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REVISED COMPREHENSIVE READING LIST AND LITERARY TERMS
English Department, Xavier University (Updated 2004)
Important Information: During the first semester of the senior year every English and English Education major must register to take the departmental comprehensive examination (ENGL
- and the English Senior Colloquium (ENGL 3001). If the student has a 3.5 gpa in English and has received permission from the Chair of the Department to write a senior thesis, the department will waive the essay sections of the comprehensive (parts 2 and 3), but ALL students must complete and pass the multiple choice section of the comprehensive (part 1) and ENGL
- The reading list and list of literary terms is meant as a study guide for the exam. In addition to the authors and works listed below, students are responsible for basic knowledge of literary periods and relevant historical or biographical information, such as that which can be found in introductory chapters of the Norton anthologies.
AREA 1: BRITISH LITERATURE Recommended texts: The Norton Anthology of English Literature , Vols. 1 and 2; individually published titles
Middle Ages or Medieval Literature (Old and Middle English Literature) Beowulf Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (“The General Prologue,” “The Pardoner’s Tale,” “The Wife of Bath’s Tale”)
The Renaissance, 16th^ and 17th^ Century Literature Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella (7, “When Nature made her chief work, Stella’s eyes”; 9, “Queen Virtue’s court, which some call Stella’s face”; 45, “Stella oft sees the very face of woe”) John Donne, “The Flea,” “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress” John Milton, Paradise Lost , Books I, IX William Shakespeare, Othello Sir Thomas More, Utopia (Norton selections)
The Restoration and 18th^ Century Literature Alexander Pope, “The Rape of the Lock” Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, Books I, IV ; “A Modest Proposal”
The Romantic Period and Early 19th^ Century Literature William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience (“London,” “The Tyger,” “The Sick Rose,” “The Garden of Love”) William Wordsworth, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
John Keats, “Ode to a Nightengale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn” Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
The Victorian Period Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses” Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess” Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach” Christina Rossetti, “Goblin Market” Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles
The 20th^ Century (includes Modern and Postmodern Literature) Wilfred Owen “Dulce et Decorum Est” William Butler Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Leda and the Swan,” “The Second Coming” W.H. Auden, “Musee des Beaux Arts” Dylan Thomas, “Do not go gentle into that good night” Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway James Joyce “The Dead” Seamus Heaney, “Digging” Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
AREA 2: AMERICAN AND AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE Recommended texts: The Norton Anthology of American Literature , Vols. 1 and 2; The Norton Anthology of African American Literature , Vols. 1 and 2; individually published titles
The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods Anne Bradstreet, “To My Dear and Loving Husband” Phillis Wheatley, “Thoughts on Imagination”
The 19th^ Century to the Civil War Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven,” “The Cask of Amontillado” Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life... Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter Herman Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener” Walt Whitman, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed” Emily Dickinson, “After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes”
The Late 19th^ Century after the Civil War Paul Laurence Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask” Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn Charles Chesnutt, “The Wife of His Youth” Kate Chopin, The Awakening
The 20th^ Century (including Modernism and Postmodernism) Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings”
LITERARY TERMS Recommended text: M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 6th^ ed.
Ancient/Classical Period allegory alliteration allusion archetype catharsis chorus cliché comedy deus ex machine diction drama dramatic monologue elegy epic explication genre hamartia hero hubris hyperbole imagery irony lyric magic realism Medieval Literature/Middle Ages metaphor modernism motif myth naturalism oral tradition omniscient speaker parody pastoral personification poetic justice
point of view postmodernism protagonist realism Renaissance Restoration Romantic Period romance satire sentimental simile sonnet stream of consciousness surrealism symbol theme tone tragedy Transcendentalism Victorian Period understatement
