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English Literature (YET01)
9 sections available · 139 chapters available
Free English Literature (YET01) study notes for Pearson Edexcel International A Level students. Each chapter below covers a key topic with worked examples and practice prompts you can take into the thinka app.
Unit 1 Section A: Post-2000 Poetry — Poems of the Decade
Eat Me, Patience Agbabi
Chainsaw Versus the Pampas Grass, Simon Armitage
Material, Ros Barber
History, John Burnside
An Easy Passage, Julia Copus
The Deliverer, Tishani Doshi
The Map Woman, Carol Ann Duffy
The Lammas Hireling, Ian Duhig
To My Nine-Year-Old Self, Helen Dunmore
A Minor Role, U A Fanthorpe
The Gun, Vicki Feaver
The Furthest Distances I’ve Travelled, Leontia Flynn
Giuseppe, Roderick Ford
Out of the Bag, Seamus Heaney
Effects, Alan Jenkins
Genetics, Sinéad Morrissey
From the Journal of a Disappointed Man, Andrew Motion
Look We Have Coming to Dover, Daljit Nagra
Please Hold, Ciaran O’Driscoll
On Her Blindness, Adam Thorpe
Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn, Tim Turnbull
Unit 1 Section B: Post-2000 Prose
Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín
The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
The Life of Pi, Yann Martel
Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga
Unit 2: Drama — pre-1900 and post-1900 set texts
Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe
Othello, William Shakespeare
The Rover, Aphra Behn
She Stoops to Conquer, Oliver Goldsmith
Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare
A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry
A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams
Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller
Top Girls, Caryl Churchill
Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett
Unit 3 Section B: Themed Prose Fiction
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
What Maisie Knew, Henry James
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
The Lonely Londoners, Samuel Selvon
A Passage to India, E. M. Forster
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
Unit 4 Section A: Shakespeare
Hamlet
King Lear
Measure for Measure
The Taming of the Shrew
Unit 4 Section B: Pre-1900 Poetry — Metaphysical Poets
The Flea, John Donne
The Good Morrow, John Donne
Song (‘Go and catch a falling star’), John Donne
Woman’s Constancy, John Donne
The Sun Rising, John Donne
A Valediction of Weeping, John Donne
A Nocturnal Upon St Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day, John Donne
The Apparition, John Donne
Elegy: To his Mistress Going to Bed, John Donne
‘At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners’, John Donne
‘Death be not Proud’, John Donne
‘Batter My Heart’, John Donne
A Hymn to God the Father, John Donne
Redemption, George Herbert
The Collar, George Herbert
The Pulley, George Herbert
Love III, George Herbert
To My Mistress Sitting by a River’s Side: An Eddy, Thomas Carew
To a Lady that Desired I Would Love Her, Thomas Carew
A Song (‘Ask me no more where Jove bestows’), Thomas Carew
A Letter to her Husband, Absent upon Public Engagement, Anne Bradstreet
Song: To Lucasta, Going to the Wars, Richard Lovelace
The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn, Andrew Marvell
To His Coy Mistress, Andrew Marvell
The Definition of Love, Andrew Marvell
Unprofitableness, Henry Vaughan
The World, Henry Vaughan
To My Excellent Lucasia, on Our Friendship, Katherine Phillips
A Dialogue of Friendship Multiplied, Katherine Phillips
Orinda to Lucasia, Katherine Phillips
Unit 4 Section B: Pre-1900 Poetry — The Romantics
Songs of Innocence: Holy Thursday, William Blake
Songs of Experience: Holy Thursday, William Blake
Songs of Experience: The Sick Rose, William Blake
Songs of Experience: The Tyger, William Blake
Songs of Experience: London, William Blake
Lines Written in Early Spring, William Wordsworth
Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, William Wordsworth
Ode: Intimations of Immortality, William Wordsworth
Lines Inscribed upon a Cup Formed from a Skull, George Gordon, Lord Byron
So We’ll Go no more A Roving, George Gordon, Lord Byron
On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year, George Gordon, Lord Byron
‘The cold earth slept below’, Percy Bysshe Shelley
Stanzas Written in Dejection, near Naples, Percy Bysshe Shelley
Ode to the West Wind, Percy Bysshe Shelley
The Question, Percy Bysshe Shelley
Ode to a Nightingale, John Keats
Ode on a Grecian Urn, John Keats
Ode on Melancholy, John Keats
Sonnet on the Sea, John Keats
Unit 4 Section B: Pre-1900 Poetry — The Victorians
From In Memoriam: VII ‘Dark house, by which once more I stand’, Alfred Tennyson
From In Memoriam: XCV ‘By night we linger’d on the lawn’, Alfred Tennyson
From Maud: I.xi ‘O let the solid ground’, Alfred Tennyson
From Maud: I.xviii ‘I have led her home, my love, my only friend’, Alfred Tennyson
From Maud: I.xxii ‘Come into the garden, Maud’, Alfred Tennyson
From Maud: II.iv ‘O that ’twere possible’, Alfred Tennyson
The Visionary, Emily Brontë and Charlotte Brontë
Grief, Elizabeth Barrett Browning
From Sonnets from the Portuguese XXIV ‘Let the world’s sharpness, like a closing knife’, Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The Best Thing in the World, Elizabeth Barrett Browning
‘Died…’, Elizabeth Barrett Browning
My Last Duchess, Robert Browning
Home-Thoughts, from Abroad, Robert Browning
Meeting at Night, Robert Browning
Love in a Life, Robert Browning
‘The Autumn day its course has run–the Autumn evening falls’, Charlotte Brontë
‘The house was still–the room was still’, Charlotte Brontë
‘I now had only to retrace’, Charlotte Brontë
‘The Nurse believed the sick man slept’, Charlotte Brontë
Stanzas – [‘Often rebuked, yet always back returning’], Charlotte Brontë
Remember, Christina Rossetti
Echo, Christina Rossetti
May, Christina Rossetti
A Birthday, Christina Rossetti
Somewhere or Other, Christina Rossetti
At an Inn, Thomas Hardy
‘I Look into My Glass’, Thomas Hardy
Drummer Hodge, Thomas Hardy
A Wife in London, Thomas Hardy
The Darkling Thrush, Thomas Hardy
Skills: Essay & unseen
Unseen post-1900 poem: close reading and response (Unit 3 Section A)
Comparative essay: connecting two poems (Unit 1 Section A)
Comparative essay: connecting two thematic prose texts (Unit 3 Section B)
Responding to a statement-led essay question
Open-book practice: selecting and integrating quotation
Writing about context (AO3)
Writing about different interpretations (AO5)
Literary terminology and essay conventions
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