Did you do A-Level English Literature?

[BrilliantineMortality]

When did you study it?
Can you remember what books you read?

For me, I did it between 1993-95. Can't believe I sat my exams 20 years ago . I found some of my set texts recently which jogged my memory as to the other books I studied:

The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
Have the men had enough - Margaret Forster
Oranges are not the only fruit - Jeanette Winterson
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
The Cement Garden - Ian McEwan
The man who mistook his wife for a hat - Oliver Sacks (non-fiction component to the course)
King Lear
The Merchant of Venice
Ted Hughes' animal poems
John Keats' poems
The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales - Chaucer
The Revenger's Tragedy - Tourneur/Middleton (A Jacobean play)

The thing that immediately strikes me is that the novels were all relatively contemporary with a (mostly) feminist slant. Probably because both my teachers were female and in their late twenties/early thirties, so these were probably the books that they had read in the preceding decade or so.

Only the John Keats' poetry from the 19th Century, which is pretty shocking, come to think of it now. Everything was either late 20th Century or much, much earlier. I loved doing my English Lit A Level, but reading this list back I can see that it didn't do me many favours when it came to study it for my degree.

MehsMum the one good thing about Caesar's Gallic Wars is that it's very, very easy. We used to have General Reading lessons (L and U6 together) in which we'd just go round the table translating as we read v. nerve-racking with some; a doddle with Caesar.

I only remember doing the Aeneid (1-4 maybe? the beginning of the story anyway) and Catullus for Latin O'level. I remember more about the Aeneid than I do about Catullus (about which I remember precisely nothing!)

The Go Between: LP Hartley
Hamlet and Othello buy some chap from Stratford
The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. God that was dull
Chaucer: Merchants Tale
Poems of William Blake
Rosenkrantz and Gilderstern (ap?) Are Dead

Must've been other novels but I can't remember!

I did my A levels 30 years ago this year!

Soup odi et amo...
2 line poem my brother and I would chant when asked if we'd revised...
We hadn't- a C and a fail.

I did mine 98-00 and we did -
The Tempest
Othello
Talking Heads
Bleak House
Interview with a vampire and we compared it with Dracula
We had to do a mini dissertation type essay and I did mine on A Clockwork Orange
Keats poetry
Translations by Brian Friel

We must have done more than that and presumably more poetry but I can't remember, I'm getting confused with my degree I think. Our class were all girls with a male tutor and we all wrote our essays on sex and feminism! It became a bit of a joke in college about our tutor's classes. In fact, I learnt more about feminism from our male tutor than anyone else. He was a great teacher. I went on to study English at University.

I also did French & German A levels. The literature was truly dire for the most part. We also did Katarina Blum and the whole class loathed it!
Hugo poetry, Camus L'Etranger and Merimee Colomba were the French texts

Lizzylou, in the NW? You could have been in the year below me!

1984 I took my exam, books were

Waiting for Godot
Hamlet
1984
Mansfield Park
The History Man
Chaucer The Miller's Tale ( pure filth!)
Dickens Hard Times ( felt v apt for those Thatcherite times)

And I got an A!!

Mind you I was shagging the English teacher at the time...??

mehsmum The Miller's Tale was indeed rude. In my memory someone drippy kisses the arsehole of someone feisty while she is shagging someone who is not her husband. Sadly the only quotation that I can come up with is 'A beard, a beard' quoth he, as he gets hairy anus as opposed to lovely facial lips. Anyway. As you were...

I love the Miller's Tale.

It's also Oxford/Cambridge rivalry. And, the guy who tells the story that comes after it refers to himself as an 'open-arse'. Love it.

I did Latin - can't remember all of them, but Aeneid 6, which was lovely, and some Ovid, Livy, Cicero (bleugh). We did Catullus for GCSE.

Zut alors, Mintyy! Comme trés dare tu!

J'etais very good at la Francais quand j'etais a l'ecole, mais c'était aussi le fois que j'ai decrouvri les garçons ...

...although ma Franglais, ca c'est superbe, je croix!

Studied 1989-1991. We did Wuthering Heights (brilliant), Heart of Darkness (enjoyable and interesting), The Alchemist (boring), King Lear (good), another Shakespeare play which I can't recall off hand what it was but it was shit.

Quite a lot else I can't remember. In fairness it was over 20 years ago

It's interesting to see quite a few of us did Friel's Translations. I loved it and sometimes reread it even now.

Did anyone else do The Malcontent by John Marston? Was almost a contemporary of Shakespeare, and was very rude iirc Cursing was imaginative and priapic

Latin O level, 1977:
Virgil, Aeneid Book 2 (extracts)
A bit of Cicero's In Verrem speech

Greek O level, 1977:
Tales from Herodotus, extracts
Iliad Book 6, extracts

Latin A level, 1979:
Tacitus - Agricola, and possibly a bit of the Annals too
Extracts from Aeneid Book 4 and a bit of the Georgics

Greek A level, 1979:
Plato, Republic Book 1 - a nightmare. I loathe Plato. I was gutted there was no Homer set book that year, for the first time in living memory. And what should pop up on my first year reading list at university but Republic Book 1 again. Pah.
Aristophanes, Frogs - full of dirty jokes. I was a very shy, innocent teenager and I was in a class of one, so there was no hiding place when it came to the translation!

Never came to love Virgil but Cicero and Tacitus were a different matter.

Le tut, le tut Biwi.

Vous juste cannot prendre it, je pense.

(pardon pour le thread hijack toute le monde)

I did - in 1972! I loved it. Did old-fashioned things - Shakespeare - Hamlet - brilliant. The Franklins Tale - Chaucer - we had to read the original but it was so funny and clever. Also Milton - Paradise Lost Book 2, which was more difficult. Villette by Charlotte Bronte, Emma by Jane Austen (wonderful). Believe it or not we also did the Collected Poems of W H Auden, which was considered extremely modern and racy at the time!!

Another one here who did Latin O-level. The only literature we did, though, was a bit of the Aeneid - can't remember which book, may have been book 4. I remember very little about it.

Another poster mentioned Gosse's Fathers and Sons, which (in my view) is a great read - would definitely recommend.

I did Latin O level too, but the language not the literature option - it was for people who wanted to study languages at A level or university. We did tons of Caesar and Tacitus and as far as I remember only one or two passages from Virgil ever .

I like Father and Son (singular in both cases), although I don't think it's a very fair account of Philip Henry Gosse. But there are some amazing bits in it.

Latin O level - Martial's 'Witty Little Book of Epigrams' (laugh a minute)
Greek O level - Iphigenia at Aulis

You're right, niminy, it is Father and Son! I took my cue unthinkingly from the poster who referred to it as Fathers and Sons. Still worth reading.

Latin was Town mouse and Country Mouse by Horace and something by Plautus.

It's funny - absolutely the only constant seems to be Chaucer and a bit of the Canterbury Tales. It's quite a civilised thought that 17 and 18 year olds still study this as other periods wax and wane.

I remember Chanteclear and Pertelot the Cockerell and hen in one of Chaucer's tale - nun's priest?.