British Literature/Shakespeare and Composition
Course syllabus
First Quarter
Medieval Period
History of the English Language
Beowulf
Chaucer, Canturbury Tales (Essay on character traits)
Video: Castles
Arthurian Legends (excerpts from Malory, Tennyson, T.H. White)
“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”
Renaissance
Wyatt, “Whoso List to Hunt”
Sonnets by Sidney and Spenser
Spenser, excerpt from The Fairie Queen
British novel summary
Second Quarter
Shakespeare, sonnets
Marlowe, “The Passionate Shepherd To His Love”
Raleigh, “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd”
Bacon, “Of Studies”
Shakespeare, Macbeth (Collaborative paper on motifs)
Shakespeare, Othello
Donne, “Death be Not Proud,” “Meditation 17”
Milton, excerpt from Paradise Lost
Third Quarter
Group presentations on Cavalier poets (Marvel, Jonson, Suckling, Lovelace,
Herrick)
Age of Reason
Fielding, excerpt from Tom Jones
Swift, “A Modest Proposal,” excerpt from Gulliver’s Travels
Pope, “The Rape of the Lock”
Pepys, excerpts from Diary
Johnson, Dictionary
Boswell, excerpts from Life of Johnson
Defoe, excerpts from Journal of the Plague Year
Gray, ”Elegy in a Country Churchyard”
Sheridan, The Rivals (essay on satire)
Romantic Period
Blake, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience
Burns, “To a Mouse,” and “To a Louse”
British novel summary
Fourth Quarter
Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey,” “I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud”
Coleridge, “Kuble Khan,” “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
Byron, excerpts from Don Juan, “She Walks in Beauty”
Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind”
Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
Austen, excerpt from Pride and Prejudice
Lamb, “Dissertation on a Roast Pig”
Researach paper
Shakespeare, Hamlet (creative project)
Victorian Period
Browning, “My Last Duchess”
Housman, “O an Athlete Dying Young”
Arnold, “Dover Beach”
Dickens, novel excerpt
20th century
T.S. Eliot, “Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock”
Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night”
Mansfield, “The Doll’s House”
Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant”