[AisAis]

If it's any consolation, I was okay on the eve of the ELAT but was vomiting by the morning.

This list is fantastic though, I could have really done with it a year or two ago and it's brilliant future applicants will have access to it.

Oh noes, I've only read 14 books off that 'bare minimum' list. No wonder my UCAS application was so unsuccessful this year.

Regarding 19th cent. in PSs: don't most people mention Gothicism? I was going to write about Hardy and Eliot and I don't recall seeing much of them in the PS library. I've just ordered some Henrik Ibsen drama which I'll mention if I like it because I don't want to talk about Wilde... and because I won't really like Wilde.

[rainbow drops]

Yeah, I mentioned Gothicism but I get the impression that tons and tons of people do.

[LostHorizons]

I find that odd, I did Gothicism a bit at college last year and haaaated it wouldn't have thought it would be a hugely popular thing is PSs.

[AisAis]

I mentioned it when I didn't even like it that much which was just bloody stupid. In my case it was because I'd sampled some at school, the books were short and I was worried I'd only read modern fiction, and I was bloody stupid.

[rainbow drops]

I love it the fact that I really really like it has probably spiralled from my obsession with Wuthering Heights but yeah, I love Gothicism. I would have liked to have done my English synoptic or coursework or something on it for A2 but I couldn't.

[Sanyore]

Hated Gothicism, although Lovecraft gave me lulz. Excellent list by the way.

[alecangeltess]

It is a great list; randomly had a look at Wreck of the Deutschland today and that's really good. Hopkins is very idiosyncratic though, and not just with his metrics; his way of writing sentences - sometimes he messes his words up so much it's like French syntax!

What about cultural commentaries? Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, and JS Mill's On Liberty are quite important, particularly the latter.

[mel0n]

I haven't read many of those

[MSB]

(Original post by alecangeltess)
What about cultural commentaries? Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, and JS Mill's On Liberty are quite important, particularly the latter.

The writings of any major thinker from the past 200 years are 'quite important', but not important enough to warrant inclusion on my very select list.

[Brouhaha]

I randomly found this on the website of Rutgers University. As an American list the relevance may be limited, but thought I'd post for general interest. Bear in mind it's for their Master's degrees so is by no means necessary for English applicants. May be helpful though.

Spoiler:

Show

Medieval and Renaissance (to 1640)

Beowulf
Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales: General Prologue; Prologues and Tales of the Knight; Miller; Wife of Bath; Merchant; Franklin
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The Second Shepherds' Play
More, Utopia
Sidney, Apologie for Poesie
Marlowe, Dr. Faustus
Jonson, Volpone
Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Bk. I
Shakespeare, Hamlet; King Lear; The Tempest; Henry V; Twelfth Night; Measure for Measure
Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
10. Donne, “Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star”; “The Sun Rising”; “The Indifferent”; “The Flea”; “The Canonization”; “A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning”; “The Ecstasy”; “Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward”; “Hymne to God my God, in My Sickness”; the following Holy Sonnets: “Batter My Heart”; “I Am a Little World”; “Since She Whom I Lov'd”; “Death Be Not Proud.”
Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress"


II. 17th and 18th Centuries

Milton, Paradise Lost
Wycherley, The Country Wife
Dryden, All for Love
Behn, Oroonoko
Pope, "The Rape of the Lock"; "Eloisa to Abelard"; "An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot"; "An Essay on Criticism"
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Swift, "A Modest Proposal"; Gulliver's Travels
Gay, The Beggar's Opera
Fielding, Tom Jones
Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer
Burney, Evelina
Austen, Emma


