Literary Criticism

The GRE Literature exam will assume that you know the basics of several prominent schools of 20th-century literary criticism. They can be divided roughly into three major groups, as follows (with more information if you follow each of the links):

Marxist Criticism

1. Identity Criticism
2. Historicism & Sociological Criticism
   

Linguistic Criticism

1. Formalism
2. New Criticism
3. Structuralism
4. Post-Structuralism & Deconstructionism
5. Reader-Response Criticism

Psychological Criticism

1. Freudian Psychoanalysis
2. Archetype/Myth Criticism

If you didn't get a lot of theory as an undergrad, it's worth adding at least one short theory survey to your reading list for the GRE Literature exam. I recommend Culler's Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. It's short, but enough to get you through the exam.

If you have the time, though, every aspiring grad student in literature should read A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. It's a little more thorough.

World Literatures

This is the category page for world literatures. It will grow as more entries are added to the GRE Literature Study Blog.

20th Century
Marcel Proust
Rainer Maria Rilke

19th Century
Arthur Rimbaud
Anton Chekhov

18th Century

Renaissance

Classical Literature

This is the category page for Classical literature. It will grow as more entries are added to the GRE Literature Study Blog.

Poets

Playwrights

Individual Works

Medieval English Literature

This is the category page for Medieval English literature. It will grow as more entries are added to the GRE Literature Study Blog.

Middle English

Old English

Renaissance English Literature

This is the category page for Elizabethan English literature. Note that this period includes works ans authors from slightly before and slightly after Elizabeth's reign.

This page will grow as more entries are added to the GRE Literature Study Blog.

Poets
John Skelton

Playwrights

Individual Works

17th Century (British)

This is the category page for 17th-century British literature. It will grow as more entries are added to the GRE Literature Study Blog.

Metaphysical Poets
Andrew Marvell
George Herbert

John Milton

Cavalier Poets
Robert Herrick
Richard Lovelace
Thomas Carew

Playwrights

Individual Works
"To the memory of my beloved master William Shakespeare"
"An Elegy upon the Death of the Dean of St. Paul's, John Donne"
"To his Coy Mistress"

Colonial American Literature

This is the category page for Colonial American literature. It will grow as more entries are added to the GRE Literature Study Blog--though know that, in general, the colonial period does not commonly appear on the GRE Literature test.

Poets

Novelists

Individual Works

18th Century (British)

This is the category page for 18th-century British literature. It will grow as more entries are added to the GRE Literature Study Blog.

Poets
Robert Burns
(William Wordsworth)
(Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

Novelists
Henry Fielding
Jonathan Swift
The Gothic Novelists

Other
Samuel Johnson

Individual Works
Gulliver's Travels
(The Lucy poems)
"Tintern Abbey"
"Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard"

19th Century (American)

This is the category page for 19th-century American literature. It will grow as more entries are added to the GRE Literature Study Blog.

Poets
Walt Whitman

Novelists
Herman Melville

Individual Works
Two Years Before the Mast, R.H. Dana

19th Century (British)

This is the category page for 19th-century British literature. It will grow as more entries are added to the GRE Literature Study Blog.

Poets
William Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Lord Byron

Gerard Manley Hopkins
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Matthew Arnold
Walter Savage Landor
Algernon Charles Swinburne
A.E. Housman

Novelists
Charles Dickens
Jane Austen
Samuel Butler
George Eliot
Henry James

Essayists
Thomas Carlyle
John Henry Newman
John Stuart Mill
Matthew Arnold
Charles Lamb

Individual Poems
The Lucy poems
The Prelude
("Tintern Abbey")
"My Last Duchess"
"Ulysses"

Individual Prose Works
Imaginary Conversations

20th Century (American)

This is the category page for 20th-century American literature. It will grow as more entries are added to the GRE Literature Study Blog.

The Harlem Renaissance
Post-1945 American Poetry

Poets
Ezra Pound
T.S. Eliot
Robert Lowell
Robert Frost
Wallace Stevens
William Carlos Williams

Novelists
Edith Wharton
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Saul Bellow
Eudora Welty

Individual Works

20th Century (British)

This is the category page for 20th-century British literature. It will grow as more entries are added to the GRE Literature Study Blog.

Poets
W. B. Yeats
W. H. Auden
Dylan Thomas

Novelists
Virginia Woolf
E.M. Forster

Essayists
Virginia Woolf

Individual Works