Old Western Culture Year 4 - Reader Set

Old Western Culture Year 4 - Reader Set

by Wesley Callihan
Publisher: Roman Roads Media
Item: 95050
List Price: $128.00 Our Price: $128.00

The Old Western Culture Great Books List

Old Western Culture is a great books curriculum with a distinctly Christian “great books” reading list. It includes all the famous favorites you’ll recognize from series like the Britannica Great Books of the Western World, but also includes books that are often left out of modern editions for various reasons, most often because they are from the “Age of Faith.” We include more works from the early Church Fathers, Medieval period, and the Reformation. These are deeply influential and formative books on Western civilization, and worthy of inclusion in great books series. These books are part of our Christian and cultural inheritance, and Old Western Culture exists to help you and your children receive that inheritance!

The Old Western Culture Reader Series is a sixteen-volume set. Below are the works included in the series that students using the Old Western Culture curriculum read over four years in high school. In some cases, students do not read the full work, especially for works of philosophy. But even in those cases, it is larger swaths of the original text, not small excerpts.

We also have an Essentials List for Old Western Culture for parents or students who want a different pace through the curriculum.

Year Four: Early Moderns

Unit One: Rise of England
  • Sonnets 3, 73, 55, 60, 103, and 106 by William Shakespeare
  • King Lear by William Shakespeare
  • Richard III by William Shakespeare
  • The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
  • A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, Holy Sonnets X and XIV, Meditation XVII, by John Donne
  • Redemption, The Collar, and Love “3” by George Herbert
  • To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell
  • On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, Sonnet 16: On His Blindness, and Sonnet 15: On the Late Massacre in Piedmont by John Milton
  • Paradise Lost by John Milton
Unit Two: Poetry and Politics
  • Essay on Criticism, Essay on Man, and Ode on Solitude by Alexander Pope
  • Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke
  • The Rhime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge
  • Intimations of Immortality and The Solitary Reaper by Wordsworth
  • She Walks in Beauty and The Destruction of Sennacherib by Byron
  • In First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer by Keats
  • Ode to the West Wind by Shelley
  • The Lady of Shallot, In Memorium A.H.H., The Eagle, and Crossing the Bar by Tennyson
  • Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, My Last Duchess, and Fra Lippo Lippi by Browning
  • Dover Beach by Arnold
  • Song, A Better Resurrection, and A Birthday by Rossetti
  • God’s Grandeur, Windhover, and Pied Beauty by Hopkins
  • The Cask of Omontillado, Anabel Lee, To Helen, The Raven, and The Bells by Edgar Allen Poe
  • Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
Unit Three: The Enlightenment
  • What is Enlightenment, Emmanuel Kant
  • The Sidereal Messenger, Letter to Benedetto Castelli, and Letter to the Grand Duchess, Galileo Galilei
  • Discourse on Method and Meditations, René Descartes
  • Laws of Gravity and Motion, General Scholium, and Optics, Isaac Newton
  • An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume
  • An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, Thomas Reid
Unit Four: The Novels
  • The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky
  • The Bet by Chekhov
  • Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
  • A Christmas Carol by Dickens
  • Selected Essays by C. S. Lewis
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