The Department of English

Doctor of Philosophy

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AMERICAN LITERATURE BEFORE 1900 READING LIST

Native Americans (choose one): speeches or traditional stories (from The Heath Anthology of American Literature, vol 1. or The Norton Anthology of American Literature, vol. 1)

Early explorers (choose one): Christopher Columbus, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Álvar NúÍñez Cabeza de Vaca, Samuel Champlain, Jesuit Relations, Thomas Harriot, John Smith

John Winthrop, Cotton Mather, William Bradford, or Mary Rowlandson
Anne Bradstreet or Edward Taylor
Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, or Thomas Jefferson
Olaudah Equiano or Phillis Wheatley
Lydia Sigourney, William Cullen Bryant, or Philip Freneau
James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, or Catharine Maria Sedgwick
Edgar Allan Poe
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Margaret Fuller or Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Jacobs, Harriet E. Wilson, or William Wells Brown
Frederick Douglass
William Apess or Samson Occom
Lydia Maria Child, Fanny Fern, or Frances E. W. Harper
Henry David Thoreau
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Herman Melville
Walt Whitman
Emily Dickinson

Female regionalists (choose one): Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Rose Terry Cooke, Grace King, Mary Noialles Murfree, Sarah Barnwell Elliott, Mary Hallock Foote

Mark Twain
Charles Chesnutt or William Dean Howells
Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, or Hart Crane
Sarah Winnemucca, Charles Alexander Eastman, or Zitkala-Ša

Late nineteenth-century poets (choose one): Sidney Lanier, Joaquin Miller, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Lizette Woodworth Reese, E. Pauline Johnson, Emma Lazarus, Sarah Piatt, Celia Thaxter, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Alexander Posey

Henry James

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For more information, contact:
Ms. Alyson Everhart
Administrative Assistant to Graduate Studies in English
3137 MHRA
(336) 334-5311