Twelve Books to Have
Below you will find all of the editions of the primary texts used for the courses. It's recommended that students get a hard copy where possible. However, many of the following are also available as ebooks and you will receive further advice on which format to use ahead of your course. You will also find some recommended secondary literature but these books are not needed for the course, as excerpts and pdfs will be provided.
Homer
Primary Text:
​
* Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (Penguin, 1996)
​
Recommended Secondary Literature:
​
*Clay, J.S., The Wrath of Athena: Gods and Men in the Odyssey (1996)
* Nagy, G. The Best of the Achaeans: The Concept of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry (1998)
* Olson, S.D., Blood and Iron: Stories and Storytelling in Homer's Odyssey (1995)
* Segal, C. Singers, Heroes and Gods in The Odyssey (1994)
“Be strong, saith my heart; I am a soldier; I have seen worse sights than this."
Plato
Primary Text:
​
* Plato, The Republic, Ed. G.R.F Ferrari. Trans. Tom Griffith (Cambridge University Press, 2000)
​
Recommended Secondary Literature:
​
* Annas, J. An Introduction to Plato's Republic (1985)
* Howland, J. The Republic: The Odyssey of Philosophy (2004)
* Popper, K. The Open Society and Its Enemies (1950)
* Roochnik, D. Beautiful City: The Dialectical Character of Plato's Republic (2003)
* Samons, L. What's Wrong with Democracy? (2004)
​
"I’ll tell you … I think our minds can lose a belief either with or without our consent. With our consent when it’s a false belief and we learn better. Without our consent in the case of all true belief."
Sophocles
Primary Text:
​
* Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Trans. Robert Fagles (Penguin, 1982)
​
Recommended Secondary Literature:
​
* Freud, S. Totem and Taboo (1913)
* Gregory, J. A Companion to Greek Tragedy (2005)
* MacIntyre, A. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (1981)
* Seaford, R. Tragedy, Ritual and Money in Ancient Greece (2018)
* Segal, C. Sophocles Tragic World: Divinity, Nature and Society (1995)
“Numberless wonders
terrible wonders walk the world but
none the match for man—
that great wonder crossing the heaving gray sea,
driven on by the blasts of winter
on through breakers crashing left and right,
holds his steady course
and the oldest of the gods he wears away—”
.
Dante
Primary Text:
​
* Dante, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno, Ed. & Trans. Robert M. During (Oxford University Press, 1996)
​
Recommended Secondary Literature:
​
* Auerbach, E. Dante: Poet of the Secular World (1929)
* Barolini, T. The Undivine Comedy (1992)
* Barolini, T. Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture (2006)
* Gilson, E. Dante and Philosophy. Trans. David More (1949)
* Thompson, D. Dante's Epic Journeys (1974)
* Waley, D. The Italian City Republics (1960)
"If I have well understood your word," replied the shade of that great-souled one, "your soul is wounded by cowardice,
which many times so encumbers a man that he turns back from honorable endeavor, as a false sight turns a beast when it shies.
Early Modern Political Thought
Primary Text:
​
* Machiavelli, N. The Prince, Trans. Peter Bondanella (Oxford University Press, 2005)
*More, T. Utopia, Ed. George M. Logan (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, 3rd ed. 2016)
​
Recommended Secondary Literature:
​
* Gramsci, A. "The Prince" in Prison Notebooks (1935)
* Norbrook, D. Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (2009)
* Pocock, J.G.A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (2016)
* Skinner, Q. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978)
"A man who wishes to profess goodness at all times will come to ruin among so many who are not good. Therefore, it is necessary for a prince who wishes to maintain himself to learn how not to be good, and to use this knowledge or not to use it according to necessity."
Primary Texts:
​
* Shakespeare, W. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Ed. Philip Edwards (The New Cambridge Shakespeare, 2003)
___ MacBeth, Ed. A.R. Braunmuller (New Cambridge, 1999)
___ Othello, Ed. Norman Sanders (New Cambridge, 1984)
___ King Lear, Ed. Jay L. Halio (New Cambridge, 2005)
​
Recommended Secondary Literature:
​
* Adelman, J. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays: Hamlet to The Tempest (1992)
* Bate, J. The Genius of Shakespeare (1997)
* Bloom, H. Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (2003)
* Bradley, A.C. Shakespearean Tragedy (1992)
* Drakakis, J. Ed. Alternative Shakespeares (2002)
* Woodbridge, L. English Revenge Drama: Money, Resistance, Equality (2010).
​
"Come, come and sit you down, you shall not budge.
You go not till I set you up a glass
Where you may see the inmost part of you."
