Invitation to the Classics
by Louise Cowan and Os Guinness
When used in conjunction with H. E. Marshall's History of English Literature, more material is covered in Marshall's History of English Literature from Year 7 to the middle of Year 10, and more is covered in Invitation to the Classics from the middle of Year 10, and through Year 11. Corresponding schedule for Marshall's History of English Literature
Introductory Material
The Purpose of Invitation to the Classics
The Importance of the Classics
The Classics Are Not the "Canon"
Year 6 Term 2 (or Year 12)
Homer - The Iliad and The Odyssey
Aeschylus - The Oresteia
Herodotus - History of the Persian Wars
Western Histories
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Euripides - The Bacchae
Aristophanes - Comedies
Plato - The Republic
Aristotle - Nicomachean Ethics
Year 6 Term 3 (or Year 12)
Virgil - The Aeneid
Roman and Italian Classics
Year 7 Term 1
Early Christian Writers
Augustine - The Confessions
Beowulf
Year 7 Term 2
Medieval Christian Writers
Thomas Aquinas - Summa Theologica
Dante - The Divine Comedy
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Year 7 Term 3
Geoffry Chaucer - The Canterbury Tales
Year 8 Term 1
The Second Shepherds' Play and Everyman
Thomas More - Utopia
Martin Luther - The Babylonian Captivity of the Church; The Small Catechism
Devotional Classics
Niccolo Machiavelli - The Prince
John Calvin - Institutes of the Christian Religion
Year 8 Term 2
Miguel de Cervantes - Don Quixote
Spanish Classics
William Shakespeare - Hamlet; King Lear; Midsummer Night's Dream; and The Tempest
John Donne - Poems
George Herbert - The Temple
Year 8 Term 3
John Milton - Paradise Lost
Blaise Pascal - Pensees
John Bunyan - The Pilgrim's Progress
Year 9 Term 1
Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels
Year 9 Term 2
Jonathan Edwards - A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections
Samuel Johnson Essays and Rasselas; James Boswell - The Life of Samuel Johnson
Western Social and Political Philosophy
Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Confessions
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay - The Federalist
Year 10 Term 1
Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Faust
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Lyrical Ballads
German Classics
John Keats - The Great Odes
Year 10 Term 2
Alexis de Tocqueville - Democracy in America
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Essays
Frederick Douglass - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter
Emily Dickinson - The Complete Poems
Herman Melville - Moby Dick
Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary
French Classics
Charles Dickens - Great Expectations
Year 10 Term 3
John Henry, Cardinal Newman - Apologia pro vita sua
Soren Kierkegaard - Fear and Trembling
George Eliot - Middlemarch
Gerard Manley Hopkins - Poems
Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
Henry James - The Portrait of a Lady
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Makers of the Modern World
Fredrich Nietzsche - Twilight of the Idols
Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness
Year 11 Term 1
James Joyce - Dubliners
Franz Kafka - The Trial
William Butler Yeats - Poems
Year 11 Term 2
T. S. Eliot - Four Quartets
Robert Frost - Poems
Modern Poetry in English
Modern Drama
C. S. Lewis - The Screwtape Letters
William Faulkner - Go Down, Moses
Simone Weil - Waiting for God
Dietrich Bonhoeffer - Letters and Papers from Prison
Year 11 Term 3
Flannery O'Connor - A Good Man is Hard to Find; Greenleaf; Revelation
Aleksander I. Solzhenitsyn - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Contemporary Writers