Background
The Bible (Genesis-Exodus 20, Joshua-II Kings, Psalms, Proverbs, Isaiah, Jonah, Daniel, Gospels and Revelation constitute the sections that appear the most).
Classical Literature: Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Hesiod’s Works and Days, Theognis, Plautus and Terence, Seneca’s Tragedies, Martial Epigrams, Horace (selections), the Oresteia, the Oedepus Cycle, Lysistrata
English Lit
- Medieval Beowulf
- Judith
- Wanderer
- Seafarer
- Caedmon’s Hymn
- Bede’s Death Song
- Life of St. Cuthbert
- Dream of the Rood
- Marie de France-Fables
- Havelock the Dane
- King Horn
- Owl and the Nightingale
- Pearl
- Sir Orfeo
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
- Some selection of Langland, Piers Ploughman
- Chaucer: Canterbury Tales
- Julian of Norwich
- Margery Kempe
- Wakefield Master
- Middle English Lyrics (Selection)
- Malory (Selection—bks 7-8)
16th Century
- Thomas Wyatt
- Henry Howard
- Spenser (sonnets, Selections) Fairy Queen (selections)
- Sydney
- Marlowe (Faustus, Hero and Leander)
- Shakespeare
17th Century
- Ben Jonson (selections)
- John Donne (Holy Sonnets, The Flea, Elegies, selections)
- KJV Psalms
- Lady Mary Wroth (selections)
- Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan)
- Thomas Browne (Religio Medici)
- The Cavalier Poets (esp. Herrick, Noble Numbers and Hesperides)
- George Herbert (selections)
- Henry Vaughn (selections)
- Andrew Marvell (selections)
- Kathryn Philips (selections)
- Milton (Paradise Lost, other selections)
18th Century
- John Dryden (selections)
- Samuel Pepys (The Diary)
- John Bunyan (Pilgrim’s Progress)
- John Locke (selections)
- Daniel Defoe (Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe)
- Anne Finche (selections)
- Henry Fielding (selections; Joseph Andrews)
- Jonathan Swift (selections)
- Alexander Pope (selections)
- Samuel Johnson (selections)
- James Boswell (Life of Samuel Johnson)
- Thomas Gray (Ode…Eton College, Ode…Cat, Elegy…Churchyard)
- William Cowper (selections)
- Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels, essay selections)
- Lawrence Sterne (Tristram Shandy, A Sentimental Journey)
- Frances Burney (Evelina)
- Elizabeth Inchbald (A Simple Story)
- Samuel Richardson (Pamela)
- Edmund Burke (essays on French Revolution, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful)
19 Century-Romantic
- Jane Austen (all!)
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Lyrical Ballads)
- William Wordsworth (Lyrical Ballads)
- Dorothy Wordsworth (The Grasmere Journals)
- Mary Shelley (Frankenstein)
- Percy Shelley (selections)
- Lord Byron (selections)
- Sir Walter Scott (Waverly, Ivanhoe)
- 19th Century-Victorian
- Bronte sisters (Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall)
- Charles Darwin (selections)
- Thomas Carlyle (Sartor Resartus)
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Aurora Leigh, Sonnets from the Portuguese)
- Robert Browning (selections)
- Elizabeth Gaskell (North and South; Mary Barton)
- Charles Dickens (Great Expectations; David Copperfield)
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson (In Memoriam)
- Thomas Hardy (Tess of the d’Urbervilles; Jude the Obscure)
- George Eliot (Middlemarch)
- Robert Louis Stevenson (Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Treasure Island)
- Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest)
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Lost World)
- H. G. Wells (War of the Worlds, The Time Machine)
20th Century
- Rudyard Kipling (Kim; story selections)
- E. M. Forster (A Passage To India)
- Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited)
- Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)
- Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse; Mrs. Dalloway)
- James Joyce (The Dead, Portrait of the Artist)
- W. B. Yeats (selections)
- T. S. Eliot (selections)
- Muriel Sparks (The Girls of Slender Means)
- Sir Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim)
- J. R. R. Tolkein (The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings)
- C. S. Lewis (Chronicles of Narnia)
- Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children; The Satanic Verses)
- Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day)
- Julian Barnes (A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters)
- Anything nominated for a Man Booker Prize, 1969-present