love through the ages - help

I was wanting to start working on this now, I've looked over the specification and it doesn't really give you a clear idea of what to do (like a wider reading list). How do you learn this, I've seen on a few sites that you go through all the centuries 14th - modern, is this correct? And what exactly am I looking for, I know I have to cover prose, drama, poetry.

How did everyone start the course? What did you first start looking at? And what sort of context/background info do you need?

Thanks :-)

What specification is this?

Just the main English literature A specification on the aqa website

Well basically, the English department within your school/sixth form college would already have a reading list created by the English teachers. When you start A2 English Literature, they will almost certainly, immediately give you this wider reading list because it's vital to start wider reading as soon as possible because you will have to read a lot!

Because AQA say you should read literature from 13th century (Chaucer) to present day, there is no 'specific' or required reading list out there. You don't have to study all of Chaucer's work such as the whole of The Canterbury Tales (unless you did it for coursework), but you have to read bits of it, just to get an understanding of Chaucer's literature and how love was perceived during the 13th century Literature.

The theme for the exam is 'Love Through the Ages' which literally means love in all your literature. So you're looking for any types of love in the literature you will study independently. Some types of love that you can consider are: passionate, destructive, lustful, maternal, paternal, brotherly, unconditional, conditional, divine love, etc.

So for example, divine love would come from John Milton's 'Paradise Lost', lust from Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe, destructive love in 'The Great Gatsby', 'Birdsong' by Sebastian Faulks (a lot of war literature explore brotherly love a lot), passionate love 'Pride & Prejudice' by Jane Austen, unconditional and maternal love are presented in 'We Need to Talk About Kevin' by Lionel Shriver. Just to name a few you might want to explore. There are thousands of poetry that you can look at that are well-known.

What we're doing now is - with one teacher, we are reading 'Enduring Love' by Ian McEwan for our coursework and with our other teacher, we are looking at love extracts from the literary periods from each genre, where appropriate.

We haven't really started the context and background. But our teacher vaguely said that it would be thing such as how love was perceived at that time of when your piece of literature was written. For example the elopement in Pride and Prejudice, was this appropriate int he Regency Period? And how might this reflect the novel and it's readers of that time?

You also have to start comparing different texts and genres from different periods, which I personally think is going to be difficult.

I hope this has helped. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask and I will be happy to answer

I can give you a reading list that I received?