Supplemental: Research Activity

Research Task: To get to know the historical names by which we label literary periods/styles

Hi All!

I've been really pleased to see how many of you have accessed the literary material and been engaging with the A Level texts :) As you may wish to have something more to do as well as the reading, I have put together a short research project for you that I think will help prepare you for the ways we will look at texts at A Level. Understanding literary context is something that will be very important in this subject - and context is tested in one of our five assessment objectives (AO3).

I'd like to start off by unpicking some useful terminology. Please research the following terms, which refer to historical periods of literature:

The Renaissance

Post Modern

Victorianism

Middle English/The Medieval Period

The Restoration

Modern

Romanticism

Old English/The Anglo Saxon Period

Contemporary

Your task is, firstly, to put these into date order, and then, to try to find out:

- Roughly what dates do these labels cover? In other words, is Victorianism from 1600 – 1750 or …? Don’t worry if you find slight differing dates: even literary critics disagree on exact start and end dates. We will discuss why this might be in class, but to give you a clue, there is a clash, perhaps, between what a historian might say and what a student of literature might say :)

Then, once you have your timeline in date order, please research each period in detail. Please find out, for each, things like:

- What are the typical features of this period? Does a lot of Romantic Literature share a common tone, for example? Were the Victorians interested in similar themes?

- Can you find out the key writers from your historical period and the types of texts they wrote? Were they poets or novelists? Playwrights? What was their most famous text? What was happening historically at the time they were writing?

Being familiar with these terms, the dates to which they refer, and key features of literature from these times will really help you to be able to pick out key themes, and even to be able to guess the time period of a text based on the themes and concerns of the authors.

Think about how you will present your findings. An academic poster? A PowerPoint/Google Slides doc?

We will discuss all of this in more detail in the induction period in Year 12.

See you all soon!

Lindsey