19th Century British Literature

GRADUATE COMPREHENSIVE EXAMINATION READING LIST SELECTED BY THE GRADUATE FACULTY

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The degree candidate is responsible for having read all of the following works:

Matthew Arnold. “The Buried Life,” “Dover Beach,” “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” “The Study of Poetry,” “To Marguerite—Continued”

Jane Austen. Emma or Pride and Prejudice

William Blake. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Songs of Innocence and Experience

Charlotte Bronte. Jane Eyre

Emily Bronte. Wuthering Heights

Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Aurora Leigh: Books 1 and 5; Sonnets from the Portuguese: Sonnets III, XXII, XXIX, and XXLIII

Robert Browning. “Andrea del Sarto,” “Fra Lippo Lippi,” “My Last Duchess”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Selections from Biographia Literaria; “Dejection: An Ode”; “Frost at Midnight”; “Kubla Khan”; “This Lime-Tree Bower, My Prison”; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

 Charles Dickens. Any Novel

George Eliot. The Mill on the Floss or Middlemarch

Elizabeth Gaskell. North and South

George Gordon, Lord Byron. Selections from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan 

Thomas Hardy. Tess of the D’Urbervilles or Return of the Native, Selected Poetry 

Gerard Manley Hopkins. “God’s Grandeur”; “The Windhover”; “Pied Beauty”; “Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord” 

John Keats. “The Eve of St. Agnes,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode on Melancholy,” “Ode to Autumn,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode to Psyche,” Selected Letters

George Meredith. The Egoist, Modern Love

Ann Radcliffe. A Sicilian Romance

Christina Rossetti. “Goblin Market”

George Bernard Shaw. Arms and the Man 

Mary Shelley. Frankenstein

Percy Bysshe Shelley. Adonais; Defence of Poetry; “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”; “Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni”; “Ode to the West Wind”; “To a Skylark”

Charlotte Smith. Beachy Head

Robert Louis Stevenson. Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Alfred, Lord Tennyson. In Memoriam, “The Lady of Shalott,” “Locksley Hall,” “The Lotos-Eaters,” “Ulysses”

William Makepeace Thackeray. Vanity Fair

Oscar Wilde. The Importance of Being Earnest, The Picture of Dorian Gray

William Wordsworth. “Elegaic Stanzas”; “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”; Preface to Lyrical Ballads; “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”; Selections from The Prelude (1805 version); “Resolution and Independence”; “Tintern Abbey”; “We Are Seven”

 

A candidate may also submit a list of readings to supplement, but not replace, the readings from the core 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


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