A Level English Literature

A Level English Literature introduces you to some of the most enjoyable, inspiring and challenging writing from the late 1300s to the present day. The course ranges widely across and beyond the traditional canon, whilst sharpening your skills in analysing how writers shape their ideas. You are encouraged to make connections between the texts you study and to explore them within their intellectual, cultural, social and historical contexts. The subject is highly valued by universities and employers for the skills it fosters in thinking critically, reading sensitively, approaching problems creatively, evaluating others’ views perceptively, and expressing arguments concisely and persuasively. We follow the OCR specification.

Numerous extra-curricular opportunities supplement the course. There is an annual trip to London for the Lower Sixth, taking in two different plays and a museum visit. Theatre trips to Stratford and London happen regularly. There are frequent creative writing workshops and competitions. The English Society puts on weekly extension seminars, some student led, others given by teachers and visiting academics.

Overview

In the Lower Sixth, you will begin with introductory courses with each of your two teachers. These bridge the transition from GCSE and encourage you to make connections between the texts encountered, exploring them within their intellectual, cultural, social and historical contexts. From October, you will begin work on your set texts. With one teacher, you will work on American Literature 1880-1940, studying The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath. With the other, you will focus on Pre-1900 Poetry and Drama, beginning with Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Prologue and Tale and then comparing this with John Webster’s tragedy The Duchess of Malfi.

In the Upper Sixth, you will study your set Shakespeare play in depth (Hamlet, Measure for Measure, Richard III or Twelfth Night), and will complete your coursework. This is a portfolio consisting of a close reading or piece of recreative writing inspired by your study of a contemporary text, and a comparative essay on two further texts. There is lots of scope for independent work and for studying writings from other English-speaking cultures. Examples of coursework texts recently taught in the department include Butterworth’s Jerusalem, Ford’s The Good Soldier, Mansfield’s stories, McEwan’s Atonement, Penhall’s Blue/Orange, Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Stoppard’s Arcadia and poetry by Elizabeth Bishop, T. S. Eliot, Philip Larkin, Kei Miller, Claudia Rankine and Roger Robinson.

Study Preparation

The best way to prepare for the course is by reading widely as widely and adventurously as possible, using the ideas below as a starting point. Over the summer, we would like you to read The Great Gatsby and at least two other texts, including one American novel published between 1880 and 1940 (asterisked on the list). You can supplement this by taking advantage of some of the theatre being performed locally and via streaming sites.

You can find out about the subject in general, and about many of the works listed below, at the British Library’s ‘Discovering Literature’ site. Many of the texts themselves can be downloaded for free from Project Gutenberg or Google Books. For a good paperback overview of the subject, try Jonathan Bate’s English Literature: A Very Short Introduction (2010). Old Waynflete Robert Eaglestone’s Doing English (2009) is an excellent introduction to some of the more theoretical aspects of studying the subject in the sixth form and at university.

Shakespeare

The following all offer very good overviews of Shakespeare’s work and style:

Simon Palfrey Doing Shakespeare (2005)

Emma Smith This is Shakespeare (2019)

Jonathan Bate The Genius of Shakespeare (1997)

Sean McEvoy Shakespeare: The Basics (2000)

Stanley Wells William Shakespeare: A Very Short Introduction (2015)

You could also sign up for the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) that King’s College London has put together for something more interactive: Shakespeare, Print and Performance.

An enjoyable way of beginning to think about the ways Shakespeare has been interpreted over the years would be to read some novels inspired by his plays. For example, if you studied Macbeth for GCSE, you could read Jo Nesbø’s eponymous thriller. If you’ve seen King Lear, why not compare Jane Smiley’s reimagining of it in the American west, A Thousand Acres (1991), with Edward St Aubyn’s Lear-as-Rupert-Murdoch satire, Dunbar (2017)? If you want to read more contemporary fiction, consider how two of the most praised novels of 2019 – Mark Haddon’s The Porpoise and Ali Smith’s Spring – both rework Pericles, a late play Shakespeare probably co-authored with George Wilkins. For novelisations of other plays, see http://hogarthshakespeare.com/.

Poetry

There are several excellent anthologies of poetry which you could dip into. The Oxford Book of English Verse (ed. Christopher Ricks, 1999) and The Penguin Book of English Verse (ed. Paul Keegan, 2000) are good examples; others can easily be found in second hand bookshops. We would strongly recommend that you buy one of these and get into the habit of regularly and randomly picking, reading and re-reading a short poem or two. James Fenton’s An Introduction to English Poetry (2003) is a readable handbook.

How to choose

Go to the library, a bookshop or an online bookseller that allows you to ‘look inside’. Browse. Read the first page, or the synopsis, or take Ford Madox Ford’s advice: ‘Open the book to page ninety-nine and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.’ Enjoy!