Core Reading List: British, Irish, and New Literature(s) in English

(updated by Berensmeyer, October 2001) The Oxford Anthology of English Literature and the Norton Anthology of English Literature are the best anthologies available; when the works on our list are contained in these anthologies, we have indicated this by (O) or (N) respectively. Please note that, in the Norton, spelling is often modernised or Americanised. Copies of the Oxford are available in the library (2 vols.). For Irish writing, the three-volume Field Day Anthology provides an extensive survey (also available in the library). Texts contained in this anthology are marked (F). Medieval period
anon. anon. anon. Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?-1400) anon. anon. The Dream of the Rood (7th ct.) <mod. version> (O/N) Beowulf (8th ct.) <mod. version> (O/N) translated excerpt from Tin B Cuailnge (F) The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400) (O/N) The Wakefield Second Shepherds Play (betw. 1400 and 1450) (O/N) Everyman (ca. 1485; publ. 1528/29) (O/N)

Renaissance/Baroque/Restoration/Classicism
Thomas More (1478?-1535) Edmund Spenser (1552-1599) Thomas Kyd (1558-1593) Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) William Shakespeare (1564-1616) Utopia (1516; Engl. 1550) (O/N) The Faerie Queene (print. 1596) (O/N/F); excerpt from A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596) (F) The Spanish Tragedy (betw. 1582 and 1592) Defence of Poesie (1595) (O/N) Doctor Faustus (1592/93, publ. 1604) (O/N) selected sonnets (O/N) Richard III (1592-93) A Midsummer Nights Dream (1594-98) Hamlet (1599-1601) selected poems (e.g. Songs and Sonnets) (O/N) To His Coy Mistress, The Mower Against Gardens (O/N) Volpone, or the Fox (1605-08) (N) The New Atlantis (1626/27) (O/N) Paradise Lost (1671) (O/N) The Pilgrims Progress (O/N) The Way of the World (1700) (O/N) The Rape of the Locke (1712 & 1714) (O/N)

John Donne (1572-1631) Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) Ben Jonson (1573-1637) Francis Bacon (1561-1626) John Milton (1608-1674) John Bunyan (1628-1688) William Congreve (1670-1729) Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

Preromanticism to Romanticism
Daniel Defoe (1659-1731) Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) Henry Fielding (1707-1754) Laurence Sterne (1713-1768) Horace Walpole (1717-1797) Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) Robert Burns (1759-1796) William Blake (1757-1827) Robinson Crusoe (1719) Moll Flanders (1721-22) (O) Gullivers Travels (1726) (O/F) A Modest Proposal (1729) (O/N/F) Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740/41) The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews (1742) The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1760-67) (extracts in O/F) The Castle of Otranto (1764) The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771) selected poems (O) Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789-94) (O/N)

-2Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816) Maria Edgeworth (1767/8-1849) Jane Austen (1775-1817) Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) The Rivals (1775) or She Stoops to Conquer (1773) (both in F) Castle Rackrent (1800) (extract in F) Pride and Prejudice (1813) or Emma (1815) Waverley, or Tis Sixty Years Since (1814)

Romanticism to Victorian Times

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) John Keats (1795-1821) Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) Charlotte Bront (1816-1855) Emily Bront (1818-1848) William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) Charles Dickens (1812-1870) Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) Robert Browning (1812-1889) Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) Lyrical Ballads (1798/1800) (O/N), selected poems (O/N) Don Juan (1819-24) (O/N) selected poems (O/N) selected poems (O/N) Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818) Sartor Resartus (1833/34) Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845) Jane Eyre (1847) Wuthering Heights (1847) Vanity Fair (1847/48) David Copperfield (1849/50) or Bleak House (1852/53) The Warden (1855) selected poems (O/N) selected poems (O/N) selected poems (O/N)

Victorian Times to Modern Times

George Eliot (1819-1880) George Meredith (1828-1909) Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) Henry James (1843-1916) George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) Herbert George Wells (1860-1946) Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) John Millington Synge (1871-1909) Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970) David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) Middlemarch (1871/72) The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) or The Egoist (1879) The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) (N/F) Tess of the dUrbervilles (1891) The Portrait of a Lady (1881) Mrs Warrens Profession (1893) (N) or Pygmalion (1913) Heart of Darkness (1902) (O/N) or Lord Jim (1900) The Time Machine (1895) or War of the Worlds (1898) Kim (1901) selected poems (O/N/F) The Playboy of the Western World (1907) (F) Howards End (1910) or A Passage to India (1924) Sons and Lovers (1913)

Modern to Postmodern and Contemporary

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) James Joyce (1882-1941) The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1910-11) (O/N); The Waste Land (1923) (N) The Dead from Dubliners (1914) (O/N) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) (O/F) (extracts from) Ulysses (1922) and, for the daring, Finnegans Wake (1939) (O/N/F) Mrs Dalloway (1925) or To the Lighthouse (1927) Brave New World (1932) At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) (extracts in F) Animal Farm (1945), Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) Lord of the Flies (1954) Waiting for Godot (1953), Endgame (1958) (F) The Unnamable (1959), Company (1980) (F) Look Back in Anger (1956)

