the list

List I. The intersection of high and low culture in the modern anglophone novel
Novels
Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White	1859
Early for my list, and yet such a great canonical example of the sensation novel -- makes a great reference point for discussions of how popular and elite genres of fiction grow more specialized and disparate (and how they don't) between the nineteenth and the twentieth century. A book I would love to put on my syllabus as the first reading in a course on modern genre literature.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde	1886
The Stevenson, Doyle, Wells, and Stoker give a good sampling of popular genres, detection, and the remnants of the gothic at the turn of the century.
Jerome, Jerome K. Three Men in a Boat	1889
Doyle, Arthur Conan. Selected Sherlock Holmes.	1892-1905
Wells, H. G. The Island of Dr. Moreau	1896
Stoker, Bram. Dracula.	1897
Conrad, Joseph: Lord Jim.	1900
Conrad is an interesting figure to look at as a sort of counterargument (though only in part) to the Great Divide (or The Intellectuals and the Masses) account of modernism as a movement vested in creating cultural artifacts that would be inaccessible to the great unwashed. He's also a great playground for questions of genre conventions and how they are read in different contexts, the literarification (to coin a horrible word) of the sea novel and its rapid decline as a widely read genre. Lord Jim is nicely self-conscious and a good fit for this list, as the young Jim is the victim of too many readings of romances of the sea, believed too whole-heartedly.
Kipling, Rudyard. Kim.	1901
One of those books that I put on my list for reasons of institutional credibility, but actually reading it made me see that it fits in more naturally than I would have expected. Wildly popular, and surprising (to me) in a number of ways -- it's smarter, more likeable, and less overtly racist than I ever would have expected -- and the degree to which it reads both as being firmly the bildungsroman and boy adventure novel genre traditions and as something strikingly new is worth talking about. Probably not a book I'll talk about in my dissertation, but a good book to be able to talk about in conversation.
Chesterton, G. K. The Man Who Was Thursday.	1907
Handy for me in its use of spy/detective novel elements in service of what is definitely not, in the end, a detective novel at all -- what it IS is difficult, if not impossible, to pin down. It also reads to me like a much later book; I'd thought it was written after WWI until I went back and looked it up. Period outliers are always interesting. Plus, I love it.
Conrad, Joseph. The Secret Agent.	1907
One of the earliest examples of the modern espionage novel; many many others, including Chesterton's TMWWT (which isn't an espionage novel in any ordinary sense) are written directly or indirectly in response to it. A touchstone; I can surely expect Peter to bring it up in relation to my work ("Oh, that reminds me of XYZ from Secret Agent"), and I suspect other people will, too. Also cf. my remarks above about Conrad in general.
Wells, H. G. Tono-Bungay.	1909
What happens when Wells writes a didactic political novel; also a bildungsroman. On here because Brian and Peter both thought it should be, and I think it's becoming the fashionable Wells to write about these days. The highly mixed reception it received, and continues to receive -- many critics today think it is his best work, though not me -- is of at least some interest to my project. Probably not the very best use of a slot on my list in terms of preparing for my dissertation, but hey, I've read it already and it will make B&P happy and make me look au courant.
Forster, E. M: Howard's End (1910)	1910
Our good friend High Culture and those who aspire towards it.
Ford, Ford Madox: The Good Soldier (1915)	1915
More high culture.
Joyce, James: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)	1916
High culture and high modernism, in a form appropriate for teaching to undergraduates. Besides, Joyce is an interesting case in the charge of elitism levied against the modernists.
Conrad, Joseph: The Shadow Line	1917
Late Conrad, largely autobiographical, short and easy to teach; useful for most of the reasons that Lord Jim is, but also for Conrad's defensive forward, in which he writes hotly about why he would never write about the supernatural.
Lawrence, D. H.: Women in Love (1921)	1921
The Lawrence you have to know in order to appear to be a literate human being. Lawrence is not only huge, but also a huge figure for talking about the different ways the British modernists treated the relationship between class and literacy.
Joyce, James: Ulysses (1922)	1922
Here for all the obvious reasons and more.
Forster, E. M.: A Passage to India (1924)	1924
Huge, classic, teachable, and a favorite of mine.
Ford, Ford Madox: Parade's End	1924-1928
Chock full of that special brand of Tory intellectual elitism.
Christie, Agatha. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)	1926
A terrific example of the way transgression can inspire a frenzy of genre policing in the reading public.
Woolf, Virginia: To the Lighthouse (1927)	1927
Something I'll want to teach and to know, and to use in discussions of narrative form.
