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British Literature Base Reading List
The following listing represent the readings that will form the basis of British Literature at D’Evelyn. In addition to these selections, teachers may assign other readings to add to the course. All textual selections are from Adventures in English Literature. For each author named, the text’s biographical introduction is assigned.
First Semester
Introduction to The Anglo-Saxon Period
All the Beowulf readings
“The Seafarer”
Introduction to The Medieval Period
The film Becket
Chaucer, the text’s introduction to The Canterbury Tales, and the following selections from “The
General Prologue”: the spring invocation, meeting at the Tabard, the Knight, the
Prioress, the Monk, the Wife of Bath, the Parson, the Summoner, and the Pardoner.
Finally, “The Pardoner’s Tale” intro and reading.
Malory, Morte D’Arthur reading
Introduction to The Elizabethan Age
“The Sonnet”
Wyatt, “Whoso List to Hunt”
Sidney, Sonnet 39
Spenser, Sonnets 67 and 75
Shakespeare, Sonnets 29, 30, 73, 116, 130, and the play Macbeth
“The Metaphysical Poets”
Donne, “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” “Holy Sonnets” 6 and 10, and “Meditation 17”
Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”
“The Tribe of Ben”
Ben Jonson, “On My First Son,” “Song: To Celia,” and “It Is Not Growing Like a Tree”
Robert Herrick, “To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time” and “To Daffodils”
John Milton, reading from Paradise Lost
Introduction to The Restoration and Eighteenth Century
Dryden, his bio intro only
Swift, the two Gulliver’s Travels readings and “A Modest Proposal”
Pope, from “Essay on Man” (handout)
Johnson, his bio intro only
Second Semester
Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”
Introduction to The Romantic Age
Blake, all poems in the text
Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey,” “My Heart Leaps Up” and “The World Is Too Much With Us”
Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”
Byron, “After Swimming from Sestos to Abydos,” “Apostrophe to the Ocean,” and “On this Day
I Complete My 36th Year”
Shelley, “Ozymandias” and “Ode to the West Wind”
Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” and “To Autumn”
Bronte, Jane Eyre
Introduction to The Victorian Age
Tennyson, “Break, Break, Break,” In Memoriam sections 7, 54, and 130, and “Crossing the Bar”
Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess” and “Prospice”
Arnold, “Dover Beach”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnet 43
Introduction to The Twentieth Century
Joyce, “Araby”
Yeats, “The Second Coming”
Eliot, “The Hollow Men”
Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night”
Summer readings prior to this year:
Dickens, Oliver Twist
Orwell, 1984
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