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) Flann OBrien (1911-1966) George Orwell (1903-1950) William Golding (1911-1993) Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) John Osborne (1929-1994)

-3Harold Pinter (1930) Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990) Doris Lessing (1919) Tom Stoppard (1937) John Fowles (1929) Margaret Drabble (1939) Angela Carter (1940-1992) Brian Friel (1929) A.S. Byatt (1936) The Caretaker (1960) Under the Net (1954) The Alexandria Quartet (1957-60) <one of the four novels> The Golden Notebook (1962) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) The French Lieutenants Woman (1969) The Needles Eye (1972) The Magic Toyshop (1967) The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972) Translations (1980) (F) The Virgin in the Garden (1978) Possession, A Romance (1990) or Angels and Insects (1992) Flauberts Parrot (1984) Money. A Suicide Note (1984) Lanark, A Life in 4 Books (1985) Chatterton (1987) The Book of Evidence (1989) or Athena (1995) Trainspotting (1993) Shopping and Fucking (1995) Blasted (1994), Crave (1998)

Julian Barnes (1946) Martin Amis (1949) Alasdair Gray (1934) Peter Ackroyd (1949) John Banville (1945) Irvine Welsh (1961) Mark Ravenhill (1966) Sarah Kane (1971-1999)

Poetry by W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, Roger McGough, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, and others.

It is of course virtually impossible to make a selection from contemporary books or authors. Book reviews, newspapers, journals, the internet and not least fellow readers will be the best sources of information on present-day writing in English.

New Literatures written in English (Africa, Australia, Canada, Caribbean, India, NZ) (adapted from a previous compilation by Dr. Bernd Schulte) AFRICA
Allan Paton (S.A.) Amos Tutuola (Nigeria) Chinua Achebe (Nigeria) Elechi Amadi (Nigeria) Ayi Kwei Armah (Ghana) Doris Lessing (Rhodesia/UK) Wole Soyinka (Nigeria) Ngugi wa Thiongo (Kenya) Eskia Mpahlele (S.A.) J.M. Coetzee (S.A.) Nadine Gordimer (S.A.) Cry the Beloved Country (1948) The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) Things Fall Apart (1954) The Concubine (1966) The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) African Stories (1965) The Interpreters (1965) A Grain of Wheat (1967) Petals of Blood (1977) Chirundu (1979) Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) or Disgrace (1999) Julys People (1981)

AUSTRALIA

Henry Handel Richardson Catherine Helen Spence Patrick White Thomas Keneally

The Getting of Wisdom (1910) Handfasted (ms. 1879; publ. 1984) Voss (1958) A Fringe of Leaves (1976) The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (1972)

-4David Malouf Peter Carey Johnno (1975) Remembering Babylon (1993) Illywhacker (1985)

See also Laurie Hergenhan, ed., New Literary History of Australia (1987).
CANADA

Malcolm Lowry Margaret Atwood Robert Kroetsch Alice Munro John Metcalf Rudy Wiebe William Gibson Michael Ondaatje

Under the Volcano (1947) The Edible Woman (1969) Bodily Harm (1981) Badlands (1975) Famous Last Words (1981) Kicking Against the Pricks (1982) The Scorched-Wood People (1985) Neuromancer (1984) In the Skin of a Lion (1987) The English Patient (1992)

CARIBBEAN
Edgar Mittelholzer (Guyana/UK) Wilson Harris (Guyana) Jean Rhys (Dominica) V.S. Naipaul (Trinidad/UK) A Morning at the Office (1950) The Guyana Quartet (1960-63) Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) Miguel Street (1959) A House for Mr Biswas (1961) A Bend in the River (1979) The Unbelonging (1987) Omeros (1991) and poems

Joan Riley (Jamaica) Derek Walcott

INDIA
Mulk Raj Anand R.K. Narayan Untouchable (1935, rev. 1970) Coolie (1936) Malgudi Days (1941) The Vendor of Sweets (1967) The Painter of Signs (1976) The Serpent and the Rope (1960) The Village by the Sea (1982) Out of India (1988) Midnights Children (1981) The God of Small Things (1996)

Raja Rao Anita Desai Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Salman Rushdie Arundhati Roy

NEW ZEALAND
Katherine Mansfield Janet Frame Maurice Gee Marilyn Duckworth Keri Hulme short stories (The Garden Party, The Daughters of the Late Colonel, 1922) The Edge of the Alphabet (1962) Living in the Maniototo (1979) Meg (1981) The Halfmen of O. (1982) Married Alive (1985) The Bone People (1985)