Literature

Modern Texts and Context Syllabus Timeline

  • William Blake, "London"

  • William Wordworth, "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads"

  • Wordsworth, "London, 1802"

    First published in "Poems in Two Volumes"
  • Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

  • Mary Shelley, "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus"

  • Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ozymandias"

    First published in 'The Examiner" in London
  • John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn"

  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Poet"

  • Frederick Douglass, "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave"

  • Charlotte Bronte, "Jane Eyre"

  • Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

  • Emily Dickinson's poetry

    Most of her poetry was published posthumously, and a complete collection did not appear until 1955
  • Oscar Wilde, "The Importance of Being Earnest" first performance

  • Ezra Pound, "In a Station of the Metro"

  • Hilda Doolittle, "Sea Rose"

  • Claude McKay, "If We Must Die"

  • William Carlos Williams, "The Rose is Obsolete"

  • Virginia Woolf, "To The Lighthouse"

  • Zora Neale Hurston, "Story in Harlem Slang"

  • William Carlos Williams, "To Elsie"

  • Jean Rhys, "Wide Sargasso Sea"

    First part published in 1964, later completed in 1966
  • Chinua Achebe, "The African Writer and the English Language"

  • Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, "On the Abolition of the English Department"

  • James Baldwin, "If Black English isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?"

  • Ken Saro-Wiwa, "Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English"

  • Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, "The Language of African Literature"

  • P.M.S. Dawson, "Poetry in an Age of Revolution"

  • Junot Diaz, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"