English Literature

Course summary

Students will study one Shakespeare play and one other drama, and engage with critical essays related to their reading. Teachers will choose two texts from the following for students to read closely: Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello (all Shakespeare), Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), The Duchess of Malfi (Webster), The Home Place (Friel) and A Streetcar Named Desire (Williams). Prose •Students will study prose texts from one of the following themes. Staff will choose which theme students will follow and will teach 2 texts, including one written before 1900: •Childhood Pre-1900: Hard Times, Charles Dickens; What Maisie Knew, Henry James Post-1900: Atonement, Ian McEwan; The Color Purple, Alice Walker •Colonization and its Aftermath Pre-1900: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain; Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad Post-1900: Home Fire, Kamila Shamsie; The Lonely Londoners, Sam Selvon; A Passage to India, E M Forster •Crime and Detection Pre-1900: Lady Audley’s Secret, Mary Elizabeth Braddon; The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins Post-1900: The Cutting Room, Attica Locke; In Cold Blood, Truman Capote; The Murder Room, P D James •Science and Society Pre-1900: Frankenstein, Mary Shelley; The War of the Worlds, H G Wells Post-1900: The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood; Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro •The Supernatural Pre-1900: Dracula, Bram Stoker; The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde Post-1900: Beloved, Toni Morrison; The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters •Women and Society Pre-1900: Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy; Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë Post-1900: Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf; A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini Poetry Students will study EDEXCEL’s own anthology of poetry, ‘ Poems of the Decade: An Anthology of the Forward Books of Poetry 2002–2011’. They will also study works from across the canon, ranging from Chaucer and Donne to Eliot and Larkin. What skills will you develop? By the end of the course students should be able to: •Read widely and independently set texts and others that they have selected for themselves •Engage critically and creatively with a substantial body of texts and ways of responding to them •Develop and effectively apply their knowledge of literary analysis and evaluation •Explore the contexts of the texts they are reading and others’ interpretations of them •Undertake independent and sustained studies to deepen their appreciation and understanding of English literature, including its changing traditions. English Literature encourages students to explore the relationships that exist between texts and the contexts within which they are written, received and understood. Studying texts within a shared context enables students to investigate and connect them, drawing out patterns of similarity and difference using a variety of reading strategies and perspectives. English Literature privileges the process of making autonomous meaning, encouraging students to debate and challenge the interpretations of other readers as they develop their own informed personal responses.