Great Readings in English Studies
A curated bibliography of landmark monographs, seminal theoretical essays, and field-defining critical texts that have shaped the discipline of English Studies, textual analysis, and literary history.
Foundations of Literary Criticism, Poetics & Hermeneutics
| Title | Author(s) |
|---|---|
| Poetics | Aristotle |
| An Apology for Poetry (The Defence of Poesy) | Sir Philip Sidney |
| Preface to Lyrical Ballads | William Wordsworth |
| A Defence of Poetry | Percy Bysshe Shelley |
| Tradition and the Individual Talent | T. S. Eliot |
| The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry | Cleanth Brooks |
| Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature | Erich Auerbach |
| The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays | Mikhail Bakhtin |
Structuralism, Post-Structuralism & Deconstruction
| Title | Author(s) |
|---|---|
| Course in General Linguistics | Ferdinand de Saussure |
| The Death of the Author | Roland Barthes |
| What Is an Author? | Michel Foucault |
| Of Grammatology | Jacques Derrida |
| Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism | Paul de Man |
| S/Z: An Essay | Roland Barthes |
Marxism, Cultural Materialism & New Historicism
| Title | Author(s) |
|---|---|
| The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction | Walter Benjamin |
| Marxism and Literature | Raymond Williams |
| The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act | Fredric Jameson |
| Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare | Stephen Greenblatt |
| The Country and the City | Raymond Williams |
Feminist Poetics, Gender Studies & Queer Theory
| Title | Author(s) |
|---|---|
| A Room of One's Own | Virginia Woolf |
| The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination | Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar |
| The Laugh of the Medusa | Hélène Cixous |
| In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose | Alice Walker |
| Epistemology of the Closet | Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick |
| Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity | Judith Butler |
Postcolonialism, Critical Race Theory & Global Anglophone Studies
| Title | Author(s) |
|---|---|
| Black Skin, White Masks | Frantz Fanon |
| Orientalism | Edward W. Said |
| Can the Subaltern Speak? | Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak |
| The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism | Henry Louis Gates Jr. |
| Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination | Toni Morrison |
| The Location of Culture | Homi K. Bhabha |
Rhetoric, Narrative Poetics & Stylistics
| Title | Author(s) |
|---|---|
| The Rhetoric of Fiction | Wayne C. Booth |
| A Rhetoric of Motives | Kenneth Burke |
| Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method | Gérard Genette |
| Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word | Walter J. Ong |
| More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor | George Lakoff and Mark Turner |
Book History, Print Culture & Textual Scholarship
| Title | Author(s) |
|---|---|
| What Is the History of Books? | Robert Darnton |
| The Printing Press as an Agent of Change | Elizabeth L. Eisenstein |
| Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts | D. F. McKenzie |
| The Textual Condition | Jerome J. McGann |