Course Outline for High School British Literature:
Unit 1: Old English & Medieval (449–1485)
Readings will include: Beowulf by Unknown; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by The Pearl Poet; The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (selected readings)
Unit 2: English Renaissance (1485–1625)
Readings will include: Macbeth by William Shakespeare; KJV Bible (1 Samuel & selected readings); poetry selected from the works of William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, and George Herbert
Unit 3: 17th & 18th Centuries (1625–1798)
Readings will include: Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan; Paradise Lost by John Milton; Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (selected readings); poetry selected from the works of John Dryden, Alexander Pope, John Milton, Anne Killigrew, Samuel Johnson, and Richard Lovelace
Unit 4: Romantic Period (1798–1832)
Readings will include: Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen; Charles Dickens; poetry selected from the works of Byron and Blake
Unit 5: Victorian Period (1833–1901)
Readings will include: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte; North & South by Elizabeth Gaskell; poetry selected from the works of Tennyson, Browning, and Kipling
Unit 6: Modern & Postmodern (1901–Present)
Readings will include: The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis; Animal Farm by George Orwell; poetry selected from the works of Yeats, Eliot; WWI poetry (Brooke, Owen, Rosenberg—The Soldier, Dulce et Decorum Est—compare and contrast)
