Lightning Lit — British Lit: Mid-Late 19th Century Student Guide

Third Edition

Lessons cover conflict, rhyme and meter, local color, theme, genre, and sources of ideas. The Student’s Guide includes information about the authors, comprehension questions, writing exercises, discussion questions, reading lists appropriate to the period or subject, semester and full-year schedules, and a bibliography. The answers to comprehension questions are in the Teacher’s Guide. Book-length works are sold separately and in a pack with the guides.

Recommendations:

This course is especially recommended for the students who have already taken at least one previous high-school level Lightning Literature course, who are studying world history, and who are interested in British literature. These should not be viewed as restrictions; this course can profitably be used by high-school students of any grade regardless of which previous Lightning Literature courses they have completed. Generally speaking, this course is more difficult than the two American Literature courses and Speech but easier than the Shakespeare courses, British Christian Literature, or British Medieval Literature. Much depends on student interest in the material, however.

Students read in this order:

• Alfred, Lord Tennyson (selected poems; text in this Guide)
• George Eliot (novel: Silas Marner)
• Charles Dickens (novel: Great Expectations)
• Lewis Carroll: (selected poems; text in this Guide)
• Robert Louis Stevenson (travelogue/essay, text in this Guide:”The Silverado Squatters”)
• Oscar Wilde (play: The Importance of Being Earnest)
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, (short story, text in this Guide: “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”)
• Rudyard Kipling (novel: Stalky & Co.)