III. Romantic and Victorian

Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; Songs of Innocence and of Experience.
Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, including the 1802 Preface; "Michael"; "Resolution and Independence"; "Ode: Intimations of Immortality"
Coleridge, "The Eolian Harp"; "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"; "Kubla Khan"; "Christabel"; "Frost at Midnight"; "Dejection: An Ode"
Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto 3; Don Juan, Canto 1
P. Shelley, "Mont Blanc"; "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"; "Ode to the West Wind"; "Adonais";"To a Skylark"; "Ozymandias"
Keats, "The Eve of St. Agnes"; "To a Nightingale"; "Ode on a Grecian Urn"; "Ode on Melancholy"; "The Fall of Hyperion"; "To Autumn"
M. Shelley, Frankenstein
Tennyson, "Ulysses"; In Memoriam, A.H.H.
Browning, "My Last Duchess"; "Meeting at Night"; "Parting at Morning"; "The Bishop Orders His Tomb"; "Fra Lippo Lippi"; "Andrea Del Sarto"
Dickens, Hard Times
E. Bronte, Wuthering Heights
G. Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
Back to Top



IV. American Literature, Colonial - 1900

Bradstreet, “The Prologue”; “To Her Father with Some Verses”; “The Author to Her Book”; “Contemplations”; “The Flesh and the Spirit”; “Before the Birth of One of Her Children”; “To My Dear and Loving Husband”; “In Reference to Her Children, 23 June, 1659”; “In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet”; “Upon the Burning of Our House”
Rowlandson, A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson
Franklin, The Autobiography
Emerson, Nature; The American Scholar
Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.
Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter.
Melville, Moby Dick.
Thoreau, Walden, Chapters 1,2,7,11,16-18.
Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century
Whitman, Preface to the 1855 Edition of Leaves of Grass; "Song of Myself"; "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"; "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"; Democratic Vistas.
Dickinson, “I felt a funeral, in my Brain” (P280); “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church-” (P324); “After great pain, a formal feeling comes” (P341); “This was a Poet-It is That” (448); “I heard a Fly buzz-when I died-” (P465); “Because I could not stop For Death-” (P712); “She rose to His Requirement-dropt” (732); “My Life had stood-a Loaded Gun-” (P754); “Title divine-is Mine!” (P1072); “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant-” (P1129)
Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
James, Portrait of a Lady.
Chopin, The Awakening


V. 20th Century Literature

Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Wharton, The House of Mirth.
Joyce, Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man.
Woolf, To the Lighthouse; A Room of One's Own.
Yeats, "Among School Children"; "Sailing to Byzantium"; "The Magi"; "Leda and the Swan"; "Easter 1916"; "The Second Coming"; "Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop"; "Lapis Lazuli"; "The Circus Animals' Dersertion".
Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"; The Waste Land.
Frost, "Mowing"; "Mending Wall"; "Home Burial"; "After Apple-Picking"; "An Old Man's Winter Night"; "The Oven Bird"; "Birches"; "Out, Out --"; "Design"; "Directive."
Stevens, “The Snow Man”; “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock”; “Sunday Morning”; “Peter Quince at the Clavier”; “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”; “The Idea of Order at Key West”; “Of Modern Poetry”; “Not Ideas about the Thing But the Thing Itself.”.
Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”; “The Weary Blues”; “I, Too”; “Come to the Waldorf-Astoria”; “Goodbye Christ.”.
Hemingway, “Big Two-Hearted River”; “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”; “Hills like White Elephants”; “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”; “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.”.
Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.
Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury.
O'Neill, A Long Day's Journey Into Night.
Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Ellison, Invisible Man.
Beckett, Waiting for Godot.
Back to Top

VI. Literary Criticism

Plato, Republic, Book X.
Aristotle, "Poetics."
Horace, "Ars Poetica."
Sidney, "An Apologie for Poesie."
Pope, "An Essay on Criticism."
Wordsworth, Preface (1802) to Lyrical Ballads.
Poe, "The Poetic Principle."
Arnold, "The Study of Poetry."
James, "The Art of Fiction."
Freud, "Creative Writers and Daydreaming."
Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent."
Ransom, "Criticism, Inc."
De Beauvoir, The Second Sex.
Derrida, Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.
Eagleton, "Marxism and Literary Criticism.”

