A Year of Oxford Reading Lists | Holly Goes Abroad

What do we have here? A Holly Goes Abroad post on a Wednesday?! Indeed. A few weeks ago someone commented asking if I could share all of my required reading lists from my year studying at Oxford, so that’s what I’m going to do today. I’m posting this in the middle of the week because it’s more about books than the traveling aspect itself… besides, I have so many of these abroad posts that I want to write and not enough Sundays to post them on!

Here’s how my required reading works: about a month before each term begins I get reading lists for the primary and secondary tutorials I’ll be taking next (primary meets every week, secondary meets every other). I usually try to read all of those books during my five-week breaks between term because once term begins I’m inundated with mountains of secondary sources (mostly literary criticism articles from JSTOR) which I use to write my weekly essays. Doing so much prep reading is arduous to say the least, but it definitely pays off in the long run because it eases some of the pressure of term-time. To be honest, I don’t know how people survive without doing any prep work at all– especially English lit students!

The following lists are all of the primary texts (mostly novels, but also some essays and poems) I’ve had to read for my tutorials–and yes, I’ve read every. single. one. of. them. (If you’ve wondering how I’ve managed to double my Goodreads reading goal already, this is why.)

Primary: Victorian Literature

1. Hard Times by Charles Dickens
2. North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
3. Alfred Tennyson, ‘Ulysses’
4. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’
5. Robert Browning ‘Porphyria’s Lover’; ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’
6. Matthew Arnold, ‘Dover Beach’
7. Middlemarch by George Eliot
8. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
9. Christina Rossetti, ‘Goblin Market’
10. DG Rossetti, ‘Jenny’
11. Augusta Webster ‘A Castaway’
12. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
13. Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
14. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
15. Bram Stoker, Dracula
16. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
17. E.M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread

Secondary: William Faulkner

1. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
2. Light in August by William Faulkner
3. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
4. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
5. Intruder in the Dust by William Faulkner

Primary: English Literature 1910-Present

1. Ann Veronica by H.G. Wells
2. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
3. Not So Quiet: Stepdaughters of War by Helen Zenna Smith
4. “Peace” by Rupert Brooke
5. “Glory to Women” by Siegfried Sassoon
6. “Anthem for Doomed Youth” by Wilfred Owen
7. “Dulce et decorum est” by Wilfred Owen
8. Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
9. Night by Eli Wiesel
10. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
11. On Beauty by Zadie Smith
12. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Secondary: Writing Feminisms

1. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft
2. Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner
3. “This Sex Which Is Not One” by Luce Irigaray
4. “Fin de Siecle, Fin de Sexe: transsexuality and the death of history” in Doing Time by Rita Felski
5. Many, many, many poems by Emily Dickinson
6. Memorial: An Excavation of the Iliad by Alice Oswald
7. White Teeth by Zadie Smith
8. Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison

Primary: Postcolonial Literature

1. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
2. The Bacchae of Euripides by Wole Soyinka
3. Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka
4. Butterfly Burning by Yvonne Vera
5. Changes by Ama Ata Aidoo
6. The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid
7. Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid
8. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
9. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
10. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundati Roy

Secondary: Virginia Woolf in Modernist Contexts

1. The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot
2. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
3. Ulysses by James Joyce (only the first few sections)
4. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
5. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
6. How to be Both by Ali Smith
7. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
8. Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf

I hope you’ve enjoyed this look into what I’ve been reading for the past year… it’s a lot! I don’t know how I managed to read all of these AND sneak in some books for fun along the way… SO. MUCH. READING.

Click here to check out other posts in my Holly Goes Abroad series!

Have you read any of these books before. What did you think of them? Have you taken courses like this before? Let me know in the comments section below!

Yours,

HOLLY