These are my three reading lists for my Comprehensive Exams. I will update them as I decide to include new material and receive feedback from profs. I have barely started reading.
My three test areas are: Children's Literature, 19th Century American Literature (approx. 1830-1870), and 20th Century American Literature (approx. 1900-1950).
Children’s Literature
Primary Texts
Alcott, Louisa May
"The Blind Lark"
"Daisy’s Jewel-Box and How She Filled It"
Anderson, Hans Christian
Collected Fairy Tales
Babbitt, Natalie
Tuck Everlasting
Banks, Lynne Reid
The Indian in the Cupboard
Barrie, J.M.
Peter Pan (play)
Baum, L. Frank
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Brown, Margaret Wise
Goodnight, Moon
Bunyan, John
The Pilgrim’s Progress
Burnett, Frances Hodgson
The Secret Garden
The Little Princess
Carroll, Lewis
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There
Dahl, Roald
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
The Witches
Fantastic Mr. Fox
DeFoe, Daniel
Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles
A Christmas Carol
Eastman, P.D.
Are You My Mother?
Grahame, Kenneth
The Wind in the Willows
Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
Hamilton, Virginia
MC Higgins the Great
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys
Hinton, S.E.
The Outsiders
Juster, Norton
The Phantom Tollbooth
Kipling, Rudyard
Rikki-Tikki-Tavi
Lowry, Lois
The Giver
L’Engle
A Wrinkle in Time
Lewis, C.S.
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
Lee, Harper
To Kill a Mockingbird
Milne, A. A.
Winnie-the-Pooh
Montgomery, L. M
Anne of Avonlea
Newberry, John
A Little Pretty Pocket-Book
O’Dell, Scott
Island of the Blue Dolphins
Paterson, Katherine
Bridge to Terabithia
Potter, Beatrix
The Tale of Peter Rabbit
Rowling, J.K.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Sendak, Maurice
Where the Wild Things Are
Seuss, Dr.
The Cat in the Hat
Sewell, Anna
Black Beauty
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Twain, Mark
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Verne, Jules
Webster, Jean
Daddy Long-Legs
White, E.B.
Charlotte's Web
Stuart Little
Wiggin, Kate Douglas
Wilder, Laura Ingalls
Little House in the Big Woods
Little House on the Prairie
Williams, Margery
The Velveteen Rabbit
Wyss, Johann
Swiss Family Robinson
Secondary Readings
Blackford, Holly Virginia. Out of This World: Why Literature Matters to Girls. New York:
Teacher’s College Press, 2004.
Bradford, Clare. "The End of Empire? Colonial and Postcolonial Journeys in Children's Books."
Children's Literature 29, 2001, 196-218.
Buckley, Jerome. Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1974.
Clark, Beverly Lyon. Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children's Literature in America.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003.
Dobrin, Sidney I. and Kenneth B. Kidd, Eds. Wild Things: Children's Culture and Ecocriticism.
Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2004. 16-30.
Griswold, Jerry. Feeling Like a Kid: Childhood and Children's Literature. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Press, 2006.
Gubar, Marah. Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children's Literature. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Hollindale, Peter. Signs of Children in Children’s Books
Lerer, Seth. Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Lesnik-Oberstein, Karin. Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child.
Lurie, Alison. Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups: The Subversive Power of Children’s Literature.
Marcus. Leonard S. Minders of Make-Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of
American Children’s Literature. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008.
MacLeod, Anne Scott. American Childhood: Essays on Children's Literature of the Nineteenth
and Twentieth Centuries. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1994.
Nodelman, Perry. The Hidden Adult: Defining Children's Literature. Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2008.
---Words about Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children's Picture Books. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990.
Rose, Jacqueline The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children's Fiction. London:
MacMillan, 1984.
Stephens, John. Language and Ideology in Children's Fiction. 1992.
Stephens, John, Ed. Ways of Being Male: Representing Masculinities in Children's Literature and Film. 2002.
Stephens, John and Robyn McCallum. Retelling Stories, Framing Culture, Traditional Story and
Metanarratives in Children's Literature. 1998.
Tatar, Maria. Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood. New York: W.W. Norton
& Company, 2009.
Trites, Roberta Serlinger. Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent
Literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000.
---Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children’s Novels. Iowa City: University
of Iowa Press, 1997.
Tucker, Nicholas.The Child and the Book; a Psychological and Literary Exploration. 1983.
Zipes, Jack David. Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children's Literature from
Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter. New York: Routledge, 2001.
---Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre. New York:
Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 2006.
Zornado, Joseph. Inventing the Child: Culture, Ideology, and the Rise of Childhood. 2001.
Nineteenth Century American Literature (1830-1870)
Primary Texts
Alcott, Louisa May
Little Women
Child, Lydia Maria
Hobomok, An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans
Cummins, Maria Susanna
The Lamplighter
Cooper, James Fennimore
The Last of the Mohicans
Dickinson, Emily
various poems
Douglass, Frederick
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
"The Poet"
“Self-Reliance”
“Nature”
“The American Scholar”
Fuller, Margaret
“Women in the Nineteenth Century”
Jacobs, Harriet
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
"Young Goodman Brown"
"The Celestial Rail-road”
The Scarlett Letter
The House of the Seven Gables
The Blithedale Romance
The Marble Faun
Melville, Herman
Poe, Edgar Allan
“The Cask of Amontillado”
“The Fall of the House of Usher”
“The Tell-Tale Heart”
“Ligeia”
“The Raven”
“Annabell Lee”
“The Philosophy of Composition”
Sedgwick, Catherine Maria
A New-England Tale
Hope Leslie
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Thoreau, Henry David
Walden
“Resistance to Civil Government”/”Civil Disobedience”
“Walking”
Warner, Susan
The Wide, Wide World
Whitman, Walt
Preface to Leaves of Grass (1855)
“Song of Myself”
“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”
“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”
Secondary Readings
Baym, Nina. Novels, Readers, Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America. Ithaca:
Cornell University, 1984.
