Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought. Matsuo Basho
Idea Transcript
Novel Reading List The Novel Comprehensive Examination should reflect the novel’s historical and aesthetic development from the genre’s beginnings through the present, across geographical and national boundaries. Questions will be drawn from the Novel Comprehensive Examination reading list and supplemental texts added by the student. Students will be required to answer three questions for the examination, at least one of which will be concerned primarily with theoretical and/or critical claims: the cultural/ideological nature and impact of the novel across time, knowledge of subgenres of the novel; and techniques of narration, plotting, characterization, and structure. Each novel examination committee will consist of three faculty members, at least one of whom must be from the Literature faculty. (added 4/6/10) Primary Texts 17th- and 18th-century British 1. Aphra Behn 2. Daniel Defoe 3. Samuel Richardson 4. Henry Fielding 5. Laurence Sterne 6. Horace Walpole
Oroonoko Robinson Crusoe Pamela Tom Jones Tristram Shandy The Castle of Otranto
19th-century British 1. Jane Austen 2. Walter Scott 3. Mary Shelley 4. Charlotte Brontë 5. Emily Brontë 6. Charles Dickens 7. George Eliot 8. Thomas Hardy
Pride and Prejudice Waverley Frankenstein Jane Eyre Wuthering Heights Bleak House Middlemarch Jude the Obscure
19th-century American 1. James Fenimore Cooper 2. Nathaniel Hawthorne 3. Harriet Beecher Stowe 4. Herman Melville 5. William Wells Brown 6. Henry James 7. Mark Twain 8. Theodore Dreiser
The Pioneers The Scarlet Letter Uncle Tom’s Cabin Moby-Dick Clotel The Portrait of a Lady Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Sister Carrie
20th-century British and Irish 1. Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness
2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Ford Madox Ford James Joyce E.M. Forster Virginia Woolf Graham Swift
The Good Soldier Ulysses A Passage to India Mrs. Dalloway Waterland
20th-century American 1. Charles W. Chesnutt 2. Edith Wharton 3. F. Scott Fitzgerald 4. Ernest Hemingway 5. Djuna Barnes 6. William Faulkner 7. Zora Neale Hurston 8. Richard Wright 9. Ralph Ellison 10. Vladimir Nabokov 11. Thomas Pynchon 12. Leslie Marmon Silko 13. Toni Morrison 14. Art Spiegelman
The Marrow of Tradition The House of Mirth The Great Gatsby The Sun Also Rises Nightwood The Sound and the Fury Their Eyes Were Watching God Native Son Invisible Man Lolita Gravity’s Rainbow Ceremony Beloved Maus I and Maus II
International 1. Miguel de Cervantes 2. Stendhal 3. Honoré de Balzac 4. Gustave Flaubert 5. Fyodor Dostoevsky 6. Leo Tolstoy 7. Émile Zola 8. Franz Kafka 9. Marcel Proust 10. Thomas Mann 11. Chinua Achebe 12. Alain Robbe-Grillet 13. V.S. Napiaul 14. Jean Rhys 15. Gabriel García Márquez 16. Italo Calvino 17. Salman Rushdie
Don Quixote The Red and the Black Père Goriot Madame Bovary Crime and Punishment Anna Karenina Nana The Trial Swann’s Way The Magic Mountain Things Fall Apart Jealousy A House for Mr. Biswas Wide Sargasso Sea One Hundred Years of Solitude If on a winter’s night a traveler Midnight’s Children Secondary Texts
1. Ian Watt 2. Mikhail Bakhtin
The Rise of the Novel The Dialogic Imagination
3. Michael McKeon, ed.
Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach (anthology) 4. Nancy Armstrong Desire and Domestic Fiction 5. D.A. Miller The Novel and the Police 6. Terry Eagleton The English Novel 7. Peter Brooks Reading for the Plot 8. Seymour Chatman Story and Discourse 9. Frank Kermode The Sense of and Ending 10. Leslie Fiedler Love and Death in the American Novel 11. Bernard Bell The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition 12. Georg Lukács The Theory of the Novel 13. Michael Hoffman and Patrick Murphy, eds., Essentials of the Theory of Fiction (anthology). (N.B.: Contains Henry James, “The Art of Fiction”; Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”; Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature”; John Barth, “The Literature of Replenishment”; Linda Hutcheon, “The Pastime of Past Time”, and many others) 14. Alain Robbe-Grillet For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction 15. John Barth “The Literature of Exhaustion” 16. Patricia Waugh Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction 17. Andrew Gibson Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative