1) The English Renaissance, Elizabethan sonnets

2) Renaissance drama: William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

3) Shakespeare. Seventeenth-century English poetry (John Donne), selected passages from John Milton’s Paradise Lost

4) The rise of the English novel: Swift, Defoe, Fielding, Sterne. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

5) The English Romantics: Blake, the Lake poets, Keats, Shelley, Byron (William Blake, ‘The Chimney Sweeper’, William Wordsworth, ‘Tintern Abbey’, John Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’)

6) Victorian novelists: Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (W. M. Thackeray, the Brontë sisters, George Eliot)

7) Late Victorian and Edwardian authors: Thomas Hardy, George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

8) Modernism: D. H. Lawrence, ‘The Shadow in the Rose Garden’ (short story)

9) Modernism: T. S. Eliot (Canto I from The Waste Land), Virginia Wolf, ‘The Mark on the Wall’ (short story), James Joyce, ‘Eveline’ (short story)

10) Modernism and its alternatives: E. M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, ‘Shooting an Elephant’ (essay) (from ‘Politics and the English Language’ and ‘The Prevention of Literature’)

11) Post-war literature: Graham Greene, William Golding, Lord of the Flies. Angry young men: Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

12) Contemporary Nobel prize-winning authors: Seamus Heaney (Irish poet), Herald Pinter (playwright), British novelists: V. S. Naipaul, Doris Lessing, ‘To Room Nineteen’ (short story), Kazuo Ishiguro, ‘A Family Supper’ (short story). The young Irish millennial novelist Sally Rooney (extracts from the novel Normal People).