To all the bookworms...

Can you recommend any books that would be worth reading for my preparation for English at uni in September? Although I'm predicted an A* in English this year I am not very well read and now seems the perfect time to catch up on some reading. Thanks :smile:

Reply 1

flopsybunnybell

8

wow....where to start....
I have basically taken most of these authors off of the English uni prep list that my teacher gave me.

Novels and short stories:
Jane Austen
the Bronte sisters - Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre are the most well-known; perhaps read Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys after Jane Eyre
Charles Dickens
Thomas Hardy
Elizabeth Gaskell
Mary Shelley (if you want to prepare for a degree in English, only bother with Frankenstein, don't read any of the others)
Oscar Wilde
Margaret Atwood
F Scott Fitzgerald
EM Forster
James Joyce
DH Lawrence
Toni Morrison
George Orwell
Virginia Woolf
Angela Carter - The Bloody Chamber

Poetry:
Sylvia Plath (if you only read one poem, make it Daddy)
Simon Armitage
William Blake
Geoffrey Chaucer
TS Eliot
Ted Hughes
John Keats
William Shakespeare
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
PB Shelley
William Wordsworth

And some drama:
Caryl Churchill - Top Girls
Henrik Ibsen - A Doll's House
Christopher Marlowe
Harold Pinter
John Webster
Tennessee Williams
And Oscar Wilde again

Criticism:
Terry Eagleton
Harold Bloom

This is just a starting point, I'm sure others will have more suggestions.

BTW - if you're going to start uni in september this year, they might have sent you a reading list, or there will probably be one on your university website. Perhaps try googling '[name of university] english reading list'.

Reply 2

Elle333

OP

9

Original post by flopsybunnybell

wow....where to start....
I have basically taken most of these authors off of the English uni prep list that my teacher gave me.

Novels and short stories:
Jane Austen
the Bronte sisters - Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre are the most well-known; perhaps read Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys after Jane Eyre
Charles Dickens
Thomas Hardy
Elizabeth Gaskell
Mary Shelley (if you want to prepare for a degree in English, only bother with Frankenstein, don't read any of the others)
Oscar Wilde
Margaret Atwood
F Scott Fitzgerald
EM Forster
James Joyce
DH Lawrence
Toni Morrison
George Orwell
Virginia Woolf
Angela Carter - The Bloody Chamber

Poetry:
Sylvia Plath (if you only read one poem, make it Daddy)
Simon Armitage
William Blake
Geoffrey Chaucer
TS Eliot
Ted Hughes
John Keats
William Shakespeare
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
PB Shelley
William Wordsworth

And some drama:
Caryl Churchill - Top Girls
Henrik Ibsen - A Doll's House
Christopher Marlowe
Harold Pinter
John Webster
Tennessee Williams
And Oscar Wilde again

Criticism:
Terry Eagleton
Harold Bloom

This is just a starting point, I'm sure others will have more suggestions.

BTW - if you're going to start uni in september this year, they might have sent you a reading list, or there will probably be one on your university website. Perhaps try googling '[name of university] english reading list'.

Thank you so much. I googled it and it came up with the preliminary reading list for those who started last September. Do you think it would bet the same reading this year?

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Reply 3

flopsybunnybell

8

Original post by Elle333

Thank you so much. I googled it and it came up with the preliminary reading list for those who started last September. Do you think it would bet the same reading this year?

It's unlikely that the course would have changed dramatically. There might have been a couple of tweaks to which exact texts are being studied, but you don't really have anything to loose from reading a book :wink:

Reply 4

username474976

15

First get an introductory text on literary theory like Eagleton's (1983). This will provide a broad overview of what literary criticism at university really entails, as well as an understanding of all those pesky ists and isms.

After that, I would suggest some essential reading (Shakespeare, Dickens, Milton, Wordsworth, etc.); some module-specific reading (i.e. particular periods/genres/authors you will be specialising in during the course of your degree); and lastly some interdisciplinary reading that will give you a broader knowledge base (Homer, Plato, Sophocles, religious texts, etc.).

I would leave the more challenging authors like Joyce and Faulkner until second year when you will be better equipped to understand them for their literary merit.

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