Literature in Time - Selected Reading List

<Back to Last Page>

Old/Middle English | 16th | 17th | 18th | 19th | 20th

Period: Old & Middle English Literature (to 1485)

-- Bede, or Baeda (673?-735)

• Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (597-731)
  • Text

-- Anon

• Beowulf (c 750)
  • Text

-- Anon (Caedmon?)

• The Dream of the Rood (8th-9th Century A.D )
  • Text

-- Anon

• The Battle of Maldon (991 A.D ?)
  • Text

-- Geoffrey of Monmouth

• Prophetia Merlini (1135)
• Historia Regum Britanniæ (1136)

-- Geoffrey Chaucer (c 1340-1400)

• The Canterbury Tales (c 1387)
  • Text

-- Anon (Gawain Poet)

• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c 1350-1400)
  • Overview

Anon (Pearl Poet)

• Pearl (1400)

-- William Langland (c 1330-c 1386)

• Piers Plowman (c 1362-c 1370)

-- Anon

• Everyman (c 1485)

-- Julian of Norwich (1342-c1416)

• A Revelation of Love

-- Margery Kempe (c 1373-1438)

• The Book of Margery Kempe (1436)

-- Sir Thomas Malory (c 1405-1471)

• Morte D'Arthur (c 1470)
  • Text (c 1470)

Period: Renaissance, 16th Century

-- Sir Thomas More (1478-1535)

• Utopia (1518)

-- John Skelton (ca.1460-1529)

• Upon a Dead Man's Head (1557)
• Mannerly Margery (1557)

-- Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)

• They Flee From Me (1557)
• Mine Own John Poins (1557)

-- Howard Henry, Earl of Surre (1517?-1547)

• My Friend, the Things that Do Attai (1547)
• Love, That Doth Reign and Live Within My Thought (1557)

-- Thomas Kyd (1558-1594)

• The Spanish Tragedy (1589)

-- Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)

• Astrophil and Stella (1591)
• The Defense of Poesie (1595)

-- John Lyly (1554-1606)

• Endymion (1591)

-- Sir Edward Dyer (1543-1607)

• My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is (1588)

-- Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)

• The Passionate Shepherd to His Love (1599)
• The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1604, 1616)

-- Thomas Nashe (1567-1601)

• Summer's Last Will and Testament (1600)

-- Thomas Campion (1567-1620)

• A Booke of Ayres (1601)

-- Richard Hooker (1554-1600)

• Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593)

-- Edmund Spenser (1552-1599)

• The Fairie Queene (1580)
• Epithalamion (1597)

-- William Shakespeare

• Sonnets
• Hamlet
• King Lear
• Othello
• Macbeth
• Richard II
• Richard III
• Henry the Fourth, Part One
• Love's Labour's Lost
• Much Ado About Nothing
• The Tempest

Period: 17th Century

-- John Donne (1572-1631)

• The Good-Morrow
• The Canonization
• A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning (1633)
• The Sun Rising
• Air and Angels
• The Relic
• Elegy XIX (On his Mistress' Going to Bed)
• Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward
• Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness
• Sermon XV ("The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death")

-- Ben Jonson (1572-1637)

• Every Man in His Humour (1598)
• Every Man Out of His Humour (1599)
• Sejanus (1603)
• Volpone (1606)
• Bartholomew Fair (1614)

-- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

• Essays (1597-1625)
• The Proficience and Advancement of Learning (1605)
• Novum Organum (1620)
• The New Atlantis (1627)

-- Sir Thomas Overbury (1581-1613)

• A Wife (1614)

-- John Earle (1601?-1665)

• Microcosmography (1628)

-- Robert Herrick (1591-1674)

• Prayer to Ben Jonson (1648)
• His Grange, or Private Wealth
• Upon Julia's Clothes (1648)
• The Country Life
• Hesperides (1648)

-- Richard Lovelace (1618-1657)

• To Althea, from Prison (1649)
• To Lucasta, Going to the Wars (1649)

-- Thomas Carew (1594-1640)

• Elegy on the Death of Donne

-- George Herbert (1593-1633)

• The Temple (1633)

-- Edmund Waller (1606-1687)

• Go, Lovely Rose (1645)
• On a Girdle (1645)

-- Sir John Suckling (1609-1642)

• A Doubt of Martyrdom
• The Constant Lover

-- Sir John Denham (1615-1669)

