MODERN BRITISH LITERATURE (c.

1900 to 1950)
READING LIST

Please note that there are two lists below. The first is the full list with the core readings in bold; the
second is the core list separated out. You are responsible for all core readings and may incorporate
readings from the full list into your tailored list.

Unless otherwise noted, selections separated by commas indicate all works students should know.

A. FICTION
Beckett, Samuel. One of the following: Murphy, Watt, Molloy
Bennett, Arnold. Clayhanger
Bowen, Elizabeth. The Heat of the Day
Butler, Samuel. The Way of All Flesh
Chesterton, G.K. The Man Who Was Thursday
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness AND one of: Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, Nostromo, Under Western
Eyes
Ford, Ford Madox. The Good Soldier
Forster, E. M. Howards End, A Passage to India (plus the essays “What I Believe” and “The Challenge
of Our Times” in Two Cheers for Democracy)
Galsworthy, John. The Man of Property
Greene, Graham. One of: Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World
Joyce, James. Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses
Kipling, Rudyard. Kim
Lawrence, D. H. Two of: Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, The Rainbow, The Plumed Serpent
Lewis, Wyndham. Tarr, manifestos in BLAST 1
Mansfield, Katherine. “Prelude,” “At the Bay,” “The Garden Party,” “The Daughters of the Late
Colonel” (in Collected Stories)
Orwell, George. 1984 (or Aldous Huxley, Brave New World)
Wells, H. G. One of the following: Ann Veronica, Tono-Bungay, The New Machiavelli
West, Rebecca. The Return of the Soldier
Waugh, Evelyn. One of: Vile Bodies, A Handful of Dust, Brideshead Revisited
Woolf, Virginia. Two of: The Voyage Out, Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando,
Between the Acts (plus the essays “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” and “Modern Fiction” in
Collected Essays)

B. POETRY
The poems below are available in either The Longman Anthology of British Literature or The Norton
Anthology of British Literature.

Pre-World War I Poets

Thomas Hardy. Hap, Neutral Tones, Drummer Hodge, The Darkling Thrush, The Ruined Maid, The
Convergence of the Twain, Channel Firing, In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations,’ Ah, Are You Digging on
My Grave?, Heredity, During Wind and Rain, Afterwards, He Never Expected Much
A.E. Housman. Loveliest of Trees, When I was One-and-Twenty, To an Athlete Dying Young, On
Wenlock Edge, With Rue My Heart is Laden, Terence, This is Stupid Stuff, Epitaph on an Army of
Mercenaries

World War I Poets

Owen, Wilfred. Anthem for Doomed Youth, Apologia Pro Poemate Meo, Miners, Dulce et Decorum
Est, Strange Meeting

Rosenberg, Isaac. Break of Day in the Trenches, Louse Hunting, Returning, We Hear the Larks, Dead
Man’s Dump

Sassoon, Siegfried. “They,” The Rear-Guard, Glory of Women, On Passing the New Menin Gate

W. B. Yeats
The Madness of King Goll, Down by the Salley Gardens, The Lake Isle of Innisfree, The Man Who
Dreamed of Faeryland, Adam’s Curse, No Second Troy, The Fascination of What’s Difficult, September
1913, The Wild Swans at Coole, Easter 1916, The Second Coming, A Prayer for My Daughter, Sailing to
Byzantium, Leda and the Swan, Among School Children, In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con
Markievicz, Crazy Jane Talks With the Bishop, Lapis Lazuli, Under Ben Bulben, The Circus Animals’
Desertion

T. S. Eliot
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Gerontion, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, The Journey of the
Magi, Four Quartets (plus the essays “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” “The Metaphysical Poets,”
“What Is a Classic?,” and “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot)

The 1930s and 1940s

W. H. Auden. On This Island, Spain 1937, Musee des Beaux Arts, Lullaby, In Memory of W. B. Yeats,
September 1, 1939, In Praise of Limestone, The Shield of Achilles

Stevie Smith. Is It Wise?, Our Bog is Dood, Not Waving But Drowning, The New Age, Thoughts about
the Person from Porlock

Stephen Spender. Icarus, What I Expected, The Express, The Pylons

Dylan Thomas. The Force that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower, After the Funeral, Fern Hill,
Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night, A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London

C. DRAMA
Auden, W.H., and Christopher Isherwood. The Dog Beneath the Skin
Beckett, Samuel. Endgame, Waiting for Godot
O’Casey, Sean. Juno and the Paycock
Osborne, John. Look Back in Anger
Shaw, G. B. Two of the following: Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Man and Superman, Pygmalion,
Major Barbara
Synge, J.M. Playboy of the Western World
Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Earnest
Yeats, W.B. Cathleen ni Houlihan

D. REQUIRED SECONDARY SOURCES AND CRITICISM

Depending on your familiarity with modernism, you may want to consult the introductory texts under
section E before turning to these required secondary sources.

AESTHETIC FORM
Joseph Frank. “Spatial Form in Modern Literature.” (Sections I, II, III, VI, VII). In The Widening Gyre:
Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1963.
Also see required essays listed under Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot.

THE CITY
Raymond Williams. “Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism.” In The Politics of
Modernism: Against the New Conformists. London: Verso, 1989. 37-48.

THE CULTURE INDUSTRY AND MASS CULTURE

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” The
Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. New York: Seabury, 1972.
Andreas Huyssen. “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other.” After the Great Divide: Modernism,
Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986.

WORLD WAR I
Paul Fussell. The Great War and Modern Memory. London: Oxford UP, 1975. [Chapters I, III, VIII]
James Campbell, “Combat Gnosticism: The Ideology of First World War Poetry Criticism.” New
Literary
History 30.1 (Winter 1999): 203-15.
Sarah Cole, “Modernism, Male Intimacy, and the Great War.” ELH 68.2 (Summer 2001): 469-500.

GENDER
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth
Century. Vol. 1. The War of the Words. New Haven: Yale UP, 1988. [Chapters 1 and 5]
Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995. [Introduction and Chapter 1]

IMPERIALISM
Fredric Jameson. “Modernism and Imperialism.” In Nationalism, Colonialism, Literature. By Terry
Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward Said. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990. 43-66.
Jed Esty. A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England. Princeton: Princeton UP,
2004. [Introduction and Chapter 1]

E. INTRODUCTIONS TO MODERNISM (NOT REQUIRED)

In addition to the sources listed below, students would be well served to survey back issues of the
following journals, to orient themselves to recent critical debates on modern British literature and its
key authors: Modernism/Modernity, Modern Fiction Studies, Novel, ELT: English Literature in Transition,
and Twentieth-Century Literature.

Bradbury, Malcolm, and James McFarlane, eds. Modernism: A Guide to European Literature,
1890-1930. [A classic but now somewhat dated collection of essays]
Childs, Peter. Modernism. [A useful and concise introduction to central issues of modernism]
Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era.
Lewis, Pericles. The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism. [A more extensive introduction,
with useful chapters on Eliot and Joyce.]
Levenson, Michael, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. [A collection of essays with helpful
introductions to modernist fiction, poetry, drama, cinema, visual art]
Levenson, Michael. A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine, 1908-1922.
Nicholls, Peter. Modernisms: A Literary Guide.
Trotter, David. The English Novel in History 1895-1920.

Modern Literature and Culture, Society, Politics

Eagleton, Terry. Exiles and Émigrés: Studies in Modern Literature. [A somewhat dated but helpful
overview of modern British writers and their politics]
Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. [A
groundbreaking study of modernism’s relation to mass culture]
Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918. [A fascinating cultural history of
technology’s impact on modern life and art]
Naremore, James, and Patrick Brantlinger. Modernity and Mass Culture. [See the introductory
essay, “Six Artistic Cultures,” for a helpful contextualizing of modernism and other art
forms in the early twentieth century]
North, Michael. Reading 1922. [A literary and cultural analysis of modernism’s climactic year]
Trattner, Michael. Modernism and Mass Politics.
Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society 1780-1950. [Parts II and III]
—. The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists.

