Recommendations for Two-term Core Course in British and World Literature (12^th grade)

Term I: Early British Literature

Strongly Recommended

Beowulf

Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, selections

Shakespeare, Hamlet

Selected lyrics and sonnets by Shakespeare Jonson, Donne, Marvell, Milton, et al.

Suggested Additional Works

John Gardner, Grendel

Anglo-Saxon riddle poems

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

More, Utopia

Marlowe, Doctor Faustus

Milton, Samson Agonistes; selections from Paradise Lost

Bedier, The Romance of Tristan and Iseult

Term II: Later British and World Literature

Recommended Works and Authors

Another play by Shakespeare--Lear, Othello, or The Tempest

Swift, "A Modest Proposal," Gulliver's Travels

Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer

Romantic Poetry

Austen, Emma or Persuasion (Pride and Prejudice is reserved for an earlier term)

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Dickens, Bleak House

Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge; Far from the Madding Crowd

Shaw, Pygmalion; Man and Superman; Arms and the Man

Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

Wells, The Time Machine; The Invisible Man

Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Dubliners

Conrad, Lord Jim; The Secret Agent

Lawrence, Sons and Lovers; Women in Love

Woolf, To the Lighthouse; Mrs. Dalloway

Forster, A Passage to India

Huxley, Brave New World; Antic Hay

Pinter, The Dumb Waiter

Stoppard, The Real Inspector Hound; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Selected Poetry by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Tennyson, Arnold,

Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Thomas, Walcott, and others--see Major British Poets and the Norton Anthology

In Translation:

Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, "The Kreutzer Sonata"

Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment; Notes from the Underground

Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard and other plays

Ibsen, A Doll's House and other plays

Kafka, "In the Penal Colony," "The Metamorphosis," and other stories

Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Mann, Death in Venice; The Magic Mountain

Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

di Lampedusa, The Leopard

Borges, Labyrinths

Possible Organizing Themes: the hero, man vs nature, the individual vs society, moral choices in the face of evil, love and marriage, parents and children, the quest for utopia, the artistic imagination, the writer as social critic, romanticism vs realism, modern alienation, male vs female modalities