Shakespeare
Cervantes
Primary Text:
​
* Cervantes, M. 1605. The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote De La Mancha, Trans. John Rutherford (Penguin, 2002)​
Recommended Secondary Literature:
​
* Elliott, J.H. Imperial Spain 1469-1716 (2002)
* Quint, D. Cervantes Novel of Modern Times: A New Reading (2003)
* González Echevarría, R. Ed. Cervantes’ Don Quixote: A Casebook (2005)
* Watt, I. Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan and Robinson Crusoe (1996)
* Segal, C. Singers, Heroes and Gods in The Odyssey (1994)
"You bottle head," replied Don Quixote, "it concerneth not knights-errant to examine whether the afflicted, the enchained, and oppressed, which they encounter by the way be carried in that fashion, or are plunged in that distress, through their own fault or disgrace, but only are obliged to assist them as needy and oppressed, setting their eyes upon their pains, and not their crimes."
Milton
Primary Text:
​
* Milton, J. Paradise Lost, Ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Blackwell, 2007)
​
Recommended Secondary Literature:
​
* Forsyth, N. The Satanic Epic (2003)
* Lewalkski, B. Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (1985)
* Norbrook, D. Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627-1660 (1999)
* Quint, D. Inside Paradise Lost: Reading the Designs of Milton's Epic (2014)
​
“Is this the region, this the soil, the clime,”
Said then the lost Archangel, “this the seat
That we must change for Heaven?—this mournful gloom
For that celestial light? Be it so, since He
Who now is sovran can dispose and bid
What shall be right: fardest from Him is best,
Whom reason hath equalled, force hath made supreme Above his equals."
​
Early Marx
Primary Text:
​
* Marx, K. & Engels, F. The German Ideology, Ed. C.J. Arthur (Lawrence & Wishart, 1974)
​
Recommended Secondary Literature:
​
* Althusser, L., Balibar, E., et al. Reading Capital (1965)
* Federici, S. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (1998)
* Harvey, D. A Companion to Marx's Capital (2010)
* Sperber, J. Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (2013)
​
“Hitherto men have always formed wrong ideas about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relations according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The products of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations.”
Primary Texts (a selection):
​
* Althusser, L. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes towards an Investigation” In Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays (Monthly Review 2001) 85-120.
* W.E.B. DuBois. "Marxism and the Negro Problem." The Crisis 40:5 (May 1933).
* Foucault, M. and Deleuze, G. “Intellectuals and Power.” In Michel Foucault, Language. Counter-Memory. Practice (Cornell 1977) 205-217.
* Foucault, M. History of Sexuality. Vol 1: An Introduction (Vintage 1990) 92-102.
* Horkheimer. “Traditional and Critical Theory.” Critical Theory: Selected Essays (Continuum 1975)
* Marx, K. “Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” In The Marx-Engels Reader 4-5.
​
​
“For tact, we now know, has its precise historical hour. It was the hour when the bourgeois individual rid himself of absolutist compulsion. Free and solitary, he answers for himself, while the forms of hierarchical respect and consideration developed by absolutism, divested of their economic basis and their menacing power, are still just sufficiently present to make living together within privileged groups bearable. This seemingly paradoxical interchange between absolutism and liberality is perceptible... in Beethoven's attitude towards traditional patterns of composition, and even in logic, in Kant's subjective reconstruction of objectively binding ideas.
Critical Theory
Short Fiction
Primary Text:
​
* James, H. The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories (Oxford World Classics, 2008)
* Joyce, J. Dubliners (Penguin Modern Classics, 2000)
* Kafka, F. Metamorphosis and Other Stories, Trans. Michael Hofmann (Penguin Modern Classics, 2008)
* O'Connor, F. Complete Stories (Faber & Faber, 2009)
​
Recommended Secondary Literature:
​
* Bal, M. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (1978)
* Booth, W. The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961)
* Iser, W. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (1974)
* Phelan, J. A Companion to Narrative Theory (2005)
“People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.”
― Flannery O'Connor
Joyce
Primary Text:
​
* Joyce, J. 1922. Ulysses (Oxford World Classics, 2008)
​
Recommended Secondary Literature:
​
* Blamires, H. The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses (1966)
* Deming, J. James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, 1928- 41 (1970)
* Gifford, D. Annotated Notes for James Joyce's Ulysses (2008)
* Gilbert, S. Ulysses: A Study (1952)
* Lawrence, K. The Odyssey of Style in “Ulysses” (1981)
* O’Brien, D. The Conscience of James Joyce (1968)
* Seidel, M. Epic Geography: James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (1976)
* Schwaber, P. The Cast of Characters: A Reading of Ulysses (1999)
You wouldn’t kneel down to pray for your mother on her deathbed when she asked you. Why ? Because you have the cursed jesuit strain in you, only it’s injected the wrong way. To me it’s all a mockery and beastly. Her cerebral lobes are not functioning. She calls the doctor Sir Peter Teazle* and picks buttercups off the quilt. Humour her till it's over.