• Coopers Hill (1642)

-- Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)

• To His Coy Mistress
• Upon Appleton House
• The Garden (1681)
• The Mower Against Gardens
• Lancelot Andrewes
• Whitehall Sermon ("A cold coming they had of it")

-- Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667)

• The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (1651)

-- Robert Burton

• The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)

-- Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682)

• The Compleat Angler (1653)
• Hydriotaphia (1658)

-- Izaak Walton (1593-1683)

• Life of John Donne (1640)

-- John Milton (1608-1674)

• Paradise Lost (1667)
• Lycidas
• Samson Agonistes
• L'Allegro
• Il Penseroso
• Sonnet XV (Piedmont Massacre)
• Sonnet XVI (On His Blindness)
• Areopagetica
• Of Education

-- Abraham Cowley (1618-1667)

• Poetical Blossoms (1633)
• Love's Riddle (1638)

-- Samuel Butler 1612-1680

• Hudibras

-- John Bunyan (1628-1688)

• The Pilgrim's Progress (1678)

-- John Rochester (1648-1680)

• A Satire Against Mankind
• The Imperfect Enjoyment
• To the Postboy
• Artimisia to Chloe

-- George Etherege (ca. 1635-1691)

• The Man of Mode (1676)

-- William Wycherley (1641-1715)

• The Country Wife (1675)

-- George Farquhar (1677-1707)

• The Beaux' Strategm (1707)

-- William Congreve (1670-1729)

• The Way of the World (1700)

-- John Dryden (1631-1700)

• Annus Mirabilis (1667)
• To the Pious Memory of the Accomplished Young Lady Mrs. Anne Killigrew (1686)
• Religio Laici (1682)
• Absalom and Achitophel (1682)
• To My Kinsman, John Driden
• Essay of Dramatic Poetry (1668)
• All for Love (1677)

Period: 18th Century

-- Daniel Defoe (1660-1731)

• Robinson Crusoe (1719)
• Moll Flanders (1722)

-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

• Eloisa to Abelard (1717)
• The Rape of the Lock (1714)
• Epistle to Burlington (1731)
• Epistle to a Lady (1743)
• Epistle to Arbuthnot (1735)
• Essay on Criticism (1711)

-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)

• A Modest Proposal (1729)
• Gulliver's Travels (1726)
• A Description of a City Shower (1710)
• Verses on the Death of Dr Swift (1739)

-- John Gay (1685-1732)

• Trivia
• The Beggar's Opera (1728)

Samuel Richardson (1689-1761)

• Pamela (1740)

-- Henry Fielding (1707-1754)

• Tom Jones (1749)

-- Laurence Sterne (1713-1768)

• Tristram Shandy

-- Tobias George Smollett (1721-1771)

• Humphry Clinker (1771)

-- Earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773)

• Letters to His Son (1749)

-- David Hume (1711-1776)

• Essay on Miracles (1748)

-- Thomas Gray (1716-1771)

• Eton College Ode
• Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

-- Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774)

• The Citizen of the World
• She Stoops to Conquer (1773) Related Books
• The Vicar of Wakefield (1766)
• The Deserted Village (1770)

-- Richard Sheridan (1751-1816)

• The School for Scandal (1777)

-- William Cowper (1731-1800)

• The Task: Book Four
• The Cast-Away

-- Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)

• Autobiography
• Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

-- Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

• Letter to a Noble Lord

-- James Boswell (1740-1795)

• Tour to the Hebrides (1785)

-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

• The Vanity of Human Wishes
• Rasselas
• The Rambler
• The Idler
• On the Death of Dr Levet

-- Fanny Burney (1752-1840)

• Evelina (1778)

Robert Burns (1759-1796)

• To a Mouse
• Epistle to Lapraik
• Address to the Unco Guid
• Holy Willie's Prayer

Period: 19th Century

-- William Blake (1757-1827)

• The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)
• London (1791)
• The Sick Rose (1794)
• The Tyger (1794)
• Mock On Mock Voltaire Rousseau (1800)

-- William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

• Preface to Lyrical Ballads
• Tintern Abbey (1888)
• Resolution and Independence
• Yew Trees
• Elegiac Stanzas (Peele Castle)
• Sonnet: Westminister Bridge
• Sonnet: The World is Too Much with Us
• The Prelude
• Ode: Intimations of Immortality

