British literary time periods and
assigned works for Honors English 4
Anglo-Saxon period: (500 – 1000)
o The Seafarer
o Beowulf
Medieval period: (1066 – 1470)
o Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
o Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, including The Wife of Bath’s Tale,
The Pardoner’s Tale, The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, and The Miller’s Tale
The Renaissance: (1485 – 1660)
o Spenser’s Amoretti: sonnets #30 and #75
o Wyatt’s Whoso List To Hunt
o Donne’s Death Be Not Proud
o Herrick’s To The Virgins
o Jonson’s On My First Son
o Marlowe’s The Passionate Shepherd
o Raleigh’s The Nymph’s Reply
o Donne’s A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
o Shakespeare: Selected sonnets
o Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Macbeth
o Shakespeare’s Hamlet
o Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream
The Enlightenment of the 18th Century (1700 – 1800)
o Swift’s A Modest Proposal
The Romantic Movement (1800 – 1837)
o Blake’s The Chimney Sweeper
o Blake’s The Tyger
o Blake’s London
o Wordsworth’s Composed Upon Westminster Bridge
o Wordsworth’s I Wandered As Lonely As A Cloud
o Wordsworth’s The World Is Too Much With Us
o Keats’ When I Have Fears
o Keats’ Ode On A Grecian Urn
o Coleridge’s To Nature
o Coleridge’s Kubla Kahn
o Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
o Byron’s She Walks In Beauty
o Shelley’s Ozymandias
o Shelley’s Ode To The West Wind
o The Gothic Novel: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
o Film: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice
The Victorian period (1837 – 1900)
o Browning’s My Last Duchess
o Browning’s Porphyria’s Lover
o Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet 43
o Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses
o William Earnest Henley’s Invictus
o A.E. Housman’s To An Athlete Dying Young
o Rudyard Kipling’s If--o Comedy of Manners: Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest
The Modern period (1900 - 1950)
o T. S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men
o Dylan Thomas’ Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
o W. H. Auden’s The Unknown Citizen
o Wilfred Owen’s Dulce Et Decorum Est
o Siegfried Sassoon’s Dreamers
o Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier
o The Modern Novel: Book Club Selections
The Contemporary period (1970 – 2010)
o Dystopian novel: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
Films:
o Elizabeth: The Virgin Queen
o The Tragedy of Macbeth (Roman Polanski version)
o The Importance of Being Earnest (Firth/Witherspoon version)
o Hamlet (Gibson and Brannagh versions)
o Invictus
o The King’s Speech
Significant essays/papers/projects:
o Four core essays, including one lengthy research paper
o Bi-monthly timed essays in class that respond to literature prompts
o Bi-monthly focused quick writes that react to literature
o Poems, group projects, individual projects and reflections