English Literature

Assessment

you will prepare one piece of coursework (20%) and complete three exams, each is two hours long. Poetry (30%), allows you to take your books in; drama is closed-text (30%) and the final exam is on two unseen texts (20%). One unit of your course will focus on Poetry, and your teachers will choose one from each section of the current set texts: Pre-1900: Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale, John Milton’s Paradise Lost Book IX, or Christina Rossetti’s Selected Poems. Post-1900: One of the following pairings: Thomas Hardy and T.S. Eliot; Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath; or Seamus Heaney and Owen Sheers. The second unit will focus on Drama, and your teachers will choose one of the following Shakespeare plays: King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Henry IV Part 1, or The Tempest. In addition, you will also study John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. Throughout the course, you will explore the full range of English Literature as part of the Unseen unit. For Unseen prose, you will focus on the period of 1918-1939, exploring topics such as Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance through the writing of authors such as Virginia Woolf to Zora Neale Hurston. For Poetry, you will explore examples from all periods. In addition to these units, you will also study two novels as part of your coursework preparation. One will be a post-2000 text, and in the past teachers have chosen texts such as Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The second will be a pre-2000 novel; popular choices in recent years have included Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. Following your study of two novels, you will devise your coursework title and essay, based on your own thematic and stylistic interests. In your first term, all English Literature Sixth Formers enter the T.S. Eliot essay writing competition, in which you write an essay based on your choice of any two texts that you have read independently. This essay competition prepares you for your independent coursework and is an opportunity for you to develop your skills of independent research, with support from your teachers.