The following list includes some of the texts considered in the course of drawing up this year’s syllabus. Feel free to draw on these for your comparative essay as part of the portfolio to be submitted in term 3 (though note you are also free to choose your own text).

I (1789-1848): Enlightenment, Revolution, Romanticism

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
Heinrich von Kleist, “The Earthquake in Chile”
E. T. A. Hoffmann, “The Sandman”
Marquis de Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom
Novalis, Hymns to the Night
Friedrich Hölderlin, “Hyperion”
Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle
Madame de Stäel, Corinne; or, Italy
Jan Potocki, Manuscript Found in Sargossa
William Wordsworth, Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defense of Poetry
Heinrich Heine, Germany: A Winter’s Tale
Giacomo Leopardi, Canti
Adam Mickiewicz, Pan Tadeusz
Honoré de Balzac, Le Colonel Chabert
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Georg Büchner, Woyczek
James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
Nikolai Gogol, The Overcoat; Diary of a Madman
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”; “The Black Cat”; “Hop-Frog”
Li Ju-chen, Flowers in the Mirror

II (1848-1914): Modernity, Capital, Empire

Charles Dickens, Hard Times
Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
Emily Dickinson, poems
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Gustave Flaubert, A Simple Heart
Guy de Maupassant, “Boule de Suif”; Pierre and Jean
Giovanni Verga, “The She Wolf”; “Rosso Malpelo”
Emile Zola, Thérèse Raquin
George Eliot, “The Lifted Veil”
Gottfried Keller, Green Henry
Adalbert Stifter, Rock Crystal
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground; The Double
Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Illych
Ivan Turgenev, First Love
Anton Chekhov, “Ward 6”; “Lady with Lapdog”
Maxim Gorky, Mother
Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
George Gissing, New Grub Street
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbevilles
Multatuli, Max Havelaar
Bankim Chandra Chatterji, Anandamath
Han Bangqing, The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai
Eça de Queirós, Cousin Bazilio
Boleslaw Prus, The Doll
Camillo Boito, Senso
Bram Stoker, Dracula
Emilia Pardo Bazán, The House of Ulloa
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”
Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm
Sol Plaatje, Mhudi
H. Rider Haggard, She
H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau
Herman Melville, Benito Cereno; “Bartleby the Scrivener”
Henry James, “In the Cage”; The Princess Casamassima
Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
Kate Chopin, The Awakening
Edith Wharton, “Roman Fever”
Knut Hamsun, Hunger
Joris-Karl Huysmans, A Rebours
José Maria Rizal, Noli Me Tangere
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, The Alienist
Lima Barreto, The Sad End of Policarpo Quaresma
Benito Pérez Galdós, Doña Perfecta
Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest
August Strindberg, Miss Julie
Arthur Schnitzler, La Ronde; Road into the Open
Franz Wedekind, Spring Awakening
Stanisław Wyspianski, The Wedding
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy; Beyond Good and Evil
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
Henry Adams, “The Dynamo and the Virgin 1900”

