Restoration & 18th Century Long List

The PhD Oral Examination in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century (1660-1800)

(updated 10-May-2004)

The list of primary sources given below represents a comprehensive, but by no means exhaustive, selection of topics and genres, authors and works, with which specialists in the area ought to be familiar. For purposes of the period examination, however, the student, in consultation with a member of the faculty, should prepare a short list of 25-30 authors (and the equivalent of about forty books), including something from each of the eight categories below. In accord with the departmental consensus of 1/23/04 , the goal should be breadth: the readings should represent the period’s salient genres, its chronological range, and its important developments. In addition, the student should choose six secondary works that provide a variety of scholarly perspectives on the period.

Classical Backgrounds

Homer, Odyssey, Iliad

Aesop, Fables

Aristotle, Poetics

Plato, Phaedrus , Republic Book 10

Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid

Horace, Ars Poetica, Satires

Ovid, Metamorphoses

Juvenal, Satires

Longinus, On the Sublime

Continental Backgrounds

Cervantes (1547-1616)

Descartes (1596-1650)

Moliere (1622-73)

Spinoza (1632-77)

Racine (1639-99)

Lesage (1668-1747)

Voltaire (1694-1778)

Rousseau (1712-78)

Diderot (1713-84)

Kant (1724-1804)

Lessing (1729-81)

Laclos (1741-1803)

Goethe (1749-1832)

Intellectual Prose: Philosophical, Religious, Political

Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)

Cavendish, New Blazing World (1666)

Tillotson, Barrow, South, Sermons [In Irene Simon, ed. Three Restoration Divines (1967)

Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690)

Two Treatises of Government (1690)

Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693)

The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695)

Astell, An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (1696)

Defoe, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702)

Swift, A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books (1704)

An Argument against Abolishing Christianity (1708)

The Examiner (1710)

The Drapier's Letters (1724)

A Modest Proposal (1729)

Sermons [ Davis , ed. Prose Works : Vol. 9, ed. Landa (1948)]

Addison and Steele, The Tatler (1709)

The Spectator (1711-12)

Shaftesbury, Characteristicks (1711)

Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees (1714, 1723)

Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728)

Bolingbroke, A Dissertation on Parties (1735)

The Idea of a Patriot King (1738)

Hume, Treatise of Human Nature (1739)

Essays Moral and Political (1741-42)

An Enquiry concerning the Human Understanding (1748)

Four Dissertations (1757)

Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779)

Johnson, The Rambler (1750), The Adventurer (1753-54), Preface to the Dictionary (1755), The Idler (1758-60), Review of Soame Jenyns's A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil (1757), Sermons [Hazen et al . , eds. Yale edition of Works : Vol. 14, eds. Hagstrum and Gray (1978)]

Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)

The Wealth of Nations (1776)

Sterne, Sermons [Cross, ed. Collected Works (1904), Vols. 12-13]

Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88)

Burke, Reflecions on the Revolution in France (1790)

A Letter to a Noble Lord (1794)

Paine, The Rights of Man (1791)

Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

Criticism and Aesthetics

Dryden, Of Dramatick Poesie (1668), Of Heroick Plays (1672), A Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1692), Dedication to Aeneis (1697)

Dennis, The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry (1701), The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704)

Addison and Steele, The Spectator (1711-12)

Pope, An Essay on Criticism (1711), The Guardian , No. 40 (1713), Preface to the Iliad (1715), "A Discourse on Pastoral Poetry" (1717), Preface to Shakespeare (1725), Peri Bathous (1727)

Fielding, S., Remarks on Clarissa (1749)

Johnson, The Rambler (1750), The Adventurer (1753-54), The Idler (1758-60), Preface to Shakespeare (1765), Lives of the English Poets (1779-81)

Hume, Essays Moral and Political (1741-42)

Four Dissertations (1757)

Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (1753)

Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757)

Young, Conjectures on Original Composition (1759)

Goldsmith, Citizen of the World (1762), "An Essay on the Theatre: or A Comparison between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy" (1773)

Reynolds, Discourses (1769-91)

Reeve, The Progress of Romance (1785)

Gilpin, Three Essays (1792)

Price, Essays on the Picturesque (1794)

Biographical, Autobiographical, and Personal Prose

Pepys, Diary [1660-69]

Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666)

Montagu, Letters

Swift, Journal to Stella [1710-13]

Cibber, Apology for the Life (1740)

Walpole , Correspondence

Johnson, Life of Savage (1744), Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), Lives of the English Poets (1779-81)

