The Student Room Group
Reply 1
Well at Cardiff you do three subjects in your first year, meaning our English list is probably a lot shorter than most places!

The French Lieutenant's Woman
Dracula
Goblin Market
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Sons and Lovers
A Portrait of the Artist as a young man
Oroonoko
Translations
Roger Dodsworth (a short story by Mary Shelley)
And a lot of poems from the norton anthology!
Reply 2
heheh. This is from a few years ago, but it's still vividly etched on my memory. We didn't have department-wide reading lists, but here's what what prescribed by my supervisors:

The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde
Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy
Poems of the Pearl/Gawain Poet
Piers Plowman
Morte Darthur
extracts from Julian of Norwich and Margery of Kempe
Astrophil and Stella
Shakepeare's Sonnets
extracts of Renaissance literary criticism
Dr Faustus
Volpone, The Alchemist, Epicoene, Bartholemew Fair, selected poems of Ben Jonson
The Spanish Tragedy, The Revenger's Tragedy, The Changeling
Launcelot Andrewes - sermons
Donne - sonnets and selected sermons
Herbert - The Temple
Grace Abounding and Pilgrim's Progress
Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, various essays by Milton
and about 20-odd Shakespeare plays (we were encouraged to read them all, but I was flagging by this point)
ooh, and Horace's satires for a language paper
and various "theory"ish essays (Freud/Eliot/Arnold, others) and Heart of Darkness for classes


Yeah, baby :wink:
Reply 3
that's a nice renaissance selection.

i can't really remember mine.. we were just told our set texts, informed of the high importance of classical texts/writers (homer, virgil, pinder etc) and the rest was slowly given as the year went on.
Reply 4
It differed slightly for us according to which English course you were on but this was mine:
Genesis (King James version)
The Odyssey (Homer)
Beowulf (tr. Seamus Heaney)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Utopia (Thomas More)
Richard III (Shakespeare)
The Tempest (Shakespeare)
Paradise Lost (Milton)
Oroonoko (Aphra Behn)
Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe)
The Great Gatsby (F Scott Fitzgerald)
Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys)
the poetry of William Blake
Jane Eyre (Bronte)
The Importance of Being Earnest (Oscar Wilde)
the poetry of Philip Larkin
Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)

I know there were more but the course reading lists for my first year are no longer online...
Mine was:

Norton Anthology of Poetry: Astrophil and Stella, Shakespeare's Sonnets, John Donne, George Herbet, John Vaughan.
The Taming of the Shrew
Paradise Lost
Great Expectations
Oroonoko
Moll Flanders
Pamela
Joseph Andrews
Man of Feeling
Evelina
Northanger Abbey
Everyman
Dr Faustus
The Alchemist
Richard III
Henry IV Part 1
As You Like It
All For Love
The Countrywife
The Spanish Tragedy
Hamlet
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Oedipus Rex, Sophocles
The Awakening, Kate Chopin
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Surfacing, Margaret Atwood
Oranges are not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson
Cathedral, Raymond Carver
How late it was, how late, James Kelman
The Dead School, Patrick McCabe
Reading in the Dark, Seamus Deane

Also The Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, Henry V, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Pericles, The Tempest and the sonnets by Shakespeare.

Also did loads and loads of poetry, but we didn't really have a reading list for that, just things set every week, so I can't list it all. But we studied a wide variety of poetry, from Milton to Pope, Spenser, Wyatt, all the way through to T.S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Adrienne Rich.....all kinds of stuff really.

These were all our compulsory primary texts, but we also had to read loads and loads of criticism and essays, and other texts which were linked, for example, we were encouraged to read The Jew of Malta alongside The Merchant of Venice and The Spanish Tragedy alongside Titus Andronicus etc. I think most of us did, to be fair.
Reply 7
Things Fall Apart
The Bloody Chamber
Paradise Lost
Frankenstein
To the Lighthouse
Shakepeare's Sonnets
Wordsworth's poetry
Venus and Adonis
Beowulf
The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki
Macbeth
A Doll's House
The Rover
Medea
The Second Shepherd's Play

I can't remember them all, here's some. xx
Thanks for the replies so far folks. Greatly appreciated!

Just one more question. What textbooks are a good point to start learning from, e.g - The Oxford Companion, Norton Anthology, etc?

:smile:
Reply 9
LouReedsPyjamas
Thanks for the replies so far folks. Greatly appreciated!

Just one more question. What textbooks are a good point to start learning from, e.g - The Oxford Companion, Norton Anthology, etc?

:smile:

Well if you're doing a fair bit of poetry on your course, the the norton anthology is a must. Aside from that I'm not sure, reading some general critical theoey books might help, but since I haven't actually read any myself I can't really help! What uni are you going to? You will probably be given a reading list...if not, you could email them and ask what they would suggest (have you applied for uni yet?)