Everything I Read During My English Literature Degree

On everything I read during my BA English Literature Degree...

If you’ve been here a little while, you’ll know I have a section on my Substack called Substack Uni — basically my excuse to ramble about everything I learned (and occasionally unlearned) during my English Literature and Philosophy degree, as well as what I have continued to research after. If you missed the intro post explaining what it’s all about, you can catch up here.

Quick bit of background before we dive in: I’m from the UK, and I know degree terminology can get confusing depending on where you’re based. I did a BA — basically, your standard undergraduate degree — in English Literature and Philosophy. Mine was a joint degree, which meant I did half English, half Philosophy. A little taste of everything, but only half of what a full-time English student would study.

I spent three years bouncing between these two subjects and loved how they overlapped in every way. But I quickly realised Philosophy wasn’t going to be the most practical path, so when I went on to do my Master’s, I dropped it and stuck with English Lit. My uni offered different pathways and I went for Modern and Contemporary Literature — which felt like the right choice at the time (I have mixed feelings now, but we move).

Anyway, after a year of academic chaos, I finished my MA.

Today I just wanted to do something fun and low-stakes while continuing to do what I love most: research and write.

The whole point of Substack Uni is to give you literature and philosophy studies that you can learn from and enter a conversation into. So you can do your own research, using the articles as a springboard to find your own interest. I firmly believe literature, and at times philosophy, is a conversational subject. Critics talking to critics. While Substack may not be mature enough for that, I welcome critical engagement with my works.

Just one heads up! I was a theory nerd through and through, so you won’t see endless novels on these lists. I also devoured secondary sources like my life depended on it, but I’ll spare you the full bibliography… unless you’re interested, in which case I’m happy to do a deep dive into specific modules or topics For now this is is a list every novel and primary text I read during my undergrad English degree (at least the ones I still have a record of!). I’ll follow this up with two more lists in due course— one for Philosophy and one for my MA Literature.

The Novel

This course spanned two terms and was compulsory. It traced the history of the novel and explored different forms of the novel and how this was reflected through race, class, culture etc:

• Pamela, Samuel Richardson

• Room, Emma Donoghue

• The Accidental, Ali Smith

• Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe

• Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe

• Foe, J.M. Coetzee

• The Italian, Ann Radcliffe

• The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham

• The Turn of the Screw, Henry James

• North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell

• The Year of the Runaways, Sunjeev Sahota

Critics

This course was also compulsory. It was predominantly non-fiction texts and focused on one set text, training us to consider texts critically:

• Doing English, Robert Eaglestone

• In the Cart, Anton Chekhov

• This is Shakespeare: How to Read the World’s Greatest Playwright, Emma Smith

• "They Say / I Say": The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing, Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein

• Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities, Stanley Eugene Fish

• Types of Narration, Wayne booth

• Closure, H Porter Abbott

Contemporary Literary Criticism

This was the course that stemmed my interest in literary theory and the beauty of academic articles or essays, particularly Fanon’s writing:

• The Left Hemisphere: Mapping Critical Theory Today, Razmig Keucheyan

• Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging, Tessa McWatt

• The Odd One In: On Comedy, Alenka Zupančič

• How to Teach Reading: A Primer for Ezra Pound

• Civilisations and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud

• The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar

• Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea, Gayatri Spivak

• Orientalism, Edward Said

• The Fact of Blackness, Franz Fanon

• Black Skin, White Masks and the Black Bodily Scheme, Franz Fanon

• The Animal That Therefore I Am, Jacques Derrida

• Narrate and Describe, George Lukacs

Paradise — Early Modern Poetry

This just focused on one text and I did not want to do this course but I had too many timetable clashes for anything else:

• Paradise Lost, John Milton

• The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, Stephen Greenblatt

Literary Adaptations

For all these novels I also had to watch the film:

• Little Women, Louisa May Alcott

• The Handmaids Tale, Margaret Atwood

• The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins

• Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell

• Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet

• Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller

Culture

A course focusing on different aspects of culture like race, class, feminism:

• Howards End, E.M. Forster

• A Room of One’s Own, Virgina Woolf

• Women, Race & Class, Angela Davis

• The Human Stain, Philip Roth

• On Beauty, Zadie Smith

• Three Guineas, Virgina Woolf

• The Two Cultures, C. P. Snow

Literature and Philosophy

My two degrees collided and this was one of my favourite courses:

• The Republic, Plato

• Protagoras, Plato

• Phaedrus, Plato

• Ion, Plato

• Poetics, Aristotle

• The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche

• The Fire & the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists, Iris Murdoch

• Nichomachean Ethics, Artistotle

Girl’s and Bildungsroman’s

This course also spanned two terms and was my special project. This is where I found my love for mother-daughter relationships that created my MA dissertation:

• Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte

• Atonement, Ian McEwan

• Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson

• Frost in May, Antonia White

• The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot

• My Ántonia, Willa Cather

• The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers

• To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

• We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson

• The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Maxine Hong Kingston

• Winter’s Bone, Daniel Woodrell

Poetry

We had the chunky 1000+ page Norton anthology to carry around campus and read select English poems from. I am not a poetry fan but this was compulsory. Just a few of these poems included:

• Sonnet 55, William Shakespeare

• Sonnet 129, William Shakespeare

• Sailing to Byzantium, W.B. Yeats

• Ave Maria, Frank O’Hara

• Why I Am Not a Painter, Frank O’Hara

• Frequently Unasked Questions, Charles Berstein

• This Poem Unintentionally Left Blank, Charles Berstein

• Poetry, Marianne Moore

• The Fish, Marianne More

• Holy Sonnet 14 (Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God), John Donne

• When I Consider How My Light Is Spent, John Milton

• ‘The Verse’ from Paradise Lost, John Milton

• Anecdote of the Jar, Wallace Stevens

• This Is Just to Say, William Carlos Williams

• The Red Wheelbarrow, William Carlos Williams

• Gretel in Darkness, Louise Glück

• A Fit of Rhyme Against Rhyme, Ben Jonson

• Delight in Disorder, Robert Herrick

• Frost at Midnight, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• I Felt a Funeral in My Brain, Emily Dickinson

We also had to read the following as a companion:

Poetry: The Basics, Jeffery Wainwright

This is just a list and if you would like detailed accounts of my thoughts on any of these please let me know!

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