The PhD Oral Examination
in the
Nineteenth Century
(updated July 2018)
In addition to six critical works, students should choose forty primary authors (each represented by a novel, play, or cluster of poems/essays) distributed among the various genres as indicated.
POETRY (at least 10)
Matthew Arnold, William Blake, Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Robert Burns, Lord Byron, John Clare, Arthur Hugh Clough, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Crabbe, Michael Field, Thomas Hardy, Felicia Hemans, G.M. Hopkins, John Keats, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, George Meredith, William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Percy Bysshe Shelley, A.C. Swinburne, Alfred Tennyson, Augusta Webster, Oscar Wilde, William Wordsworth, W.B. Yeats
FICTION (at least 10)
Jane Austen, M.E. Braddon, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Lewis Carroll, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Godwin, H. Rider Haggard, Thomas Hardy, James Hogg, Elizabeth Inchbald, Charles Kingsley, M.G. Lewis, Robert Charles Maturin, George Meredith, Margaret Oliphant, Anne Radcliffe, Olive Schreiner, Walter Scott, Mary Shelley, R.L. Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, William MakepeaceThackeray, Mrs. Humphry Ward, H.G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, Charlotte Yonge
NON-FICTION PROSE (at least 8)
(Note: one or more periodicals might serve in the place of an author, or authors, in this section.)
Matthew Arnold, William Blake, Edmund Burke, Thomas Carlyle, Frances Power Cobbe, S.T. Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, Charles Darwin, George Eliot, T. H. Huxley, Anna Jameson, John Keats, Charles Lamb, Vernon Lee, T. B. Macaulay, Harriet Martineau, Alice Meynell, J. S. Mill, John Henry Newman, Thomas Paine, Walter Pater, John Ruskin, Walter Scott, P. B. Shelley, Herbert Spencer, Oscar Wilde, Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, William Wordsworth
DRAMA
Students may optionally include a list of no more than 6 scripts by the following playwrights, reducing their selection from the other literary genres accordingly.
Joanna Baillie
Dion Boucicault
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Lord Byron
Wilkie Collins
George Colman, the Younger
W.S. Gilbert
Felicia Hemans
Thomas Holcroft
Elizabeth Inchbald
Douglas Jerrold
William Moncrief
Arthur Wing Pinero
James Robinson Planché
Tom Robertson
George Bernard Shaw
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Tom Taylor
Oscar Wilde
ACADEMIC CRITICISM
Students should choose six from the list below; substitutions are possible but need to be approved by the area chair.
James Eli Adams, A History of Victorian Literature
M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism
Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics
Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel
Nina Auerbach, The Life of a Victorian Myth
Gillian Beer, Darwin ’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin , George Eliot, and 19th Century Fiction
Alison Booth, Homes and Haunts: Touring Writers’ Shrines and Countries
Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism
Karen Chase and Michael Levenson, The Spectacle of Intimacy: A Public Life for the Victorian Family
Phillip Davis, The Victorians
Devin Griffiths, The Age of Analogy
Kate Flint, ed., Cambridge History of Victorian Literature
Susan Fraiman, Unbecoming Women
Anna-Lise Francois. Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience
Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel
Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, 1832-1867
Robin Gilmour, The Victorian Period
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the 19 th Century Literary Imagination
Christopher Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century
Gary Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period
Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience
Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network
George Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley
Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire and Marriage in Victorian England
Iain McCalman, ed., An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest
Jerome McGann, Byron and Romanticism
Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England
D.A. Miller, The Novel and the Police
Tom Mole, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism
Virgil Nemoianu, The Taming of Romanticism
Terry Otten, The Deserted Stage: The Search for Dramatic Form in Nineteenth Century England
Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England
Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony
Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain
Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian Britain
Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism
Catherine Robson, Heart Beats
Jeffrey Robinson, Unfettering Poetry: Fancy in British Romanticism
Marlon Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism
Talia Schaffer, Romance’s Rival
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire
William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period
Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire
Herbert Tucker, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790-1910
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950
Susan Wolfson, Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism
Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel
Duncan Wu, ed., Romanticism, A Critical Reader