Download Southern (revised Fall 2015)

Reading List for Southern Literature Comprehensive Exam
I. Primary Texts
1. Michael Drayton, “To the Virginian Voyage”
2. John Smith, A True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Note as Hath
Hapned in Virginia; The Generall History of Virginia, New England, and the
Summer Isles
3. George Alsop, A Character of the Province of Maryland
4. Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia
5. Ebenezer Cook, “The Sot-Weed Factor”
6. William Byrd, History of the Dividing Line; Secret History of the Dividing Line;
selections from the Diary
7. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia
8. John Marrant, A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant,
A Black
9. William Bartram, Travels (selections)
8. Angelina Grimké Weld, Appeal to the Christian Women of the South
9. George Moses Horton, “Division of an Estate”; “George Moses Horton, Myself”;
“The Slave’s Complaint”
10. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”; “Ligeia”; “The Masque of
Red Death”; “The Raven”; “Ulalume”; “The Philosophy of Composition”
11. William Gilmore Simms, The Yemassee OR Woodcraft
12. John Pendleton Kennedy, Swallow Barn
13. James Henry Hammond, “Letter to an English Abolitionist”
14. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; My Bondage
and My Freedom
15. Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Georgia Scenes OR Johnson Jones Hooper, Some
Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, Late of the Tallapoosa Volunteers
16. T.B. Thorpe, “The Big Bear of Arkansas”
17. Henry Timrod, “The Cotton Boll”; “Ethnogenesis”
18. Mary Chesnut, excerpts from Mary Chesnut’s Civil War
19. Harriet Ann Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
20. E.D.E.N. Southworth, The Hidden Hand OR Augusta Jane Evans Wilson,
Beulah
21. Sidney Lanier, “The Marshes of Glynn”; “Song of the Chattahoochee”
22. George Washington Cable, The Grandissimes
23. Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; “Enchantments and Enchanters”
(ch. 46 of Life on the Mississippi); Puddn’head Wilson
24. Thomas Nelson Page, In Ole Virginia
25. George Washington Harris, “Parson John Bullin’s Lizards”; Mrs. Yardley’s
Quiltling”
26. Kate Chopin, The Awakening
27. Mary Noailles Murfree, “The ‘Harnt’ That Walks Chilhowee”; “The Star in the
Valley”
28. Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition; “The Goophered Grapevine”;
“Po’ Sandy”
29. Joel Chandler Harris, “Free Joe and the Rest of the World” and one Uncle Remus
story.
30. Henry W. Grady, “The New South”
31. Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery
32. H.L. Mencken, “The Sahara of the Bozart”
33. Ellen Glasgow, Barren Ground, The Sheltered Life, OR Vein of Iron (one of the
three)
34. Evelyn Scott, Escapade
35. John Crowe Ransom, “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter”; “Janet Waking”;
“Spectral Lovers”; “Necrological”; “Amphibious Crocodile”
36. Allen Tate, “To Intellectual Detachment”; “Ode to the Confederate Dead”; “Last
Days of Alice”; “Aeneas at Washington”; “The Mediterranean”; “The
Swimmers”; “The New Provincialism” (essay)
37. Caroline Gordon, Aleck Maury, Sportsman OR Green Centuries
38. Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition
39. Jean Toomer, Cane
40. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury; As I Lay Dying; Light in August OR
Go Down, Moses; Absalom, Absalom!; “Barn Burning”
41. Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Time of Man OR The Great Meadow
42. Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
43. Lillian Hellman, The Little Foxes
44. Erksine Caldwell, Tobacco Road OR God’s Little Acre
45. Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel
46. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; “Characteristics of Negro
Expression”; “The Gilded Six-Bits”
47. James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; A Death in the Family
48. Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men, “The Ballad of Billie Potts”; Audubon:
A Vision
49. Richard Wright, Black Boy; “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow”
50. Eudora Welty, “Why I Live at the P.O”; “A Worn Path”; “Petrified Man”; “A
Memory”; Delta Wedding; “Place in Fiction”; “Must the Novelist Crusade?”
51. Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream
52. Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
53. Katherine Anne Porter, “Old Mortality”; “Pale Horse, Pale Rider”; “He”; “The
Jilting of Granny Weatherall”; “The Old Order”; “The Grave”
54. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
55. Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms OR A Tree of Night
56. Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”; “Good Country People”;
“Everything That Rises Must Converge”; “Revelation”; Wise Blood; “Some
Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction”
57. A.R. Ammons, “So I Said I Am Ezra”; “Corson’s Inlet”; “Easter Morning”
58. Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
59. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
60. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail”
61. James Dickey, “The Heaven of Animals”; “The Firebombing”; “The Lifeguard”;
“Cherrylog Road”; “Hunting Civil War Relics at Nimblewill Creek”; “The
Strength of Fields”; “Falling” OR Deliverance.
62. Alice Walker, “Revolutionary Petunias”; “For My Sister Molly Who in the
Fifties”; “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens”; “Everyday Use”; The Color
Purple
63. Ernest Gaines, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman OR A Lesson Before
Dying
64. Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
65. Peter Taylor, “In the Miro District,” “Miss Leonora When Last Seen,” and
“Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time”; OR A Summons to Memphis
66. Alex Haley, Roots
67. Wendell Berry, “The Regional Motive”; “The Work of Local Culture”; “Why I
Am Not Going to Buy a Computer”
68. Barry Hannah, “Eating Wife and Friends”; “Knowing He Was Not My Kind Yet
I Followed”; “Water Liars”
69. Cormac McCarthy, Suttree
70. John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
71. Bobbie Ann Mason, “Shiloh”; “Still Life with Watermelon”; “Three-Wheeler”
72. Lee Smith, Oral History and a second novel
73. Marsha Norman, ‘night, Mother
74. Dorothy Allison, Bastard out of Carolina
75. Yusef Komunyakaa, “Facing It,” “Ia Drang Valley,” “Jasmine,” “My Father’s
Love Letters,” “Nude Interrogation,” “Nude Study,” “Saigon Bar Girls, 1975,”
and “Slam, Dunk, & Hook”
76. Randall Kenan, A Visitation of Spirits
77. Natasha Trethewey, Bellocq’s Ophelia
78. Nikki Finney, “God Ain’t Making No More Land,” “Pluck,” “Cotton Tea,” [all
from Rice]; “Left,” “Dancing with Strom,” and “My Time Up with You” [all in
Head Off and Split].
79. Cynthia Shearer, The Celestial Jukebox
II. Critical, Historical, and Secondary Works
1. Richard Beale Davis, Intellectual Life in the Colonial South (selections)
2. Lewis P. Simpson, The Dispossessed Garden: Pastoral and History in Southern
Literature
3. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South
4. Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made
5. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White
Women of the Old South
6. Louis D. Rubin, Jr., The Wary Fugitive OR The Edge of the Swamp
7. Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country
8. W.J. Cash, The Mind of the South
9. Michael Kreyling, Inventing Southern Literature
10. Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan Donaldson (eds.), Haunted Bodies: Gender and
Southern Texts
11. Patricia Yaeger, Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing,
1930-1990
12. Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn, eds., Look Away! The U.S South in New World
Studies
13. Houston A. Baker, Jr., Turning South Again: Re-Thinking Modernism/ReReading Booker T.
14. Trudier Harris, The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: American American Writers and
the South
15. Jennifer Rae Greeson, Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National
Literature
16. Special editions of American Literature on New Southern Studies (June 2001 and
December 2006)
17. Leigh Ann Duck, The Nation’s Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and
U.S. Nationalism
18. Scott Romine, The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural
Reproduction
19. Daniel Cross Turner, Southern Crossings: Poetry, Memory, and the Transcultural
South