Literature Reading List

The following list is work in progress. To be added: a list of Titles by Topics: Reading List II.

Before 1450

• Chaucer, Canterbury Tales (1386-1400)

plus one of the following

• Beowulf (in modern translation)
• Sir Gawayn and the Green Night
• Mandeville; Travels (1370)

1450 - 1499

• Malory, Le Morte Darthur (London William Caxton, 1485).

plus one of the following

• Sir John Mandeville, Travels (early printed edition)

1500 - 1549

• Thomas Morus, Utopia (1515)

plus one of the following

1550 - 1599

• Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedie: or, Hieronimo is Mad Againe (c. 1590).
• Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus is a play by Christopher Marlowe (1594 [published in 1604]).

plus one of the following

1600 - 1649

• William Shakespeare, Anthony and Cleopatra (c. 1607 [published in 1623]).

plus one of the following

• John Fletcher, The Wild Goose Chase (c.1621 [published in 1652]).

1650 - 1699

• Richard Head, The English Rogue vol.1 (1665).
• John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress (1678).
• Aphra Behn, Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684).

plus one of the following

• William Congreve, The Country Wife (1675).

1700 - 1749

• Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719).
• Samuel Richardson, Pamela (1740).

plus one of the following

• Eliza Haywood, Love in Excess (1719-1720).
• Richard Steele, The Conscious Lovers (1722).
• Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal: For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick (1729).
• Samuel Madden, Memoirs of the Twentieth Century (1733).
• Alexander Pope, Essay on Man (1734).
• John Cleland, Fanny Hill (1748).

1750 - 1799

• Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768).
• James McPherson, Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem in Six Books, together with Several Other Poems composed by Ossian, the Son of Fingal, translated from the Gaelic Language (1761).

plus one of the following

1800 - 1849

• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1819).
• Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (1838).

plus one of the following

• Walter Scott, Waverley (1814).
• James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (1826).
• Mary Shelley, The Last Man (1828).
• Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813).
• Edgar Allan Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination (?)

1850 - 1899

• Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854).
• Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, revised edition: 1891)
• H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895).

plus one of the following

• Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851).
• Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (1852).
• Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855).
• George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871-72).
• Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876).
• Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).
• Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889).
• Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888).
• Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Ernest (1895).

1900 - 1949

• T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922).
• Ernest Hemingway, "Hills like White Elephants" and "The Killers" from Men Without Women (1927).
• George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

plus one of the following

• D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (1915).
• James Joyce, Ulysses (1922).
• John Dos Passos, U.S.A. trilogy, comprising: The 42nd Parallel (1930), Nineteen Nineteen (1932), and The Big Money (1936).
• Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925).
• Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932).

1950 - 1999

• Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot [originally written in 1948/49 under the title En attendant Godot] (1952).
• David and Janet Peoples [authors], Terry Gilliam [director], Twelve Monkeys [movie] (1995).

plus one of the following

• Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955).
• Salman Rushdie, Satanic Verses (1988).