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 need 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. Painter
• 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 Galsworthy
• 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 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 Folklore
• 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