Literature

While teaching students the skills and terminology of literary criticism and rhetoric, the Upper School literature courses immerse them in the great questions of human life, presented through the artistic masterpieces of Western Civilization’s best writers and thinkers.

Courses and Central Texts

Ancient Literature (Literature I) 

  • The Iliad, Homer

  • The Odyssey, Homer

  • The Aeneid, Virgil

  • Prometheus Bound, Aeschylus

  • Oedipus Rex, Sophocles

  • Antigone, Sophocles

  • Medea or Alcestis, Euripides

  • Frogs, Sophocles

  • Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare

  • Durable Design: Classical Oration for Speeches and Essays, Michael Larson

Medieval Literature (Literature II) 

  • The Divine Comedy, Alighieri Dante

  • Beowulf, Anonymous

  • Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer

  • The Ballad of the White Horse, G. K. Chesterton

  • Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Anonymous

  • Yvain, Chrétien de Troyes

  • Revelations of Divine Love, Julian of Norwich

  • The Song of Roland, Anonymous

  • The Saga of the Volsungs, Anonymous

  • Henry V, William Shakespeare

Modern Literature I (Literature III) 

  • Don Quixote, Miguel Cervantes

  • Paradise Lost, John Milton

  • Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

  • Pride & Prejudice, Jane Austen

  • Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens

  • King Lear, William Shakespeare

  • The Tempest, William Shakespeare

  • Poetry by Donne, Pope, Lovelace, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Johnson, Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Hopkins

Modern Literature II (Literature IV) 

  • Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  • The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

  • Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

  • Dracula, Bram Stoker

  • Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare

  • Idylls of the King, Alfred Lord Tennyson

  • Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh

  • The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

  • Short Stories by Flannery O’Connor

  • Poetry by Hopkins, Arnold, Elliot, Owen, and Frost