Foundational Texts in Literary History and Periodization

  1. Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. Oxford University Press, 2004.

  2. Daiches, David. A Critical History of English Literature. Routledge, 2001.

  3. Ford, Boris (ed.). The Pelican Guide to English Literature (Volumes 5–8). Penguin Books, various editions.

  4. Alexander, Michael. A History of English Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.

  5. Waugh, Patricia (ed.). Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide. Oxford University Press, 2006.

Selected Primary Texts by Period

Romanticism (Week 1–3)

  • William Blake. Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794)

  • William Wordsworth & Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads (1798)

  • John Keats. Selected Odes (especially “Ode to a Nightingale”, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”)

  • Percy Shelley. Ode to the West Wind

  • Lord Byron. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

Victorian Literature (Week 4–6)

  • Charles Dickens. Hard Times (1854)

  • George Eliot. Middlemarch (1871–72)

  • Alfred Tennyson. In Memoriam A.H.H.

  • Robert Browning. My Last Duchess

  • Oscar Wilde. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890); The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)

Modernism (Week 7–10)

  • T.S. Eliot. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915); The Waste Land (1922)

  • Virginia Woolf. Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

  • James Joyce. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

  • Gerard Manley Hopkins. Selected Poems

  • H.G. Wells. The Time Machine (1895)

Postmodernism and Contemporary Literature (Week 11–14)

  • John Fowles. The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969)

  • A.S. Byatt. Possession (1990)

  • Doris Lessing. The Golden Notebook (1962)

Critical and Contextual Studies

  1. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Blackwell, 1983.

  2. Abrams, M.H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. Oxford University Press, 1953.

  3. Leavis, F.R. The Great Tradition. Chatto & Windus, 1948.

  4. Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic. Yale University Press, 1979.

  5. Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society: 1780–1950. Columbia University Press, 1958.

  6. McGann, Jerome. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. University of Chicago Press, 1983.

Optional Supplementary Resources

  • The Cambridge Companion Series (e.g., to the Victorian Novel, to Modernism, etc.) 

  • Norton Anthologies of English Literature (selected volumes, useful for excerpts and shorter texts)

  • Open-access digital archives: