Exams
Literary Theory
The best way to prepare oneself for a standardized test that covers literary theory is to read the selections and introductions to be found in a good anthology. One very good anthology is David Richter’s The Critical Tradition (Bedford Books, 1998). Below is list of important authors and texts which may be found in Richter’s volume as well as in other sources. Another invaluable guide is a handbook of terms, such as The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms, Murfin and Ray, eds.

• Plato, Republic and Ion
• Aristotle, Poetics
• Horace, The Art of Poetry
• Longinus, On the Sublime
• Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry
• Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism
• Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, No.4; Rasselas, Chpt 10; Preface to Shakespeare
• Hume, Of the Standard of Taste
• Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment
• William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads
• S.T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria
• P. B. Shelley, A Defence of Poetry
• Matthew Arnold, The Function of Criticism at the Present Time
• F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
• L. Tolstoy, What Is Art?
• T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent
• Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
• Northrop Frye, “The Archetypes of Literature” in Fables of Identity
• Erich Auerbach, “Odysseus’s Scar” in Mimesis
• W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley; “The Intentional Fallacy”
• Cleanth Brooks, “Irony as a Principle of Structure”
• Claude Levi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth”
• Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”
• Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?”
• Wolfgang Iser, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach”
• Harold Bloom, “A Meditation upon Priority” in The Anxiety of Influence
• Terry Eagleton, Introduction to Literary Theory: An Introduction
• Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight”
• Elaine Showalter, “Toward a Feminist Poetics” from The New Feminist Criticism
• Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Writing, ‘Race,’ and the Difference It Makes”

British Literature
I.     Medieval British Literature

• Beowulf
• Chaucer Book of the Duchess, Canterbury Tales (General Prologue, Knight’s Tale, Wife of Bath’s Prologue & Tale, Miller’s Tale, Pardoner’s Prologue & Tale, Franklin’s Tale, Nun’s Priest’s Tale), lyric poems, House of Fame, Parliament of Birds, Troilus and Creseyde.
• Dunbar selected lyrics
• Gower Confessio Amantis
• Henryson selected lyrics (including Testament of Cresside)
• Malory Le Morte d’Arthur
• Medieval drama: The 2nd Shepherd’s Play, York Play of the Crucifixion, Everyman
• Langland Piers Plowman
• Pearl Poet Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

II.    Renaissance British Literature (to 1660)

• John Aubrey Brief Lives
• Francis Bacon Advancement of Learning (selections), Novum Organum (selections)
• Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher A King and No King
• Thomas Browne Religio Medici
• Robert Burton Anatomy of Melancholy
• Thomas Carow selected poems
• George Chapman Bussy D’Ambois
• Abraham Courtey selected poems
• Richard Crashaw selected poems
• Donne selections including “Good Friday,” “The Flea,” “Valection: Forbidding Mourning,” “First Anniversary: Anatomy of World,” selection of Holy Sonnets; at least know sermon with “No Man is an Island”; Meditations (selections), Sermons (selections); selected poems
• Michael Drayton selected poems
• John Fletcher The Wild-Goose Chase
• John Ford ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore
• Herbert selected poems
• Robert Herrick selected poems
• Thomas Hobbes Leviathan
• Jonson Volpone, Timber, The Alchemist, selected poems
• Lovelace “To Althea, from Prison,” “To Lucasta, Going to the Wars”
• Marlowe Dr. Faustus, Edward II
• Marvell “To His Coy Mistress,” garden poems, selected poems
• Thomas Middleton and William Rouley The Changeling
• Milton Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, “Lycidas,” “When I Consider How My Light is Spent,” shorter poems—selections, Areopagitica
• Francis Quarles selected poems
• Shakespeare Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, I Henry IV, Tempest, sonnets
• Spenser (selections) Amoretti, Epithalamion, Shepeardes Calender, Faerie Queene
• John Suckling selected poems
• Cyril Tourneur Atheist’s Tragedy, Revenger’s Tragedy
• Henry Vaughan selected poems
• Izaak Walton Complete Angler
• John Webster White Devil, Duchess of Malfi
• Thomas Wyatt “They Flee From Me"

