10th-Grade Reading List

First Semester

Summer Reading:

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens1984 by George Orwell

The Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Period

Textbook Introduction: "The Anglo-Saxon Period" (2-9)All textbook Beowulf excerpts"The Seafarer"Textbook introduction: "The Medieval Period" (43-54)Excerpts from the film BecketTextbook introduction to the Canterbury TalesThe following selections from "The General Prologue":  The spring invocation         The Knight The Prioress The Monk The Parson The Pardoner"The Pardoner's Tale" introduction and reading in the textbookSir Thomas Malory bio and the Morte D' Arthur reading

The Renaissance Period

Textbook introduction: "The Renaissance" (127-148)Textbook: "The Sonnet" (152-153)Sir Thomas Wyatt bio and "Whoso List to Hunt"Edmund Spenser Bio; Sonnets 67 and 75William Shakespeare bio; Sonnets 29,73,116,130, and the play Macbeth

Second Semester

The Metaphysical Poets and The Puritan Age

Textbook introduction to "The Jacobean Age: The Metaphysical Poets" (263)John Donne bio and the following selections: "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" Holy Sonnet 6 "Meditation 17"Andrew Marvell bio; "To His Coy Mistress""The Tribe of Ben"Ben Johnson bio; "On My First Son", "My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold", and "It Is Not Growing Like a Tree"Robert Herrick bio; "To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time"John Milton bio; excerpt from Paradise Lost

The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century

Textbook introduction: "The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century" (327-347)Samuel Pepys bio; an excerpt from The Diary of Samuel PepysJonathan Swift bio; two Gulliver's Travels readings and "A Modest Proposal"Alexander Pope bio; and handout sections of "the Essay on Man"Thomas Gray bio; "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"

The Romantic Period 

Textbook introduction: "The Romantic Period (455-472)William Blake bio; selections in the textbookWilliam Wordsworth bio; "Tintern Abbey", "My Heart Leaps Up", and "The World is Too Much With Us"Samuel Taylor Coleridge bio; "Kubla khan"George Gordon, Lord Byron bio; "Written After Swimming from Sestos to Abydos",  an exerpt from "Apostrophe to the Ocean" , and "On This Day I Complete My 36th Year"Percy Bysshe Shelley bio; "Ozymandias" and "Ode to the West Wind"John Keats bio; "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" and "To Autumn"Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

The Victorian Age

Textbook introduction: "The Victorian Age" (599-619)Alfred Lord Tennyson bio; In Memoriam sections 7, 54,  and 130; "Crossing the Bar"Robert Browning bio; "Prospice", "Home Thoughts, From Abroad", "My Last Duchess",  and "Porphyria's Lover"Matthew Arnold bio; "Dover Beach"Elizabeth Barrett Browning bio; Sonnets 14 and 43

The Twentieth Century 

Textbook introduction: "The Twentieth Century (759-772)James Joyce bio; "Araby"William Butler Yeats bio; "The Second Coming"T.S. Eliot bio; "The Hollow Men"Dylan Thomas bio; "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night"