III (1914-1945): Modernisms and World War

Munshi Premchand, Godaan
Junichiro Tanazaki, Naomi
Yasunari Kawabata, The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa
Ding Ling, Shanghai, Spring 1930; “Miss Sophie’s Diary”
Shen Congwen, Border Town
Lao She, Rickshaw Boy
Xiao Hong,The Field of Life and Death
Pío Baroja, The Quest
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Letter to Lord Chandos”
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Franz Kafka, The Trial
Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way
André Gide, The Immoralist
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice; Doctor Faustus
Klaus Mann, Mephisto
Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf
Paul Valéry, “Le cimetière marin”; “Monsieur Teste”
Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies; Sonnets to Orpheus
Italo Svevo, Zeno’s Conscience
Andrei Bely, Petersburg
Isaac Babel, Red Cavalry
Bruno Schulz, Street of Crocodiles
Yegveny Zamyatin, We
Andrey Platonov, The Foundation Pit
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of Night
Georges Bataille, The Story of the Eye
Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double
Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven, Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons; Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; “The Dead”
William Butler Yeats, Irish civil war poems
Ezra Pound, Cathay; “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly”; Cantos I-V
HD, Sea Garden; Trilogy
Marianne Moore, Observations
Mina Loy, “Songs to Joannes”
Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning”; “Esthetique du Mal”
Jean Toomer, Cane
Hart Crane, The Bridge
W. H. Auden, “In Memoriam W. B. Yeats”; “September 1, 1939”
David Jones, In Parenthesis
Pierre Reverdy, selected poems
Paul Eluard, selected poems
André Breton, selected poems; Nadja
D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers; Women in Love
Aldos Huxley, Brave New World
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway; Orlando; A Room of One’s Own
Katherine Mansfield, The Collected Stories
E. M. Forster, Passage to India; Howards End
Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier
Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier
Jaroslav Hasek, The Good Soldier Schweik
Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
Anna Seghers, Transit
Mário de Andrade, Macunaima
César Vallejo, The Human Poems
Pablo Neruda, Residence on Earth; Canto General
Roberto Arlt, The Seven Madmen
Patricia Galvão, Industrial Park
Antonio Tabucchi, Pereira Maintains
Jorge Amado, The Violent Land
Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time; The Sun Also Rises
F. Scott Fitzgerald, stories; The Great Gatsby
William Faulkner, stories; The Sound and the Fury
John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer
Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts
Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop
Zora Neal Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely
Richard Wright, Native Son; “Long Black Song”
Henry Green, Living
Graham Greene, The Quiet American
Vladimir Mayakovksy, A Cloud in Trousers
Anna Akhmatova, “Requiem”
Maria Tsvetaeva, poems
Osip Mandelstam, The Egyptian Stamp
Velimir Khlebnikov, Zaum
Daniil Kharms, Today I Wrote Nothing
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and the Margarita
Ilya Ehrenburg, The Life of the Automobile
Sándor Márai, Embers
Nasim Hikmet, selected poems
Eugenio Montale, selected poems
Giuseppe Ungaretti, selected poems
Edith Södergran, poems
Bertolt Brecht, The Good Person of Szechuan; “A Reader for Those Who Live in the Cities”
Susan Glaspell, Trifles
Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author
Federico García Lorca, Blood Wedding; The Poet in New York
Karel Kapek, R.U.R.
Silvina Campo, “The Infinite Horses”; stories
Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel

IV (1945-1989): Cold War, Decolonization & the Long Boom

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain; The Fire Next Time
James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Claude Levi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked; Tristes Tropiques; The Savage Mind
C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
Yashar Kemal, Memed, My Hawk
Amos Tutuola, The Palm Wine Drinkard, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Ousmane Sembène, God’s Bits of Wood
Ayi Kwei Amah, The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born
Wole Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman
Bessie Head, Maru
Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions
Assia Djebar, Children of the New World; Far from Medina
Etel Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose
Naguib Mahfouz, Miramar; Adrift on the Nile
Nuruddin Farah, Maps
Ngugi wa’ Thiongo, A Grain of Wheat; Petals of Blood
Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North
Abdul Rahman Munif, Cities of Salt Vol. 1
Dambudzo Marechera, The House of Hunger
Flora Nwapa, Efuru
Saadat Hassan Manto, “Toba Tek Singh”
R. K. Narayan, The Painter of Signs
G. V. Desani, All about H. Hatterr
Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day
Mahasweta Devi, Imaginary Maps
U. R. Ananthamurthy, Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man
Mariama Bâ, So Long a Letter
Ama Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy
U. R. Ananthamurthy, Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man
Amrita Pritam, Pinjar
Kamala Markandaya, Nectar in a Sieve
V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas
Intizar Husain, Basti
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians
Pramoedya Ananta Toer, This Earth of Mankind
Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow
Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human
Alejo Carpentier, The Lost Steps
Miguel Asturias, Men of Maize
Juan Carlos Onetti, A Brief Life
Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo
Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch
Gabriel García Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Mario Vargas Llosa, The War of the End of the World
Manuel Puig, Kiss of the Spider Woman
Andrés Caicedo, Liveforever
Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr Ripley
Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; The First Circle
Primo Levi, If This is a Man
Taduesz Borowski, This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
Ingeborg Bachman, Darkness Spoken
Paul Celan, “Todesfüge”; “The Meridian”
Ingeborg Bachman, Darkness Spoken
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
B. S. Johnson, The Informants
George Orwell, Essays
Hugh MacDiarmid, “On a Raised Beach”
Basil Bunting, “Briggflatts”
Gwendolyn Brooks, A Street in Bronzeville
Elizabeth Bishop, Questions of Travel
Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead
Charles Reznikoff, Testimony
Lorine Niedecker, North Central
Gwendolyn Brooks, A Street in Bronzeville
Charles Olson, “Projective Verse”; “The Kingfishers”
Frank O’Hara, Lunch Poems
John Ashbery, The Tennis Court Oath; “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”
Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”; “Kaddish”; “Wichita Vortex Sutra”
Robert Creeley, For Love
Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck
Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum
Peter Weiss, Marat/Sade
Ernst Jünger, The Glass Bees
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Halldor Laxness, Independent People
Jean-Paul Sartre, “What is Literature?”
Jean Genet, The Blacks
Albert Camus, The Stranger
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook; Going Home
Nadine Gordimer, July’s People
Elsa Morante, History
Marianne Fritz, The Weight of Things
Shirley Hazzard, Transit to Venus
Saul Bellow, Seize the Day
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities; If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
William Gibson, Neuromancer
Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood
Philip Roth, The Counterlife
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Alasdair Gray, Lanark
Geoffrey Hill, Mercian Hymns
Seamus Heaney, North
Paul Muldoon, Meeting the British
Tom Leonard, Intimate Voices
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
Tennesee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire
Harold Pinter, The Homecoming
Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Dutchman
Diane di Prima, My Life as a Woman
José Saramago, Blindness
Antonio Lobo Antunes, The Land at the End of the World
Mercedè Rodoreda, In Diamond Square
Wilson Harris, The Palace of the Peacock
Paule Marshall, Praisesong for the Widow
Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place
Simone Schwarz-Bart, The Bridge of Beyond
Erna Brodber, Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home
Jacques Stéphen Alexis, General Sun, My Brother
Michelle Cliff, Abeng
Hanan al-Shaykh, Women of Sand and Myrrh
Rigoberta Menchú, I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee
Kathy Acker, Great Expectations; Blood and Guts in High School
Clark Coolidge, Polaroid
Michael Palmer, Sun
Susan Howe, The Europe of Trusts
Lyn Hejinian, My Life
Bernadette Mayer, Midwinter Day
Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
J. G. Ballard, Crash; High Rise; Empire of the Sun
Shahrnush Parsipur, Women without Men
Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta and Maria Velho da Costa (‘the three Marias’), New Portuguese Letters
Gerard Reve, The Evenings: A Winter’s Tale
Georges Perec, Life: A User’s Manual

