English Literature

Course summary

A Level English Literature involves the study of literary movements, eras and genres. It explores universal themes and encourages students with a shared passion for reading to become confident critics. This course builds on the skills developed at GCSE by engaging creatively and critically with a wide range of texts and discourses. It will help you to develop your autonomy as a reader and as a critic of a wide range of literature, both classic and modern. In addition, this course prepares you for any other university course that demands the ability to argue and defend a point of view, to be open-minded and to use inference and deduction. The A Level course encourages the exploration of texts in several different ways. You will engage with two of the main historicist perspectives; texts written across widely different periods that explore the same theme and those written within a narrower and clearly defined period. It entails the study of various texts, both singly and comparatively. You are required to read widely across a range of texts and connect them across time and topic.