Romantic Literature Reading List

The following reading list for the English and Film Studies PhD program is provided by the department and is updated yearly to reflect changes in the discipline.

For more information about reading lists, see the Comprehensive Area Exam page.

Fiction

• Austen, Jane. Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), Northanger Abbey (1817), Persuasion (1817)
• Bage, Robert. Hermsprong (1796 )
• Beckford, William. Vathek (1982, 1786 trans.)
• Brontё, Charlotte. Jane Eyre (1847), Villette (1853)
• Brontё, Emily. Wuthering Heights (1847)
• Burney, Frances. Evelina (1778), The Wanderer, Or Female Difficulties (1814)
• Dacre, Charlotte. Zofloya, or The Moor (1806)
• Edgeworth, Maria. Castle Rackrent (1800), Belinda (1801)
• Fenwick, Eliza. Secresy; or, The Ruin on the Rock (1795)
• Gaskell, Elizabeth. Mary Barton (1848), Cranford (1851), North and South (1855)
• Godwin, William. Caleb Williams (1796)
• Hamilton, Elizabeth. Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800)
• Hays, Mary. Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), Victim of Prejudice (1799)
• Hogg, James. Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)
• Inchbald, Elizabeth. A Simple Story (1791), Nature and Art (1796)
• Lewis, Matthew. The Monk (1796)
• Mackenzie, Henry. The Man of Feeling (1771)
• Maturin, Charles. Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)
• Mitford, Mary Russell. Our Village: Sketches of Rural Life, Character, and Scenery (1824)
• More, Hannah. Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1808)
• Love Peacock, Thomas. Nightmare Abbey (1818, 1837)
• Opie, Amelia. The Father and Daughter, with Dangers of Coquetry (1801), Adeline Mowbray; or, The Mother and Daughter (1805)
• Owenson, Sydney, Lady Morgan. The Wild Irish Girl (1806)
• Radcliffe, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), The Italian (1796)
• Robinson, Mary. The Natural Daughter. With Portraits of the Leadenhead Family. A Novel (1799)
• Scott, Sir Walter. Ivanhoe (1819), The Bride of Lammermoor (1819)
• Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein (1818), The Last Man (1826)
• Smith, Charlotte. Desmond (1792), The Old Manor House (1793)
• Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto (1746)
• West, Jane. A Tale of the Times (1799)
• Wollstonecraft, Mary. Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman (1798)

