Faculty Committee

Maurizia Boscagli, Enda Duffy, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Sowon Park, Rita Raley, Glyn Salton-Cox, Russell Samolsky, Teresa Shewry

Notes and Resources

It is assumed that students taking the first qualifying examination in the 20th-Century Anglophone field will be familiar not only with the following primary texts but also with the principal critical and interpretive issues concerning these texts and the period at large.

Because of the exponential global increase in Anglophone literature, particularly in the latter part of the century, students may limit themselves to three areas in the post–1939 period.

1.0 = equivalent of one full-length novel
L =  in UCSB Library
N = in Norton Anthology of English Literature, seventh edition

Reading List, 1900-1939

  • One of the following (all L) (1.0):
    • Rudyard Kipling, Kim or
    • H. G. Wells, Tono Bungay, or
    • Baron Corvo, Hadrian the Seventh, or
    • Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier
  • Joseph Conrad,
    • Heart of Darkness, and
    • one of Nostromo, The Secret Agent, or Under Western Eyes (all L) (1.5)
  • D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers or Women in Love (both L) (1.0)
  • Katherine Mansfield,
    • “Bliss,”
    • “The Daughters of the Late Colonel,”
    • “The Stranger”,
    • “This Flower,”
    • “The Fly”, and
    • “The Garden Party” in Collected Stories (L) (0.25)
  • Virginia Woolf,
    • A Room of One’s Own,
    • “Mr. Bennett and Mr. Brown” (1924 version in Collected Essays) + and
    • one of Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, or The Waves (all L) (1.0)
  • James Joyce, Ulysses (L) (1.5)
  • E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (L) (1.0)
  • Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (L) (1.0)
  • Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (L) (1.0)
  • First World War poets (Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Siegfried Sassoon, Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg, Winfred Owen, May Wedderburn Cannan, David Jones) + (N) and Thomas Hardy, “Channel Firing,” “Drummer Hodge,” “The Man he Killed,” “And There was a Great Calm” in Complete Poems (L) (0.5)
  • Yeats, selected poems, (N) (0.5)
  • T.S. Eliot,
    • “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “The Waste Land,” “Four Quartets” in Collected Poems: 1909-1962,
    • “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” “Hamlet,” + “Metaphysical Poets” in Essays on Poetry and Poets
      (all L) (1.0)
  • W. H. Auden, selected poems (N) (1.0)
  • George Bernard Shaw, Heartbreak House (L) (0.5)
  • J. M. Synge, Playboy of the Western World or Sean O’Casey, Juno and the Paycock (both L) (0.5)
  • One of the following (all L) (0.5):
    • Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust,
    • Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September,
    • Christopher Isherwood, Berlin Stories,
    • Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness

Reading List, 1939-Present

British

  • Graham Greene, The Honorary Consul or Brighton Rock (both L) (1.0)
  • Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (L) (1.0)
  • Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honorable Defeat (L) (1.0)
  • Selected poems by Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes (N) (0.5)
  • Selected poems by Stevie Smith (N), Fleur Adcock, Elizabeth Jennings, Ann Stevenson, and Carol Ann Duffy in Linda France, ed., Sixty Women Poets (L) (0.5)
  • Harold Pinter, The Caretaker, or Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (both L) (0.5)
  • Caryl Churchill, Top Girls or Sarah Daniels, Ripen our Darkness (both L) (0.5)
  • Two of the following (all L) (2.0):
    • Margaret Drabble, The Realms of Gold,
    • J.G. Ballard, Crash,
    • Pat Barker, Regeneration,
    • Ian McEwan, Atonement,
    • Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus,
    • Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry,
    • Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming Pool Library,
    • James Kelman, How Late it Was, How Late

Irish

  • Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (L) (1.0)
  • Samuel Beckett, Molloy and Endgame (both L) (1.0)
  • Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne or Lies of Silence (both L) (1.0)
  • Edna O’Brien, The Country Girls or The House of Splendid Isolation (both L) (1.0)
  • William Trevor, The News from Ireland or Felicia’s Journey (both L) (1.0)
  • Patrick Kavanagh, candidate’s choice of poems from Collected or Complete Poems (both L) (0.25)
  • Seamus Heaney, candidate’s choice of poems from Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996 (L) (0.25)
  • Candidate’s choice of selected poems by Eavan Boland, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Eileen ni Chuilleanain, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon from Peggy O’Brian, ed., Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry: 1967-2000 and volume 3 of Seamus Deane, ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (both L) (0.5)
  • Brian Friel, Translations or Tom Murphy, The Gigli Concert (both L) (0.5)
  • Two of the following (all L) (1.5):
    • John McGahern, Amongst Women,
    • John Banville, The Book of Evidence,
    • Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha,
    • Jennifer Johnston, Shadows on Our Skin,
    • Patrick McCabe, The Butcher Boy

