Grade 12 English Grade 12 Required Readings:

Beowulf The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer The Tragedy of Hamlet, William Shakespeare

Poetry: “A Poem of Changgan”, Po Li “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”, John Donne “My Last Duchess”, Robert Browning “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, John Keats “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, Thomas Gray

Informational Texts: “from the Diary of Samuel Pepys”, Samuel Pepys “from A Journal of The Plague Year”, Daniel DeFoe “Letter to Lord Chesterfield”, Samuel Johnson “William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech”, William Faulkner

Grade 12 Optional Readings

Stories/Novels: 1984, George Orwell A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce “A White Heron”, Sarah Orne Jewett Adrift: 76 Days Lost at Sea, Steve Callahan And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCourt Beggar’s Opera, John Gay Brave New World, Aldous Huxley Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky Cry, The Beloved Country, Mildred Taylor Daisy Miller, Henry James Dead Man Walking, Helen Prejean Dead Poet’s Society, N.H Kleinbaum Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson Dubliners, James Joyce Emma, Jane Austen Far From the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy Frankenstein, Mary Shelley Goodbye, Mr. Chips, James Hilton Grendel, John Gardner Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathon Swift Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad “Home”, Anton Chekov Kim, Rudyard Kipling Lost Horizon, James Hilton Moll Flanders, Daniel DeFoe Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf Mutiny on the Bounty, Charles Nordhoff Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens Passage to India, E.M. Forester Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson Sons and Lovers, D.H Lawrence Sun Rises Over Fallujah, Myers The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas The Elephant Man, Ashley Montagu The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles The Garden Party and Other Stories, Katherine Mansfield The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing The King’s Shadow, Elizabeth Alder The Lord of the Flies, William Golding The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens The Reader, Bernhard Schlink The Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough The Turn of the Screw, Henry James Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

Drama: Death and the King’s Horsemen: A Play, Wile Soyinka A Man for All Seasons¸ Robert Bolt Man and Superman, George Bernard Shaw Mourning Becomes Electra, Eugene O’Neil Murder in the Cathedral, T.S Eliot Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw She Stoops to Conquer, Oliver Goldsmith Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard The School for Scandal, Richard Brinsley Sheriden The Tempest, William Shakespeare Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett

Poetry: “Song VII”, Rabindranath Tagore “Demeter’s Prayer to Hades”, Rita Dove “Dulce et Decorum Est”, Wilfred Owen “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”, Dylan Thomas “Not Waving but Drowning”, Stevie Smith

Informational Texts: Black Boy, Richard Wright First They Killed My Father, Loung Ung Freakonmics, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, Lynn Truss “Politics and the English Language”, George Orwell The American Language, 4th Edition, H.L. Mencken “The Fallacy of Success”, G.K. Chesterton