Poetry

• Billie, Joanna. “Wind,” “Thunder,” “The Kitten,” “Woo’d and Married and A,’” “Address to a Steam-Vessel,” “Lines to a Teapot,” “The Maid of Llanwellyn.”
• Barbauld, Anna Letitia. “Ode to Spring,” “Hymn to Content,” “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven,” “The First Fire,” “Washing Day,” “The Rights of Woman.”
• Blake, William. Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, “The Book of Thel,” “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” “The Mental Traveller,” “Visions of the Daughters of Albion”, “America: A Prophecy,” “With Happiness Stretched across the Hills,” “Auguries of Innocence,” Milton
• Burns, Robert. “Sweet Afton,” “To a Mouse,” “Scots Wha Hae,” “Tam O’Shanter.”
• Byron, George Gordon Lord. “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,” Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, “Maid of Athens, ere we Part,” “The Bride of Abydos,” Hebrew Melodies, “She Walks in Beauty,” “By the Rivers of Babylon,” “The Destruction of Sennacherib,” “The Prisoner of Chillon,” “Manfred,” “Prometheus,” “The Vision of Judgement,” Don Juan, Cain, “On this day I complete my Thirty-Sixth Year.”
• Clare, John. Major Works (Oxford, 1987), esp. “Cock-a-Clay,” “The Flitting,” “Solitude,” “February,” “A Sunday…,” “I am,” “The
  Badger,” “Helpston,” “The Lament of Swordy Well,” “The Flood,” “Invite to Eternity,” “Birds Nest.”
• Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Pantisocracy,” “Religious Musing,” “The Eolian Harp,” “Frost at  Midnight,” “This in Solitude,” “Dejection: an Ode,” “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Christabel,” “Kubla Khan,” “Youth and Age,” “Love,” “Psyche,” “The Pains of Sleep,” “Constancy to an Ideal Object,” “To William Wordsworth,” “On Donne’s Poetry,” “Epitaph,” The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798, 1815), Biographia Literaria.
• Cristall, Ann Batten. Selections from Poetical Sketches (1795) (Wu 2nd Anthology Edition)
• Goldsmith, Oliver. “The Deserted Village.”
• Gray, Thomas. “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”
• Hemans, Felicia. The Domestic Affections (1812), The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy (1816), Tales and Historic Scenes (1819), The Forest Sanctuary (1825), Records of Woman (1828)
• Hood, Thomas. “Ruth,” “The Song of the Shirt.”
• Hunt, Leigh. “Abou Ben Adhem,” “Jenny Kissed Me,” “The Grasshopper and the Cricket.”
• Keats, John. “Imitation of Spenser,” “Sleep and Poetry,” “I Stood Tiptoe,” Endymion, “Isabella,” “The Eve of St. Agnes,” “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” “Lamia,” “Soman!”; the odes – “To Psyche,” “On Indolence,” “To a Nightingale,” On a Grecian Urn,” “On Melancholy,” and “To Autumn”; Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion; “Written on the Day Leigh Hunt left Prison,” “Ode to
  Apollo,” “To Solitude,” “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” “To Leigh Hunt” [Dedication to Poems (1817)], “On the Grasshopper and the Cricket,” “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,” “On Seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair,” “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again,” “When I Have Fears,” “What the Thrush Said,” “The Human Seasons,” “Epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds,” “Bright Star,” “Why did I Laugh Tonight?” “To Sleep,” “This Living Hand.”
• Lamb, Charles. “The Old Familiar Faces,” “Living Without God in the World.”
• Landon, Letitia Elizabeth. The Improvisatrice (1824), The Troubadour (1825), The Venetian Bracelet, The Lost Pleiad, A History of the Lyre, and Other Poems (1829), “To Wordsworth.”
• More, Hannah. Selections from the Cheap Repository Tracts, including “Sinful Sally.”
• Opie, Amelia. “Ode to Borrowdale in Cumberland.”
• Robinson, Mary. “The Haunted Beach.” “Sappho and Phaon.” (sonnet sequence, 1796)
• Scott, Walter. The Lay of the Last Minstrel.
• Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Alastor,” “Julian and Maddalo,” Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, “The Mask of Anarchy,” “Epipsychidion,” “Adonais,” “The Witch of Atlas,” “The Triumph Life,” “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” “Mont Blanc,” Ozymandias,” “Lines Written among the Euganean Hills,” “Ode to Liberty,” “Lift not the Painted Veil,” “England in 1819,” “Ode to the West Wind,” “Love’s Philosophy,” “The Sensitive Plant,” “The Cloud,” “To a Skylark,” “The Two Spirits: an Allegory,” “To Night,” “Music when Soft Voices Die,” “When the Lamp is Shattered,” Jane Williams lyrics: “The Invitation,” “The Recollection,” “With a Guitar,” “The Keen Stars were Twinkling”; “Lines written in the Bay of Lerici.”
• Smith, Charlotte. Elegiac Sonnets, and Other Essays (expanded ed. 1797), “The Emigrants” (1793), “Beachy Head.” (1807)
• Southey, Robert. “The Battle of Blenheim,” “A Vision of Judgement.”
• Tennyson, Alfred Lord. “The Lady of Shallot,” “The Palace of Art,” “The Lotos Eaters,” “Ulysses,” “Locksley Hall,” “The Two Voices.”
• Tighe, Mary. Psyche. (1805)
• Williams, Helen Maria. Sonnets “To Hope,” “To Twilight,” “To the Moon.”
• Wordsworth, William. Lyrical Ballads (1798, 1800), The Prelude (1805), and Book XIV of the 1850 edition; “Nutting,” the ‘Lucy Poems,’ “My Heart Leaps Up,” “I wandered lonely as a Cloud,” “She was a Phantom of Delight,” “Michael,” “Resolution and Independence,” “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” “Peter Bell,” “The Solitary Reaper,” “Composed upon Westminster Bridge,” “London, 1802,” “It is a Beauteous Evening,” “The World is too much with us,” “Surprised by Joy,” “Ode to Duty,” “Elegiac Stanzas suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle.”
• Yearsley, Ann. Poems, On Several Occasions (1785), “Clifton Hill” (1787), Poems, On Various Subjects (1787), The Rural Lyre. (1796)

