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)

17^th 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)

18^th 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

20^th 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)