[MSB]

Can you spoiler that? It's huge. It's a good list, but huge.

[Brouhaha]

(Original post by MSB)
Can you spoiler that? It's huge. It's a good list, but huge.

Yeah sure.

[e hine e]

I mentioned Enid Blyton in my personal statement and it was discussed in my interview so that's something to think about

As for the predictable/unpredictable in your PS, why not just do a mixture of both? I'm sure they're more bothered about the thinking you've done about what you've read than the names of them anyway. I was told I wouldn't be asked about the essay I submitted (The Rime of The Ancient Mariner) but they asked me in depth about that. I suppose if they ask you about something they are familiar with and which you claim to know about they can find out if you're bluffing or not.

I think overall this is a great list though I would suggest some poetry such as that by the Bronte sisters, Charlotte Mew and Emily Dickinson (just my opinion). Then, if you're feeling daring, Chaucer. Shakespeare and Donne seem good to me too. My list says you can never read too much poetry in preparation.

[mel0n]

(Original post by Brouhaha)
I randomly found this on the website of Rutgers University. As an American list the relevance may be limited, but thought I'd post for general interest. Bear in mind it's for their Master's degrees so is by no means necessary for English applicants. May be helpful though.

Spoiler:

Show

Medieval and Renaissance (to 1640)

Beowulf
Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales: General Prologue; Prologues and Tales of the Knight; Miller; Wife of Bath; Merchant; Franklin
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The Second Shepherds' Play
More, Utopia
Sidney, Apologie for Poesie
Marlowe, Dr. Faustus
Jonson, Volpone
Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Bk. I
Shakespeare, Hamlet; King Lear; The Tempest; Henry V; Twelfth Night; Measure for Measure
Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
10. Donne, “Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star”; “The Sun Rising”; “The Indifferent”; “The Flea”; “The Canonization”; “A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning”; “The Ecstasy”; “Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward”; “Hymne to God my God, in My Sickness”; the following Holy Sonnets: “Batter My Heart”; “I Am a Little World”; “Since She Whom I Lov'd”; “Death Be Not Proud.”
Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress"


II. 17th and 18th Centuries

Milton, Paradise Lost
Wycherley, The Country Wife
Dryden, All for Love
Behn, Oroonoko
Pope, "The Rape of the Lock"; "Eloisa to Abelard"; "An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot"; "An Essay on Criticism"
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Swift, "A Modest Proposal"; Gulliver's Travels
Gay, The Beggar's Opera
Fielding, Tom Jones
Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer
Burney, Evelina
Austen, Emma


III. Romantic and Victorian

Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; Songs of Innocence and of Experience.
Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, including the 1802 Preface; "Michael"; "Resolution and Independence"; "Ode: Intimations of Immortality"
Coleridge, "The Eolian Harp"; "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"; "Kubla Khan"; "Christabel"; "Frost at Midnight"; "Dejection: An Ode"
Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto 3; Don Juan, Canto 1
P. Shelley, "Mont Blanc"; "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"; "Ode to the West Wind"; "Adonais";"To a Skylark"; "Ozymandias"
Keats, "The Eve of St. Agnes"; "To a Nightingale"; "Ode on a Grecian Urn"; "Ode on Melancholy"; "The Fall of Hyperion"; "To Autumn"
M. Shelley, Frankenstein
Tennyson, "Ulysses"; In Memoriam, A.H.H.
Browning, "My Last Duchess"; "Meeting at Night"; "Parting at Morning"; "The Bishop Orders His Tomb"; "Fra Lippo Lippi"; "Andrea Del Sarto"
Dickens, Hard Times
E. Bronte, Wuthering Heights
G. Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
Back to Top