Woolf, Virginia: Orlando (1928)	1928
I could have gone on and on with Woolf selections, but Orlando seemed especially worthy of inclusion because it was the "popular" and "accessible" Woolf novel in its day, which was a great relief to a certain class of readers; it's of course enormously engaged with history and historicizing, with rewriting, and with reading; it plays with genre conventions, particularly in its biography conceit; and it's enormously teachable, as I found this semester.
Rhys, Jean: After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931)	1931
On here mainly because I've already read Wide Sargasso Sea, and want to get a sense of what Rhys was doing back in the 30s, and because Brian told me to include it.
Huxley, Aldous: Brave New World (1932)	1932
A classic, and a classic of science fiction. Terrible, but fun, and historically interesting. Probably a teaching candidate, at least if I'll be teaching classes in the history of genre lit.
Greene, Graham. This Gun for Sale	1936
A good example of popularly successful suspense fiction from between the wars. Greene was perhaps the biggest snot of all of that crowd of post-Bloomsbury writers, which earns him plenty of mention from literary historians like Carey. His "high literary" books get a fair amount of attention, and his popular espionage and detective fiction less, though the psycholinguistic literature on suspense likes to mine him for illustrative examples. I've chosen a couple of representative samples of this vast body of his work. The Confidential Agent is the more interesting of the two, with its Kafkaesque plotting, self-conscious style, and subplot hinging on a school dedicated to the teaching of an Esperanto-like artificial language (!), but this is a nice solid example keeping to the conventions of its genre without seeming too formulaic and flat.
Greene, Graham. Brighton Rock	1938
Ambler, Eric. A Coffin for Dimitrios (1939)	1939
Solid, classic suspense fiction.
Ambler, Eric. Cause for Alarm (1939)	1939
Greene, Graham. The Confidential Agent.	1939
O'Brien, Flann: At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)	1939
Here primarily for the self-serving reason that I adore Flann O'Brian and wish he were taught and discussed more often. He's fairly unclassifiable genre-wise, with a wonderful hodgepodge of borrowings. At Swim-Two-Birds is more Joycean and proto-postmodern, while The Third Policeman is both ghost story and grotesque, with a hearty dash of Pinteresque absurdity.
Lewis, C. S. That Hideous Strength	1945
The culmination of C.S. Lewis' science-fiction-with-religion trilogy.
Lowry, Malcolm: Under the Volcano (1947)	1947
A classic I'd never read before, here because it seems like something I Ought To Know.
Orwell, George: 1984 (1949)	1949
Paranoia, political didacticism, intrigue, and science fiction written by someone with no great love for the genre as a whole.
Beckett, Samuel: Molloy (1951)	1951
This one is here purely for coverage, and because I know Brian Richardson will want me to know it.
Forester, C. S. Lieutenant Hornblower (1952)	1952
The return of the sea novel, and the nostalgic imperialist fantasy to go with it -- but this time, with a hearty side helping of self-monitoring and self-doubt (but never failure).
Tolkein, J. R. R. The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955)	1954-1955
Echoes of WWI, the invention of the modern fantasy novel, Oxbridge dons writing fiction both populist and elitist -- what more could you ask for?
Greene, Graham. The Quiet American (1955)	1955
The other side of Graham Greene. Espionage in the literary sphere.
Fleming, Ian. From Russia, With Love (1957)	1957
Classic, pulpy, popular, formulaic.
Achebe, Chinua: Things Fall Apart	1958
Craven pandering to institutional expectations.
Naipaul, V. S.: A House for Mr Biswas (1961)	1961
Craven pandering to institutional expectations, part two.
Burgess, Anthony: A Clockwork Orange (1962)	1962
Another case of crossover science fiction by a "literary" author.
Le Carré, John: The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963)	1963
The classic and bestselling spy novel.
Kavan, Anna: Ice (1967)	1967
O'Brien, Flann: The Third Policeman (1967)	1967
See above.
Fowles, John: The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969)	1969
Another reception-y novel (that is, a novel about reading, and about previous modes of writing), good to teach, and a favorite of mine. Also a classic example for narratology/structure of the novel discussions because of its double ending.
Poetry
Auden, W. H. "Spain," "As I walked out one evening," "Musee des Beaux Arts," "In Memory of W.B. Yeats," "September 1, 1939," "In Praise of Limestone"
Eliot, T. S. Selections, including "The Wasteland," "Prufrock," and "Sweeney Among the Nightingales"
Heaney, Seamus. Selections from Norton Anthology
Hughes, Ted. Selected Poems
Kinsella, Thomas. Nightwalker & Other Poems
Larkin, Philip. High Windows
Owen, Wilfred. Selections from Norton Anthology
Raine, Craig. " Martian Sends a Postcard Home," "The Onion," "Memory," "Rich"
Smith, Stevie. New Selected Poems
Yeats, William Butler. Selections from Norton Anthology
Critical history: the development and maintenance of genre distinctions
Amis, Kingsley. New Maps of Hell.
