A Beginning Recommended Reading List

At one point during this semester, I discussed with one of my classes a set of readings that I consider vital to understand English-language literary (and broader artistic) culture*; in brief, I asserted at least part of my own canon.  Not long ago, one of the students in that class asked if I would kindly post the list so that it could be referenced.  Hence, the following (which may or may not line up with what I noted in class):

• The Holy Bible (particularly the King James Version for English literature, though a good English version of the Catholic canon will also be of help)
• Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey
• Virgil, The Æneid
• Beowulf
• Dante, Divine Comedy
• Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
• Machiavelli, The Prince
• Malory, Le Morte d'Arthur
• Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier
• Spenser, The Faerie Queene
• Elizabeth I, "Speech to the Troops at Tilbury" and "The Golden Speech"
• Shakespeare (all of it, really, but notably Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Julius Cæsar, Romeo and Juliet {I hate the play but it gets referenced frequently}, Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, and the sonnets)
• Marlowe, Doctor Faustus
• Bacon (aside from having a cool name), Essays
• More, Utopia
• Sidney, A Defence of Poesy
• Donne, "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning," "The Flea," Elegy 8, Meditation 17 from Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, and the Holy Sonnets
• Jonson, Volpone
• Milton, "Areopagitica" and Paradise Lost
• Behn, Oroonoko
• Butler, Hudibras
• Hamilton, Mythology (not an original source but a good introduction)

The list is only partial, but it provides a solid start.  I may revisit it at some point in the future.

*I am aware that the list I provide is largely Anglo-normative.  I do not mean by this to disenfranchise other languages and literatures, but the list was compiled in response to a specific question by a student, and so it is relatively narrow in its scope.  Also, it reflects my own readings, which have, admittedly, been Anglo-normative and largely defined by the traditional patriarchal literary canon.