First-Year Vacation Reading Oriel English 2017 First of all: many congratulations on your offer of a place to read English at Oriel, and on the completion of your exams! You are all thoroughly deserving of sunshine and vacation in its etymological sense (freedom, release; absence from duty) but please do take a moment to read this document carefully. It is designed to outline your first year of study, and to help you make the best use of your preparation time this summer. In the upcoming academic year, I will taking all of you for Paper 1 (Introduction to Language and Literature), and those single-honours English students amongst you for Paper 3 (Literature in English, 1830-1910), and Paper 4 (Literature in English, 1910-present). English and Modern Languages students will choose between these papers, or opt for Old English. You should pay particular attention to the sections on Paper 1A and Paper 3, as these are the papers taught next term. How to use this reading list. Don t be daunted by the length of this document you are not expected to read every indicated text before you arrive in Oxford. It is true, however, that the Oxford terms are brief and hectic, so whatever you can read over the vacation will free up your precious study time during term. The Oxford English course encourages breadth, depth and independence you should read widely and closely, and will have the opportunity to pursue your own interests in every one of your papers. In the paragraphs below I will highlight some important companion texts for the Introduction to Language and Literature paper, and a selection of key texts for the Victorian and Modern papers. There is no such thing as a set text for these exams, but the key texts will provide coverage in the period, and introduce you to its major genres and critical and cultural concerns. A handful of further reading suggestions are offered for each author. In addition to the primary texts, I have selected four or five authors whose work will introduce you to the intellectual background of the period, and I have also indicated some valuable starting-points for your critical reading. Primary reading should be your priority this summer. For those of you taking the Victorian paper next term, it would be advisable to begin by working through the key texts, and seeking out one or two of the background texts. Once you have sampled a range of the key texts (5 or 6, as a rough guide), you should then delve deeper into those authors who most appealed to you, thinking about how their works compare, and how they interact with broader Victorian concerns. It would be a good idea to consult at least one critical work from the key criticism list this summer. The introduction to Isobel Armstrong s Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics, for example, will give you an insight into how Victorian poetry, and the period, have been received by readers in the twentieth century, and how critical prejudices have been corrected in more recent criticism. English and Modern languages students who are opting for the Modern paper should focus on the key texts over the summer: the Christmas vacation is shorter, and allows less time for exploratory reading. In preparation for Paper 1, I recommend that all of you try to get hold of one of the suggested companion texts for the language side of the paper, and one for the literature side of the paper. A note on editions. Your studies in literature so far will have introduced you to the fact that texts can be unstable they can exist in different versions, elected by different editors, and with varying supporting material. What this means is that editions are important; the nomination of a particular edition isn t merely pedantry on the part of your tutors, so do try to follow our instructions. This advice does not only hold for primary material the recommended companion texts for Paper 1, for example, have been updated to accommodate recent research trends. Your tutors are sympathetic to the fact that books are expensive, and students today are under a great deal of financial pressure. I do not expect you to purchase all the key texts for these courses, and once you arrive in Oxford you will have access to a number of excellent 1
libraries. Over the summer, you should by all means investigate what your local library has to offer. Buying reliable second-hand editions is a good way of saving money second-hand books in good condition are increasingly available to us online through sites such as www.amazon.co.uk and www.abebooks.co.uk. It is also worth having a hit-list in mind every time you visit a second-hand bookshop. If you have any questions before the start of term, please don t hesitate to get in touch. You can reach me on sarah.bennett@oriel.ox.ac.uk. I very much look forward to meeting you all properly in what you will know for the next three years of your life as Noughth Week until then, happy reading, and have a great post-exam vacation! Sarah Bennett Oriel College, 2017 2
Paper 1 (Introduction to Language and Literature) Part A, Approaches to Language In your first term, you will be focusing on the Language side of this paper, with Steven Kaye. Though some of you will have studied English Language at A-Level, this course will challenge you to think differently about the language, its history and development, its varieties and uses. Below are Steven s reading suggestions to help prepare you for this side of the paper, and some advice about how to approach the suggested texts. Core Reading - Peter Trudgill, Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society, 4th ed. (London: Penguin, 2000). - David Crystal, The English Language, 2nd ed. (London: Penguin, 2002). I recommend that you buy both of these and read them over the summer if at all possible: they are widely available in paperback, are not overly long or technical, and will serve you well in introducing many of the topics dealt with in this part of paper 1. As you read these turn-of-the-century books you should consider whether any of the things they have to say already seem outdated, and why that is. Further