British Literature
Reading Synopsis
Mr. Garner
Unit 1: From Legend to History (449-1485)
The Seafarer -
The Wanderer -
The Wife’s Lament –
Beowulf -
History of the English
Church and People (Bede) –
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Bede) –
The Canterbury
Tales: The Pardoner’s Tale (Geoffrey Chaucer) –
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Sir Thomas Malory) –
Unit 2: Celebrating Humanity (1485-1625)
The King James Bible –
Macbeth, Act 1 –
Macbeth, Act 2 –
Macbeth, Act 3 –
Macbeth, Act 4 –
Macbeth, Act 5 –
Unit 3: A Turbulent Time (1625-1798)
Holy Sonnet 10 (John Donne) –
Meditation 17 (John Donne) –
On My First Son (Ben Jonson) –
Paradise Lost (John Milton) –
The Diary (Samuel Pepys) –
A Journal of the Plague Year (Daniel Defoe) –
Unit 4: Rebels and Dreamers (1798-1832)
The Lamb (William Blake) –
The Tyger (William Blake) –
The Chimney Sweeper (William Blake) –
Infant Sorrow (William Blake) –
Introduction to Frankenstein –
The World Is Too Much with Us (William Wordsworth) –
London, 1802
(William Wordsworth) –
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Samuel Taylor Coleridge) –
Kubla Khan (Samuel Taylor Coleridge) –
Apostrophe to the Ocean (George Gordon, Lord Byron) –
When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be (John Keats) –
On Making An Agreeable Marriage (Jane Austen) –
Unit 5: Progress and Decline (1833-1901)
In Memoriam, A.H.H. (Alfred, Lord Tennyson) –
The Lady of Shalott (Alfred, Lord Tennyson) –
The Princess (Alfred, Lord Tennyson) –
Ulysses (Alfred, Lord Tennyson) –
Hard Times (Charles Dickens) –
Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte) –
Recessional (Rudyard Kipling) –
The Widow at Windsor (Rudyard Kipling) –
Condition of Ireland
(Illustrated London News) –
Unit 6: A Time of
Rapid Change (1901-Present)
When You Are Old (William Butler
Yeats) –
The Lake Isle
of Innisfree (William Butler Yeats)
-
The Wild Swans at Coole (William Butler
Yeats) –
The Second Coming (William Butler
Yeats) –
Sailing to Byzantium
(William Butler Yeats) –
Preludes (T.S. Eliot) –
Journey of the Magi (T.S. Eliot) –
The Hollow Men (T.S. Eliot) –
The Soldier (Rupert Brooke) –
Wirers (Siegfried Sassoon) –
Anthem for Doomed Youth (Wilfred Owen) –
Birds of the Western Front (Saki (H.H. Munro)) –
Wartime Speech (Sir Winston Churchill) –
Defending Nonviolence (Mohandas K. Gandhi) –
The Lagoon (Joseph Conrad) –
The First Year of My Life (Muriel Spark) –
A Shocking Accident (Graham Greene) –
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night (Dylan Thomas) –