Medieval

Beowulf Sir Gawain and the Green Knight : “General Prologue”; “The Knight’s Tale”; “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale”; “The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale” from Julian of Norwich: A Book of Showings (Revelations of Divine Love) Long Text Chapters 1-11, 25-28, 50-63, 83-86 (Modernized version by Elizabeth and A. C. Spearing in the Penguin edition recommended.) Everyman

Renaissance and Seventeenth Century

William Shakespeare: Twelfth Night Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker: The Roaring Girl Sir Philip Sidney: Astrophil and Stella, Sonnets: 1 (“Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show”), 5 (“It is most true that eyes are formed to serve”), 6 (“Some lovers speak, when they their muses entertain”), 45 (“Stella oft sees the very face of woe”), 52 (“A strife is grown between Virtue and Love”), 74 (“I never drank of Aganippe well”), 81 (“O kiss, which dost those ruddy gems impart”), 108 (“When Sorrow (using mine own fire’s might)”) John Donne: “The Good Morrow,” “The Sun Rising,” “The Canonization,” “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” “The Ecstacy,” “Elegy: To His Mistress Going to Bed,” “Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward” Aemilia Lanyer: “The Description of Cookham” John Milton: Paradise Lost

Restoration & Eighteenth Century

William Congreve: The Way of the World Aphra Behn: Oroonoko Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels Fanny Burney: Evelina John Gay: The Beggar's Opera Richard B. Sheridan: The School for Scandal

Nineteenth-Century British

William Wordsworth: 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, “Tintern Abbey,” “Ode: Intimations of Mortality” S.T. Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” John Keats: “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode on Melancholy” Mary Shelley: Frankenstein Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice Robert Browning: “My Last Duchess” Charles Dickens: Great Expectations Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest

TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITISH/POSTCOLONIAL

W. B. Yeats: “September 1913,” “Easter 1916,” “The Second Coming,” Sailing to Byzantium,” “Leda and the Swan” “Among School Children” Seamus Heaney: “Digging,” “Punishment,” “The Strand at Lough Beg” Derek Walcott: “A Far Cry from Africa,” “Ruins of a Great House,” “The Fortunate Traveller” Wole Soyinka: Death and the King’s Horseman James Joyce: “Araby,” “The Dead” Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway E. M. Forster: A Passage to India

AMERICAN LITERATURE PRIOR TO 1860

Benjamin Franklin: Autobiography, Book II Phillis Wheatley: “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” “To His Excellency General Washington,” “To the University of Cambridge, in New England” Henry David Thoreau: From Walden: “Economy,” “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” “Higher Laws,” “Spring,” “Conclusion” Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Young Goodman Brown,” “My Kingsman, Major Molineux” Frederick Douglass: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin Walt Whitman: “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”

AMERICAN LITERATURE 1860 TO PRESENT

Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Emily Dickinson: “I never lost as much but twice--,” “Wild Nights—Wild Nights,” “I like a Look of Agony,” “I Felt a Funeral in my Brain,” “After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” “Publication—is the Auction” Henry James: Portrait of a Lady Robert Frost: “After Apple Picking,” “Home Burial,” “Design,” “Desert Places” Flannery O’Connor: “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” “Good Country People,” “Parker’s Back” Toni Morrison: The Bluest Eye Louise Erdrich: Love Medicine!