Drama

• Baillie, Joanna. Selections from Plays on the Passions (1798), including De Montfort
• Cowley, Hannah. The Belle’s Stratagem (1780)
• Inchbald, Elizabeth. Lover’s Vows (1798), A Mogul Tale (1827) (available online)
• Lewis, Matthew Gregory. The Castle Spectre (1796)
• Hemans, Felicia. The Siege of Valencia (1823), The Vespers of Palermo (1823)
• Pocock, Isaac. The Miller and His Men (1813)
• Shelley, Percy B. Cenci (1819), Prometheus Unbound (1820),

Non-Fiction Prose

• Aiken, Lucy. Epistles on Women (1810)
• Baillie, Joanna. “Introductory Discourse” to Plays on the Passions (1798)
• Blake, William. Letters a) to the Rev. Dr. Trussler (23 August 1799) and b) to Thomas Butts (10 January 1802)
• Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful (1757, 1759), (Abridged) Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
• Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria, “On Poesy or Art,” Shakespeare’s Judgment equal to his Genius”
• Clare, John. “Journey out of Essex,” “Grammar”
• De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822), “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth” (1823), Reflections of the Lake Poets, Suspiria de Profundis (1845)
• Gilpin, William. Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape: to Which Is Added a Poem, on Landscape Painting (1794)
• Godwin, William. From Political Justice: “On the Right of Private Justice,” “The Moral Effect of Aristocracy,” “Of Co-operation, Co-habitation, and Marriage,” “Doctrine of Necessity,” Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798)
• Hazlitt, William. “My First Acquaintance with Poets,” “On Poetry in General,” from The Spirit of the Age: “Jeremy Bentham,” “William Godwin,” “Mr. Coleridge,” “The Late Horne Tooke,” “Sir Walter Scott,” “Lord Byron,” “Mr. Southey,” and “Mr. Wordsworth”
• Hays, Mary. Letters and Essays, Appeal to the Men of Great Britain (in Mary Hays Reader)
• Hunt, Leigh. “What is Poetry?”; “Young Poets” (Examiner 1 December 1816); “The Poems of John Keats” (Examiner June 1817); “Getting up on Cold Mornings”
• Kant, Immanuel. Critiques on Judgment and Aesthetics
• Keats, John. The Letters, ed. Robert Gittings (some anthologized)
• Lamb, Charles. “Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago,” “Dream-Children: A Reverie,” “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig,” “The Superannuated Man”
• Lamb, Mary. From Tales from Shakespeare: Preface
• Lockhart, John Gibson. “The Cockney School of Poetry”
• Love Peacock, Thomas. “Essay on Fashionable Literature,” The Four Ages of Poetry
• Rousseau, J. J. (Abridged) Rousseau's Political Writings: New Translations, Interpretive notes, Backgrounds, Commentaries, La nouvelle Heloïse
• Scott, Walter. “Essays of Romance,” Preface to Waverley
• Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Defence of Poetry, “On Life,” “On Love”
• Williams, Helen Maria. Letters from France (1793)
• Wollstonecraft, Mary. Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), excerpts from her letters
• Wordsworth, Dorothy. The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals, Letters
• Wordsworth, William. Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), Preface to the Edition of 1815 and “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface,” Preface to The Excursion (1814), Essays on Epitaphs

Secondary Works

Abrams, M. H. (Meyer Howard). Natural Supernaturalism – “Introduction” & selections (1971), WLU PN603. A3

Armstrong, Nancy. Introduction & Chapter 1. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1987), WLU PR830.D65 A7