Critics for Particular Authors

Critical editions published by Norton and Bedford are especially useful in highlighting the shifting
debates surrounding particular authors, texts, and genres, as is the Cambridge Companion series (to
Modernism, Twentieth Century Irish Drama, Beckett, Conrad, Eliot, Joyce, Shaw, and Woolf, with others
forthcoming).

Next to each literary figure below are authors of important books, articles, and collections, presented in
roughly chronological order with early critics first.

Conrad: Avrom Fleishman, Zdzislaw Najder, Edward Said, Norman Sherry, Ian Watt, Benita Parry, Fredric
Jameson, J.H. Stape, Christopher GoGwilt, Owen Knowles and Gene Moore

Eliot: F.O. Matthiessen, Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom, Frank Lentricchia, Ronald Bush, John Paul
Riquelme, Michael North, Anthony David Moody, Joshua Esty

Forster: Lionel Trilling, Wilfred Stone, P.N. Furbank, Paul Armstrong, Robert K. Martin and George
Piggford

Joyce: Harry Blamires, Richard Ellmann, Hugh Kenner, Colin MacCabe, Bonnie Kime Scott, Don Gifford,
Morris Beja, Derek Attridge, Vincent Cheng, Enda Duffy, Joseph Valente

Kipling: John McClure, Bart Moore-Gilbert, John McBratney

Lawrence: F.R. Leavis, Keith Sagar, Philip Hobsbaum, Michael Bell, Ann Fernihough

Woolf: James Naremore, Quentin Bell, Rachel Bowlby, Bonnie Kime Scott, Alex Zwerdling, Gillian Beer,
Douglas Mao, Kathy Philips

Yeats: Frank Kermode, Harold Bloom, Richard Ellmann, Richard Finneran, Michael North, Jahan
Ramazani

Other Topics
Women and Gender: Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Bonnie Kime Scott, Shari Benstock, Suzanne Clark,
Ann Ardis, Marianne DeKoven, Rita Felski, Sarah Cole

Race and Empire: Patrick Brantlinger, Edward Said, Benita Parry, Fredric Jameson, Sara Suleri,
Christopher Lane, Marianna Torgovnick, Ian Baucom, Joshua Esty

World War I: Paul Fussell, Allyson Booth, Vincent Sherry, Sarah Cole

Core List: Primary Sources

Unless otherwise noted, selections separated by commas indicate all works students should
know.

A. FICTION
1. Joseph Conrad. Heart of Darkness AND one of: Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, Nostromo,
Under Western Eyes
2. Ford Madox Ford. The Good Soldier
3. E. M. Forster. Howards End, A Passage to India (plus the essays “What I Believe”
and “The Challenge of Our Times” in Two Cheers for Democracy)
4. Graham Greene. One of: Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the
Matter
5. James Joyce. Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses
6. D. H. Lawrence. Two of: Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, The Rainbow, The Plumed
Serpent
7. Katherine Mansfield. “Prelude,” “At the Bay,” “The Garden Party,” “The Daughters of
the Late Colonel” (in Collected Stories)
8. George Orwell. 1984 (or Aldous Huxley, Brave New World)
9. Rebecca West. The Return of the Soldier
10. Evelyn Waugh. One of: Vile Bodies, A Handful of Dust, Brideshead Revisited
11. Virginia Woolf. Two of: Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando,
Between the Acts (plus the essays “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” and “Modern
Fiction” in Collected Essays)

B. POETRY
The poems below are available in either The Longman Anthology of British Literature or The
Norton Anthology of British Literature.

12. Pre-World War I Poets

Thomas Hardy. Hap, Neutral Tones, Drummer Hodge, The Darkling Thrush, The Ruined
Maid, The Convergence of the Twain, Channel Firing, In Time of ‘The Breaking of
Nations,’ Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?, Heredity, During Wind and Rain,
Afterwards, He Never Expected Much
A.E. Housman. Loveliest of Trees, When I was One-and-Twenty, To an Athlete Dying
Young, On Wenlock Edge, With Rue My Heart is Laden, Terence, This is Stupid
Stuff, Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries

13. World War I Poets

Owen, Wilfred. Anthem for Doomed Youth, Apologia Pro Poemate Meo, Miners,
Dulce et Decorum Est, Strange Meeting
Rosenberg, Isaac. Break of Day in the Trenches, Louse Hunting, Returning, We Hear
the Larks, Dead Man’s Dump
Sassoon, Siegfried. “They,” The Rear-Guard, Glory of Women, On Passing the New
Menin Gate

14. W. B. Yeats. The Madness of King Goll, Down by the Salley Gardens, The Lake Isle of
Innisfree, The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland, Adam’s Curse, No Second Troy,
The Fascination of What’s Difficult, September 1913, The Wild Swans at Coole,
Easter 1916, The Second Coming, A Prayer for My Daughter, Sailing to
Byzantium, Leda and the Swan, Among School Children, In Memory of Eva Gore-
Booth and Con Markievicz, Crazy Jane Talks With the Bishop, Lapis Lazuli, Under
Ben Bulben, The Circus Animals’ Desertion

15. T. S. Eliot. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Gerontion, The Waste Land, The Hollow
Men, The Journey of the Magi, Four Quartets (plus the essays “Tradition and the
Individual Talent,” “The Metaphysical Poets,” “What Is a Classic?,” and “Ulysses,
Order, and Myth,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot

16. The 1930s and 1940s

W. H. Auden. On This Island, Spain 1937, Musee des Beaux Arts, Lullaby, In Memory of
W. B. Yeats, September 1, 1939, In Praise of Limestone, The Shield of Achilles
Stevie Smith. Is It Wise?, Our Bog is Dood, Not Waving But Drowning, The New Age,
Thoughts about the Person from Porlock
Stephen Spender. Icarus, What I Expected, The Express, The Pylons
Dylan Thomas. The Force that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower, After the
Funeral, Fern Hill, Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night, A Refusal to Mourn
the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London

C. DRAMA
 17. Samuel Beckett. Endgame, Waiting for Godot
18. G. B. Shaw. Two of the following: Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Man and Superman,
Pygmalion, Major Barbara
19. J. M. Synge. Playboy of the Western World

Core List: Secondary Sources

1. AESTHETIC FORM
Joseph Frank. “Spatial Form in Modern Literature.” (Sections I, II, III, VI, VII). In The
Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature. New Brunswick: Rutgers
UP, 1963.

2. THE CITY
Raymond Williams. “Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism.” In
The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists. London: Verso, 1989.
37-48.

3. THE CULTURE INDUSTRY AND MASS CULTURE

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass
Deception.” The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. New York:
Seabury, 1972.
Andreas Huyssen. “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other.” After the Great
Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana UP,
1986.

4. WORLD WAR I
Paul Fussell. The Great War and Modern Memory. London: Oxford UP, 1975. [Chapters
I, III, VIII]
James Campbell, “Combat Gnosticism: The Ideology of First World War Poetry
Criticism.” New Literary History 30.1 (Winter 1999): 203-15.
Sarah Cole, “Modernism, Male Intimacy, and the Great War.” ELH 68.2 (Summer 2001):
469-500.

5. GENDER
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in
the Twentieth Century. Vol. 1. The War of the Words. New Haven: Yale UP, 1988.
[Chapters 1 and 5]
Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995. [Introduction
and Chapter 1]

6. IMPERIALISM
Fredric Jameson. “Modernism and Imperialism.” In Nationalism, Colonialism, Literature.
 By Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward Said. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1990. 43-66.
Jed Esty. A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 2004. [Introduction and Chapter 1]