What You Will Study

This course will provide you with the opportunity to explore an exciting variety of literary texts from the seventeenth century to the present day. You will read a wide range of poems, novels and plays, learning the skills of close textual analysis, using evidence to support and develop arguments, and expressing ideas clearly and accurately.

As part of this course you will study two units. The first, drama and poetry pre 1900, involves Shakespeare’s King Lear.Perhaps his bleakest play, it deals with the catastrophic fallout from an unexpected regime change, which leads to extremes of violence, suffering and cruelty. 'Humanity must perforce prey on itself,' says one character, 'like monsters of the deep.' You will also read Christina Rossetti, widely regarded as the most significant woman poet in England before the twentieth century. You will look at these poems alongside John Webster’s macabre tragedy The Duchess of Malfi (1612-13), a terrifying piece of writing about the consequences for a woman who tries to control her own sexuality, featuring murder, incestuous desire, severed body parts, and a man who believes he’s a wolf.

For the second unit you will study the way the immigrant experience has been represented in prose fiction. You will focus on Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a disturbing and provocative post 9/11 thriller, and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, a family saga looking at the effect of immigration on two generations of an Indian family transplanted to America.

Studying English Literature will compliment other essay-based subjects available at Paston College. You will be given some freedom to choose your own material for the coursework-assessed unit. Recently students have chosen to write about the poetry of Eavan Boland, plays by Shelagh Delaney, Caryl Churchill and Stephen Beresford, and prose fiction by Sally Rooney, Zadie Smith, Colm Tóibín, Jeanette Winterson, and Bernadine Evaristo.