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JAMES WALDEN JOHNSON

 

James Walden Johnson was an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance who, as poet and editor, took part in literary debates of the time. He is best known for his only novel,
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
, and his book of poems,
God's Trombones, Seven Negro Sermons in Verse
.

Drill Questions

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

  1. The speaker of this poem compares himself to
    1. Hamlet.
    2. Shakespeare.
    3. Polonius.
    4. Claudius.
    5. the Fool.
  2. The stanza is excerpted from
    1. “The Waste Land.”
    2. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
    3. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”
    4. “Who Goes with Fergus?”
    5. “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.”

Note: This review is by necessity incomplete. It is impossible for us to go into great detail about individual authors or to be all-inclusive, just as it is impossible for you to study all of English literature in preparation for this test. We encourage you to refer to the more exhaustive list that follows as a general reference. And as a further aid, we have marked with an asterisk those titles in our
MAXnotes
®
series of literary digests.

SUGGESTED READING LIST

Achebe, Chinua.
Things Fall Apart *

Adams, Henry.
The Education of Henry Adams

Addison, Joseph.
The Pleasures of the Imagination,
“Tulips”

Aeschylus.
The Libation Bearers, Oresteia

Algren, Nelson.
The Man with the Golden Arm

Amis, Kingsley.
Lucky Jim

Angelou, Maya.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings *

Anouilh, Jean.
The Lark

Aristophanes.
Lysistrata

Aristotle.
On the Art of Poetry, Poetics

Arnold, Matthew. “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-Gypsy,”
The Study of Poetry
, “Thyrsis,” “To Marguerite - Continued”

Atwood, Margaret.
The Handmaid's Tale, * Lady Oracle

Auden, W.H. “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” “Musée des Beaux Arts”

Auerbach, Eric.
Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

Austen, Jane.
Emma,* Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice,* Sense and Sensibility

Baldwin, James.
Go Tell it On the Mountain, Notes of a Native Son

Baraka, Amiri (Leroi Jones). “Poem for Half White College Students”

Barth, John.
Lost in the Funhouse
, “The Battle of Maldon”

Beckett, Samuel.
Murphy, Waiting for Godot *

Bede.
Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum

Behan, Brendan.
The Hostage

Behn, Aphra.
Oroonoko: Or, the Royal Slave

Bellow, Saul.
Henderson the Rain King, Seize the Day

Beowulf*

Bishop, Elizabeth. “One Art”

Blair, Robert. “The Grave”

Blake, William. “The Lamb,” “London,”
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,
“The Tyger”

Booth, Wayne C.
The Rhetoric of Fiction

Borges, Jorge Luis.
The Garden of Forking Paths

Boswell, James.
The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.

Brecht, Bertolt.
The Caucasian Chalk Circle, St. Joan of the Stock-yards, The Threepenny Opera

Brode, Anthony. “Breakfast with Gerard Manley Hopkins”

Brontë, Charlotte.
Jane Eyre
*

Brontë, Emily.
Wuthering Heights

Brooks, Gwendolyn. “We Real Cool”

Browne, Sir Thomas.
Religio Medici

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. “Aurora Leigh,”
Sonnets from the Portuguese

Browning, Robert. “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church,” “Fra Lippo Lippi,” “The House Holder,” “My Last Duchess,” “Porphyria's Lover”

Bryant, William Cullen. “The Death of Lincoln”

Bunyan, John.
The Pilgrim's Progress

Burke, Edmund.
Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies

Burney, Fanny.
Evelina

Burns, Robert. “A Red, Red Rose,” “Tam o' Shanter,” “To a Louse [On Seeing One on a Lady's Bonnet at Church]”

Burton, Robert.
Anatomy of Melancholy

Butler, Samuel (1612-1680). “Hudibras”

Butler, Samuel (1835-1902).
Erewhon, The Way of All Flesh

Byrd, William.
The History of the Dividing Line

Byron, George Gordon, Lord.
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Don Juan
,
Manfred,
“She Walks in Beauty”

Campion, Thomas. “When to Her Lute Corinna Sings”

Camus, Albert.
The Myth of Sisyphus, The Stranger
*

Carlyle, Thomas.
Characteristics, On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History, Portrait of His Contemporaries, Sartor Resartus

Carroll, Lewis.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,
“Jabberwocky”

Cather, Willa.
Death Comes to the Archbishop, My Antonia *

Centlivre, Susanna.
A Bold Stroke for a Wife, The Busie Bodie

Cervantes, Miguel de.
Don Quixote

Chaucer, Geoffrey.
The Canterbury Tales,* Troylus and Criseyde

Chekhov, Anton.
The Cherry Orchard, The Darling

Chopin, Kate.
The Awakening,* The Story of an Hour

Cibber, Colley.
Love's Last Shift

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor.
Biographia Literaria,
“Frost at Midnight,” “On Donne's Poetry,” “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,”
Table Talk

Congreve, William.
The Way of the World

Conrad, Joseph.
Heart of Darkness,* Lord Jim, The Secret Sharer

Cooper, James Fenimore.
The Deerslayer, The Pioneers

Cortazar, Julio.
Blow-Up

Crabbe, George. “The Village”

Crane, Stephen. “The Open Boat,”
The Red Badge of Courage

Cullen, Countee. “From the Dark Tower”

Cumberland, Richard.
The West Indian

cummings, e.e. “A salesman is an it that stinks Excuse”

Dante Alighieri.
The Divine Comedy I: Inferno *

Declaration of Independence

Defoe, Daniel.
Moll Flanders,* Robinson Crusoe

De Quincey, Thomas. “Confessions of an English Opium Eater”

Dickens, Charles.
Bleak House, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, * Hard Times,* The Pickwick Papers