Bate, Jonathan. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (1991), WLU PR5892. N2B38

Burwick, Fredrick. Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination (1996), Guelph PN 1241.B87

Campbell, Colin. Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (1987), Guelph HC 79.C6 C36

Copley, Stephern and John Whale, eds. Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts 1780-1832 (1992), WLU PR457. B38

Curran, Stuart. Poetic Form and British Romanticism (1986), WLU Online access

Day, Aidan. Romanticism (1996), WLU PR 457. D38

Eaves, Morris. The Counter-Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake (1992), WLU N72. I53E28

Ellis, Kate. The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (1989), WLU PR830.T3 E53

Fay, Elizabeth. A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism (1998), WLU PR468.F46 F39

Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake, WLU PR4147. F7 2004

Hanley, Keith and Raman Selden, eds. Revolution and English Romanticism: Politics and Rhetoric (1990), WLU PR 129. F8R47

Homans, Margaret. Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Brontё, and Emily Dickinson (1980), WLU PR589. W6H6

Jacobus, Mary. Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference: Essays on The Prelude (1989), WLU PR5864. J27 1994

Johnson, Claudia. Equivocal Beings: Gender, Politics, and Sentimentality in the 1790s – Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (1995), WLU PR858. W6 J64

Johnson, Claudia. Introduction & Chapter 1. Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (1988), WLU PR4038.P6 J64

Johnston, Kenneth R. Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory (1990), Guelph PR 475. R644

Kelly, Gary. The English Jacobin Novel, 1780-1805 (1976), WLU PR851.K4

Lovejoy, Arthur O. “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms,” in Essays in the History of Ideas (1948), Guelph B 945.L583 E7 1961

MacGann, Jerome J. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (1983), WLU PR590. M34

Mellor, Anne. Romanticism & Gender (1993), WLU PR 486. F46 M45

Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (1984), WLU PR 468.W6P66

Richardson, Alan. Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780-1832 (1994), Guelph PR 457.R456

Richardson, Alan and Sonia Hofkosh. Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780-1834 (1996), WLU PR 457. R6447

Roe, Nicholas. Romanticism: An Oxford Guide (2005), WLU PR 457. R4575

Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (1958), WLU DA533. W6

Wu, Duncan, ed. Romanticism: A Critical Reader (1995), Guelph PR 457.R6445

Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. Part 1 of Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel (1991), WLU PR858 .C69Y4

Other Material

NB: The following material greatly informs the literary contexts of the above Reading List, but will not be included on the Comprehensive Area Exams.

A) The Romantic Inheritance

Poetry

• Bowles, William Lisle. “Hope”
• Collins, William. “Ode to Evening.”
• Cowper, William. “The Castaway,” “Light Shining out of Darkness,” The Task
• Chatterton, Thomas. “An Excelente Balade of Charitie”
• Goldsmith, Oliver. “The Deserted Village.”
• Gray, Thomas. “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” “The Bard”
• Thomson, James. The Seasons, The Castle of Indolence
• Warton, Joseph. “The Enthusiast: or, The Lover of Nature”
• Young, Edward. from Night Thoughts, “Night the Third” and “Night the Ninth”

Fiction

• Fielding, Henry. Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, Shamella
• Goldsmith, Oliver. The Vicar of Wakefield.
• Johnson, Samuel. Rasselas
• Mackenzie, Henry. The Man of Feeling
• Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey, Tristram Shandy
• Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto

B) The Romantic Legacy

Prose

• Arnold, Matthew. “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” “The Study of Poetry,” “Wordsworth,” “Byron,” “Shelley”
• Carlyle, Thomas. “Characteristics,” Sartor Resartus
• Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” essays on “Blake,” “Wordsworth and Coleridge,” “Shelley and Keats,” and “Byron”
• Hulme, T.E. “Romanticism and Classicism” in Speculations
• Macauley, Thomas. “Review of Southey’s Colloquies”
• Mill, John Stuart. Autobiography, essays on “Bentham” and “Coleridge” in Dissertations and Discussions
• Yeats, W.B. “William Blake and the Imagination,” “The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry”