Portal:Literary Studies/Reading lists

Reading Lists for the School of Literature & English Studies

• English Literature - Read and discuss - participants form discussion groups
• English Literature - Read and write - participants read and then write essays
• ...

Collaborators

• ...Alexander Tirk

Fiction

• Major Authors
  • Louisa May Alcott
  • Margaret Atwood
  • Jane Austen
  • James Baldwin
  • Ray Bradbury
  • Anne Bronte
  • Charlotte Bronte
  • Emily Bronte
  • William S. Burroughs
  • Willa Cather
  • Michael Chabon
  • Raymond Chandler
  • Kate Chopin
  • James Fenimore Cooper
  • Philip K. Dick
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Ralph Ellison
  • James Ellroy
  • William Faulkner
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • William Gaddis
  • William H. Gass
  • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • Robert Heinlen
  • Joseph Heller
  • Ernest Hemingway
  • Frank Herbert
  • Aldous Huxley
  • Henry James
  • James Joyce
  • John Kennedy O'Toole
  • Jack Kerouac
  • Ken Kesey
  • Ursula LeGuin
  • Doris Lessing
  • Sinclair Lewis
  • Jack London
  • Herman Melville
  • Arthur Miller
  • Henry Miller
  • George Orwell
  • Edgar Allan Poe
  • Thomas Pynchon
  • Ayn Rand
  • Tom Robbins
  • Richard Russo
  • J.D. Salinger
  • William Shakespeare
  • Gertrude Stein
  • John Steinbeck
  • Lawrence Sterne
  • Henry David Thoreau
  • Mark Twain
  • William T. Vollmann
  • Kurt Vonnegut
  • David Foster Wallace
  • Robert Penn Warren
  • Edith Wharton
  • Jeanette Winterson

• Important Works
  • The Age of Innocence
  • Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
  • Atlas Shrugged
  • Big Sur
  • Cannery Row
  • Catch 22
  • Catcher in the Rye
  • Confederacy of Dunces
  • Demon Box
  • Dr. Sax
  • Dune
  • East of Eden
  • Elmer Gantry
  • Empire Falls
  • Fahrenheit 451
  • For Whom the Bell Tolls
  • Hamlet
  • the Handmaid's Tale
  • Herland
  • Infinite Jest
  • Invisible Man
  • Kings Blood Royal
  • Last of the Mohicans
  • the Lathe of Heaven
  • LIttle Women
  • Look Homeward, Angel
  • Lost Horizon
  • Main Street
  • Memoirs of a Survivor
  • Moby Dick
  • My Antonia
  • Naked Lunch
  • Neuromancer
  • Nineteen Eighty-Four
  • Pride and Prejudice
  • Of Mice and Men
  • One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
  • On The Road
  • the Song of the Lark
  • Stranger in a Strange Land
  • The Beautiful and Damned
  • The Grapes of Wrath
  • The Great Gatsby
  • The Lord of the Flies
  • The Love of the Last Tycoon
  • The Martian Chronicles
  • The Old Man and the Sea
  • The Recognitions
  • The Rosy Crucifixion
  • The Satanic Verses
  • Sense and Sensibility
  • Sexing the Cherry
  • The Sun Also Rises
  • The Winter's Tale
  • Things Fall Apart
  • The Town and the City
  • This Side of Paradise
  • To Kill a Mockingbird
  • Tortilla Flat
  • Walden
  • The Yellow Wallpaper

Poetry

• Major Poets
  • John Ashberry
  • John Berryman
  • E.E. Cummings
  • Emily Dickinson
  • John Donne
  • Thomas Stearns Eliot
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Robert Frost
  • Langston Hughes
  • Kenneth Koch
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
  • Frank O'Hara
  • Sylvia Plath
  • Ted Hughes
  • W. H. Auden
  • Edgar Allan Poe
  • Ezra Pound
  • Anne Sexton
  • Wallace Stevens
  • Dylan Thomas
  • Walt Whitman

Major Authors and Works in Languages other than English

Ancient -- for a more extensive list, please visit the Classics Department

• • Chuang Chou, Chuang Tzu
  • Gilgamesh
  • Homer: the Iliad and the Odyssey
  • Plato: The Apology of Socrates
  • Sappho: lyric poetry
  • Tu Fu: lyric poetry

Early Modern/The Renaissance -- Prose and Drama

• • Boccaccio: **The Decameron: Folktale Collection
  • Calderon: Life is a Dream
  • Castiglione: the Book of the Courtier
  • Geoffrey Chaucer: **The Canterbury Tales
  • Dante: the Divine Comedy
  • Marguerite de Navarre: the Heptameron
  • Sei Shonagon: The Pillow Book
  • The Arabian Nights: Folktale Collection

The 18th Century -- Prose and Drama

• • Basho: The Narrow Road to the Interior
  • Goethe: the Sorrows of young Werther
  • Laclos: Les Liaisons Dangereuses
  • Montesquieu: the Persian Letters
  • Jean Jacques Rousseau: the Confessions, the Social Contract: the Discourse on Inequality
  • Voltaire: Candide, Micromegas, the Ingenu

The 19th Century -- Prose and Drama

• • Goethe: Elective Affinities, Faust
  • Victor Hugo: Notre Dame de Paris, Les Miserables
  • Ibsen: The Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, The Wild Duck
  • John Ruskin: **Sesame and Lilies
  • George Sand: the Intimate Journal

Major 20th Century writers -- Prose and Drama

• • Tadeusz Borowski: This way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
  • Calvino: Cosmicomics
  • Albert Camus: The Stranger, The Fall, The Plague
  • Colette: The Vagabond, Cheri, Gigi
  • Marguerite Duras: Hiroshima, mon Amour
  • Gunther Grass: The Tin Drum
  • Elfriede Jelinek: The Piano Teacher
  • Franz Kafka: The Trial, The Castle, The Metamorphosis
  • Kazantzakis: The Last Temptation of Christ
  • Haruki Murakami: The Windup Bird Chronicle
  • Marjane Satrapi: Persepolis

Poets

• Akhmatova
  • Seamus Heaney
• Mahadeviakka
• Mirabai
• Rilke
• Rumi
• Szymborska
  • William Butler Yeats
• Pablo Neruda

See also

• English literary canon

Type classification: this is a reading list resource.