Dickinson, Emily. “Because I could not stop for Death,” “I reason, earth is short,” “If I can stop one heart from breaking,” “That after Horror - that ‘twas us”

Donne, John. “The Bait,”
Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions
, “The Flea,” “The Sun Rising,” “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”

Dos Passos, John (Roderigo).
The Big Money

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Crime
and
Punishment

Douglass, Frederick. The Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass

Drayton, Michael. “Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part”

Dreiser, Theodore (Herman Albert). An American
Tragedy
, Sister Carrie

Drummond, William. Notes on Ben
Jonson

Dryden, John. “Absalom and Achitophel,” “Alexander's Feast,”
All For Love, The Conquest of Granada,
“Epigram on Milton,”
Essay of Dramatic Poesy, An Evening's Love
, “Mac Flecknoe,” “Ode to Mrs. Anne Killi-grew,” “A Song for St. Cecilia's Day”

Edwards, Jonathan.
Personal Narrative, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

Eliot, George.
Adam Bede, Middlemarch, * Silas Marner

Eliot, T.S.
Hamlet and His Problems
, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,”
Tradition and the Individual Talent,
“The Waste Land”

Ellison, Ralph.
Invisible Man

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Brahma,”
Divinity School Address, Journals,
“Nature,” “Poet,” “Self-Reliance,” “Two Rivers”

Erik's Saga

Etherege, Sir George.
The Man of Mode

Euripides.
Iphigenia at Aulis, Medea
*

Everyman

Farrell, James T.
Studs Lonigan

Faulkner, William.
As I Lay Dying
, * “The Bear,” “A Rose for Emily,”
The Sound and the Fury
*

Fielding, Henry.
Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones

Finch, Anne. “Adam Pos'd”

Fish, Stanley.
Is There a Text in This Class?

Fitzgerald, F. Scott.
Babylon Revisited, The Great Gatsby
*

Flaubert, Gustave.
Madame Bovary

Fleming, William.
Arts and Ideas

Fletcher, Phineas.
The Purple Island

Ford, John.
‘Tis Pity She's a Whore

Forster, E. M.
Aspects of the Novel, Howard's End, A Passage to India, * The Road to Colonus, A Room With a View, What I Believe
,
Where Angels Fear to Tread

Foster, Hannah Webster.
The Coquette

Fowles,
John. Wormholes

Franklin, Benjamin.
Autobiography

Freneau, Philip (Morin). “The House of Night”

Frost, Robert. “Design,” “Meeting and Passing,” “Mending Wall,” “Mowing,” “The Road Not Taken”

Frye, Northrop.
Anatomy of Criticism

Gay, John.
The Beggar's Opera

Gide, Andre.
The Counterfeiters

Ginsberg, Allen. “Howl”

Godwin, William.
Caleb Williams

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von.
Faust
,
The Sorrows of Young Werther

Gogol, Nikolai.
The Diary of a Madman

Goldman, Emma.
In Jail

Goldsmith, Oliver. “The Deserted Village,”
National Prejudices, She Stoops to Conquer, The Vicar of Wakefield

Gower, John.
Confessio Amantis

Gray, Thomas. “The Bard on a Pindaric Ode,” “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes,”
The Progress of Poesy

Greene, Henry Graham.
Monsignor Quixote, The Quiet American

Halle, Morris.
The Rules of Language

Hardy, Thomas. “Ah, Are you Digging on my Grave?”
Far From the Madding Crowd, “Hap,” Jude the Obscure,* Neutral Tones, The Return of the Native, Tess of the D'Urbervilles *

Hawthorne, Nathaniel.
The Minister's Black Veil—A Parable, My Kinsman, Major Molineux, The Scarlet Letter, * Young Goodman Brown

Hazlitt, William.
My First Aquaintance with Poets, On the Pleasure of Hating

Heller, Joseph.
Catch-22

Hemingway, Ernest.
A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hills Like White Elephants, The Killers, The Old Man and the Sea, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, The Sun Also Rises
*

Herbert, George. “The Altar,” “Easter Wings,” “The Pulley”

Herrick, Robert. “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” “Upon Julia's Clothes”

Hesse, Hermann.
Siddartha

Heywood, Thomas. A
Woman Killed With Kindness

Hobbes, Thomas.
Leviathan

Holmes, Oliver Wendell. “The Chambered Nautilus,” “Elsie Venner,” “My Aunt”

Home, John.
The Fatal Discovery

Homer.
The Iliad, * The Odyssey
*

Hopkins, Gerard Manley. “Carrion Comfort,” “Pied Beauty,” “Spring and Fall,” “Thou art Indeed Just, Lord, If I Contend,” “The Windhover”

Horace.
Art of Poetry, Epistles

Housman, A.E. “To an Athlete Dying Young,” “When I Was One-and-Twenty”

Howells, William Dean.
Criticism and Fiction

Hughes, James Langston. “Harlem”

Hume, David.
Of Tragedy, Of the Standard of Taste

Hurston, Zora Neale.
Their Eyes Were Watching God *

Huxley, Aldous.
Brave New World,
*
Point Counter Point, Science and Culture

Huxley, Sir Julian Sorell.
Memories

Ibsen, Henrik. A
Doll's House, An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck

Ionesco, Eugene.
The Chairs, The Lesson, Rhinoceros

Irving, Washington.
The Golden Reign of Wouter Van Twiller, Rip Van Winkle, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent

James, Henry.
The Ambassadors, The Art of Fiction, The Aspern Papers, The Beast in the Jungle, The Golden Bowl, The Portrait of a Lady, * What Maisie Knew

BOOK: GRE Literature in English (REA)
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