The PhD Oral Examination
in the
Romantic Period
(updated July 2018)
The student should choose a significant body of work for each of the forty authors chosen. While the student may quite reasonably emphasize one or another category – poetry in this period is a dominant genre, for example – at least four authors from each of the four categories must be selected. The selection of Academic Criticism – in which category the student should list some half-dozen titles – provides guidance about the current state of scholarly thought about the work of the period.
POETRY
Letitia Barbauld
Thomas Lovell Beddoes
William Blake
Robert Burns
George Gordon, Lord Byron
Thomas Campbell
John Clare
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
William Cowper
George Crabbe
Erasmus Darwin
Felicia Hemans
Leigh Hunt
John Keats
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Walter Savage Landor
Thomas Moore
Hannah More
Mary Robinson
Walter Scott
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Charlotte Smith
Robert Southey
Mary Tighe
William Wordsworth
FICTION
Jane Austen
Robert Bage
Fanny Burney
Charlotte Dacre
Maria Edgeworth
John Galt
William Godwin
Mary Hays
James Hogg
Elizabeth Inchbald
Lady Caroline Lamb
M. G. Lewis
Hannah More
Robert Charles Maturin
Amelia Opie
Thomas Love Peacock
Anne Radcliffe
Walter Scott
Mary Shelley
Charlotte Smith
Mary Wollstonecraft
NON-FICTION PROSE
[NB: The student should be aware of the crucial importance of the periodical press in this period. One or more periodicals might therefore serve in place of an “author” in this category.]
Joanna Baillie
Jeremy Bentham
William Blake
Edmund Burke
S. T. Coleridge
Thomas DeQuincey
William Gifford
William Gilpin
William Godwin
William Hazlitt
William Hone
Leigh Hunt
Francis Jeffrey
John Keats
Richard Payne Knight
Charles Lamb
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Thomas Malthus
James Mill
Hannah More
Robert Owen
Thomas Paine
Thomas Love Peacock
Joseph Priestley
Walter Scott
P. B. Shelley
Robert Southey
Helen Maria Williams
Mary Wollstonecraft
Dorothy Wordsworth
William Wordsworth
DRAMA
Joanna Baillie
Lord Byron
S. T. Coleridge
George Colman, the Younger
Felicia Hemans
Thomas Holcroft
Elizabeth Inchbald
M. G. Lewis
Robert Charles Maturin
William Moncrieff
P. B. Shelley
ACADEMIC CRITICISM
M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp
Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology
James Chandler, England in 1819
Adriana Craciun, Fatal Women of Romanticism
Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism
Ian Duncan, Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh
Mary Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime
Northrop Frye, A Study of English Romanticism
Michael Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic
Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics
Gary Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period
Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832
Iain McCalman, ed., An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age .
Jerome McGann, Byron and Romanticism
Tilottama Rajan, Dark Interpreter
Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism
Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh, eds., Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture
Jeffrey Robinson, Unfettering Poetry: Fancy in British Romanticism
Marlon Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire
William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period
Clifford Siskin, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse
Kate Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire
Susan Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism
Duncan Wu, ed., Romanticism, A Critical Reader