🐯 Princeton English unofficial reading list 2026
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Sophomore level
Lyric Language & Form I: Renaissance to Romantic ENG 241 (fa26)
- The Complete Poetry by George Herbert
- The Major Works: Including Songs & Sonnets & Sermons by John Donne
- Poetry Handbook: A Dictionary of Terms by Babette Deutsch
- The Major Works: including The Prelude by William Wordsworth
- Keats’s Poetry and Prose
- The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
- Renaissance and Baroque Poetry of Spain: With English Prose Translations by Elias L. Rivers
- Shakespeare’s Sonnets by Stephen Booth
- Hymns and Fragments by Friedrich Hölderlin
The Souls of Black Folk - Reading W.E.B. Du Bois ENG 245 (fa26)
- The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois
- Writings: The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade / The Souls of Black Folk / Dusk of Dawn / Essays & Articles by W.E.B. Du Bois
- ✔️ Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil by W.E.B. Du Bois (my highlights)
- Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 by W.E.B. Du Bois
- The World & Africa by W.E.B. Du Bois
The Makeover ENG 296 (fa26)
- A Gesture Life by Chang-rae Lee
- Ornamentalism by Anne Anlin Cheng
- Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority by Anne Anlin Cheng
Girls & Dolls ENG 297 (fa26)
- The Lonely Doll by Dare Wright
- What Maisie Knew by Henry James
- The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
- The Membranes by Chi Ta-wei
- The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
- Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
- Ornamentalism by Anne Anlin Cheng
- Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority by Anne Anlin Cheng
Junior level
The Nature of Old English: Select Old English Literature ENG 315 (fa26)
- A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse by Richard Hamer
- The Unstill Ones by Miller Oberman
- The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English by Hana Videen
- Intro. to Old English by Peter S. Baker
Shakespeare: Toward Hamlet ENG 318 (fa26)
- The Complete Pelican Shakespeare by Orgel & Braunmuller
Milton ENG 325 (fa26)
- To Reign in Hell by Steven Brust
- The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton by Kerrigan et al.
Romanticism & the Age of Revolutions ENG 330 (fa26) / The Romantic Period: Cultural & Literary Revolutions ENG 550 (fa26)
- Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas De Quincey
- The Longman Anthology of British Literature, Volume 2A: The Romantics & Their Contemporaries by David Damrosch et al.
19th-Century Fiction ENG 345 (fa26)
- Emma by Jane Austen
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
- Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
- Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life by George Eliot
American Literature: 1930-Present ENG 368 (fa26)
- ✔️ The Road by Cormac McCarthy
- American Pastoral by Philip Roth
- ✔️ Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman
- ✔️ Beloved by Toni Morrison (my highlights)
- Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
- The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
- The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
Irish Literature: James Joyce ENG 385 (fa26)
- Dubliners by James Joyce
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
- Ulysses by James Joyce
The Bible as Literature ENG 390 (fa26)
- The Literary Guide to the Bible by Alter & Kermode
- The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Version
Senior level
Forms of Literature: American Short Stories ENG 401 (fa26)
- Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
Forms of Literature: Postcolonialism ENG 402 (fa26)
- Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
- A Passage to India by E.M. Foster
- A Tempest by Aime Cesaire
- Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga
- Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee
- No Telephone to Heaven by Michelle Cliff
Between Selves: Living Letters from Antiquity to the Present ENG 410 (fa26)
- Letter to the Father by Franz Kafka
- The Letters of Abelard and Heloise
- ✔️ The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin (my highlights)
- Heroides by Ovid
- The Ides of March by Thornton Wilder
- The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
- Selected Letters by Seneca
Troubadours & Sonneteers ENG 470 (fa26)
- Taylor’s Version: The Poetic & Musical Genius of Taylor Swift by Stephanie Burt
- Bob Dylan’s Poetics: How the Songs Work by Timothy Hampton
- The Cambridge Companion to the Singer-Songwriter by Williams & Williams
- Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
- Troubadour Poems from the South of France by Paden & Paden
- The Major Works: Including Songs & Sonnets & Sermons by John Donne
Graduate level
The Renaissance in England: Milton ENG 522 (fa26)
- The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton
- Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
- The Oxford English Literary History: Vol. V: 1645-1714: The Later 17th Century by Margaret J. M. Ezell
Contemporary Critical Theories: Marx’s Capital ENG 528 (fa26)Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, v.1 by Karl Marx
Modernism: Surprised by Passion ENG 567 (fa26)
- Death in Venice and Other Stories by Thomas Mann
- A Lost Lady by Willa Cather
- The Ambassadors by Henry James
- The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
- Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert
- The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
- Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
- Swann’s Way: In Search of Lost Time, v.1 by Marcel Proust
- Cheri & The Last of Cheri by Colette
- The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
Problems in Literary Study: Chronopolitics: Medieval & African ENG 573 (fa26)
- My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Amos Tutuola
- Things They Lost by Okwiri Oduor
- Song of Lawino & Song of Ocol by Okot p’Bitek
- The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell
- The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
- The Middle English Breton Lays by Laskaya & Salisbury
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight