12th Grade Literature
12th Grade Core Literature
The list below outlines the core pieces we often cover in the 12th Grade Literature course at Chenango Forks High School. The literature includes: Ancient Greek tragedy--Sophocles: The Oedipus Cycle translated by Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald. The textbook Prentice Hall Literature: The British Tradition is utilized. The Shakespeare is used from either the Prentice Hall or Baron's Shakespeare Made Easy series.
The bold titles are the standards.
Sophocles: Oedipus Rex; Antigone
Shakespeare: Hamlet and Macbeth if possible—Hamlet if only one can be accomplished
Anglo-Saxon: Beowulf (excerpt)
Medieval:
Malory: Morte d’ Arthur (ex)
Chaucer: Canterbury Tales Prologue and Pardoner’s tale
Gawain and the Green Knight (ex)
Everyman (ex)
Renaissance:
Marlowe: The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus (ex)
Sidney: Sonnet 31 or 39
Spencer: Sonnet 1, 26, 75
Shakespeare: Sonnets 29, or 73 and 116 and 130
King James Version of the Bible: Psalms 23
17thC:
Jonson: On my first son
Puritan Poets:
Donne: Holy Sonnet 10; Meditation XVII (17) (Scroll to pre page 108)
Herbert: Easter wings
Cavalier Poets:
Marvell: To His Coy Mistress
Herrick: To the Virgins, to make much of time
Suckling: The Constant Lover; Song
Lovelace: To Lucasta, on going to the Wars
More Puritans:
Milton: Selection from Paradise Lost
Bunyan: Selection from The Pilgrim’s Progress (start at Pilgrim at Vanity Faire 116- In Stocks 121)
18thC Restoration lit:
Blake: The Lamb; Tyger; Infant Sorrow; A Poison Tree (Original manuscripts are linked on Blake's name)
Dryden: A Song for St. Cecilia’s day
Pepys:The Diary (ex)
Defoe: Journal of Plague year (ex)
Swift: Modest proposal; Gulliver's Travels (ex)
Johnson: Dictionary of the English Language (ex)
Gray: Elegy written in a country churchyard
Burns: To a mouse; To a louse
19th-Romantics
Wordsworth: Lines composed a few miles above tintern abbey
Coleridge: Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Byron: She walks in beauty; Don Juan
P. Shelley: Ozymandias
Keats: Ode on a Grecian urn
M. Shelley: Introduction to Frankenstein
Victorians:
Browning: My Last duchess; Home-thoughts from Abroad
E. Browning: Sonnet 43
AE Housman: To an Athlete dying young
Moderns: Orwell: 1984 or Shooting an elephant
If time: Thomas: Do not go gentle into that good night
Lawrence, Eliot, Shaw . . . .
Video links- YouTube and downloads
Kenneth Branagh
Mel Gibson
Laurence Olivier
Simba
Ethan Hawke
David Tennant
Derek Jacobi
Richard Burton