Anon.: Everyman or Second Shepherd's Play
Anon.: Beowulf
Anon.: Bible (King James Version): Genesis, the Gospel According to Saint Matthew, Revelation
Anon.: Sir. Gawain and the Green Knight
Arnold: "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" and selected poems
Atwood: Surfacing
Austen: Emma or Pride and Prejudice
Baudelaire: Selected Poems
Beckett: Waiting for Godot
Behn: The Rover or Oroonoko
Blake: Songs of Innocence and of Experience
Borges: Selected stories and essays
Boswell: Life of Johnson (selections)
Bradstreet: Selected poetry
Brontë: Wuthering Heights
Brontë: Jane Eyre
Browne: Religio Medici
Browning, R.: Selected Poems
Bunyan: Pilgrim's Progress
Byron: Selected Poems
Calvino: The Baron in the Trees
Carlyle: Sartor Resartus (selections)
Cather: My Antonia
Cervantes: Don Quixote
Chaucer: Canterbury Tales
Chopin: The Awakening
Coleridge: Selected poems including "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
Congreve: The Way of the World
Conrad: Heart of Darkness or Lord Jim
Crane : The Red Badge of Courage
Dante: The Divine Comedy: The Inferno
Defoe: Moll Flanders or Robinson Crusoe
DeQuincey: Confessions of an English Opium Eater
Dickens: Great Expectations or David Copperfield
Dickinson :Selected poetry
Donne: Selected poetry
Douglass: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dryden: "Essay of Dramatic Poesy"
Eliot, T.S.: Selected poetry
Eliot, G.: The Mill on the Floss
Ellison: Invisible Man
Emerson: Selected poetry and essays
Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury
Fielding: Tom Jones or Joseph Andrews
Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Forster : A Passage to India or Howard's End
Franklin: Autobiography
Frost: Selected poetry
Hardy: Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter and selected stories
Hemingway : In Our Time
Homer: The Iliad and The Odyssey
Hopkins: Selected poems
Irving: The Sketch Book
James: Portrait of a Lady, The Turn of the Screw, or What Maisie Knew
Jewett: The Country of the Pointed Firs
Johnson: Rasselas
Joyce: Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka: Selected stories
Keats: Selected letters and poems
Kingston: Woman Warrior
Lamb: Essays of Elia
Lawrence: Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow
Lessing, D.: Selected stories
Lowell, R.: Selected poems
Marlowe: Doctor Faustus
Marvell: Selected poems
Melville: Moby-Dick
Milton: Paradise Lost (selections) and selected shorter poems
Morrison: Beloved or Song of Solomon
Olsen: Tell Me a Riddle
O'Neill: A Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell: 1984
Plath: Selected poems
Poe: Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque
Pope: The Rape of the Lock and other selected poems
Pound: Selected poems
Richardson: Clarissa or Pamela
Ruskin: Selected essays
Shakespeare: As You Like It, Hamlet, 1 Henry IV, The Tempest orWinter's Tale, Macbeth, sonnets
Shaw: Heartbreak House or Pygmalion
Shelley, P.B. : Selected poetry
Shelley, M.: Frankenstein
Sidney: Defence of Poesy
Silko: Ceremony
Spenser: The Faerie Queene (selections)
Sterne: Tristram Shandy
Swift: Gulliver's Travels, "A Modest Proposal," selected poems
Tennyson: Selected poems
Thackeray: Vanity Fair
Thomas, D. : Selected poems
Thoreau: Walden
Twain: Huckleberry Finn
Virgil: The Aeneid
Walcott: Another Life
Wells: Selected stories
Wharton: The Age of Innocence
Whitman: Leaves of Grass
Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest or The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire
Woolf: To the Lighthouse or Mrs. Dalloway
Wordsworth: The Prelude (selections) and selected poems
Wright: Black Boy or Native Son
Yeats: Selected poems
There is no short-cut to becoming familiar with literary and critical terminology, but you might begin with a book such as M. H. Abrams' Glossary of Literary Terms. The sixth edition includes helpful short essays on various critical approaches and types of literary theory.
