NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE
2018 REVISED READING LIST
Rationale/Explanatory Note:
This exam uses one core list. Students are responsible for both the Romantic and Victorian sections. We estimate the total length to bebetween 27 and 28 books. To explain how we have counted: there are 21 authors represented by a single longer work (i.e. a novel)or a book-length group of works. There are 19additional authors represented only by briefer selections(a single poem or a short list of poems, a few chapters of a prose work, or a short book like De Quincey’s Confessions), averaging 1/3 of a book each. That makes a bit more than6additional books-length readings, keeping the total below 28.
ROMANTIC
- JANE AUSTEN
Emma
- ANNA LAETITIA BARBAULD
“Washing Day”
“Eighteen Hundred and Eleven”
“An inventory of the furniture in Dr Priestley’s Study”
“The Mouse’s Petition”
“To a little invisible being who is expected soon to become visible”
“Rights of woman”
“On a lady’s writing”
“To a lady, with some painted flowers”
“Epistle to William Wilberforce”
- WILLIAM BLAKE
Songs of Innocence and of Experience
The Book of Thel
Visions of the Daughters of Albion
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
America
Europe
The [First] Book of Urizen
Note: Students should consult the series from Princeton University Press, Blake’s Illuminated Works (gen. ed. David Bindman) or so that they will know the visual as well as the verbal texts.
- BYRON (GEORGE GORDON)
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Cantos 1, 2 and 3
- JOHN CLARE
“I Am”
“Song’s Eternity”
“Clock-o’-Clay”
“The Mores”
“The Skylark”
“Mouse’s Nest”
- SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
“Frost at Midnight”
“To a Nightingale”
“The Eolian Harp”
“Dejection: An Ode”
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1817 version)
“Christabel”
“Kubla Khan”
Biographia Literaria, Chapters 13 and 14
- Thomas De Quincey
Confessions of an English Opium Eater
- WILLIAM GODWIN
Caleb Williams
- FELICIA HEMANS
“Casabianca”
“Woman and Fame”
“Evening Prayer at a Girl’s School”
“The Graves of a Household”
“The Bride of the Greek Isle”
“Properzia Rossi”
“Joan of Arc in Rheims”
- MARIA EDGEWORTH
Belinda
- JOHN KEATS
“The Eve of St. Agnes”
“Hyperion”
“The Fall of Hyperion”
“Ode to Psyche”
“Ode to a Nightingale”
“Ode on a Grecian Urn”
“On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again”
“On Seeing the Elgin Marbles”
“Bright Star, Would I Were as Steadfast as Thou Art”
Letters
22 Nov. 1817 to Benjamin Bailey
21-27 December 1817 to George and Tom Keats
3 May 1818 to J. H. Reynolds
25-27 June 1818 to Tom Keats
27 October 1818 to Richard Woodhouse
21 April 1819 to George and Georgiana Keats
21-22 September 1819 to Richard Woodhouse
16 August 1820 to Percy Bysshe Shelley.
- MARY PRINCE
The History of Mary Prince
- MARY ROBINSON
Sappho and Phaon, Sonnets 4, 7, 11, 12, 18, 30, 37
“The Haunted Beach”
“A London Summer Morning”
“The Camp”
“The Poet’s Garret”
“The Old Beggar”
“To the Poet Coleridge”
- WALTER SCOTT
Waverley
- MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY
Frankenstein
- PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
“Ode to the West Wind”
“Mont Blanc”
Prometheus Unbound
Adonais
“To Wordsworth”
“Sonnet: Lift not the painted veil”
“Ode to Liberty”
“Sonnet: England in 1819”
A Defence of Poetry
- CHARLOTTE SMITH
Elegiac Sonnets: I, XI, XXVII, XXXV, XXXIX, XLIII, XLIV, XLVII, LVII, LIX, LXV, LXX, LXXIV, LXXXIV, XCI
“Beachy Head”
- MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
- DOROTHY WORDSWORTH
“Floating Island”
- WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
“Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey”
“We are Seven”
“Nutting”
“Michael”
“Ode: Intimations of Immortality”
“The Solitary Reaper”
The Prelude (1805) Books 1, 6, 10, 11, 13
“London, 1802”
“Composed Upon Westminster Bridge”
Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800)
VICTORIAN
- MATTHEW ARNOLD
“Dover Beach”
Culture and Anarchy, Chapter 1 “Sweetness and Light “; Chapter 4 “Hebraism and
Hellenism”
“The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”
- CHARLOTTE BRONTË
Jane Eyre
- EMILY BRONTË
Wuthering Heights
- ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
“The Cry of the Children”
“The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”
“A Musical Instrument”
Sonnets from the Portuguese 21, 22, 28, 43
- ROBERT BROWNING
Pippa Passes
“Love Among the Ruins”
“Fra Lippo Lippi”
“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”
“My Last Duchess”
“The Bishop Orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church”
“Porphyria’s Lover”
- THOMAS CARLYLE
“Signs of the Times”
Sartor Resartus: “The Everlasting No,” “Centre of Indifference,” “The Everlasting Yea,” “Natural Supernaturalism”
- CHARLES DICKENS
Great Expectations
- GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch
- MICHAEL FIELD
“It was deep April”
“Nests in Elms”
“To Christina Rossetti”
“Fellowship”
“Eros”
“Maids, not to you my mind doth change”
“A Girl”
“Unbosoming”
- ELIZABETH GASKELL
Mary Barton
- THOMAS HARDY
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
- GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
“Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves”
“Carrion Comfort”
“No worst, there is none . . . “
“I wake and feel the fell of dark . . .”
“The Windover”
- JOHN STUART MILL
On Liberty, Chapter 2 “Of the Liberty of Thought & Discussion”
The Subjection of Women, Chapter 1
- CHRISTINA ROSSETTI
Goblin Market
“When I am dead, my dearest”
“In the Artist’s Studio”
“A Birthday”
“Sleeping at Last”
- DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
“Jenny”
From The House of Life:
“A sonnet is a moment’s monument”
“Nuptial Sleep”
19 “Silent Noon
77 “Soul’s Beauty”
78 “Body’s Beauty”
97 “A Superscription”
101 “The One Hope”
- JOHN RUSKIN
The Stones of Venice, “The Nature of Gothic”
- ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
“Hymn to Proserpine”
“The Garden of Proserpine”
“The Leper”
- ALFRED TENNYSON
“The Lady of Shalott”
“Ulysses”
“Tithonus”
“The Lotos-Eaters”
In Memoriam, “Strong Son of God,” 1-15, 21-35, 56-59, 78, 95, 104-109, 119, Epilogue
- WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Vanity Fair
- OSCAR WILDE
The Importance of Being Earnest
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