MA Orals Reading List -- Restoration and Eighteenth Century
(Revised October 2007)
Candidates will be examined on twelve works--two from each of the six categories listed below. One relevant classical or continental text may be substituted in any of the first five categories. Before making your selections, consult with a faculty member knowledgeable in the field.
Philosophy
1. Thomas Hobbes, Selections from Leviathan (1651)
2. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)
3. Shaftesbury, one of the following essays from Characteristics (1711):
“Soliloquy or Advice to an Author”
“The Moralists”
Treatise VI, Miscellany III and V
4. Bernard Mandeville, Fable of the Bees (1714-24)
5. William Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty (1753)
6. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)
7. David Hume, “Of Tragedy” and “Of the Standard of Taste” (1757)
8. Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)
9. Joshua Reynolds, Discourses (1769-91)
10. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
11. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1793)
Criticism
1. John Dryden, one of the following essays:
An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668)
“A discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire” (1693)
2. Joseph Addison, one of the following from The Spectator (1711-12):
Nos. 411-421, “The Pleasures of the Imagination”
Papers on Paradise Lost beginning with No. 267
3. Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism (1711)
4. Sarah Fielding, Remarks on Clarissa (1749)
5. Samuel Johnson
Selections from The Rambler (1750-52)
Preface to Shakespeare (1765)
Lives of the English Poets (1779-81)--Cowley, Pope, and Milton
6. Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition (1759)
7. Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance (1785)
8. Maria Edgeworth, Letters to Literary Ladies (1795)
Prose/Fiction
1. Samuel Pepys, Diaries (1660-69)
2. John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)
3. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (1688)
4. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)
5. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
6. Samuel Richardson, Pamela (1740)
7. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (1749)
8. Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote (1752)
9. Samuel Johnson, Rasselas (1759)
10. James Boswell, London Journal 1762-63
11. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1765)
12. Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766)
13. Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759-67)
14. Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771)
15. Frances Burney, Evelina (1778)
16. France Burney, Journals and Letters
17. William Godwin, Caleb Williams (1794)
18. Ann Radcliffe, Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
19. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813; “First Impressions,” 1796-97)
Drama
1. William Wycherley, The Country Wife (1675)
2. Aphra Behn, The Rover (1677)
3. John Dryden, All for Love (1678)
4. William Congreve, The Way of the World (1700)
5. Joseph Addison, Cato (1713)
6. Susanna Centlivre, A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718)
7. Richard Steele, The Conscious Lovers (1723)
8. John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera (1728)
9. George Lillo, The London Merchant (1731)
10. Henry Fielding, The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731)
11. Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer (1773)
12. Richard Sheridan, The Rivals (1775)
Poetry
1. Samuel Butler, Hudibras Book I (1663)
2. Rochester, selections
3. John Dryden
Absalom and Achitophel (1681)
MacFlecknoe (1682)
Alexander’s Feast (1697)
4. Alexander Pope
The Rape of the Lock (1712-17)
Essay on Man, Books 1 and 2 (1733)
Epistle to Arbuthnot (1734)
The Dunciad Book 4 (1742)
5. Jonathan Swift, selections
6. Mary Leapor, selections
7. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Town Eclogues (1715)
8. Anne Finch, “The Spleen,” “To the Nightingale,” “A Nocturnal Reverie” (1713-14)
9. James Thomson, Winter (1726)
10. Thomas Gray, Elegy Wrote in a Country Churchyard (1751)
11. Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village (1770)
12. Charlotte Smith, Selections (1784-97)
13. William Cowper, The Task (1785)--Selections
14. William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794)
15. William Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (1798)
Secondary Readings
1. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987)
2. Martin Battestin, The Providence of Wit: Aspects of Form in Augustan Literature and the Arts (1974)
3. G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility (1992)
4. John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary (1987)
5. David Brewer, The Afterlife of Character (2005)
6. John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination (1997)
7. Laura Brown, Fables of Modernity (2001)
8. Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization (1986)
9. Ralph Cohen, The Art of Discrimination (1964)
10. Linda Colley, Britons (1992)
11. Margaret Doody, The Daring Muse (1985)
12. David Foxon, Pope and the Early English Book Trade (1991)
13. Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story (1994)
14. J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels (1990)
15. N. H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England (1987)
16. Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (1987)
17. A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (1936)
18. Deidre Lynch, The Economy of Character (1998)
19. Paula McDowell, The Women of Grub Street (1998)
20. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel (1987)
21. S. H. Monk, The Sublime (1935)
22. John O’Brien, Harlequin Britain (2004)
23. Douglas Patey, Probability and Literary Form (1984)
24. Ronald Paulson, Emblem and Expression (1975)
25. Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (1982)
26. Pat Rogers, Grub Street (1972)
27. Eric Rothstein, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Poetry, 1660-1780 (1981)
28. Stuart Sherman, Telling Time (1996)
29. Irène Simon, Neo-Classical Criticism (1971)
30. Patricia Spacks
Desire and Truth (1990)
Imagining a Self (1976)
31. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986)
32. Leslie Stephen, The History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876)
33. Cynthia Wall, The Prose of Things (2006)
34. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (1957)
35. Howard Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue (1993)
36. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973)
37. Virginia Woolf, Common Reader essays