Reading (optional) A third popular book, likewise scholarly although written for a general audience, is: - Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. (London: Penguin, 2008). If you are at all interested in the relationship between language and thought, this is an entertaining read and well worth getting hold of: chapters 1 and 5-9 are likely to be most rewarding, as they are the least technical and least concerned with adjudicating between rival linguistic theories. Topics discussed include how metaphors work, why the popularity of different baby names varies over time, and why some words are taboo. The remaining books on this list are more specialized, but by no means tough going. A clear, wideranging overview of the topics involved in the study of the English language is this textbook: - Christian Mair, English Linguistics: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Tübingen: Narr, 2012). For a more detailed history of English than is provided by Crystal or Mair, I suggest: - Charles Barber, Joan Beal and Philip Shaw, The English Language: A Historical Introduction, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Finally, if you are interested in the study of language more broadly, the one book on general linguistics that I would suggest looking into before or during your course is: - Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman and Nina Hyams, An Introduction to Language. This is an excellent introduction to the questions linguists are concerned with and how they go about investigating them. It has been republished and updated several times in recent years and the very latest version is hard to get hold of cheaply, but any edition from the 2000s comes recommended, and various editions can be found e.g. on Amazon (as well as in Oxford libraries). 3
Paper 1B (Approaches to Literature) I will be teaching you in Hilary term, when our focus will shift to critical and theoretical approaches to literature. Useful companion texts for this part of the course are Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, 25 th anniversary edition (London: Routledge, 2008) and Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2 nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008). 4
Paper 3 (Literature in English, 1830-1910) KEY TEXTS Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature and Selected Essays, ed. Larzer Ziff (London: Penguin, 2003) See, in particular, Nature (1836); The American Scholar (1837); Self-Reliance (1841); The Transcendentalist (1842); The Poet (1844). Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847) See also Shirley (1859); Villette (1853); The Professor (1857). Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850) The best edition of Tennyson s poems available is Christopher Ricks s Tennyson: A Selected Edition, rev. ed. (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007) for the Longman Annotated English Poets series. These are dense volumes with exhaustive textual and contextual notes a cheaper, acceptable alternative is Ricks recent Penguin edition, Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 2007). In addition to In Memoriam you should read Mariana, The Lady of Shalott, The Lotos Eaters, Ulysses, Locksley Hall, The Charge of the Light Brigade Maud: A Monodrama, Tithonus, Lucretius and Crossing the Bar. Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1852-3) See also David Copperfield (1849-50); Hard Times (1854); Our Mutual Friend (1864-5). Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (1855) See also Mary Barton (1848); The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857); Wives and Daughters (1865). Robert Browning, Men and Women (1855) Browning s Selected Poems have recently been published in the Longman Annotated English Poets series. Again, this is the best edition of the shorter poems available, but expensive. A great alternative is the Oxford World s Classics edition of The Major Works, edited by Adam Roberts. The Everyman edition of Men and Women and Other Poems is another option a cheap, convenient paperback, including a good selection of Browning s earlier and later short poems. It s out of print, but second-hand copies are easy to find on amazon or abebooks. In addition to Men and Women, you should read My Last Duchess, Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, Porphyria s Lover, Rabbi Ben Ezra and Caliban upon Setebos. Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market, and Other Poems (1862) The standard edition of Rossetti s poems is Christina Rossetti: The Complete Poems, edited by R. W. Crump, with notes by Betty Flowers (London: Penguin, 2001). The more recent Oxford World s Classics edition (Poems and Prose, ed. Simon Humphries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)) offers a good range of poems, but it is eccentric in presenting the poems chronologically, by order of composition rather than volume. It is therefore not the most useful reference for the poems its advantage, however, is that it contains selections of Rossetti s stories, devotional poems and letters. In addition to Goblin Market, and Other Poems you should look at The Prince s Progress and Other Poems (1866) particularly Monna Innominata: A Sonnet of Sonnets ; A Pageant and Other Poems (1881) and Verses (1893). Of the prose, you should look at Maude: Prose and Verse (1850) and Time Flies: A Reading Diary (1885). George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871-2) See also: Scenes of Clerical Life (1858); The Mill on the Floss (1860); Silas Marner (1861); Daniel Deronda (1878). 5
