Comprehensive Examination | Part 2 Period Texts

American Literature: Beginnings to 1865

  1. Melville, Moby-Dick
  2. Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
  3. Thoreau, Walden
  4. Douglass, Narrative of the Life…
  5. Franklin, The Autobiography
  6. Rowlandson, ... Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration ...   

American Literature: 1865 to 1914

  1. Dreiser, Sister Carrie
  2. Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
  3. Wharton, The House of Mirth
  4. Chesnutt, The House Behind the Cedars
  5. Norris, McTeague
  6. James, The Bostonians, “The Art of Fiction”

American Literature: 1914 to present

  1. Cather, My Antonia.
  2. Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire.
  3. Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury.
  4. Morrison, Beloved.
  5. Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies.
  6. Nabokov, “Terror,” “Terra Incognita,” “Spring in Fialta,” “Mademoiselle O,” “That in Aleppo Once,” “Cloud, Castle, Lake,” and “Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster” in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov.

British Literature: Medieval

  1. Chaucer, Canterbury Tales
  2. Beowulf
  3. Langland, Piers Plowman
  4. Book of Margery Kempe
  5. Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde
  6. Morality Plays: Everyman and Mankind

British Literature: Renaissance

  1. Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
  2. Milton, Paradise Lost
  3. Marlowe, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
  4. Jonson, Volpone
  5. More, Utopia
  6. Shakespeare, Sonnets

British Literature: Restoration and Eighteenth Century

  1. Defoe, Moll Flanders
  2. Sheridan, School for Scandal
  3. Congreve, The Way of the World
  4. Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel
  5. Richardson, Pamela
  6. Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield

British Literature: Nineteenth Century

  1. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (1798); Wordsworth, “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, “Michael,” “Resolution and Independence,” “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” “Ode to Duty”; Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1817 with marginal notes in prose), “Christabel”
  2. Austen, Mansfield Park or Persuasion
  3. Shelley and Keats: Shelley, Prometheus Unbound; Keats, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820) (in Keats’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox)
  4. Tennyson In Memoriam, “The Lady of Shalott,” “Mariana,” “Ulysses,” “The Lotus Eaters,” “Charge of the Light Brigade,” “Morte d’Arthur,”  “St. Agnes Eve,” “Maud”
  5. Dickens, Oliver Twist or Hard Times
  6. Eliot, Daniel Deronda or Felix Holt

British Literature: Twentieth Century

  1. Lawrence, Women in Love
  2. Forster, Passage to India
  3. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
  4. Huxley, Point Counter Point
  5. Larkin, Heaney, Gunn, (all selections in the most recent edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature)

Composition, Rhetoric, and Language

  1. Connors, Robert. Composition-Rhetoric
  2. Crowley, Sharon.  Composition in the University 
  3. Elbow, Peter.  Embracing Contraries
  4. Gary Tate, Amy Rupiper, and Kurt Schick. A Guide to Composition Pedagogies
  5. George Hillocks. Teaching Writing as Reflective Practice
  6. Kent, Thomas. Post Process Theory: Beyond the Writing Process Paradigm

World Literature in Translation: Classical

  1. Homer, The Iliad or The Odyssey (either the Latimore or the Fagles tr.)
  2. Sophocles, Antigone
  3. Virgil, The Aeneid (Indian / Humphries or Fitzgerald tr.)
  4. Aristotle, Poetics
  5. Ovid, The Metamorphoses

World Literature in Translation: Middle Ages to 1600

  1. Dante, Inferno
  2. Lope de Vega, The Sheep Well (Fuenteovejuna)
  3. The Song of Roland (Penguin)
  4. Calderon de la Barca, Life is a Dream (Hill and Wang)
  5. Tristan and Iseult
  6. Machiavelli, The Prince

World Literature in Translation: 1600-1800

  1. Voltaire, Candide
  2. Molière, The Misanthrope (tr. Wilbur) or The Middle-class Gentlemen
  3. Racine, Phaedra (tr. Lowell)
  4. Mme. de La Fayette, The Princess of Cleves
  5. Goethe, Faust, Part One
  6. Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Penguin)

World Literature in Translation: 1800-1900

  1. Flaubert, Madame Bovary
  2. Stendhal, The Red and the Black
  3. Baudelaire, Paris Spleen
  4. Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground or Crime and Punishment
  5. Chekhov’s selected short stories, including “The Kiss,” “Gooseberries,” and “The Lady with the Pet Dog”

World Literature in Translation: 1900-1945

  1. Proust, Swann's Way
  2. Kafka, Selected Stories including “Metamorphosis”
  3. Brecht, Galileo or Mother Courage
  4. Gide, The Counterfeiters
  5. Malraux, Man's Fate

World Literature in Translation: 1945 to present

  1. Camus, The Stranger
  2. Borges, Ficciones
  3. Beckett, Waiting for Godot
  4. Nabokov, Lolita
  5. Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
  6. Rushdie, Midnight's Children

Postcolonial and Anglophone Literatures: Contemporary Period, 1947-present

  1. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
  2. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians
  3. Aboulela, Minaret
  4. Naipaul, A Bend in the River
  5. Djebar, A Sister to Scheherazade.
  6. Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horsemen