The following works represent what English majors at Southwestern Adventist University should have read before they graduate with their B. A. degree. Most of these works are assigned in the various classes students must take to complete the major. But some works listed here are not assigned in any class; further, since an English major does not need to take every offered literature class to graduate, you will not be assigned all these works. While such a long list might initially appear imposing, the typical English major will cover a majority of these works while taking the major classes themselves.
American Literature to 1860
John Smith
Selections from The General History of Virginia (ENGL 231)
William Bradford
Selections from Of Plymouth Plantation (ENGL 231)
Anne Bradstreet
Selections (ENGL 231)
Mary Rowlandson
A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (ENGL 231)
Benjamin Franklin
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (ENGL 231)
Washington Irving
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (ENGL 231)
“Rip Van Winkle” (ENGL 231)
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature (ENGL 231)
Henry David Thoreau
Walden (ENGL 231)
Edgar Allan Poe
“The Fall of the House of Usher” (ENGL 231)
“The Purloined Letter” (ENGL 231)
“The Raven” (ENGL 231)
“The Philosophy of Composition” (ENGL 231)
“To Helen” (ENGL 231)
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Scarlet Letter (ENGL 231)
“Young Goodman Brown” (ENGL 231)
“My Kinsman, Major Molineux” (ENGL 231)
“Rappaccini’s Daughter” (ENGL 231)
Herman Melville
Moby Dick
Billy Budd (ENGL 231)
Walt Whitman
Song of Myself (ENGL 231)
“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” (ENGL 231)
“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed” (ENGL 231)
Emily Dickinson, selections (ENGL 231)
American Literature 1865-present
Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (232)
Ambrose Bierce
“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” or “Chickamauga” or “The Boarded Window” (ENGL 232)
Bret Harte
“The Luck of Roaring Camp” or “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” (ENGL 232)
Henry James
“Daisy Miller” or “The Turn of the Screw”
Kate Chopin
The Awakening (ENGL 232)
Booker T. Washington
A selection from Up From Slavery
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
“The Yellow Wallpaper” (ENGL 232)
W. E. B. Du Bois
A selection from The Souls of Black Folk
Jack London
“To Build a Fire” (ENGL 232)
Stephen Crane
The Red Badge of Courage
“The Open Boat” (ENGL 232)
Selected poems
E. A. Robinson
Selected poems (ENGL 232)
Gertrude Stein
Selected poems from Tender Buttons
Robert Frost
Selected poems (ENGL 232)
Sherwood Anderson
“Mother”
“Adventure” (ENGL 232)
Carl Sandburg
Selected poems (ENGL 232)
Wallace Stevens
Selected poems, including “Sunday Morning” (ENGL 232 and ENGL 457)
William Carlos Williams
Selected poems (ENGL 232 and ENGL 457)
Ezra Pound
Selected poems, including “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly”
Marianne Moore
Selected poems (ENGL 232)
T. S. Eliot
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (ENGL 232)
The Wasteland (ENGL 457)
Eugene O’Neill
Long Day’s Journey Into Night (ENGL 232)
Zora Neal Hurston
“How It Feels to Be Colored Me”
e. e. cummings
Selected poems (ENGL 232 and ENGL 457)
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby (ENGL 457)
William Faulkner
“Barn Burning” (ENGL 232)
As I Lay Dying (ENGL 457)
Ernest Hemingway
In Our Time
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro”
“Hills Like White Elephants”
Nathanael West
Miss Lonelyhearts (ENGL 457)
Langston Hughes
Selected poems (ENGL 232)
John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath
Countee Cullen
Selected poems (ENGL 232)
Richard Wright
“The Man Who Was Almost a Man”
Theodore Roethke
Selected poems (ENGL 232)
Eudora Welty
“Why I Live at the P. O.”
“A Worn Path”
Tennessee Williams
The Glass Menagerie (ENGL 232)
A Streetcar Named Desire
Elizabeth Bishop
Selected poems
John Cheever
A short story
Don Delillo
White Noise (ENGL 457)
Ralph Ellison
Invisible Man
Flannery O’Connor
“Good Country People” (ENGL 457)
Thomas Pynchon
The Crying of Lot 49 (ENGL 457)
John Barth
“Lost in the Funhouse” (assigned in ENGL 457)
Raymond Carver
“Cathedral” or another short story (assigned in ENGL 457)
Alice Walker
“Everyday Use” (assigned in ENGL 457)
Tillie Olsen
“I Stand Here Ironing”
Philip Roth
Selected stories
John Updike
Short stories
Some poems by the following:
Hart Crane
Randall Jarrell
John Berryman
Robert Lowell
Gwendolyn Brooks (ENGL 232)
Sylvia Plath
Richard Wilbur
Allen Ginsberg
Adrienne Rich
Medieval Literature
Beowulf (ENGL 454)
Battle of Maldon (ENGL 454)
The Dream of the Rood (ENGL 454)
The Wanderer (ENGL 454)
The Seafarer (ENGL 454)
Sir Thomas Mallory
Le Morte d’Arthur
Mandeville’s Travels
Geoffrey Chaucer
“Parliament of Fowls” (ENGL 454)
“House of Fame” (ENGL 454)
“Book of the Duchess” (ENGL 454)
“Troilus and Criseyde”
“The Canterbury Tales” (ENGL 454)
