English Literature

Course summary

The pleasure of seeing what is under the surface of a literary text is something you will have experienced at GCSE. You have been exposed to Shakespeare at GCSE and it is now time to build on this firm basis by adding to your repertoire of his plays, while also tracking English literature to its sources by making the acquaintance of the first poet to choose to write poetry in English: Geoffrey Chaucer. The first year of English studies also takes account of an exciting mid-to-late twentieth-century writer: Angela Carter and her adventurous and definitively adult re-telling of fairy tales in her collection of Gothic short (but interlocking) stories The Bloody Chamber which draws on psychoanalytical interpretations of what these stories mean! In the first year, you will study two texts in preparation for the exams to be sat in the second year of A-level studies. These are The Tempest (Shakespeare), and The Bloody Chamber (Angela Carter). In addition, students will be offered an induction to Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale. This will take the form of a study of Chaucer’s The General Prologue and The Merchant’s Tale in preparation for the study of the latter work in Year 13. In the second year, you will build on the topics studied in the first year. You will continue your study of The Tempest and develop your familiarity with early modern drama by adding Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. This latter text will be compared and contrasted to The Merchant’s Tale. You will similarly develop your understanding of the Gothic genre by studying Bram Stoker’s Dracula alongside Carter’s The Bloody Chamber. You will also study three literary texts in respect of the coursework option, one being a prose text, one a poetic text and one a dramatic text. We will be comparing and contrasting Ted Lewis’ Jack’s Return Home to and with Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming. The poetry text is Damian Walford Davies’ 2012 poetical sequence, Witch.