English Literature

This is a curriculum of English language literature designed to cover up to six years of secondary study, with further readings listed for exploration.

You will notice that this curriculum mostly focuses on prose over poetry, which has its own curricula; poets who are represented for the most part will refer to their dramatic works or other work as men of letters.

Obviously, the years are simply suggestions.

First Year

Beowulf Bede Geoffrey of Monmouth Alfred the Great William of Malmesbury John of Salisbury Thomas Malory Chaucer

Second Year

Thomas More Richard Hooker Thomas Cranmer Francis Bacon Richard Burton Thomas Nashe Ben Jonson John Bunyan Izaak Walton Shakespeare Samuel Pepys John Evelyn John Milton Richard Baxter John Owen

Third Year

Shakespeare Daniel Defoe Jonathan Swift Addison & Steele Henry Fielding Laurence Sterne Tobias Smollett Oliver Goldsmith Horace Walpole James Boswell Edward Gibbon John Locke Thomas Hobbes David Hume Adam Smith

Fourth Year

Shakespeare Edmund Burke Mary Wollstonecraft Jane Austen Sir Walter Scott Charles Dickens William Makepeace Thackeray The Brontë Sisters George Eliot Thomas Hardy Anthony Trollope Samuel Taylor Coleridge William Hazlitt

Fifth Year

Charles Darwin Robert Louis Stevenson H. Rider Haggard Rudyard Kipling John Henry Newman Thomas Carlyle John Stuart Mill Thomas Macaulay John Ruskin William Morris George MacDonald Henry James

Sixth Year

Joseph Conrad H.G. Wells D. H. Lawrence E. M. Forster Virginia Woolf Aldous Huxley Graham Greene Evelyn Waugh George Orwell P.G. Wodehouse Roald Dahl Auden T.S. Eliot C. S. Lewis J. R. R. Tolkien Kingsley Amis Anthony Burgess