British Literature: Reading and Writing Through the Classics

British Literature, the fourth volume of the Excellence in Literature curriculum, is designed to cultivate not only a love for great literature, but also to build college-ready writing skills and deep cultural literacy. Students work with unabridged great classics (purchased separately), including novels, short stories, poems, and drama, which have been selected for compelling ideas, literary quality, and in honor of their place in the historical development of literature.

This study guide is designed for one year of study, and it covers the following books, and includes poetry in every module.

-Beowulf

-Canterbury Tales (selected) by Geoffrey Chaucer

-Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and other Arthurian works

-King Lear by William Shakespeare

-Paradise Lost by John Milton

-Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

-Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

-Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

-To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Study Guide Features:

• Self-directed;
• Structured and easy to use with week-by-week lesson plans;
• Formats and Models chapter with instructions for each type of paper and a student-written model;
• Optional Honors track;
• Grading instructions and a rubric.

Additional short readings and audio-visual resources (linked) provide background information about the author, the historical period, and the literary and artistic context of each great book.

Carefully designed assignments help students fully understand what they are studying as they develop competence in various types of written composition.

An optional Honors track provides additional reading, writing, and the possibility of taking an assigned CLEP as a final exam. This guide is appropriate for Grades 8-12.