Faculty Committee

Bernadette Andrea, Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, Rachael King

Notes and Resources

It is assumed that students taking the first qualifying exam in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century will be familiar not only with the following primary texts but also with the critical and interpretive issues concerning these texts and the period at large.

Required selections may be found as indicated:

  • BL = British Literature 1640-1789, An Anthology. 2d Edition. Ed. Robert DeMaria, Jr. Blackwell, 2001.
  • ECP = Eighteenth-Century Poetry, An Annotated Anthology. Eds. David Fairer and Christine Gerrard. Blackwell, 1999
  • AB = Oroonoko, The Rover, and Other Works. Ed. Janet Todd. Penguin, 1992.
  • RED = Broadview Anthology of Restoration & Early Eighteenth-Century Drama. Ed. J. Douglas Canfield. Broadview, 2001.
  • PC = photocopy available in the office of the Staff Graduate Advisor

Students are encouraged to read widely in the relevant secondary literature.

Reading List

Drama (in RED unless noted)

  • Joseph Addison. Cato, A Tragedy (1712)
  • Aphra Behn. The Rover or The Lucky Chance
  • William Congreve. The Way of the World (1700)
  • John Dryden. Marriage à la Mode or All for Love
    • PC: “Preface” to An Evening’s Love
  • John Gay. The Beggar’s Opera
  • Oliver Goldsmith. She Stoops to Conquer
    • PC: “An Essay on Theater”
  • George Lillo. The London Merchant (1731)
  • Richard Brinsley Sheridan. The School for Scandal
  • William Wycherley. The Country Wife

Novel

  • Jane Austen. Mansfield Park (1814)
  • Aphra Behn. Oroonoko (1688)
  • John Bunyan. Pilgrim’s Progress, Part One
  • Frances Burney. Evelina
  • Maria Edgeworth. Belinda (1801) or Castle Rackrent
  • Henry Fielding. Tom Jones
  • Eliza Haywood. BL: Fantomina
  • Charlotte Lennox. The Female Quixote
  • Ann Radcliffe. The Italian or Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
  • Samuel Richardson. Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (Broadview abridge edition permissible) (1748-9)
  • Sarah Scott. Millenium Hall (1762)
  • Laurence Sterne. Tristram Shandy
  • Horace Walpole. Castle of Otranto (1764)

Poetry (BL unless noted)

  • Aphra Behn. AB: “Love Armed”; “The Disappointment”; “To the fair Clarinda …”
  • Mary Collier. “The Woman’s Labor”
  • William Collins. “Ode to Fear”; “Ode on the Poetical Character”; “Ode to Evening”
  • William Cowper. “The Negro’s Complaint”; “On a Spaniel Called Beau”; “Beau’s Reply”; “The Castaway”; The Task Book I
  • Stephen Duck. From “The Thresher’s Labor”
  • Anne Finch. “The Introduction”; “Adam Posed”; “The Petition for an Absolute Retreat”; “To the Nightingale”; “The Unequal Fetters”; “The Spleen: A Pindaric Poem.”
  • Oliver Goldsmith. “The Deserted Village”
  • Thomas Gray. “Sonnet [on the death of Richard West]”; “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat”; “An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard”; “The Progress of Poesy”
    • ECP: “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”
  • John Milton. Paradise Lost Books I, IV, IX, XII lines 574-end
  • Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. “The Reasons that Induced Dr. S- …”; “To the Memory of Mr. Congreve”
    • ECP: “Epistle from Arthur Gray the Footman”; “Verses Address’d to the Imitator of Horace” (with Lord Hervey)
  • James Thomson. “Winter.” PC: “Rule, Britannia”
  • John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester. “The Imperfect Enjoyment”; “A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind”; “Signior Dildo”

Prose writers (BL unless noted)

  • Addison and Steele. Spectators 1, 2, 10, 11 (BL), 62, 112, 122, 287, 411-414 (PC) (1711-14)
  • Mary Astell. From A Serious Proposal to the Ladies
  • James Boswell. From The Life of Johnson (BL) (1791); from the Journal (PC)
  • Edmund Burke. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, Part 2, Sections 1-5, 13-16 (1757)
  • Olaudah Equiano. From The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
  • Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan, Ch XIII: “Of the Natural Condition of Mankind …”
  • David Hume. “Of the Liberty of the Press”; “My Own Life”
  • John Locke. An Essay concerning … Civil Government, excerpts from Chs. 1, 2, 4, 5
  • Bernard Mandeville. From A Modest Defence of Public Stews
  • Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. LETTERS Of the Right Honourable Lady M-y W—y M—u
  • Clara Reeve. FC: The Progress of Romance Preface, Evening I, II, VII (1785)
  • Adam Smith. Theory of Moral Sentiments, Section I Chs. 1-5 (1759)

Daniel Defoe

  • Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders or Roxana
  • A Journal of the Plague Year
  • “The True-Born Englishman” (1701)
  • The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1703)

John Dryden (BL unless noted)

  • Absalom and Achitophel
  • “Song for St. Cecilia’s Day”
  • “Mac Flecknoe”
  • PC: “Essay of Dramatic Poesy”

Jonathan Swift (BL unless noted)

  • A Tale of a Tub
  • Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
  • “A Modest Proposal”
  • “The Lady’s Dressing Room”; “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed,” “A Description of a City Shower”
  • ECP: “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift”; “Stella’s Birthday 1727”
  • PC: “To Stella Visiting Me in My Sickness”; “An Argument Against the Abolishing of Christianity in England”

Alexander Pope (ECP unless noted)

  • The Dunciad, Bks. I and II (1743); “Eloisa to Abelard”; “Windsor-Forest”; “An Epistle to a Lady. Of the Characters of Women”; “To Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington. Of the Use of Riches”; “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot”
  • BL: The Rape of the Lock (1712)
  • PC: An Essay on Criticism; An Essay on Man (1734) Book I and “The Design”

Samuel Johnson (BL unless noted)

  • Rasselas (1759)
  • From the Preface to The Plays of William Shakespeare
  • From the Preface to The Dictionary of the English Language
  • “The Vanity of Human Wishes”
  • PC: Rambler, No. 4, No. 60 (1750); from Lives of the Poets: “Milton”; “Dryden”; “Pope,” “Savage”

Revised 01/16