazarus,” “Cut,” “Ariel,” “The
Applicant,” “Death & Co.,” “Daddy.”
Stevens, Wallace - “Sunday Morning,” “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “The Snow
Man,” “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” “Of Modern Poetry,” “Notes
Toward a Supreme Fiction.”
Thiong’o, Ngugi wa - Petals of Blood (1977); “On the Abolition of the English Department.”
Vonnegut, Kurt - Slaughterhouse-Five