Sterne, Journal to Eliza (1767)

Burney, Diary, Letters

Equiano, Interesting Narrative of the Life (1789)

Boswell, Journals, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785), Life of Johnson (1791)

Gibbon, Memoirs (1796)

Wordsworth, Prelude (1799)

Austen, Letters

Poetry

Lonsdale, ed. Eighteenth-Century Women Poets (1989)

Waller (1606-87)

Milton (1608-74)

Butler (1613-80)

Denham (1615-69)

Marvell (1621-78)

Dryden (1631-1700)

Behn (1640-89)

Rochester (1647-80)

Finch (1661-1720)

Prior (1664-1721)

Watts (1674-1748)

Young (1683-1765)

Gay (1685-1732)

Pope (1688-1744)

Montagu (1649-1762)

Thomson (1700-48)

Wesley, C. (1707-88)

Johnson (1709-84)

Gray (1716-71)

Collins (1721-59)

Smart (1722-71)

Goldsmith (?1730-74)

Cowper (1731-1800)

Smith (1748-1806)

Chatterton (1752-70)

Yearsley (1752-1806)

Crabbe (1754-1832)

Blake (1757-1827)

Burns (1759-96)

Drama

Dryden (1631-1700)

Etherege (?1634-91)

Behn (1640-89)

Wycherley (1641-1715)

Otway (1652-85)

Vanbrugh (1664-1726)

Centlivre (1669-1723)

Congreve (1670-1729)

Cibber (1671-1757)

Addison (1672-1719)

Steele (1672-1729)

Farquhar (1678-1707)

Gay (1685-1732)

Lillo (1693-1739)

Fielding, H. (1707-54)

Sheridan, F. (1724-66)

Goldsmith (?1730-74)

Sheridan, R. B. (1751-1816)

Inchbald (1753-1821)

Prose Fiction

Bunyan (1628-88)

Behn (1640-89)

Defoe (1660-1731)

Swift (1667-1745)

Haywood (?1693-1756)

Richardson (1689-1761)

Fielding, H. (1707-54)

Johnson (1709-84)

Fielding, S. (1710-68)

Sterne (1713-68)

Walpole (1717-97)

Lennox (1720-1804)

Smollett (1721-71)

Sheridan, F. (1724-66)

Goldsmith (?1730-74)

Smith (1748-1806)

Burney (1752-1840)

Inchbald (1753-1821)

Godwin (1756-1836)

Radcliffe (1764-1832)

Raspe, Baron Munchausen’s Narrative (1785)

Suggestions for Secondary Reading

O’Brien, Entertaining Culture (2004) 

Fairer, English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century (2003) 

Nussbaum, The Global Eighteenth Century (2003) 

Rawson, God, Gulliver, and Genocide (2001) 

Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (1999) 

Johns, The Nature of the Book (1998) 

Lynch, The Economy of Character (1998) 

Wall, The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London (1998) 

Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination (1997) 

Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670-1740 (1997) 

Benedict, Making the Modern Reader (1996) 

Campbell, Natural Masques (1995) 

Gallagher, Nobody's Story (1994) 

Weinbrot, Britannia's Issue (1993) 

Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility (1992) 

Colley, Britons (1992) 

Colomb, Designs on Truth (1992) 

Straub, Sexual Suspects (1992) 

Foxon, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade (1991) 

Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1991) 

Stewart, Crimes of Writing (1991) 

Hunter, Before Novels (1990) 

Spacks, Desire and Truth (1990) 

Vander Meulen, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1988) 

Weinbrot, Eighteenth-Century Satire (1988) 

Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987) 

Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary (1987) 

Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England (1987) 

Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (1987) 

McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel (1987) 

Castle, Masquerade and Civilization (1986) 

Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986) 

Doody, The Daring Muse (1985) 

Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History (1985) 

Morris, Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense (1984) 

Patey, Probability and Literary Form (1984) 

Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (1982) 

Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (1981) 

Spacks, Imagining a Self (1976)  

Battestin, The Providence of Wit (1974) 

Williams, The Country and the City (1973) 

Rogers, Grub Street (1972) 

Simon, Neo-Classical Criticism (1971) 

Spacks, The Poetry of Vision (1967) 

Fussell, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism (1965) 

Cohen, The Art of Discrimination (1964) 

Nicolson, Mountain Gloom, and Mountain Glory (1959) 

Watt, The Rise of the Novel (1957) 

Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (1936) 

Monk, The Sublime (1935) 

Stephen, The History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876)