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