-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

• This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison (1800)
• Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798)
• Kubla Kahn (1798)
• Frost at Midnight (1798)
• Dejection: An Ode
• Biographia Literaria

-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)

• Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
• Don Juan

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

• Hymn to Intellectual Beauty
• England in 1819
• Ode to the West Wind
• Adonais
• A Defense of Poetry

-- John Keats (1795-1821)

• On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer
• The Elgin Marbles
• The Eve of St Agnes
• Bright Star
• Ode on a Grecian Urn
• To Autumn

-- Charles Lamb (1775-1834)

• Christ's Hospital Five-and-Thirty Years Ago
• Old China

-- William Hazlitt (1778-1830)

• My First Acquaintance with Poets

-- Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859)

• Confessions of an English Opium Eater: Preliminary Confessions

-- Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)

• The Heart of Midlothian (1818)

-- Jane Austen (1775-1817)

• Pride and Prejudice (1813)
  • Text
  • Related Books
• Emma (1815)
  • Text
  • Related Books

-- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)

• Past and Present

-- John Henry Newman (1801-1890)

• Apologia Pro Sua Vita (1865)

-- John Ruskin (1819-1900)

• The Stones of Venice: v.2, ch 6 (The Nature of Gothic)
• The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century

-- John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)

• On Liberty (1869)
• Autobiography

-- Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

• Ulysses
• In Memoriam
• Maud
• The Charge of the Light Brigade
• Idylls of the King

-- Robert Browning (1812-1889) -- (collected works)

• Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came
  • Text
• Caliban Upon Setebos
• The Bishop Orders His Tomb
  • Text
• My Last Duchess
• • Article
  • Text
  • Related Books
• Fra Lippo Lippi
  • Text
• Andrea del Sarto
  • Text

-- Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

• Our Mutual Friend
• Little Dorrit
• Bleak House

-- George Eliot -- Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880)

• Adam Bede
  • Text
• Middlemarch

-- William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863)

• Vanity Fair

-- Anthony Trollope (1815-1882)

• The Way We Live Now

-- Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

• Jude the Obscure
• Channel Firing
• New Year's Eve

-- Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)

• Dover Beach
• The Buried Life
• Stanzas on the Grande Chartreuse
• Culture and Anarchy

-- Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)

• The Blessed Damozel (1850)
• The House of Life (1870)

-- Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) -- (collected works)

• Goblin Market
  • Text

-- Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909)

• In the Orchard
• Hymn to Proserpine
• Dolores

-- Walter Pater (1839-1894)

• The Renaissance: Winckelmann and Conclusion (1873)

-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

• The Importance of Being Earnest
• The Picture of Dorian Gray

-- George Gissing (1857-1903)

• New Grub Street (1891)

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

• The Windhover
• Duns Scotus' Oxford
• Spring and Fall

Period: 20th Century

-- William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

• The Rose of the World
• The Fascination of What's Difficult
• The Wild Swans at Coole
• Easter 1916
• The Second Coming
• Sailing toByzantium
• Leda and the Swan
• Among School Children
• Crazy Jane Talks to the Bishop
• Lapis Lazuli
• The Circus Animals' Desertion

-- Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)

• Lord Jim (1900)
• Heart of Darkness (1902)
• Nostromo (1904)

-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

• Major Barbara
• Saint Joan

-- James Joyce (1882-1941)

• Dubliners
• Ulysses

-- D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)

• Women in Love

-- T.S Eliot (1888-1965)

• The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
• The Waste Land
• Journey of the Magi
• Four Quartets: Little Gidding
• Tradition and the Individual Talent

-- Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)

• Endgame
• Waiting for Godot

-- Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

• To the Lighthouse
• A Room of One's Own
• Mrs. Dalloway

-- E.M Forster (1879-1970)

• Howards End
• Passage to India

-- Ford Maddox Ford (1873-1939)

• The Good Soldier (1914)

-- Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966)

• Decline and Fall

-- W.H. Auden (1907-1973)

• Letter to Lord Byron
• Musee des Beaux Arts
• In Praise of Limestone
• In Memory of W.B Yeats
  
  

---

More: Writer Directory | Character Showcase | Book Reviews | Homework Help | Holidays & Celebrations | E-texts | Timelines

---

<Back to Last Page>

New posts to the Literature: Classic forums:

Aug 2007 - Madame Bovary - Conflictcultural nationalism in irish literatureWalt Whitman