Year 12 English Literature Reading List

In Year 12 we will be studying the following texts which you need to have bought and read before you start the course:

  • King Lear, William Shakespeare

Get the Heinemann Advanced Shakespeare [ISBN 978-0-435193-09-6] because it has good notes, lots of room to annotate and a range of activities to help you.

This is the link to the Amazon page- you can get a second hand copy, just make sure it doesn’t have someone else’s annotations!

  • Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller

Either the Penguin or Methuen editions will be fine.

  • John Keats’ Poetry

The exam board provides an anthology for this, so you don’t need to buy your own copy, however it would be a good idea to read the poems on line first:

Isabella: or, The Pot of Basil; La Belle Dame sans Merci; The Eve of St Agnes; Lamia

  • To help with your understanding of the set texts, you can buy copies of the York Notes Advanced Series.
  • If you want some optional background reading, a good general introduction to the study of English Literature and some of the ideas that underpin what we do is Doing English, Robert Eaglestone

there’s no need to buy this new, a second hand copy would be fine

The exam board publishes a text book which some students have found useful for revising; we don’t expect you to have a copy for use in class. It is quite expensive, so don’t get a new copy!

In Year 13 we will study an additional three texts. There is no requirement to have bought and read these before you start Year 12, but you may want to get ahead!

  • A Doll’s House, Henrik Ibsen This needs to be the Bloomsbury Methuen Drama Edition, translated by Michael Meyer [ISBN 978-1-4081-0602-0]
  • The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
  • Either: Songs of Innocence and of Experience, William Blake, or: Selected Poems, Tony Harrison. These will both be available through an anthology from school, but are well worth a read online.

There is a coursework component which requires you to write essays on a prose text and poetry text of your choice. We will be introducing you to a range of possibilities during the course of Year 12, however the more widely you read, the easier you will find this task. We have produced a suggested reading list of possible authors to try independently.