Faculty Committee
Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, Robert A. Erickson, William Warner
Reading List
It is assumed that students taking the first qualifying exam
in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century will be familiar
not only with the following primary texts but also with
the critical and interpretive issues concerning these texts
and the period at large.
Required selections may be found as indicated:
BL = British Literature 1640-1789, An Anthology. 2d Edition.
Ed. Robert DeMaria, Jr. Blackwell, 2001.
ECP = Eighteenth-Century Poetry, An Annotated Anthology.
Eds. David Fairer and Christine Gerrard. Blackwell, 1999
AB = Oroonoko, The Rover, and Other Works. Ed. Janet Todd.
Penguin, 1992.
RED = Broadview Anthology of Restoration & Early Eighteenth-Century
Drama. Ed. J. Douglas Canfield. Broadview, 2001.
PC = photocopy available in the office of the Staff Graduate
Adviser
Students are encouraged to read widely in the relevant secondary
literature.
DRAMA (in RED unless noted)
John Dryden. Marriage à la Mode or All for
Love, PC: “Preface” to
An Evening’s Love
William Wycherley. The Country Wife
William Congreve. The Way of the World
Aphra Behn. The Rover or The Lucky Chance
John Gay. The Beggar's Opera
Oliver Goldsmith. She Stoops to Conquer, PC: “An Essay
on the Theater”
Richard Brinsley Sheridan. The School for Scandal
NOVEL
John Bunyan. Pilgrim's Progress, Part One
Eliza Haywood. BL: Fantomina
Daniel Defoe. Robinson Crusoe or Moll Flanders
Samuel Richardson. Pamela or Clarissa
Henry Fielding. Joseph Andrews or Tom Jones
Charlotte Lennox. The Female Quixote
Oliver Goldsmith. The Vicar of Wakefield
or Tobias Smollett. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
Laurence Sterne. Tristram Shandy
Horace Walpole. Castle of Otranto
Ann Radcliffe The Italian or Mysteries of Udolpho
Frances Burney. Evelina
Jane Austen. Sense and Sensibility
POETRY (BL unless noted) John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester. “The Imperfect
Enjoyment”; “A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind”; “The
Disabled Debauchee”; “Lampoon”; “Signior
Dildo”; “A Satyr on Charles II”
Anne Finch. “The Introduction”; “Life’s
Progress”; “Adam Posed”; “The
Petition for an Absolute Retreat”; “To the
Nightingale”; “A
Poem for … Catharine Tufton”; “The
Atheist and the Acorn”; “The Unequal Fetters”; “The
Answer [to Pope’s ‘Impromptu’]”; “The
Spleen: A Pindaric Poem.”;
ECP: “A Nocturnal Rêverie”
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. “The Lover”; “The Reasons that
Induced Dr. S- …”; “To the Memory of Mr. Congreve”
ECP: “Saturday. The Small-Pox”; “Epistle from Arthur Gray
the Footman”; “Verses Address’d to the Imitator of Horace” (with
Lord Hervey); “Verses on Self-Murder”
James Thomson. PC: “Rule, Britannia”
Stephen Duck. From “The Thresher’s Labor”
Mary Collier. “The Woman’s Labor”
Thomas Gray. “Sonnet [on the death of Richard West]”; “Ode
on the Death of a Favourite Cat”; “An Elegy Wrote in a Country
Church Yard”; “The Progress of Poesy”
ECP: “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”
William Collins. “Ode to Fear”; “Ode on the Poetical Character”; “Ode
to Evening”
Oliver Goldsmith. “The Deserted Village”
William Cowper. “On a Goldfinch Starved to Death in his Cage”; “To
the Immortal Memory of the Halibut …”; “The Negro’s
Complaint”; “On a Spaniel Called Beau”; “Beau’s
Reply”; “On the Ice Islands”; “The Castaway”
PROSE WRITERS (BL unless noted)
Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan, Ch XIII: “Of the Natural Condition of Mankind …”
John Locke. An Essay concerning … Civil Government,
excerpts from Chs. 1, 2, 4, 5
Mary Astell. From A Serious Proposal to the Ladies
Daniel Defoe. “An Academy for Women”; “The Shortest-Way with
the Dissenters”; “A True Relation of the Apparition of one
Mrs. Veal”
Addison and Steele. Spectators 1, 2, 10, 11 (BL), 62, 112, 122, 287, 411-414
(PC)
David Hume. “Of the Liberty of the Press”; “My Own Life”
Edmund Burke. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas
of the Sublime and the Beautiful, Part 2, Sections 1-5, 13-16
Edward Gibbon. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, from Vol. II,
Ch. 23
Bernard Mandeville. From A Modest Defence of Public Stews …
Edward Young. Conjectures on Original Composition (PC)
James Boswell. From The Life of Johnson (BL); from the Journal (PC)
Olaudah Equiano. From The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah
Equiano…
John
Dryden (BL unless noted)
Absalom and Achitophel
"
Song for St. Cecilia's Day"
"
Mac Flecknoe"
PC: "Essay of Dramatic Poesy"
Aphra Behn (AB unless noted)
Oroonoko; “Love Armed”; “Epilogue to Sir
Patient Fancy”; “The Disappointment”; “To
Mr. Creech …on his Excellent Translation of Lucretius”; “A
Letter to Mr. Creech at Oxford”; “Song: On her
Loving Two Equally”; “To the fair Clarinda …”; “On
Desire”; “A Pindaric Poem to the Reverend Doctor
Burnet”
BL: “A Letter to a Brother of the Pen in Tribulation”
Jonathan Swift (BL unless noted)
A Tale of a Tub
Gulliver's Travels
"
A Modest Proposal"
"
The Lady's Dressing Room"; "A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed"
ECP: "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift"; "Stella's Birthday
1727"
PC: "To Stella Visiting Me in My Sickness"; "An Argument Against
the Abolishing of Christianity in England"
Alexander Pope (ECP unless noted)
The Dunciad, Bk I (1743); “Eloisa to Abelard”; "Windsor-Forest”; “An
Epistle to a Lady. Of the Characters of Women”; “To Richard Boyle,
Earl of Burlington. Of the Use of Riches”; “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot”
BL: The Rape of the Lock
PC: An Essay on Criticism; An Essay on Man and “The Design”
Samuel Johnson (BL unless noted)
Rasselas
From the Preface to The Plays of William Shakespeare
From the Preface to The Dictionary of the English Language
"
The Vanity of Human Wishes"
PC: Rambler, No. 4; from Lives of the Poets: “Milton”; “Dryden”; “Pope”
Revised 08/03
|
Reading List 2
