English Language & Literature

Welcome to Language & Literature

Recommended Reading
(To stretch you, enhance your learning and broaden your literary horizons…)

General wider reading

Homer ‘The Odyssey’ and ‘The Illiad’ (the ultimate Greek adventure)
Austen, ‘Pride and Prejudice’, ‘Emma’, ‘Northanger Abbey’ (The most accessible Austens)
Dickens, ‘Great Expectations’, ‘Hard Times’, ‘Short Stories’, ‘A Tale of Two Cities’
Woolf, ‘Orlando’, ‘To the Lighthouse’, ‘Mrs Dalloway’ (Get to grips with Modern Stream of Consciousness)
Perkins Gilman, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (Unnerving novella about mental breakdown)
Hawthorne, ‘The Scarlet Letter’ (Early American novel - adultery and redemption)
Bronte, C, ‘Jane Eyre’ (Early feminist bildingsroman)
Bronte, E, ‘Wuthering Heights’ (Classic gothic love-story. Great for understanding narrative)
Stoker, ‘Dracula’ (The one with the blood sucking vampire…)
Hardy, ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’, ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’ (Bridging the Victorian novel and the modern, sad and beautiful novels)
Wilde, ‘Picture of Dorian Gray’ (Oh the price of wanting to stay young….)
Collins, ‘The Moonstone’, ‘The Woman in White’ (Late Victorian mysteries)
Ed. Heaney, ‘Beowulf’ (one of the earliest recorded written stories)
Du Maurier, ‘Rebecca’ (Gothic novel)

Classics (some more modern ones…)

Orwell, ‘1984’ and ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’ (British political novels)
Huxley, ‘Brave New World’ (Influential novel set in a dystopian future)
Greene, ‘Brighton Rock’ (Gang violence in Brighton)
Golding, ‘Lord of the Flies’ (Classic story of what happens when a bunch of boys become stranded…)
Twain, ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’, ‘Tom Sawyer’ (Early American stories of childhood)
Atwood, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, ‘The Testaments’ and ‘Alias Grace’
Hosseini, ‘The Kite Runner’ (Growing up in 1970s Afghanistan - terrifyingly brilliant)
Barker, ‘Regeneration’ (First in trilogy about WWI)
Nabokov, ‘Lolita’ (beautiful writing, unpleasant narrative voice…)
Joyce, ‘Portrait of the Artist’, ‘Dubliners’ (classic Irish fiction)
Tartt, ‘The Secret History’, ‘The Goldfinch’ (Disturbing and enthralling American novels)
D H Lawrence, ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ (infamously sexual content….)

The Handmaids’ Tale - (Imagined Worlds - Prose text)

‘Critical Essays on Margaret Atwood’ – Judith McCombs
‘Margaret Atwood: Conversations’ – Earl G. Ingersoll
‘A Study of Narrative Discourse in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale’ – Hilda Staels
‘Margaret Atwood: Writing and Subjectivity’ – Colin Nicholson
‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ – George Orwell
‘Brave New World’ – Aldous Huxley
‘The Second Sex’ – Simone de Beauvoir
‘The Crucible’ – Arthur Miller

All My Sons - (Dramatic Encounters - Playscript)

Steinbeck, ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ and ‘Of Mice and Men’ (good for American Dream…)
Tennessee Williams, ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’

The Kite Runner - (Writing About Society - Prose text)

Robert Browning - poetry - (Poetic Voices)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning - Especially her Sonnets from the Portuguese
William Shakespeare - His soliloquies (e.g. Hamlet) influenced Browning’s voice-driven poetry
T. S. Eliot – Especially The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which echoes Browning’s introspective speakers

De Beauvoir, ‘The Second Sex’ (discussion of gender politics)
Bourke, ‘Dismembering the Male’ (Not as gory as it sounds...gender politics)
Hornby, ‘Ten Years in the Tub’ (A memoir of reading)
King, ‘On Writing: A memoir of the craft’ (By the master of horror, Stephen King)
Sutherland, ‘ Lives of the Novelists: A history of fiction’
Woolf, ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (reflections on breaking through as a female writer)

Susan Black ‘All That Remains’ (about death)
Caitlin Moran ‘How to be a Woman’ (not for the boys.. Or maybe it should be)
RD Laing ‘Self and others (psychoanalysis for the sixties generation)
Susan Showalter ‘The Female Malady’ (going mad in Literature)
Tomalin ‘Samuel Pepys’ and ‘Charles Dickens’ (biography)
Hermione Lee ‘Virginia Woolf’ (biography)
Jung Chang ‘Wild Swans’ (amazing multigenerational story about C20th China)
Beevor ‘Stalingrad’ (WW2 siege)

Fiction

Mr Smith’s:

Miss Motson’s: