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Exit Exam Reading List--Mount St. Mary's College English Department

English Major’s Survival Guide

English Literature (Beowulf to 1700)

1. Beowulf
2. The Battle of Maldon
3. The Battle of Hastings
4. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
5. Geoffrey Chaucer. “The Merchant’s Tale” from Canterbury Tales
6. The Second Shepherd’s Play
7. Thomas More. Utopia
8. Wyatt and Surrey
9. Christopher Marlowe. The Tragic History of Doctor Faustus
10. Edmund Spenser. The Faerie Queen
11. William Shakespeare. Hamlet, Twelfth Night, King Lear, MacBeth
12. Thomas Milton. Paradise Lost
13. John Donne. “The Flea”
14. Ben Jonson. Volpone
15. John Dryden. Absalom and Achitophel
16. Samuel Butler. Hudibras
17. Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko

English Literature (1700-1950)

1. Jonathan Swift. Gulliver’s Travels, "A Modest Proposal"
2. Alexander Pope. “The Rape of the Lock,” “An Essay on Man,” “An Essay on Criticism”
3. George Gordon, Lord Byron. Don Juan, Canto I
4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Frost at Midnight”
5. John Keats. “Ode on Melancholy,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to a Nightingale”
6. William Wordsworth. “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” “Tintern Abbey,” “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads”
7. Percy Bysshe Shelley. “Ode to the West Wind,” “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”
8. John Stuart Mill. “The Subjection of Women”
9. Henrik Ibsen. A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler
10. Robert Browning. “My Last Duchess,” “Fra Lippo Lippi”
11. Matthew Arnold. “Dover Beach”
12. Alfred Lord Tennyson. “In Memoriam, A. H. H.”
13. George Eliot. “Middlemarch”
14. Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina
15. Fyodor Dostoevsky.  Crime and Punishment
16. Emily Bronte. Wuthering Heights
17. Charles Dickens. Great Expectations
18. Mary Shelley. Frankenstein
19. Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice
20. Dylan Thomas. “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”
21. W. B. Yeats. “The Second Coming,” “Sailing to Byzantium”
22. Aristotle. The Poetics
23. Sir Philip Sidney. “An Apology for Poetry”

American Literature (through 1945)

1.     Benjamin Franklin. Poor Richard’s Almanac

2.     Thomas Jefferson. “The Declaration of Independence”

3.     William Apess. "An Indian's Looking-Glass for the White Man"

4.     Jonathan Edwards. “A Personal Narrative,” “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”

5.     Washington Irving. “Rip Van Winkle”

6.     Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Scarlet Letter

7.     Henry David Thoreau. Walden

8.     Mark Twain. Huckleberry Finn

9.     Walt Whitman. “Song of Myself,” “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd”

10.   Ralph Waldo Emerson. "The American Scholar," "Self Reliance"

11. Frederick Douglass. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

12.   Emily Dickinson. “After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes,” “I Died for Beauty---but Was Scarce,” “I Heard a Fly Buzz---When I Died,” “I Never Lost as Much But Twice,” “My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close,” “Some Keep the Sabbath Going to Church,” “Success is Counted Sweetest,” “Tell All the Truth, but Tell it Slant,” “These are the Days When Birds Come Back,” “There's a Certain Slant of Light”

13.   Robert Frost. “The Road Not Taken”

14.   T. S. Eliot. “The Wasteland”

15.   Sylvia Plath. “Lady Lazarus,” “Daddy”

16.   William Faulkner. As I Lay Dying

17.   J. D. Salinger. Catcher in the Rye

18.   Ernest Hemingway. A Farewell to Arms

19.   F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby

20.  Maya Angelou. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

21.   Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man

22.   Herman Melville. Moby Dick

23.   Tennessee Williams. Streetcar Named Desire

24. Arthur Miller: The Crucible  

25.   Upton Sinclair. The Jungle

26.   Henry James. Washington Square

Contemporary American and British Literature

1.     Flannery O’Connor. “A Good Man is Hard to Find”

2.     Anthony Burgess. A Clockwork Orange

3.     George Orwell. 1984

4.     Chinua Achebe. Things Fall Apart

5.     Tom Stoppard. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

6.     Samuel Beckett. Waiting for Godot

7.     Eugene O’Neill. Long Day’s Journey Into Night

8.     Arthur Miller. Death of a Salesman

9.     Lorraine Hansberry. Raisin in the Sun

10.   David Henry Hwang. M. Butterfly

11.   Allen Ginsberg. “Howl”

12.   Martin Luther King, Jr. "I Have a Dream," "I've Been to the Mountaintop"

13.   Frances Ford Coppola. The Godfather, Parts 1 and 2

14.   Toni Morrison. Beloved

15.   Zora Neale Hurston. Their Eyes Were Watching God

16.   Philip Roth. Goodbye, Columbus

17.   Don DeLillo. White Noise

Terms

1.     Transcendentalism

2.     The Harlem Renaissance

3.     Beat Poetry

4.     Existentialism

5.     Postmodernism

6.     Irony

7.     Mock epic

8.     Hyperbole

9.     Heroic couplet

10.   Iambic pentameter

11.   Mimesis

12.   Deconstruction

13.   Reader response theory

14.   The New Historicism

15.   Alliteration