The York Cycle (drama)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (ENGL 454)
William Langland
“Piers Plowman” (ENGL 454)
The Book of Margery Kempe (ENGL 454)
Renaissance Literature
Philip Sidney poems (ENGL 451)
Edmund Spenser sonnets (ENGL 451)
Shakespeare
Sonnets (ENGL 451)
As You Like It (ENGL 451)
Hamlet (ENGL 451)
King Lear (ENGL 451)
The Tempest (ENGL 451)
17th Century Literature
John Donne poems (ENGL 452)
Andrew Marvell poems (ENGL 452)
George Herbert poems (ENGL 452)
John Milton poems
Paradise Lost (ENGL 452)
Samson Agonistes (ENGL 452)
18th Century British Literature
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
The School for Scandal (ENGL 453)
John Dryden
Absalom and Achitophel (ENGL 453)
“Alexander’s Feast” (ENGL 453)
An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (ENGL 453)
Samuel Pepys
Selections from The Diary (ENGL 453)
Samuel Richardson
Pamela (ENGL 453)
Henry Fielding
Joseph Andrews (ENGL 453)
Shamela
John Bunyan
Selections from The Pilgrim’s Progress (ENGL 453)
Jonathan Swift
Gulliver’s Travels (ENGL 453)
“A Modest Proposal” (ENGL 453)
Richard Steele and Joseph Addison
Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator (ENGL 453)
Frances Burney
Selections from The Journal and Letters (ENGL 453)
Alexander Pope
Selections from An Essay on Criticism (ENGL 453)
Selections from An Essay on Man (ENGL 453)
“The Rape of the Lock” (ENGL 453)
Samuel Johnson
The History of Rasselas (ENGL 453)
James Boswell
Selections from The Life of Samuel Johnson (ENGL 453)
Daniel Defoe
Robinson Crusoe
Romantic Literature
Samuel Taylor Coleridge poems (ENGL 455)
William Wordsworth poems (ENGL 455)
Percy Bysshe Shelley poems (ENGL 455)
Lord Byron poems (ENGL 455)
William Blake Poems (ENGL 455)
John Keats poems (ENGL 455)
Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice (ENGL 455)
Emma (ENGL 455)
Victorian Literature
Thomas Carlyle
Sartor Resartus (ENGL 456)
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
In Memoriam (ENGL 456)
“Ulysses” (ENGL 456)
“The Lady of Shalott” (ENGL 456)
Emily Bronte
Wuthering Heights (ENGL 456)
Charles Dickens
Great Expectations (ENGL 456)
David Copperfield
George Eliot
Middlemarch
Robert Browning
“The Bishop Orders His Tomb” (ENGL 456)
“My Last Duchess” (ENGL 456)
“Fra Lippo Lippi” (ENGL 456)
Matthew Arnold
“The Buried Life” (ENGL 456)
“Dover Beach” (ENGL 456)
Selections from Culture and Anarchy (ENGL 456)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
“The Blessed Damozel” (ENGL 456)
Christina Rossetti
“Goblin Market” (ENGL 456)
Thomas Hardy
The Mayor of Casterbridge
The Return of the Native
“Hap” and “Neutral Tones” (ENGL 457)
Gerard Manley Hopkins
“God’s Grandeur”
“Spring”
“Pied Beauty”
“Spring and Fall”
“[Carrion Comfort]”
Oscar Wilde
The Importance of Being Earnest
20th Century British Literature
G. K. Chesterton
Aquinas
James Joyce
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (ENGL 457)
The Dead
Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway (ENGL 457)
William Butler Yeats poems (ENGL 457)
Philip Larkin poems (ENGL 457)
Dylan Thomas poems (ENGL 457)
J. R. R. Tolkien
The Hobbit
C.S. Lewis
The Discarded Image
World Literature
Homer
The Iliad (ENGL 221)
The Odyssey (ENGL 221)
Sophocles
Oedipus the King (ENGL 221)
Antigone (ENGL 221)
Virgil
Aneid (ENGL 221)
Dante
Inferno (ENGL 221)
Divine Comedy (ENGL 221)
Egil’s Saga
St. Augustine
Confessions (ENGL 221)
Miguel de Cervantes
Don Quixote
Moliere
Tartuffe (ENGL 222)
Racine
Phaedra (ENGL 222)
Voltaire
Candide (ENGL 222)
Rousseau
Selections from Confessions (ENGL 222)
Poems by:
Holderin (ENGL 222)
Lamartine (ENGL 222)
Rimbaud (ENGL 222)
Baudelaire (ENGL 222)
Verlaine (ENGL 222)
Novalis (ENGL 222)
Bunina (ENGL 222)
De Castro (ENGL 222)
Goethe
Faust (ENGL 222)
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Short stories
Gustave Flaubert
Madame Bovary
Dostoevsky
Notes from Underground (ENGL 222)
The Brothers Karamazov
Leo Tolstoy
“The Death of Ivan Ilyich” (ENGL 222)
War and Peace
Franz Kafka
The Metamorphosis (ENGL 222)
Albert Camus
“The Guest” (ENGL 222)
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
“A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”
Umberto Eco
The Name of the Rose
Luigi Pirandello
Six Characters in Search of an Author (ENGL 222)
Rhetoric and Composition Texts
Aristotle
Rhetoric (excerpts)
David Bartholomae
“A Study of Error” (ENGL 342)
Janet Emig
The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders (excerpts) (ENGL 342)
Linda Flower
“Writer-based Prose: A Cognitive Basis for Problems in Writing” (ENGL 342)
Muriel Harris and Tony Silva,
“Tutoring ESL Students: Issues and Options” (ENGL 342)
Erika Lindemann
A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers (ENGL 342)
Donald Murray
A Writer Teaches Writing (excerpts) (ENGL 342)
“First Silence, Then Paper” (ENGL 342)
Leigh Ryan and Lisa Zimmerelli
The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors (ENGL 342)
Nancy Sommers
“Responding to Student Writing” (ENGL 342)
William Stafford
“A Way of Writing” (ENGL 342)
Arthur A. Stern
“When Is a Paragraph” (ENGL 342)