Recommendations for Background Reading:

Background for the readings above is of two kinds, familiarity with historical and literary movements that have a bearing on literature in our period, and familiarity with specific works that influenced the authors in our period.
The Area will suppose a general knowledge of the history, political and cultural, of the period from the Restoration to the end of the eighteenth century. It will suppose a general knowledge of Anglicanism, involving familiarity with the Book of Common Prayer, with Broad-Church Anglicanism (as exemplified by men like Tillotson and Barrow), and with physico-theology (as exemplified by men like Durham, Pluche, and Ray); the principles of deism (e.g., in Toland, Tindal, Collins, or Chubb) and of Methodism (Wesley, Whitefield) also ought to be familiar. Among literary traditions of interest are "graveyard poetry" (Parnell's Night Piece, Blair's Grave), medievalism (Percy's Reliques, the forgeries of Chatterton), and primitivism of the "hard" and "soft" varieties--the Area will expect knowledge of these patterns of attitude, and their literary consequences; the same is true for such heavily, but not solely, literary ideas as those of the "sublime," the "picturesque," and the "sister arts." Scholars like Lovejoy and Nicolson, important in the tracing of the "history of ideas," should be familiar along with those whose interests have been more specifically concerned with literature.
The student should be prepared to discuss those foreign texts of demonstrable importance for the English works on the list. Those would include the conventions of the classical epic relevant for mock-heroic scenes in Pope, Fielding, and others, and the conventions of the Virgilian pastoral and georgic adopted by Swift, Pope, Gay, Thomson and others. The student also should understand the conventions of the romance and picaresque in Don Quixote and their transformation in the novel.
Finally, the Area will expect any scholar to have a basic knowledge of bibliographical procedures, such as may be found in P. Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (an updating of R. McKerrow, An Introduction to Bibliography).