This is the list we're working from, and I would be witty about it but we're in New York and we have other things to do.
Please feel free to make suggestions on additions or favorite translations. Remember, our constraints: Beowulf through Virginia Woolf. Nothing really after, though I sneaked Lolita on there because it's important to me.
Edit: We stop at Virginia Woolf because the point of this is to get an education in the foundations of English-language literature, and because we only have so much time in our lives. And because Serena's advisor told her she could stop there.
Besides, how can you not love the fearful symmetry?
Original
Booklist:
Beowulf
Everyman
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The Canterbury Tales
Piers Plowman
Le
Morte d’Arthur
VolponeBen Jonson's Elegy to Shakespeare
"Defense of Poesy"
Edward II
Tamburlaine“The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”
Utopia
The Tempest
Julius Caesar
Othello
Antony and Cleopatra
Romeo and Juliet
Much Ado About Nothing
The Merchant of Venice
As You Like It
The Sonnets
The Faerie Queen
AmorettiJohn Donne's Holy Sonnets
John Donne's "Elegy 20"
John Donne's "The Bait"
John Donne's "The Flea"
Paradise Lost
“To His Coy Mistress”
“The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd”
The Way of the World
Pilgrim’s Progress
All for Love
The School for Scandal
The Rivals
"A Modest Proposal"
"A Description of a City Shower"
Gulliver’s Travels
Alexander Pope's “Rape of the Lock,”
Alexander Pope's "The
Dunciad"
Alexander Pope's "Essay on Man"
Alexander Pope's "An Essay on Criticism"
Moll Flanders
Robinson Crusoe
James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson
She Stoops to Conquer
The Vicar of Wakefield
Tom Jones
Tristam Shandy
Mary Shelley's “Vindication of the Rights of Women”
Vanity Fair
»Moby Dick (Annemarie suggested it!)
Samuel Coleridge's “Kublai Khan”
Samuel Coleridge's “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
Samuel Coleridge's “Frost at Midnight”
Sense and Sensibility
Childe Harold'd Pilgrimage
Don Juan
Wuthering Heights
Percy Shelley's “Ode to the West Wind”
Percy Shelley's “Defence of Poetry”
Percy Shelley's “Ozymandias”
Percy Shelley's “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”
Walter Scott's “
Marmion”
Charles Lamb's Essays of Elia
Mysteries of
UdolphoHard Times
Oliver Twist
Tale of Two Cities
John Keats' “To a Nightingale”
John Keats' “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
John Keats' “Fall of Hyperion”
William Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads
William Wordsworth's “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”
William Wordsworth's“I Wandered Lonely as Cloud”
Songs of Innocence and Experience
Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Mill on the Floss
MiddlemarchImportance of Being Earnest
Picture of Dorian Gray
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's “Sonnets from the Portuguese”
Robert Browning's “My Last Duchess”
Robert Browning's “
Fra Lippo Lippi”
Alfred Tennyson's “In Memoriam, AH.H.”
Alfred Tennyson's “Ulysses”
Alfred Tennyson's “Charge of the Light Brigade”
Alfred Tennyson's “Lady of
Shalott”
Jonathan Edwards' “Sinners In the Hands of an Angry God”
Anne Bradstreet's “A Dialogue Between Old England and New”
Anne Bradstreet's “To My Dear and Loving Husband”
Anne Bradstreet's “The Author to Her Book"
Anne Bradstreet's "Upon the Birth of One of Her Children”
Moby Dick
Bartleby the Scrivener
House of the Seven Gables
The Scarlet Letter
Twenty Days with Julian and Little Bunny
Emily Dickinson's “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”
Emily Dickinson's “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died”
Emily Dickinson's “I Felt a Funeral In my Brain”
Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself"
Walt Whitman's “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”
Walt Whitman's “Oh Captain, My Captain”
“Nature”
Walden
Diaries of Adam and Eve
Adventures of
Huckberry Finn
Is Shakespeare Dead?
Margaret Fuller's “Women In the Nineteenth Century”
The Bostonians
Portrait of a Lady
Arms and the Man
Pgymalion»Yellow Wallpaper (Annemarie, this was a good one, and one I totally spaced)
Howard’s End
The House of Mirth
To the Lighthouse
A Room of One’s Own
Heart of Darkness
Ulysses
"The Dead"
"Araby"
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
D.H. Lawrence's “Why the Novel Matters”
W.B. Yeats' “When You Are Old”
W.B. Yeats' "Easter 1916"
W.B. Yeats' "Lake Isle of
Innisfree"
W.B. Yeats' "The Second Coming"
W.B. Yeats' "Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop"
Langston Hughes' “The Negro Speaks of Rivers"
Langston Hughes' "I, Too"
Langston Hughes' "Mother to Son"
Langston Hughes' "Theme for English B"
T.S. Eliot's “Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock”
T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets"
T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland"
Robert Frost's “After Apple Picking”
Robert Frost's "Birches"
Robert Frost's "Design"
Robert Frost's "The Mending Wall"
A
Moveable Feast
Hills Like White Elephants
The Snows of Kilimanjaro
This Side of Paradise
The Great Gatsby
The Sound and the Fury
“A Rose For Emily”
Mourning Becomes Electra
A Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Waiting for Godot
George Orwell's “Politics and the English Language”
Nineteen Eighty-Four
The Grapes of Wrath
The End of the Affair
W.H. Auden's "Funeral Blues"
W.H. Auden's "The More Loving One"
W.H. Auden's "Epitaph on a Tyrant"
W.H. Auden's "September 1, 1939"
W.H. Auden's “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”
Ezra Pound's “In a Station of the Metro”
Matthew Arnold's “Dover Beach”
Wilfred Owen's “Dulce
Et Decorum Est”
Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Love Is Not All"
Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Conscientious Objector"
Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Time Offers No Relief"
Edna St. Vincent Millay's "I Will Put Chaos Into 14 Lines"
Dylan Thomas' “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”
Dylan Thomas' “A Child’s Christmas In Wales”
Brave New World
Lolita
Recent Additions Since We Decided To Read Things Not Originally In English:
The Divine Comedy
The
OresteiaMedea
The Persians
Notes from the Underground
Crime and Punishment
Madame Bovary
Tartuffe
Candide
Faust
Death in Venice
Metamorphosis
Rilke (TBA)