Caribbean

  • Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (L) (1.0)
  • George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin (L) (1.0)
  • V. S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men (L) (1.0)
  • Sam Selvon, Moses Ascending (L) (0.5)
  • Jamaica Kincaid,
    • The Autobiography of my Mother and
    • A Small Place (L) (1.0)
  • Derek Walcott, Omeros (L) (1.0)
  • Poems by John Agard, Louise Bennett, Kamau Braithwaite, Dionne Brand, Jean Binta Breeze, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Mutabaruka, Grace Nichols in Voice Print: An Anthology of Oral and Related Poetry from the Caribbean (0.5)
  • Two of the following (all L) (1.5):
    • Earl Lovelace, Wine of Astonishment,
    • Caryl Phillips, Cambridge,
    • Michelle Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven,
    • Wilson Harris, Carnival,
    • Garth St. Omer, A Room on the Hill

African

  • Amos Tutuola, The Palm Wine Drinkard (L) (0.5)
  • Chinua Achebe,
    • Things Fall Apart and
    • “The African Writer and the English Language” in Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays (both L) (1.0)
  • Wole Soyinka, Death and The King’s Horseman (L) (0.5)
  • Ngugi wa Thiongo, Petals of Blood (L) (1.0)
  • Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing (L) (1.0)
  • Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist (L) (1.0)
  • J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (L) (1.0)
  • Candidate’s selection of poems in Adewale Maja-Pearce, ed., The Heinemann Book of African Poetry in English (L) (0.5)
  • Two of the following (L) (1.5):
    • Bessie Head, A Question of Power,
    • Buchi Emecheta, The Joys of Motherhood,
    • Nuruddin Farah, Maps,
    • Ben Okri, Stars of the New Curfew,
    • Ken Saro-Wiwa, Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English,
    • Ama Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy

South Asian

  • R.K. Narayan, Swami and Friends (L) (0.5)
  • Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day (L) (0.5)
  • Salmon Rushdie, Shame or Midnight’s Children (both L) (1.0)
  • Nayantara Sahgal, Rich Like Us or Mistry, Such a Long Journey (L only for Rich Like Us) (1.0)
  • Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy (L) (2.0)
  • Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family (L) (1.0)
  • Bapsi Sidhwa, Cracking India (1.0)
  • Mahasweta Devi, Imaginary Maps (L) or Sujata Bhatt, Brunizem (L) (0.5)
  • Candidate’s selections from Kaiser Haq, ed., Contemporary Indian Poetry (L) (0.5)
  • One of the Following (all L) (1.0):
    • Zulficar Ghose, The Incredible Brazilian,
    • Amitav Ghosh, The Circle of Reason or The Shadow Lines
    • Hanif Khureshi, The Buddha of Suburbia,
    • Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

Canadian

  • Robertson Davies, The Fifth Business (L) (1.0)
  • Modichai Richler, St. Urbain’s Horseman (L) (1.0)
  • Hugh MacLennan, The Watch that Ends the Night or Sheila Watson, The Double Hook (L) (1.0)
  • Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (L) (1.0)
  • Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel (L) (1.0)
  • Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women (L) (1.0)
  • Timothy Findley, The Wars or Not Wanted on the Voyage (both L) (1.0)
  • Selected poems by Earle Birney, Irving Layton, M. Ondaatje, P.K. Page, Margaret Avison, Al Purdy, Margaret Atwood in Gary Geddes, ed., 15 Canadian Poets X 3 (L) (0.25)
  • Two of Sharon Pollock, Blood Relations, George Ryga, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (all L) (0.5)

Antipodean (Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands)

  • Patrick White, Voss (L) (1.0)
  • Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children (L) (1.0)
  • Janet Frame, An Angel at My Table (L) (1.0)
  • Witi Tame Ihimaera, Dear Miss Mansfield (L) (1.0)
  • Colin Johnson, Dr. Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World (1.0)
  • Albert Wendt, Pouliuli (L) (1.0)
  • Patricia Grace, Potiki, Keri Hulme, The Bone People, or Sally Morgan, My Place (all L) (1.0)
  • Richard Flanagan, Gould’s Book of Fish (L) (1.0)
  • Selected poems by Les Murray, Gwen Harwood, Lionel Fogarty, John Kinsella, and A.D. Hope in John Tranter and Philip Mead, eds., The Penguin [or Bloodaxe] Book of Modern Australian Poetry (L) (0.5)

Revised 2003