British Literature Comprehensive Reading List

1. Beowulf
2. Geoffrey Chaucer – The Canterbury Tales
3. John Milton – Paradise Lost
4. William Shakespeare – Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, selected
sonnets
5. Jonathan Swift – Gulliver’s Travels
6. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Kubla Khan, Rime of the Ancient Mariner
7. George Gordon Byron – Don Juan
8. William Makepeace Thacheray – Vanity Fair
9. Charles Dickens – Great Expectations
10.Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice
11.George Bernard Shaw –Pygmalion
12.Virginia Woolf – To the Lighthouse
13.George Orwell – 1984
14.J.R.R Tolkien – The Hobbit
15.Anthony Burgess – A Clockwork Orange
16.Samuel Beckett – Waiting for Godot
17.Julian Barnes – A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters
18.Tom Stoppard – Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

19.Salman Rushdie – Midnight’s Children

20.Kazuo Ishiguro – The Remains of the Day