III.  Restoration & 18th Century British Literature

• Boswell selections from Life of Johnson
• Congreve The Way of the World
• Defoe Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders
• Fielding Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews
• Dryden All for Love, selections from poems
• Goldsmith The Vicar of Wakefield, She Stoops to Conquer
• Johnson, Vanity of Human Wishes, Rasselas
• Pepys selections from diary - on Great Fire - on theatre (at least know who he is)
• Pope Rape of the Lock, know what the Dunciad is
• Richardson Pamela
• Sterne know about Tristram Shandy
• Swift Gulliver’s Travels, “A Modest Proposal” 

IV.   19th Century British Literature

• Austen Pride and Prejudice, Emma
• Blake “The Lamb,” “The Tyger,” selections from Innocence & Experience
• Bronte, C. Jane Eyre
• Bronte, E. Wuthering Heights
• Byron Don Juan—selections
• Coleridge “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Kubla Khan,” Biographia Literaria—selections
• Dickens Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities, Hard Times, Oliver Twist
• Hardy Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure
• Keats “Ode to Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “When I Have Fears . . . ,” “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again,” “Chapman’s Homer,” “Elgin Marbles”
• Scott Ivanhoe, The Heart of Midlothian
• Shelley “Prometheus Unbound,” “The Cloud,” “Ode to the West Wind”
• Thackaray Vanity Fair
• Wordsworth Preface to Lyrical Ballads (selections of poems), “London Bridge,” “Leech Gatherer,” Prelude, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”

American Literature
The following is a reading list of American Literature developed by professors of American Literature at Wingate University. English majors should consider the list essential for an understanding of American Literature. Knowledge of these items is also important for achieving a passing score on the senior-level exit exam.

• Some knowledge of Captain John Smith The General History of Virginia
• Some knowledge of William Bradford Of Plymouth Plantation
• Some knowledge of John Winthrop Journal
• Know who the following are
  • Roger Williams
  • Anne Hutchinson
  • Samuel Sewell
  • Edward Taylor
  • Anne Bradstreet
  • Cotton Mather
  • Mary Rowlandson
  • William Byrd
  • Phyllis Wheatley
  • Philip Freneau
  • Philip Bartram
• Jonathan Edwards "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," "Personal Narrative"
• Benjamin Franklin The Autobiography
• Crevecoeur "Letters from an American Farmer"
• Thomas Paine "Common Sense," "The American Crisis," "Age of Reason"
• Thomas Jefferson The Declaration of Independence
• Washington Irving "Rip Van Winkle" "Legend of Sleepy Hollow"
• James Fenimore Cooper Deerslayer, The Prairie, Last of the Mohicans
• William Cullen Bryant "Thanatopsis"
• Edgar Allan Poe's chief poems and short stories, "Philosophy of Composition"
• Ralph Waldo Emerson selected poetry and essays "American Scholar," "Divinity School Address," "Nature," "Self-Reliance"
• Nathaniel Hawthorne "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," "Young Goodman Brown," "The Maypole of Merry Mount," "The Minister's Black Veil," "The Birthmark," The Scarlet Letter, The House of Seven Gables
• Herman Melville "Bartleby, the Scrivener," "Benito Cereno," Billy Budd, Moby Dick
• Some knowledge of poets:
  • Longfellow
  • Whittier
  • Holmes
  • James Russell Lowell
• Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Tom's Cabin
• Frederick Douglass Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
• Abraham Lincoln "Second Inaugural Address"
• Louisa May Alcott Little Women
• Walt Whitman's major poems in Leaves of Grass
• Emily Dickinson's major poems including 49, 67, 214, 241, 249, 303, 324, 435, 441, 465, 520, 632, 640, 709, 712, 754, 986, 1052, 1078, 1129, 1545, 1624, 1732
• Selected writing from local colorists:
  • Mary Freeman
  • Bret Harte
  • Joel Chandler Harris
• Mark Twain Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Henry James Daisy Miller: A Study
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman "The Yellow Wallpaper"
• Kate Chopin The Awakening
• Stephen Crane The Red Badge of Courage, "The Open Boat
• Naturalism in Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser An American Tragedy, Sister Carrie
• Jack London The Call of the Wild
• Some knowledge of Zora Neale Hurston
• Some knowledge of Henry Adams The Education of Henry Adams
• Edwin Arlington Robinson "Richard Cory," "Miniver Cheevy," "Mr. Flood's Party"
• The poetry of Robert Frost
• Selected poems of Carl Sandburg
• Willa Cather My Antonia
• Sherwood Anderson Winesberg, Ohio
• Eugene O'Neill Long Day's Journey into Night, The Hairy Ape, Desire Under the Elms
• Ezra Pound selected poems from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Cantos
• T. S. Eliot The Wasteland, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
• Selected poems of e.e. cummings
• Thomas Wolfe Look Homeward Angel, You Can't Go Home Again
• F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby
• Ernest Hemingway A Farewell to Arms, The Old Man and the Sea, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises
• William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, The Unvanquished, Go Down Moses
• Margaret Mitchell Gone with the Wind
• John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, Of Mice and Men
• Selected stories of Eudora Welty
• Selected poems of Langston Hughes
• Arthur Miller Death of a Salesman, The Crucible
• Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie, Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
• Thornton Wilder Our Town
• Lorraine Hansberry Raisin in the Sun
• Selected short stories of:
  • Flannery O'Connor
  • John Updike
  • Barnard Malamud
• J. D. Salinger Catcher in the Rye
• Selected poems of:
  • Theodore Roethke
  • Gwendolyn Brooks
  • Randall Jarrell
  • Robert Lowell
  • Elizabeth Bishop
  • Richard Wilbur
  • Allen Ginsberg
  • Adrienne Rich
  • Denise Levertov
  • Anne Sexton
  • Sylvia Platt
  • John Crowe Ransom
  • James Dickey
  • Louise Gluck
  • Rita Dove
  • Sharon Olds
  • Richard Wilbur
• James Dickey Deliverance
• Philip Roth Goodbye Columbus
• Edward Albee Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, American Dream, Zoo Story
• Saul Bellow Herzog, Seize the Day
• Joyce Carol Oates Them
• Alice Walker The Color Purple, "Everyday Use"
• Bobbie Ann Mason "Shiloh"
• Gloria Naylor The Women of Brewster Place
• Sandra Cisneros Woman Hollering Creek
• Louise Erdrich Love Medicine
• Toni Morrison Song of Solomon, Beloved
• Know literary terms and historical periods as found in texts such as Holman's A Handbook to Literature.

