William Blake took his inspiration for the watercolor Queen Katherine's Dream from William Shakespeare's play Henry VIII, in which an ailing Katherine (seated lower right) receives a vision in her sleep.

We start with the very first works written in the English language and end with Virginia Woolf's novel approach to the novel. Along the way we will watch a language grow and evolve, witness the birth of literary forms, and be privy to some of the most beautiful writing ever produced.

We'll travel from Beowulf's drinking hall to Thomas More's utopian society to Milton's paradise lost. William Wordsworth will redefine mankind's place in the poetic scheme of the universe, female authors will be given the same consideration as males, and many topics will be addressed — from mice and men to gods and monsters.

Do drop in on the workshops too. We will examine rhyme, rhythm, and metaphor, and learn to write such forms as the sestina.

Those who look at the outline below will notice a prominent name missing — Shakespeare. It's because the Bard of Avon gets his own course, of course.

Please enjoy your time here. This may be where you actually develop an appreciation for something that can bring a lifetime of meaning and pleasure: reading.

1. Ballads and Moor Monsters
   1. Yes, It Is English
   2. Beowulf
   3. Geoffrey Chaucer
   4. The Canterbury Tales
   5. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
   6. Ballads
   7. Sir Thomas Malory's The Death of Arthur
   8. Medieval Attitudes Toward Life
   9. Workshop: Alliteration
2. Renaissance, Reason, and Order
   1. Sir Thomas More's Utopia
   2. The Italian Sonnet Meets English Talent
   3. The Faerie Queene
   4. Elizabeth I, Queen Who Shaped an Age
   5. From Pen to Printing Press
   6. Shakespeare's Sisters
   7. "The Vulgar Tongue" -- English Translations of the Bible
   8. Morality Plays, Interludes, and the Emergence of Mature Drama
   9. Workshop: The Sonnet
3. Metaphysics and the Rising Middle Class: The 17th Century
   1. To Make a Point: Prose Without Frills
   2. John Donne and the Metaphysical Conceit
   3. The Metaphysical Poets
   4. Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea
   5. John Milton
   6. Adam, Eve, and the Serpent -- Milton's Paradise Lost
   7. Aphra Behn -- The First Woman to Make a Living Writing
   8. Workshop: Rhythm and Meter
4. Satire, Sitcoms, Newspapers and Novels
   1. Satire: Dryden, Pope and Swift
   2. Comedy of Manners -- Stage Sitcoms
   3. Grub Street -- The First Newspapers
   4. Clarissa and Robinson Crusoe: The Novel Emerges
   5. The Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
   6. Mary Wollstonecraft
   7. Poetry Workshop: The Heroic Couplet
5. Political and Social Revolution
   1. Robert Burns
   2. William Blake
   3. Blake's London
   4. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
   5. Workshop: Rhyme
6. The Romantic Poets
   1. William Wordsworth, Poetic Revolutionary
   2. Ode on Intimations of Immortality
   3. Lyrical Ballads by Coleridge and Wordsworth
   4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
   5. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
   6. Kubla Khan
   7. Lord Byron -- Cosmic Self-assertion
   8. Percy Bysshe Shelley -- Meek and Bold
   9. The Short Life of John Keats
   10. Ode on a Grecian Urn
   11. Workshop: The Sestina
7. Reform and Earnestness
   1. Alfred, Lord Tennyson
   2. The Brownings
   3. The Rossettis
   4. Gerard Manley Hopkins
   5. Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll
   6. Workshop: Metaphor and Simile
8. Victorian Novelists
   1. The Brontė Family
   2. Wuthering Heights
   3. Jane Eyre
   4. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice and Emma
   5. George Eliot
   6. Silas Marner and Middlemarch
   7. Charles Dickens
   8. A Tale of Two Cities
   9. David Copperfield
9. Victorian Heroes and Heroines
   1. Dickens's Pip: Great Expectations
   2. Heathcliff and Rochester
   3. Foundlings: Oliver and Emily
   4. Two Austen Heroines: Emma and Elizabeth
10. Into the 20th century
    1. End of the Century Essayists
    2. Oscar Wilde
    3. Thomas Hardy -- The Last Victorian?
    4. Virginia Woolf