Davidson, Cathy M. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1986.
Fiedler, Leslie A. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Criterion Books, 1960.
Mathiessen, F.O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and
Whitman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1941.
Reynolds, David. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of
Emerson and Melville. Harvard University Press, 1988.
Robbins, Sarah. Managing Literacy, Mothering America: Women’s Narratives on Reading and
Writing in the Nineteenth Century. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006.
Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction: 1790-1860. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
20th Century American Literature (approx. 1900-1950)
Primary Texts
Albee, Edward
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Anderson, Sherwood
Winesberg, Ohio
Austin, Mary
The Land of Little Rain
Baldwin, James
Go Tell it on the Mountain
Cather, Willa
O Pioneers!
My Antonia
Chopin, Kate
The Awakening
Cullen, Countee
“Yet Do I Marvel”; “Heritage”; “Incident”
Crane, Hart
“At Melville's Tomb;” “Chaplinesque;” “To Brooklyn Bridge;” “The Bridge”
Crane, Stephen
Maggie, A Girl of the Streets
The Red Badge of Courage
“Black Riders;” “War is Kind”
Cummings, ee
“anyone lived in a pretty how town;” “Buffalo Bill's;” “i sing of Olaf glad and big”
Eliot, T.S.
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock;” “The Waste Land;” “Journey of the Magi”
“Tradition and the Individual Talent”
Ellison, Ralph
Invisible Man
Faulkner, William
As I Lay Dying
Fitzgerald, F. Scott.
The Great Gatsby
Frost, Robert
“The Pasture;” “Mowing;” “Mending Wall;” “The Death of the Hired Man;” “Home Burial;”
“After Apple-Picking;” “The Road Not Taken;” “Birches;” “’Out, Out—‘;” “Stopping by
Woods on a Snowy Evening;” “Desert Places;” “The Figure a Poem Makes”
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins
“The Yellow Wallpaper”
“Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’”
Glaspell, Susan
“Trifles”
Hansberry, Lorraine
A Raisin in the Sun
H.D.
“Helen”
Hemingway, Ernest
A Farewell to Arms
The Sun Also Rises
“The Short Happy Life of Frances Macomber”
“Hills Like White Elephants”
Hopkins, Pauline
Contending Forces
Hughes, Langston
“The Negro Speaks of Rivers”; “Epilogue”; “Harlem”; “Same in Blues”; “Theme for
English B”; “Mother to Son”; “Song for a Dark Girl”
Hurston, Zora Neale
Their Eyes Were Watching God
James, Henry
“The Art of Fiction”
Loy, Mina
“Lunar Baedeker”
Miller, Arthur
Death of a Salesman
Moore, Marianne
“A Grave;” “Baseball and Writing;” “Poetry;” “The Paper Nautilus;” “The Mind Is an
Enchanting Thing”
Nabokov, Vladimir
Lolita
O’Connor, Flannery
Wise Blood
A Good Man is Hard to Find (collection)
O’Neill, Eugene
Long Days Journey into Night
Pound, Ezra
“The Cantos;” “To Whistler, American;” “Portrait d’une Femme”
Porter, Katherine Anne
Pale Horse, Pale Rider
Flowering Judas and other Stories
Salinger, J.D.
The Catcher in the Rye
Franny & Zooey
Stein, Gertrude
Three Lives
Steinbeck, John
The Grapes of Wrath
Stevens, Wallace
“The Snow Man”; “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock”; “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a
Blackbird”; “Of Modern Poetry”; “Not Ideas about the Thing But the Thing
Itself”
Welty, Eudora
The Collected Short Stories of Eudora Welty
Wharton, Edith Wharton
The House of Mirth
Ethan Frome
Williams, William Carlos
“Spring and All;” “To Elsie”
Williams, Tennessee
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
The Glass Menagerie
Wright, Richard
Native Son
Adding -- Jean Toomer’s Cane; Nella Larsen’s Passing and/or Quicksand; and Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust. Dreiser, either Sister Carrie or An American Tragedy; DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk; Charles Chesnutt, The House Behind the Cedars or The Marrow of Tradition; Djuna Barnes, Nightwood; James Agee/Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; Upton Sinclair, The Jungle; Henry Roth, Call It Sleep; Allan Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems; Elizabeth Bishop, some selected early poems.
Secondary Readings:
Houston Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance
Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey
Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism
Nancy Bentley, Frantic panoramas : American literature and mass culture, 1870-1920
Mark McGurl, The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James
Elizabeth Ammons, Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century
Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism
Walter Kalaidjian, ed., The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism
Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature
Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet
Hortense Spillers, Black, White, and in Color
