Read the entire “Don’t Go to Art School” series:

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

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For year four of our Nearly-Free English Degree, we’ll be covering contemporary times and other special topics. Each “course” below is worth one credit. Literary Theory and one of the In-Depth Study courses are compulsory; you’ll schoolneed to pick two others, from at least two of the groups, and then pick three electives. One of these other electives can be another literature class from any of the categories for any year, but two of them should be non-English courses from the selections I’ll give you once we’ve covered the English ones.

For each course, you’ll follow the same work pattern: Consult Wikipedia for the “lecture” before you read each book, and then do the reading, using the study techniques you developed in year one (Quiller-Couch’s methods or the highly recommended notebook-based self-study techniques used in the recommended but non-free Bauer title).

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1. COMPULSORY COURSES

Literary Theory

 Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism by F.V.N. Painterschool

 On the Art of Poetry by Aristotle

 English Literary Criticism By Charles E Vaughan

 An Apology for Poetry by Sidney

 Preface to Fables by Dryden

 On Poetic Genius by Coleridge

 A Defence of Poetry by Shelley

 An Essay on Criticism by Alexander Pope

 Censorship and Art by John Galsworthyschool

 Content by Cory Doctorow (Manybooks)

 How Copyright Broke

 In Praise of Fanfic

 All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites

 Open-Source Democracy by Douglas Rushkoff (Manybooks)

2. IN-DEPTH STUDY (Choose 1)

In-Depth Study 1 | Sacred Texts in English

 Harvard Classics Vol 44: Sacred Texts 1 (MobileRead)

 The Sayings of ConfuciuConfucius

 The Book of Job

 The Book of Psalms

 The Book of Ecclesiastes

 Harvard Classics Vol 45: Sacred Texts 2 (Mobile Read)

 Book of Corinthians I and II

• Buddhist Writings

 Hindu Writing

 Chapters from the Koran

In-Depth Study 2 | Mythology and FolkloreEdgar Rice Burroughs

 The Student’s Mythology by Catherine Ann White

 The Age of Fable by Thomas Bulfinch

 The Age of Chivalry by Thomas Bulfinch

 Legends of Charlemagne by Thomas Bulfinch

 Optional: Myths and Legends of Our Own Land (8 vols) by Charles Skinner

3. GENRE & CONTEMPORARY SUBJECTS

Genre Study 1 | Early Detective Fiction

 The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allen Poe

 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

 The Old Man in the Corner by Baroness E. Orczy

 The Innocence of Father Brown by G.K. Chesterton

 The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie

 The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey (Project Gutenberg Australia)

 The Mouse in the Mountain by Norbert Davis

 The Accused by Harold Daniels

Genre Study 2 | Literature of Adventure

 Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs

 King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard

 The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

 The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope

 The Call of the Wild by Jack London

 The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness E. Orczy

 Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson

Genre Study 3 | Literature of War

 The Iliad by Homer

 War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

 Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini

 The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper

 The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (Project Gutenberg Australia)

 A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute (Project Gutenberg Canada)

Genre Study 4 | Literature of Technology

 Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy

 The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster

 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (Project Gutenberg Australia)

 The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West

 Overclocked by Cory Doctorow

 When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth

 I, Row-Boat

 Accelerando by Charles Stross

Genre Study 5 | Pioneers of Science Fiction

 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

 A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

 The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne

 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

 Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper

Genre Study 6 | The Short Story in English
To minimize downloading, I’m basing this course on the two ‘Masters of the Short Story’ collections which were put out as free downloads from Delphi Classics. The included short stories are:

Volume One:

• Horatio Sparkins

 Daisy Miller

 The Country of the Blind

 Misery

 The Squire’s Story

 False Gems

 The Green Door

 Master and Man

 Bluebeard’s Ghost

 The Happy Prince

• The Superstitious Man…

• The Prussian Officer

• The Gold Bug

 Araby

 Amy Foster

 The Honest Thief

 To Build a Fire

Volume Two:

• Legend of Sleepy Hollow

 The Monkey’s Paw

 The Blue Cross

 The Tragedy of Error

 An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

 Immensee

 The Cop & the Anthem

 Adv of the Speckled Band

 Man Who Would Be King

 The Queen of Spades

• Public Life of Mr. Tulrumble

 The House of Cobwebs

• Lotta Schmidt

• Young Goodman Brown

• Rain

 The Unknown Masterpiece

 The Wind Blows

 The Fly

 The Call of Cthulhu

 The Open Boat

 The Son’s Veto

 The Dead

Genre Study 7 | Studies in Yiddish Authors

 Yiddish Tales by Various Authors

 Jewish Children by Sholem Aleichem

 The Rise of David Levinsky by Abraham Cahan

 The Jews of Barnow by Karl Emil Franzos

 The Market-Place by Harold Frederic

 Rabbi and Priest by Milton Goldsmith

 Children of the Ghetto by Israel Zangwill

Genre Study 8 | Studies in Children’s Literature

 Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know ed. Hamilton Wright Mabie

 The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams Bianco

 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

 Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

 Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

 A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson

 The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

 The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling

 A Visit from St. Nicholas by Clement Clarke Moore

Genre Study 9 | Twentieth Century 1: Selected Male Authors
Many of these novels are sourced from Project Gutenberg Australia and are only in the public domain in other ‘Life Plus 70’ countries. If you are American and this concerns you, you can purchase inexpensive Kindle or Kobo editions of all the listed titles.

 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence

 Siddhartha by Herman Hesse

 Main Street by Sinclair Lewis

 Burmese Days by George Orwell

 The Trial by Franz Kafka

 Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

Genre Study 10 | Twentieth Century 2: Selected Female Authors
Many of these novels are sourced from Project Gutenberg Australia and are only in the public domain in other ‘Life Plus 70’ countries. If you are American and this concerns you, you can purchase inexpensive Kindle or Kobo editions of all the listed titles.

 The Awakening and Other Stories by Kate Chopin

 O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

 Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

 The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

 Three Lives by Gertrude Stein

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