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ApplyGRADUATE COMPREHENSIVE EXAMINATION READING LIST SELECTED BY THE GRADUATE FACULTY
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The candidate is responsible for all writers and works in List A, at least three writers from List B, and at least three writers from List C.
LIST A
POETRY:
W.H. Auden. Selected Poetry
T.S. Eliot. “The Hollow Men,”“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” The Waste Land
Thomas Hardy, Selected Poetry from Satires of Circumstances
Seamus Heaney. Selected Poetry
Ted Hughes. Selected Poetry
Philip Larkin. Selected Poetry
Dylan Thomas. Selected Poetry
William Butler Yeats. Selected Poems, including “The Second Coming”; “Leda and the Swan”; “Easter, 1916”; “When You Are Old”; “The Wild Swans at Coole,” “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” and “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop”
Representative World War I Poets. Suggested: Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves
PROSE:
Kingsley Amis. Lucky Jim
Joseph Conrad. Any One of the Following: Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes
T.S. Eliot. “Tradition and the Individual Talent”
E.M. Forster. Howards End or A Passage to India
James Joyce. Dubliners and One of the Following: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Ulysses
D.H. Lawrence. Selected Short Fiction and Any One of the Following: Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, or Women in Love
Doris Lessing. The Golden Notebook or Any Other Novel
Katherine Mansfield, “At the Bay,” “Prelude,” “Je ne Parle pas Francais,” “The Daughters of the Late Colonel”
Iris Murdoch. Any One Novel
George Orwell. 1984 or Animal Farm
Ezra Pound. “The Imagist Manifesto”
Evelyn Waugh. Any One of the Following: Decline and Fall, A Handful of Dust, or Brideshead Revisited
Virginia Woolf. Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Selected Short Fiction to Include “Kew Gardens” and “Mark on the Wall”
DRAMA:
Samuel Beckett. Endgame, Waiting for Godot
T.S. Eliot. Murder in the Cathedral
George Bernard Shaw. Man and Superman, Major Barbara, or Any Other 20th-Century Play
Tom Stoppard. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead or Arcadia
John Synge. The Playboy of the Western World
LIST B
PROSE AND DRAMA (CHOOSE AT LEAST THREE FROM THE LIST THAT FOLLOWS):
Martin Amis. The Rachel Papers or Time’s Arrow
Julian Barnes. Flaubert’s Parrot
Samuel Beckett. Any Novel
Elizabeth Bowen. Selected Short Fiction or Any Novel
Anthony Burgess. A Clockwork Orange
A.S. Byatt. Possession or Angels and Insects
Roddy Doyle. The Barrytown Trilogy
Ford Madox Ford. The Good Soldier
John Fowles. The French Lieutenant’s Woman or Any Other Novel
John Galsworthy. The Silver Box or Justice
William Golding. The Lord of the Flies or Any Other Novel
Graham Greene. Any Novel
Aldous Huxley. Point Counterpoint or Brave New World
Kazuo Ishiguro. Remains of the Day
Hanif Kureishi. The Buddha of Suburbia or The Black Album
W. Somerset Maugham. Of Human Bondage or Any Other Novel
Ian McEwen. Atonement
Edna O’Brien. Any Novel or Selected Short Stories
Sean O’Casey. Juno and the Paycock or The Plough and the Stars
John Osborne. Look Back in Anger
Harold Pinter. The Dumb Waiter, The Collection, The Care Taker, or The Birthday Party
Jean Rhys. Wide Sargasso Sea
Dorothy Richardson. Pointed Roofs or Any Other Novel
Alan Sillitoe. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
Zadie Smith. White Teeth
William Trevor. Felicia’s Journey or The Story of Lucy Gault
Fay Weldon. Praxis or Any Other Novel
H.G. Wells. Tono-Bungay
Jeanette Winterson. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Written on the Body, or Any Other Novel
LIST C
POETRY (CHOOSE AT LEAST THREE FROM THE LIST THAT FOLLOWS):
Eavan Boland. Selected Poetry
Keith Douglas. Selected Poetry
A.E. Housman. Selected Poetry
Rudyard Kipling, Selected Poetry
D.H. Lawrence. Selected Poetry
Hugh MacDiarmid. Selected Poetry
Louis MacNeice. Selected Poetry
Thom Gunn. Selected Poetry
Geoffrey Hill. Selected Poetry
Paul Muldoon. Selected Poetry
Stevie Smith. Selected Poetry
Stephen Spender. Selected Poetry
Jon Stallworthy. Selected Poetry
A candidate may also submit a list of readings to supplement, but not replace, the readings from the core (“A”) list above. The supplementary list should be submitted for approval with the declaration of intent to take the comprehensive examination form.
*Rev. 1 August 2014
