The Reading List

American I American II  British I  British II  World I  World II  Literary Criticism (For English, BA only) Young Adult (For English Education only)
 * Jonathan Edwards: "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"
 * Washington Irving: "Rip Van Winkle"
 * Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Nature"
 * Edgar Allan Poe: "The Raven"
 * Henry David Thoreau:  Walden
 * Frederick Douglass:  Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
 * Walt Whitman: "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer"
 * Kate Chopin:  The Awakening
 * Elizabeth Bishop:  Norton  excerpts
 * William Faulkner:  As I Lay Dying
 * Eudora Welty: "A Worn Path"
 * Flannery O'Connor: "Good Country People"
 * Alice Walker: "Everyday Use"
 * Beowulf
 * Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
 * Geoffrey Chaucer: "The General Prologue" and "The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale"
 * Julian of Norwich:  Norton  excerpts
 * William Shakespeare:  King Lear  and  Twelfth Night, Sonnets 73 and 130
 * John Donne: Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you," "Death, be not proud, though have called thee," and "The Canonization"
 * Jonathan Swift: "A Modest Proposal"
 * William Blake: "There Is No Natural Religion"
 * William Wordsworth: "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey"
 * Tennyson: "Ulysses" and/ or Browning: "My Last Duchess"
 * Charlotte Bronte:  Jane Eyre
 * Joseph Conrad:  Heart of Darkness
 * Virginia Woolf: "A Room of One's Own"
 * T.S. Eliot: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
 * The Book of Job
 * Homer:  The Iliad
 * The Book of John
 * Augustine:  Confessions
 * Maire de France:  Lais  (excerpts from Norton)
 * Niccolo Machiavelli:  The Prince
 * Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:  Faust
 * Giacomo Leopardi: "The Infinite"
 * Fyodor Dostoevsky:  Notes from Underground
 * Gustave Flaubert: "A Simple Heart"
 * Franz Kafka:  The Metamorphosis
 * Rainer Rilke: "The Panther"
 * Chinua Achebe:  Things Fall Apart
 * Aristotle:  Poetics
 * Horace:  Ars Poetica
 * William Wordsworth: "Preface to  Lyrical Ballads "
 * T.S. Eliot: "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
 * Roland Barthes "The Death of the Author" and "From Work to Text"
 * Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird
 * S.E. Hinton: The Outsiders
 * Robert Cormier: The Chocolate War
 * Christopher Paul Curtis: Bud, Not Buddy
 * Paul Munoz Ryan: Esperanza Rising