British Literature Lessons for the Classroom

"Who so List to Hunt" and "Alas all things now do hold their peace."  These two Elizabethan poems are a great starting off point for discussing poetry. I use this handout to make a transparency for the overhead (you could use a digital projector just as well) and uncover one line at a time as we discuss the meaning (based only on the text that we have seen up to that point).  [Note: There is now a Power Point version of these poems - that allows the presenter to uncover important lines by clicking the mouse button.]  There is also an audio recording of this class.

  A lesson originally created by Natalie Leki-Albano.  This assignment has students read a different tale than one that is covered in class. After they read the story, and go over that character's coverage in the general prologue  -- they must create a three dimensional model (or puppet) of that character.  The assignment uses specific criteria to have the student use as much of the text as possible in creating their "model."   A chart also goes with this project to help keep track of who did what.

This handout can also be started as a group work in school -- it lists attributes (physical, job, irony present) for each of the major characters in Chaucer's Prologue to The Canterbury Tales.  It is useful for both studying the characters as well as laying the ground work for Group Work #2 on the Prologue.  I do not make a big deal of having students copy what they are finding -- they will use the charts to study from and they will be working with partners in class.  I have been known to initial what they finish in class though -- by the time the bell rings, I do want them to work on the rest of it on their own.  If they didn't need to study from them, I would probably collect them at the end of the period.

This play uses a brief excerpt (4 pages) from the end of John Gardner's book (yes, the Gardner who wrote Grendel) on Chaucer.  Specifically, I give them the last few pages about Chaucer's retraction and the subsequent death of Chaucer. Then the students are asked to create a brief play about these last few moments -- including his retraction (or lack thereof), characters from his book visiting his deathbed, etc.

   This group work introduces students to Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales.  It utilizes a brief excerpt by John Gardner (on the life of Chaucer) as welll as the text's other introductory material.  It asks students to consider the reasons that the pilgrims are going to visit the tomb of Saint Thomas a Becket as well as some of the linguistic problems and opportunities found in translating this work of Middle English.   There is a new (2012) version with revisions and corrections below.

When I teach the Romantics, I use this wonderful, underrated movie as a bridge between the Enlightenment (Age of Reason) and the Romantic Era.  When you see the movie, it almost feels at though that was the director's intention: the Romantic and imaginative Baron versus the forces of reason and reality that battle, and nearly kill him.  There are movie questions for three days of viewing in class, as well as an extra credit assignment involving multiple artistic depictions of the same scene from the story of Baron Munchausen, that asks students to comment on those depictions and their relationship to "imagination."  Read more »