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D Urbervilles (1892) See also: Far from the Madding Crowd (1874); The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886); Jude the Obscure (1895). Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, and Other Plays, ed. Peter Raby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) I recommend you purchase this five-play edition from the Oxford English Drama series, which includes Lady Windermere s Fan (1893); Salome (1894, English Version); A Woman of No Importance (1893); An Ideal Husband (1899);The Importance of Being Earnest (1899). Note: For the novels, you should use Penguin Classics, Oxford World s Classics or Norton Critical editions. Norton editions are a little more expensive to buy, but always worth consulting for their selection of critical and contextual material. If you re interested in exploring Victorian poetry, the anthology I would recommend is Christopher Ricks (ed.), The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002; 2008) RECOMMENDED BACKGROUND READING Primary Thomas Carlyle, Scottish essayist and historian, was hugely influential in the Victorian period. Sartor Resartus (1836) is published in the Oxford World s Classics series, edited by Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984; 2008). This will give you a taste of Carlyle s idiosyncratic prose. There hasn t, unfortunately, been a recent, authoritative edition of Carlyle s works, and selected volumes are variable in quality and availability. His Signs of the Times (1829) is available on The Victorian Web: http://www.victorianweb.org, and you should read this as a valuable introduction to Victorian thought. Charles Darwin s The Origin of the Species (1859), which you have probably already encountered, had a profound effect on literature of the period, particularly in the challenges it posed to religious belief. It is available in an Oxford World s Classics edition introduced by critic Gillian Beer, whose seminal work Darwin s Plots (1983) examines the impact of Darwin s evolutionary theory on the narrative structures of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and others. Matthew Arnold is the major cultural and literary critic of the Victorian age, and a significant poet. Culture and Anarchy (1869), his essay in social criticism, is collected with The Function of Criticism at the Present Time (1864) in Stefan Collini s Cambridge edition (1993). You should also try to read The Study of Poetry (1880), which is available online at http://www.poetryfoundation.org Walter Pater s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) is an essential work of late Victorian criticism, and a founding text of the nineteenth-century Aesthetic Movement it is also a very enjoyable read. His impressionistic prose style exerted a great influence on modernist writers such as Proust, Joyce and Yeats. Often called The Renaissance, it is widely available in paperback 6
The essays collected in Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst s The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History c.1880-1900 (2000) offer a full account of the scientific, political and literary discourses of the last decades of the nineteenth century, and the introduction is worth reading. Secondary Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870 (1957) is a stiff, but important treatment of Victorian thought. Robin Gilmour s The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1830-90 (1993) is a more comprehensive background to the period. KEY CRITICISM If you wish to venture into some criticism, here are my suggestions for starting points: Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993) (ed.), Major Victorian Poets: Reconsiderations (London: Routledge, 1969) Gillian Beer, Darwin s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 3 rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976) Richard Cronin, Reading Victorian Poetry (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012) Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: the Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 2 nd ed. (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2000) F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (London & New York: Oxford University Press, 1968 [1941]) Francis O Gorman, ed., The Victorian Novel (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002) Ian Small, Conditions for Criticism: Authority, Knowledge and Literature in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) David Trotter, The English Novel in History, 1895-1920 (London: Routledge, 1993) It might help you to know that those of you taking Paper 3 will be looking at Dickens and Gaskell in the first week, and thinking about Condition of England literature. Be sure to read Bleak House (1852-3) and North and South (1855) before you arrive in Oxford. Any other Dickens you ve read will enhance your study; my recommendation for an accompanying novel would be Hard Times (1854). Carlyle s Signs of the Times (1829), mentioned above, will also be useful preparation for the first week. 7
Paper 4 (Literature in English, 1910-present) KEY TEXTS T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922) The standard edition of the poems is The Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber & Faber, 1969); it has been reprinted a number of times and is very easy to get hold of. You should also look at Prufrock and Other Observations (1917); Poems (1920); Four Quartets (1945). James Joyce, Ulysses (1922) You should use the Oxford World s Classics edition of the 1922 text, edited by Jeri Johnson. See also Dubliners (1914); Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916); Finnegans Wake (1939). Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927) See also Jacob s Room (1922); Mrs Dalloway (1925); Orlando (1928). W. H. Auden, The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber 1977) This edition of Auden s work up to 1939 is sadly out of print but it is easy to get hold of secondhand copies online (from amazon or abebooks), and in bookshops. Failing that, you should purchase the Faber Selected Poems: Revised Edition (2010), also edited by Mendelson. If you d like to explore later Auden, you should try The Double Man (1941); For the Time Being (1944) and Homage to Clio (1960). Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works (1986) This Faber volume is an indispensable text for students of Samuel Beckett, very widely available. Beckett enthusiasts should also look at his fiction. See More Pricks than Kicks (1934), his set of short, interlocking stories based in Dublin, and the trilogy of novels: Molloy (1955, English version); Malone Dies (1956, English version) and The Unnamable (1958, English version). Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955) See also Laughter in the Dark (English version 1938); Invitation to a Beheading (English version 1959); Pale Fire (1962). Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (1956) This novel is published in the Longman African Writers series, and more recently in Penguin Modern Classics. Either edition is acceptable. See also A Brighter Sun (1952); Those Who Eat the Cascadura (1972); Moses Ascending (1975). Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus (1984) See also The Magic Toyshop (1967); The Bloody Chamber (1979); Wise Children (1991). Derek Walcott, Omeros (1990) Omeros is published as a single Faber volume. Walcott s Faber Collected Poems only extends to 1984, but if you like Walcott s poetry, the Selected Poems, ed. Edward Baugh (London: Faber 2007) would be a good investment. Volumes for particular attention: Sea Grapes (1976); The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979); The Bounty (1997); The Prodigal (2004). 8
Tom Stoppard, Arcadia (1993) Arcadia appears in Stoppard s Plays: Five (London: Faber, 1999), which also contains Night and Day (1978); The Real Thing (1982); Hapgood (1988) and Indian Ink (1995). Other notable works include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966); Jumpers (1972); The Invention of Love (1997). Note: Unless a specific edition is indicated, you should use Oxford World s Classics, Penguin or Vintage editions for the novels. RECOMMENDED BACKGROUND READING Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman & Olga Taxidou (eds.), Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (1998) is the best companion anthology for this course. It collects a huge range of formative documents, manifestoes, letters, prefaces and essays on aesthetics, the modernist tradition, and its subsequent realignments. Five key cultural figures are indicated below, whose work will help you to access the major critical and theoretical concerns of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Austrian neurologist, was the founder of psychoanalysis. His theories of sexuality and the unconscious have had a great impact on literary criticism, and more broadly on modern perceptions of the self, and the relationship between man and nature. Freud sets out his mythology of the mind in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), an extract from the James Strachey translation of which is contained in Kolocotroni, Goldman & Taxidou anthology. You should also look at Civilization and its Discontents (1930), which is available in a Penguin Modern Classics edition translated by David McLintock. T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) is perhaps the most important and influential literary critic of the early twentieth century. His essay Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919) opens Selected Essays (1932), and is included in the Kolocotroni, Goldman & Taxidou anthology. You should also read Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), the culmination of Eliot s thought on the position of art, religion and politics in modern society. Writer, theorist and critic Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is associated with the Frankfurt School of German intellectuals who worked within a Marxist tradition, supported by the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in the 1920s yet his style of cultural critique was highly original. The significance of his essays on art and modern culture has gradually been recognised after his death, and Hannah Arendt edited the first collection of his essays, Illuminations (translated by Harry Zohn), in 1968. You can read excerpted versions of Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia (1929) and his most influential essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), in Kolocotroni, Goldman & Taxidou. American fiction writer and essayist Susan Sontag (1933-2004) was responsible for one of the most widely read and resounding works of 1960s criticism, Against Interpretation (1964), in which she argued for an erotics of art in place of hermeneutics. That essay and her Notes on Camp (1964) are collected in Against Interpretation and Other Essays, first published in 1966, never out of print, and published in a Penguin Modern Classics edition in 2009. 9
Edward Said (1935-2003) was a Palestinian-American literary critic and theorist. His Orientalism (1978) is one of the founding texts of postcolonial discourse. Culture and Imperialism (1994), regarded as a sequel to Orientalism, contains important essays on imperialism in works by Jane Austen, Conrad, Yeats, Camus, and the mass media. KEY CRITICISM Christopher Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music, and Painting in Europe 1900-1916 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) Alistair Davies & Alan Sinfield (eds.), British Culture of the Postwar: An Introduction to Literature and Society, 1945-1999 (London: Routledge, 2000) Peter Gay, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy from Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond (London: Heinemann, 2007) Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London & New York: Routledge, 1988) Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine, 1908-1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York & London: Methuen, 1987) Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide, 2 nd ed. (Basingtoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) Dominic Shellard, British Theatre Since the War (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1999) Robert Sheppard, The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and its Discontents, 1950-2000 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005) Alan Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989) Randall Stevenson, The Last of England? (The Oxford English Literary History: 1960-2000) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) 10