Contemporary World Literatures (1990-present)

Roberto Bolaño, Distant Star; By Night in Chile; 2666
Earl Lovelace, Salt
W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
Javier Marias, A Heart So White
Wallace Shawn, The Fever
Don DeLillo, Underworld
Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre
Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide
Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red
Patrice Chamoiseau, Texaco
Edwige Danticat, The Farming of Bones
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
Yi Mun-yol, The Poet
Gerald Murnane, Barley Patch
Michel Houellebecq, Atomised
Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake
Juan Goytisolo, The Marx Family Saga
Pepetela, Jaime Bundam, Secret Agent
Chris Abani, GraceLand
Octavia Butler, The Parable of the Sower
Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues
Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun
Yvonne Owuor, Dust
Shailja Patel, Migritude
Teju Cole, Every Day is for the Thief
Alain Mabanckou, Broken Glass
Hisham Matar, Anatomy of a Disappearance
Mia Couto, The Last Flight of the Flamingo
Ivan Vladislavic, Portrait with Keys
James Kelman, How Late It Was, How Late
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai
David Markson, Reader’s Block
César Aira, How I Became a Nun
A. L. Kennedy, Day
Art Spiegelman, Maus
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts
Paulo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl
Elena Ferrante, Days of Abandonment
Marie NDiaye, Three Strong Women
Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle Vol. 1: A Death in the Family
Zoe Wicomb, October
Bae Suah, Time in Gray
Can Xue, Five Spice Street
Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
China Miéville, The City & the City
Georgi Gospodinov, The Physics of Sorrow
Vladimir Sorokin, Day of the Opritchnik
Victor Pelevin, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf
Svetlana Alexievich, Boys in Zinc
Jenny Erpenbeck, The End of Days
László Krasznahorkai, Seiobo There Below
Uday Prakash, The Walls of Delhi
Han Kang, Human Acts
Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead
Paulo Scott, Nowhere People
Claudia Rankine, Citizen
Kirill Medvedev, It’s No Good
Sjön, Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was
Yoko Tawada, Memoirs of a Polar Bear
Mike McCormack, Solar Bones
Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive
Hiromi Kawakami, Strange Weather in Tokyo
Mercé Rodoreda, Death in Spring
Tatyana Tolstaya, The Slynx
Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift
Akwaeke Emezi, Freshwater
Khairani Barokka, Indigenous Species
Eka Kurniawan, Man Tiger
Alejandro Zambra, Ways of Going Home