Module 10: Working with Literature Recommended Readings

Compact Anthology of World Literature I

Laura Getty and Kyounghye Kwon, University of North Georgia

Texts from a variety of genres and cultures are included in each unit. Additionally, each selection or collection includes a brief introduction about the author and text(s), and each includes 3 – 5 discussion questions. Texts in the public domain–those published or translated before 1923–are replicated here. Texts published or translated after 1923 are not yet available in the public domain. License: CC-BY-SA

Part One: The Ancient World (download Part 1 PDF)

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Part Two: The Middle Ages (download Part 2 PDF)

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Part Three: The Renaissance (download Part 3 PDF)

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Compact Anthology of World Literature II

Anita Turlington, Matthew Horton, Karen Dodson, Laura Getty, Kyounghye Kwon, and Laura Ng, University of North Georgia

Texts from a variety of genres and cultures are included in each unit. Additionally, each selection or collection includes a brief introduction about the author and text(s), and each includes 3 – 5 discussion questions. Texts in the public domain–those published or translated before 1923–are replicated in the anthology. Texts published or translated after 1923 are not yet available in the public domain. CC-BY-SA

Part Four: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (download Part 4 PDF, Part 4 epub)

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Part Five: The Long Nineteenth Century (download Part 5 PDF, Part 5 epub)

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Unit 1: Romanticism
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
- William Blake, Songs of Innocence: The Lamb, The Chimney Sweeper, Holy Thursday. Songs of Experience: Holy Thursday, The Chimney Sweeper, The Tyger, London
- Mary Wollstonecraft, from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
- Olympe De Gouges, The Rights of Woman
- William Wordsworth, Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, from Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Michael, a Pastoral Poem, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, Ode: Intimations of Immortality
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, To Wordsworth, Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, Ozymandias, A Song: “Men of England”, Ode to the West Wind, Mutability, from A Defence of Poetry
- John Keats, When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn
- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, Mathilda, The Last Man
Unit 2: Realism
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning, from Sonnets from the Portuguese, The Cry of the Children, Lord Walter’s Wife
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Lotos-Eaters, Ulysses
- Robert Browning, Porphyria’s Lover, My Last Duchess, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”
- Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, O Captain! My Captain!
- Gustave Flaubert, A Simple Soul
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
- Charles Baudelaire, Correspondences, The Corpse, Spleen, Hymn to Beauty
- Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych
- Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House, An Enemy of the People
- Emily Dickinson, Because I could not stop for Death, A bird came down the walk, The brain is wider than the sky, Hope is the thing with feathers, I died for beauty, but was scarce, I heard a fly buzz when I died, If I can stop one heart from breaking, My life closed twice before its close, The soul selects her own society, Success is counted sweetest, There’s a certain slant of light, Wild nights! Wild nights!
- Christina Rossetti, After Death, Up-Hill, Goblin Market, “No, Thank You, John”
- Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, The Poison Tree
- Guy de Maupassant, Boule de Suif, The Diamond Necklace
- Olive Schreiner , The Story of an African Farm
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper
- Anton Chekhov, The Lady with the Dog, The Cherry Orchard, A Doctor’s Visit
- W.B. Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree, When You Are Old, Easter 1916, The Second Coming
- H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The War of the Worlds

Part Six: The Twentieth Century and Contemporary Literature (download Part 6 PDF, Part 6 epub)

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(Note: Since many of these works are still in copyright, it may be necessary to purchase longer texts or work with your library to build a reader).

Unit 1: Modernism (1900-1945)
- Rabindranath Tagore, The Cabuliwallah
- Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author
- Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way
- Violetta Thurstan, Field Hospital and Flying Column
- Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman
- Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
- James Joyce, The Dead
- Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
- Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party
- T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Tradition and the Individual Talent, The Waste Land
- Anna Akhmatova, Lot’s Wife, Requiem, Why Is This Century Worse…
- Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, In a Grove, Rashomon
- Wilfred Owen, Preface, Strange Meeting, Anthem for Doomed Youth, Dulce et Decorum est, Exposure, Futility,
- Parable of the Old Men and the Young
- William Faulkner, Barn Burning, A Rose for Emily
- Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children
- Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths
- Langston Hughes, Harlem, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, Theme for English B, The Weary Blues
- Yi Sang, Phantom Illusion
Unit 2: Postcolonial Literature
- Sarojini Naidu, The Golden Threshold
- Aimé Fernand David Césaire, from Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, The Woman and the Flame
- Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
- Cho Se-hui, Knifeblade, A Little Ball Launched by a Dwarf, The Möbius Strip
- Joy Harjo, Eagle Poem, An American Sunrise, My House Is the Red Earth, A Poem to Get Rid of Fear, When the World as We Knew It Ended
Unit 3: Contemporary Literature (1955-present)
- Naguib Mahfouz, from Midaq Alley
- Yehuda Amichai, An Arab Shepherd is Searching for His Goat on Mt. Zion, Jerusalem
- Gabriel García Márquez, A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings
- Derek Walcott, The Bounty, from Omeros
- Seamus Heaney, The Haw Lantern, The Tollund Man
- Mahmoud Darwish, Identity Card, Victim Number 18
- Hanan al-Shaykh, The Women’s Swimming Pool
- Salman Rushdie, The Perforated Sheet
- Leslie Marmon Silko, Yellow Woman
- Haruki Murakami, The Second Bakery Attack
- Jamaica Kincaid, Girl
- Francisco X. Alarcón, “Mexican” Is Not a Noun, Prayer, To Those Who Have Lost Everything
- Yasmina Reza, God of Carnage”

More Anthologies:

Anthology: Reading African American Literature (SUNY Jefferson, CC-BY)

Writing and Critical Thinking Through Literature (Heather Ringo & Athena Kashyap, City College of San Francisco, CC-BY-NC)

Towards an Open Anthology of Poetry (David Mount, Clackamas Community College, CC-BY-NC)

Naming the Unnameable: An Approach to Poetry for New Generations (Michelle Bonczek Evory, SUNY Geneseo, CC-BY-NC-SA) (Poetry writing textbook)

Resources: Recommended Readings by Module