Based on a series of lectures at Princeton University in 1959. Broad overview and ambivalent defense of science fiction as a superior form of popular culture but inferior reflection of high culture.
Carey, John. The Intellectual and the Masses.
The best and most widely cited book about the relationship between the elites of modern British culture and the popular literary market.
DiBattista, Maria and Lucy McDiarmid, eds. High and Low Moderns.
Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide
Predatecats Carey and lays the groundwork for his work.
Keating, Peter J. The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel, 1875-1914.
Nice for coverage of the shifts going on around the turn of the century -- those poor Edwardians are so often left out of the story.
Leavis, F.R. The Great Tradition.
The apogee of New Critical canonicity, circumscribing literary fiction with a genre boundary so constricted that only five authors can fit inside.
Mukerji, Chandra, ed. Rethinking Popular Culture.
Nicholls, Peter. Modernisms.
Rainey, Lawrence. Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture.
Rose, Jonathan. The Intellectual History of the British Working Classes. (Selections)
Detailed and well-researched account of the reading habits of working-class people in Britain, grounded not in readings of the literature but in memoirs, autobiographies, diaries, the records of self-improvement societies, and the like.
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism.
Another, and of course enormously well-known, approach to the relationship between elite literary culture and those who both support and are shut out from that tradition.
Wilson, Edmund. Classics and Commericals.
List II. Cognitive linguistics and the experience of narrative.
Cognitive linguistics
Clark, Herbert. Using Language.
Cognitive Linguistics 11:3-4 (2000), special issue on Conceptual Blending.
Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. The Way We Think.
Fauconnier, Gilles. Mappings in Thought and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Fauconnier, Gilles. Mental Spaces.
Fillmore, Charles. "Frame semantics."
Fillmore, Charles. "Frames and the Semantics of Understanding."
Fillmore, Charles. Lectures on Deixis.
Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis.
Grice, H. P. Studies in the Ways of Words.
Haiman, John. "Iconic and economic motivation."
Haiman, John. Talk is Cheap: Sarcasm, Alienation, and the Evolution of Language.
Horn, Laurence. "Toward a New Taxonomy for Pragmatic Inference: Q-Based and R-Based Implicature."
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1980.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh.
Lakoff, George. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.
Langacker, Ronald. Concept, Image, and Symbol: The Cognitive Basis of Grammar.
Levinson, Stephen. Pragmatics.
Lewis, David. Convention: a philosophical study.
Morgan, J.L. "Two Types of Convention in Indirect Speech Acts."
Sweetser, Eve. From Etymology to Pragmatics.
Talmy, Leonard. Toward a Cognitive Semantics. 2 vols. (selections, presumably)
Applications to literature
Anderson, David R. "Razing the Framework: Reader-Response Criticism After Fish." After Post-Structuralism: Interdisciplinarity and Literary Theory, ed. Nancy Easterlin and Barbara Riebling. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1993. 155-76.
Duchan, Judith F., Gail A. Bruder, and Lynne E. Hewitt, eds., Deixis in Narrative: A Cognitive Science Perspective
Fillmore, Charles. "Ideal readers and real readers."
Freeman, Margaret H. "Cognitive Mapping in Literary Analysis." Style 36.3 (2002): 466-85.
Gerrig, Richard. Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading.
I've found myself reading lots of Gerrig lately, in the psycholinguistic debate over the degree to which readers engage in inferencing and elaborating their mental models in the course of reading a text.
Hobbs, Jerry. Literature and Cognition.
Particularly interesting for his arguments about interpretation as a function of both a text and a reader's beliefs and discussion of why it's not always necessary for readers to imagine a putative author/speaker in order to construct meaning, contra Clark.
Kay, Paul. "Three properties of the ideal reader."
Labov, William. "Uncovering the event structure of narrative."
Strauss, Claudia. A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning.
Turner, Mark. The Literary Mind.
Voderer, Peter, Hans J. Wulff, and Mike Friedrichsen, eds. Suspense: Conceptualizations, Theoretical Analyses and Empirical Explorations
Other approaches to narrative form
Bakhtin, Mikhail. "Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel" and "Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism"
Bal, Mieke. Narratology.
Barthes, Roland. S/Z .
Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction
Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method.
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Poetics of Prose.