BA English Summer Reading List 14/15

Theory: Jeffrey Wainright. Poetry: The Basics. London: Routledge, 2004

The Norton Anthology of Poetry, ed. Ferguson, Slater and Stallworthy

(These poems can be found in the Anthology)

Shakespeare, 'Sonnet 55’

John Donne: ‘Holy Sonnet 14’

John Milton, ‘Lycidas’

Andrew Marvell, ‘An Horatian Ode’

Wordsworth: ‘Tintern Abbey’

Alexander Pope, ‘The Rape of the Lock’

John Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’

Robert Browning, ‘My Last Duchess’

Emily Dickinson, ‘Because I could not stop for Death’

Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘The Windhover’

Gertrude Stein, ‘Stanzas in Meditation’

Ezra Pound, ‘Portrait d’une femme’

W. H. Auden, ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’

William Carlos Williams, ‘Pictures of Breughel’

Frank O'Hara, ‘Why I am not a painter’

Sylvia Plath, ‘Lady Lazarus’.

Term One

Moshin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Penguin, 2007 and reprints)


Daniel Defoe, Roxana, ed. John Mullan (Oxford World's Classics, 2008 and rpt.)


Aphra Behn, The Fair Jilt and Love-Letters to a Gentleman, in Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works, ed. Janet Todd (Penguin Classics, 1992 and rpt.)



Samuel Richardson, Pamela, ed. Tom Keymer and Alice Wakely (Oxford World's Classics, 2001 and rpt.)


Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela, ed. Judith Hawley (Penguin, Classics 1999 and rpt.)


Term Two

Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, ed. E. J. Clery and W. S. Lewis (Oxford World’s Classics, 2008 and rpts.)


William Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed. Pamela Clemitt (Oxford World's Classics, 2009)


Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. Gillian Beer (Penguin Classics, 2003 and rpt.)


Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (the 1818 version, not the 1831 version), ed. Marilyn

Butler (Oxford World’s Classics, 2008 and rpts.)


James Hogg, Confessions of a Justified Sinner, ed. Karl Miller (Penguin Classics, 2006)


Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, ed. Philip Horne (Penguin Classics, 2003 and rpt.)

Comedies and Histories:

As You Like It

Twelfth Night

The Merchant of Venice

Henry IV Part I

Henry V

Tragedies and late plays of the Jacobean Shakespeare

Hamlet

Othello

King Lear

The Winter's Tale

The Tempest.

The Wanderer*


Beowulf*


The Dream of the Rood*


The Battle of Brunanburh*


Malory's Tale of Balin


Sir Orfeo


The Reeve's Tale


Sir Gawain and the Green Knight


The York Play of the Crucifixion


The Old English texts (marked with * above) can also be found in anthologies. You don't have to buy one, but many are cheaply available online or in a library. Some commonly found anthologies include:

Bradley, S. A. J., trans., Anglo-Saxon Poetry (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1982)


Crossley-Holland, Kevin, trans., The Anglo-Saxon World (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 1982)


David, Alfred and James Simpson, eds, The Norton Anthology of English Literature Volume A: The Middle Ages, 8th edn (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2006) [note this also has modernised versions of some of our Middle English poems, too]


Delanty, Greg and Michael Matto, eds, The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation, foreword by Seamus Heaney (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011)


Gordon, R. K., trans., Anglo-Saxon Poetry, rev. edn (London: Dent, 1954)


Kennedy, Charles W., trans., An Anthology of Old English Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960)

Required Textbooks (Needed by January)

Marsden, Richard, ed., The Cambridge Old English Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Burrow, J. A. and Thorlac Turville-Petre, A Book of Middle English, 3rd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).

Any translation of Beowulf. Most popular recently has been Seamus Heaney's translation, but other easily available translations are: Michael Alexander, trans.,Beowulf: A Verse Translation (London: Penguin, 1973); R. M. Liuzza, trans., Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2000); Kevin Crossley Holland, trans., Beowulf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Any translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Good choices include Simon Armitage’s recent translation and the Oxford World’s Classics translation (by Keith Harrison; note especially the introduction by Helen Cooper).

Background Reading For ML

In addition, it is essential to do some background reading. There are many excellent introductions to the period’s literature; the following are merely examples. Note that, although you should read some of these, you are not expected to buy them. You may, however, find it useful to own one or two.

Alexander, Michael, A History of English Literature (Houndsmills, Basingstoke: MacMillan, 2000), chapters 1 and 2


Brown, Peter, A Companion to Chaucer (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000)


Brown, Peter, A Companion to Medieval Literature and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007)


Burrow, J. A., Medieval Writers and their Work (Oxford, 1982)


Ellis, Steve (ed.), Chaucer: An Oxford Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)


Fulk, R.D. and Christopher M. Cain, A History of Old English Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005)


Godden, Malcolm and Michael Lapidge, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)


Gray, Douglas (ed.), An Oxford Companion to Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)


Gray, Douglas, Later Medieval English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)


Johnson, David and Elaine Treharne, Readings in Medieval Texts: Interpreting Old and Middle English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)


Lewis, C. S., The Discarded Image (Cambridge, 1964)


Liuzza, R. M., ed., Old English Literature: Critical Essays (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002)


North, Richard and Joe Allard, Beowulf & Other Stories: A New Introduction to Old English, Old Icelandic & Anglo-Norman Literatures (Harlow: Pearson, 2007)


Pearsall, Derek, Old English and Middle English Poetry (London: Routledge, 1977)


Saunders, Corinne, A Companion to Medieval Poetry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010)


Turville-Petre, Thorlac, Middle English Literature: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006)