English Literature CSS Syllabus

English Literature

(100 Marks)

The paper is divided into six components along with the marks allocation for each component.

I. Essays: (10 Marks)

• • Bertrand Russell (The Conquest of Happiness)
  • George Orwell (Politics and the English Language; The Prevention of Literature)
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson (The Transcendentalist; Self-reliance)

II. Short Stories: (10 Marks)

• • Somerset Maugham (The Lotus-eater)
  • G.K.Chesterton (A Somewhat Improbable Story)
  • O’Henry (The Gift of the Magi)

III. Poetry: (20 marks)

• • William Wordsworth (Resolution and Independence; Tintern Abbey)
  • John Keats (Ode to a Nightingale; Ode to Autumn)
  • Lord Alfred Tennyson (Ulysses; The Lady of Shalott)
  • Yeats (A Dialogue of Self and Soul; The Second Coming)
  • Eliot (The Wasteland; Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock)
  • Philip Larkin (Maturity; Continuing to Live; The Trees)
  • Wallace Stevens (A postcard from the volcano; Continual conversation with a silent man; Dry loaf) OR
  • Walt Whitman (As I ponder’d in silence; Are you the new person drawn toward me?; This moment yearning and thoughtful)

IV. Drama: (20 marks)

• • Shakespeare (Hamlet; King Lear, As you like it and Twelfth Night)
  • William Congreve (The Way of the World)
  • Shaw (Pygmalion; Heartbreak House )
  • Harold Pinter (The Caretaker)
  • Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot)
  • Eugene O’Neill (Long Day’s Journey into Night)

V. Novels: (20 marks)

• • Thomas Hardy (Far from the Madding Crowd)
  • D.H. Lawrence (Sons and Lovers)
  • George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-four)
  • James Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
  • Iris Murdoch (Under the Net)
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter) or
  • William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury)

VI. Literacy Theory & Criticism (20 Marks)

1. • Structuralism
   • Marxism
   • Deconstructionism
   • Psychoanalytic Criticism
   • Feminist Criticism
   • Postcolonial Criticism