Summer Of Books

Fifty Book Exam List

I. Historical Period: Medieval
1. The Dream of the Rood (OE, MS 950-1000)
2. Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain (Latin, 1136)
3. Song of Roland (1140-1170?)
4. Chrétien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances (“The Knight of the Cart”) (late 12th century)
5. Marie de France, Lais (“Lanval”, “Bisclavret”) (late 12th century)
6. Winner and Waster (c. 1350)
7. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1385)
8. St. Erkenwald (c. 1386)
9. Corpus Christi plays: York Creation and Fall of Lucifer, Chester Noah's Flood, Brome Abraham and Isaac, Wakefield Second Shepherd's Play, Wakefield Herod the Great, N-Town Woman Taken in Adultery, York Crucifixion, and Wakefield Last Judgment (c. 1375-1570s)
10. Geoffrey Chaucer, selections from Canterbury Tales (General Prologue, Knight, Miller, Reeve, Cook, Wife of Bath, Friar, Summoner, Clerk) (1390s)
11. Julian of Norwich, The Short Text of Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love (c. 1393)
12. Selected Middle English lyrics: Luria and Hoffman ed. nos. 6 (“Foweles in the frith”), 77 (“I have a gentil cok”), 81 (“We ben chapmen light of fote”), 90 (“May no man slepe in youre halle”), 138 (“Maiden in the mor lay”), 178 (Geoffrey Chaucer, “Lak of Stedfastnesse”), 181 (“I sing of a maiden”), 182 (“Salve Regina”), 190 (“Now goth sonne under wod”), and 197 (“A God and yet a man?”)
13. The Alliterative Morte Arthure (c. 1400)
14. Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1436)
15. ** Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory (criticism)
16. ** Tim William Machan, Textual Criticism and Middle English Texts (criticism)

II. Genre: Travels and Encounters
17. Heliodorus, Æthiopica (3rd century)
18. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (c. 1375)
19. Walter Raleigh, “Discovery of Guiana” (1596)
20. William Shakespeare, The Tempest (c. 1610)
21. Sir Thomas More, Utopia (1615)
22. Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine (1633)
23. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko or The Royal Slave (1688)
24. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1726)
25. Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
26. H.G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon (1901)
27. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902)
28. Ama Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy (1977)
29. Edward Said, Orientalism (1979)
30. Amitav Ghosh, Shadow Lines (1988)
31. Martin Scorsese, Gangs of New York (2003)
32. ** Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters (criticism)

III. Theme/Theory: Form and the Material Text
33. William Langland, Piers Plowman A-Text Visio (1360s) (authorial revision)
34. William Langland, Piers Plowman B-Text Visio (Prologue-Passus 7) (1380s)
35. William Langland, Piers Plowman C-Text Visio (Prologue-Passus 9) (1380s)
36. William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Q1) (1603) (printers/publishers/authors + editions)
37. William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Q2) (1604)
38. William Shakespeare, Hamlet (F) (1623)
39. Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus A-Text (1604)
40. Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus B-Text (1616)
41. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1852) (serialization)
42. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, selected poems (1855 and 1891 editions): “A Boston Ballad” (1854), “Song of Myself” (1855), “The Sleepers” (1855), “Song of the Answerer” (1855), “Song of Myself” (1891), “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (1891), “A Boston Ballad” (1891), “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd” (1891) as well as frontispiece portraits from both editions (authorial revision, self-publication, author portraits)
43. William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience (selections) (1789; 1794) (illustrations)
44. Emily Dickinson, selected published poems: “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers —”/”The Sleeping”; “Blazing in the Gold and quenching in Purple”/”Sunset”; “I taste a liquor never brewed —”; “Publication—is the Auction”; “This is my letter to the World”; “This was a Poet—it is That”; “‘Hope’ is a thing with feathers—”; “Because I could not stop for Death” (creation of the authorial corpus; order of component texts)
45. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts including the Annotations of Ezra Pound (1971) (editorial process)
46. Alan Moore, V for Vendetta (1995) (graphic novel)
47. James McTeigue, V for Vendetta (2006) (translation into another medium)
48. ** Robert Darnton, “The Printed Word” (Section 3 of Kiss of Lamourette): “What is the History of Books?”, “The Forgotten Middlemen of Literature”, “First Steps Towards A History of Reading” (criticism)
49. ** G. Thomas Tanselle, A Rationale of Textual Criticism (criticism)
50. ** Jerome McGann, Part I of The Textual Condition (criticism)