English Literature Survey Study Guide

Foundations of Literary Analysis

Master close reading, literary elements, figurative language, prosody, and critical approaches essential for textual analysis.

Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Literature

Examine Beowulf, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and Sir Gawain within oral tradition and medieval conventions.

Renaissance and Elizabethan Literature

Analyze Shakespeare's major works, the sonnet tradition, Marlowe, and Tudor humanist contexts.

Seventeenth-Century Literature

Study metaphysical poetry, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Civil War-era prose and verse.

Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature

Explore Augustan satire, the rise of the novel, comedy of manners, and neoclassical aesthetics.

British Romantic Literature

Examine Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Blake, and the gothic novel's emergence.

Victorian Literature

Analyze Dickens, the Brontës, Eliot, dramatic monologue, and responses to industrialism and empire.

British Modernism

Study Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, and modernist techniques including fragmentation and stream of consciousness.

American Literature to 1865

Trace Puritan origins through Transcendentalism, dark Romanticism, Whitman, Dickinson, and slave narratives.

American Realism and Modernism

Examine Twain, James, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, the Harlem Renaissance, and American drama.

Postmodern British and American Literature

Analyze Beckett, Pynchon, Morrison, and postmodern techniques including metafiction and unreliable narration.

Postcolonial and Global Anglophone Literature

Study Achebe, Rushdie, Walcott, Atwood, and postcolonial theory addressing hybridity and empire.