MA Orals Reading List -- Twentieth Century British
(revised October 2007)

Choose ten of the following works (or groups of works), making sure to represent each genre (lyric, novel, drama), with no genre accounting for more than half of your selections. Also choose two secondary works. For any of the choices listed below, substitutions may be proposed.

  1. Hardy
    • "Hap"
    • "Neutral Tones"
    • "Drummer Hodge"
    • "The Darkling Thrush"
    • "The Ruined Main"
    • "A Trampwoman's Tragedy"
    • "One We Knew"
    • "She Hears the Storm"
    • "The Convergence of the Twain"
    • "Under the Waterfall"
    • "During Wind and Rain"
    • "In Time of The Breaking of Nations"
    • "He Never Expected Much"
  2. Yeats
    • "To the Rose upon the Rood of Time"
    • "Who Goes with Fergus?"
    • "Easter 1916"
    • "The Second Coming"
    • "Sailing to Byzantium"
    • "The Tower"
    • "Byzantium"
    • "Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop"
    • "Lapis Lazuli"
    • "The Circus Animals' Desertion"
    • "Under Ben Bulben"
  3. James, The Ambassadors
  4. Conrad
    • Lord Jim
    • Nostromo
  5. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World
  6. Ford, The Good Soldier
  7. Shaw, Heartbreak House
  8. Pound
    • "A Pact"
    • "Near Perigord"
    • "The Return"
    • "In a Station of the Metro"
    • "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley"
    • The Cantos I, II, XLV, LXXXI
  9. Joyce
    • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
    • Ulysses
  10. Lawrence, Women in Love
  11. Eliot
    • "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
    • The Waste Land
    • "The Hollow Men"
    • "Four Quartets"
  12. Forster, Passage to India
  13. Woolf, To the Lighthouse
  14. Auden
    • "Musee des Beaux Arts"
    • "In Memory of W. B. Yeats"
    • "In Praise of Limestone"
    • "September 1, 1939"
    • "As I walked Out One Evening"
    • "In Memory of Sigmund Freud"
    • "Lullaby"
    • "Spain 1937"
    • "Gare du Midi"
    • "The Shield of Achilles"
  15. H. D., Trilogy
  16. Beckett
    • Molloy
    • Endgame
  17. Heaney
    • "Death of a Naturalist"
    • "Digging"
    • "Personal Helicon"
    • "The Forge"
    • "Requiem for the Croppies"
    • "The Wife's Tale"
    • "The Tollund Man"
    • "Summer Home"
    • "Westering"
    • "North"
    • "The Grauballe Man"
    • "Punishment"
    • "Casualty"
    • "The Skunk"
  18. Lessing, The Golden Notebook
  19. Pinter, The Homecoming
  20. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
  21. Winterson, Sexing the Cherry
  22. Smith, White Teeth
  23. Friel, Dancing at Lughnasa
  24. Stoppard, Arcadia
  25. McDonagh, The Pillowman

Secondary Works

  1. Bradbury and McFarlane, Modernism
  2. Felski, The Gender of Modernity
  3. Gilbert and Gubar, No Man's Land
  4. Kenner, The Pound Era
  5. Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism
  6. Meisel, The Myth of the Modern
  7. Perloff, The Dance of the Intellect
  8. Said, The World, The Text, and the Critic
  9. Vendler, The Music of What Happens