The PhD Oral Examination
in the
Victorian to Modern Period
(updated 3-December-2007)
Choose forty authors representing various literary genres, in addition to six secondary works.
Poetry
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)
Christina
Rossetti (1828-1894)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)
George Meredith (1828-1909)
James Thomson (1834-1882)
William Morris (1834-96)
Robert Bridges (1834-1930)
A.C.
Swinburne (1837-1909)
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898)
Charles Montagu Doughty (1843-1926)
Michael Field [Katherine Bradley (1846-1914) and Edith Cooper (1862-1913)]
Gerard
Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)
Alice Meynell (1847-1922)
Charlotte Mew (1869-1928)
W.E.
Henley (1849-1903)
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
A.E. Housman (1859-1936)
Katherine Tynan (1861-1931)
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)
Arthur Symons (1865-1945)
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)
Ernest Dowson (1867-1900)
Lionel Johnson (1867-1902)
D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
Fiction
William Morris (1834-96)
Walter Pater (1839-1894)
Ouida (Mary Louise de la Ramee) (1839-1908)
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
W.H. Hudson (1841-1922)
Henry James (1843-1916)
Bram Stoker (1847-1912)
Alice Meynell (1847-1922)
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94)
George Moore (1852-1933)
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Marie Corelli (1855-1924)
Ella Hepworth Dixon (1855-1932)
Olive Schreiner (1855-1920)
H. Rider Haggard (1856-1925)
Vernon Lee [Violet Paget] (1856-1935)
George Gissing (1857-1903)
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)
Mona Caird (1858-1932)
Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930)
George Egerton [Mary Chavelita Bright] (1859-1945)
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
H.G. Wells (1866-1946)
Arnold Bennett (1867-1931)
H.H. Munro (1870-1916)
Max Beerbohm (1872-1956)
John Cowper Powys (1872-1963)
Ford
Madox Ford (1873-1939)
Dorothy Richardson (1873-1957)
G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
E.M. Forster (1879-1970)
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
James Joyce (1882-1941)
Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957)
D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923)
Drama
W.S. Gilbert (1804-89) & Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900)
Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)
August Strindberg (1849-1912)
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Arthur Pinero (1855-1934)
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)
J.M. Barrie (1860-1937)
W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)
Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936)
J.M. Synge (1871-1909)
Nonfiction Prose
Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
John Ruskin (1819-1900)
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)
William Morris (1834-1896)
Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
Charles Doughty (1843-1926)
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Alice Meynell (1847-1922)
Annie Besant (1847-1933)
Edmund Gosse (1849-1903)
Walter Pater (1839-1894)
Max Nordau (1849-1923)
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94)
Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904)
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Sigmund Freud 1856-1939)
Vernon Lee [Violet Paget] (1856-1935)
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Beatrice Webb (1858-1943)
Sidney Webb (1859-1947)
Havelock Ellis (1859-1939)
Henri Bergson (1859-1941)
Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)
W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)
Arthur Symons (1865-1945)
Roger Fry (1866-1934)
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
G.E. Moore (1873-1958)
Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
Lytton Strachey (1880-1932)
Oswald Spengler (1880-1936)
T.E. Hulme (1873-1917)
John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946)
T.E. Lawrence (1888-1935)
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)
Rebecca West (1892-1983)
Secondary works in Victorian and Modernist Studies
Stephen Arata, Fictions of Loss
Ann Ardis, New Women, New Novels
Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon : The Life of a Victorian Myth
Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism
Joseph Bristow, ed., The Fin-de-Siècle Poem: English Literary Culture and the 1890s
Carol
Christ, Victorian and Modern Poetics
Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture
Linda Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle; The Vulgarization of Art
Jessica Feldman, Victorian Modernism
Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism and Commodity Culture
Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public
Graham Hough, The Last Romantics
Frank Kermode, Romantic Image
Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism
George Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley
Jerome J. McGann: Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism
J.H. Miller, The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers
Perry Meisel, The Myth of the Modern Talia Schaffer The Forgotten Female Aesthetes
Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine
Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the fin de Siecle
Richard Stein, The Ritual of Interpretation
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950