Literary Terms
Below is an abbreviated list of terms and phrases that you should know for the exit exam. This list is taken from The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms, Ross Murfin and Supryia Ray.

• aesthetics
• aesthetic movement
• allegory
• allusion
• antagonist
• anxiety of influence
• Apollonian
• aporia
• apostrophe
• archetypal criticism
• authorial intention
• blank verse
• caesura
• carnival
• carpe diem
• catharsis
• climax
• conceit
• connotation
• courtly love
• deconstruction
• denouement
• deus ex machina
• diachronic
• dialectic
• dialog criticism
• diction
• didactic
• differance
• Dionysian
• discourse
• dissociation of sensibility
• dystopia
• eclogue
• encomium
• enjambement
• epic
• epigram
• epigraph
• epilogue
• epiphany
• epistolary novel
• epithalamiu
• exegesis
• explication de texte
• fancy
• farce
• figure of speech
• flat and round characters
• foil
• formalism
• frame story
• genre
• grotesque
• hamartia
• hegemony
• hermeneutics
• heroic couplet
• hubris (hybris)
• hyperbole
• iambic
• ideology
• illocutionary act
• implied author, reader
• in media res
• interior monologue
• interpretive communities
• intertextuality
• irony
• jouissance
• lexicography
• logocentric
• magic realism
• malapropism
• Marxist criticism
• masque
• metaphor
• metaphysical poetry
• meter
• metonomy
• mimesis (imitation)
• modernism
• monologic
• motif
• myth criticism
• narrator
• naturalism
• negative capability
• New Criticism
• new historicism
• octave
• organic form
• paradox
• parody
• pastoral
• pathos
• periodic sentence
• personification
• plot vs. story or syuzhet vs. fabula
• poetics
• point of view
• postcolonial studies
• postmodernism
• poststructuralism
• presence and absence
• protagonist
• quatrain
• reader-response criticism
• realism
• representation
• resolution
• rhetorical criticism
• romance
• romanticism
• satire
• scansion
• semiotics
• sestet
• sign, signified, signifier
• soliloquy
• sonnet
• stream of consciousness
• stress
• structuralism
• sublime
• suspension of disbelief
• tenor and vehicle
• tragic flaw
• transcendentalism
• utopia

CONTACT:
Dr. Robert Doak
Associate Professor and Department Chairt Chair
robdoak@wingate.edu
704-233-8080