IV. American Literature, Colonial - 1900

Bradstreet, “The Prologue”; “To Her Father with Some Verses”; “The Author to Her Book”; “Contemplations”; “The Flesh and the Spirit”; “Before the Birth of One of Her Children”; “To My Dear and Loving Husband”; “In Reference to Her Children, 23 June, 1659”; “In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet”; “Upon the Burning of Our House”
Rowlandson, A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson
Franklin, The Autobiography
Emerson, Nature; The American Scholar
Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.
Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter.
Melville, Moby Dick.
Thoreau, Walden, Chapters 1,2,7,11,16-18.
Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century
Whitman, Preface to the 1855 Edition of Leaves of Grass; "Song of Myself"; "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"; "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"; Democratic Vistas.
Dickinson, “I felt a funeral, in my Brain” (P280); “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church-” (P324); “After great pain, a formal feeling comes” (P341); “This was a Poet-It is That” (448); “I heard a Fly buzz-when I died-” (P465); “Because I could not stop For Death-” (P712); “She rose to His Requirement-dropt” (732); “My Life had stood-a Loaded Gun-” (P754); “Title divine-is Mine!” (P1072); “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant-” (P1129)
Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
James, Portrait of a Lady.
Chopin, The Awakening


V. 20th Century Literature

Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Wharton, The House of Mirth.
Joyce, Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man.
Woolf, To the Lighthouse; A Room of One's Own.
Yeats, "Among School Children"; "Sailing to Byzantium"; "The Magi"; "Leda and the Swan"; "Easter 1916"; "The Second Coming"; "Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop"; "Lapis Lazuli"; "The Circus Animals' Dersertion".
Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"; The Waste Land.
Frost, "Mowing"; "Mending Wall"; "Home Burial"; "After Apple-Picking"; "An Old Man's Winter Night"; "The Oven Bird"; "Birches"; "Out, Out --"; "Design"; "Directive."
Stevens, “The Snow Man”; “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock”; “Sunday Morning”; “Peter Quince at the Clavier”; “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”; “The Idea of Order at Key West”; “Of Modern Poetry”; “Not Ideas about the Thing But the Thing Itself.”.
Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”; “The Weary Blues”; “I, Too”; “Come to the Waldorf-Astoria”; “Goodbye Christ.”.
Hemingway, “Big Two-Hearted River”; “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”; “Hills like White Elephants”; “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”; “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.”.
Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.
Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury.
O'Neill, A Long Day's Journey Into Night.
Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Ellison, Invisible Man.
Beckett, Waiting for Godot.
Back to Top

VI. Literary Criticism

Plato, Republic, Book X.
Aristotle, "Poetics."
Horace, "Ars Poetica."
Sidney, "An Apologie for Poesie."
Pope, "An Essay on Criticism."
Wordsworth, Preface (1802) to Lyrical Ballads.
Poe, "The Poetic Principle."
Arnold, "The Study of Poetry."
James, "The Art of Fiction."
Freud, "Creative Writers and Daydreaming."
Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent."
Ransom, "Criticism, Inc."
De Beauvoir, The Second Sex.
Derrida, Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.
Eagleton, "Marxism and Literary Criticism.”

Ode on Melancholy I that poem.

[mckenna]

What's the reading list like for English and Creative Writing at Man Met? I might be applying to this university when I finally send of my application, so I just wanted to know if it's any good

[_Claudia_]

A big thank you to everyone - this is a great thread!
I really haven't read that much from the lists, but I'm Dutch, so I forgive myself.

[hobnob]

(Original post by mckenna)
What's the reading list like for English and Creative Writing at Man Met? I might be applying to this university when I finally send of my application, so I just wanted to know if it's any good

Just go here and search for any of the modules listed on this page which interest you.

[mckenna]

(Original post by hobnob)
Just go here and search for any of the modules listed on this page which interest you.

Cheers

[gunners r us]

are there any books to possible read about gender politics?

[MSB]

(Original post by gunners r us)
are there any books to possible read about gender politics?

I'm afraid I don't know much about that particular topic.