Benjamin McEvoy

Essays on writing, reading, and life

How to Get an Oxford University English Literature Education for Free

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If I had to choose between doing my three years at Oxford University again or getting anally fisted for the same duration by an iron bust of the Bard I’d choose the second in a heartbeat.

It certainly would have been the less painful of the two choices and I wouldn’t have gone into debt for an expensive sodomising reading list.

Whenever I play the Time Machine Game, the one epoch in my life I return to again and again is the Oxford Years.

Those years were mostly frittered away and if I could surgically remove any time period from my life, it would be this time period.

I don’t regret reading the great books.

I’ve read the best of English Literature from every period in history.

I’ve read everything from Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Conrad.

Passages from Paradise Lost still give me chills.

And my deep dives into mythology still serve me well today.

But…

You don’t need to go to university to study English Literature. 

I went because of the Oxford brand name.

How do you turn down the greatest institution in the world for your subject?

But really I could have got roughly the same education, minus the intellectual shaming from snobs who know nothing about life and are still elbow-deep in student debt well into their thirties, for the price of a library card. 

Do not go to Oxford University to study English Literature.

I mean, if you decide to ignore me then at least pay me my tiny consulting fee so I can tell you how to slide through the Oxford interviews, write a great personal statement, pass the ELAT, and get into the institute I so abhor.

But if you decide you want the Oxford University English Literature expertise without the headache and hassle, I’m going to show you how to do it.

First you have to understand how the English Language and Literature course at Oxford University is structured. 

How the Oxford University English Literature Course is structured:

You study English Literature at Oxford for three years and the years were broken down like this during my time at Oriel College (it may differ from college to college however):

English Literature at Oxford – Year One:

  • Introduction to English Language and Literature 
  • 1830 – 1910 – Victorian Literature
  • 1910 – Present Day – Modern Literature
  • Early Medieval Literature (Old English) 650 – 1350

English Literature at Oxford – Year Two:

  • The English Language 
  • Middle English (1509 onwards)
  • Renaissance (1509 – 1642)
  • Restoration (1642 – 1740)
  • Romanticism (1740 – 1832)

English Literature at Oxford – Year Three:

  • Special Authors
  • Shakespeare
  • Special Topic

That introduction to English Language and Literature module in the first year is basically all about criticism and learning to read literature through different lenses (e.g. historical, psychoanalytical, etc.)

You’ll read everything Shakespeare ever wrote.

The final year is a lot of fun because you get to tackle everything the Bard ever wrote (how many people can say they’ve experienced the complete works of Shakespeare several times?).

You also get to choose a special topic of basically your own choosing (I choose the Beat Generation and read authors like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs).

And you choose an author whose entire works you’ll read, study, and form a thesis about.

Check out my free Skillshare course if you want to learn how to study like an Oxford student.

You get given a choice of what authors you can choose, which changes every year (I think).

The choice of special authors while I was studying was this:

  1. (Old English): The Beowulf Poet, Alfred, The Exeter Book
  2. (Middle English): Chaucer, Langland, The N-Town Play
  3. (Renaissance): Spenser, Milton, Jonson
  4. (Restoration): Marvell, Dryden, Bunyan
  5. (Romanticism): Wordsworth, Austen, Byron
  6. (Victorianism): Tennyson, Dickens, Wilde
  7. (Modernism): Conrad, Yeats, Woolf
  8. (Postcolonial): Walcott, Roth, Friel
  9. (American): Emerson, Dickinson, Faulkner

I ended up choosing Joseph Conrad and devoured the man’s great works.

I read everything by Joseph Conrad and became a bit of an expert.

So what else do you need to know about the English Language and Literature course at Oxford University?

Well, each year is divided into three terms (or semesters) and each one lasts just eight weeks.

This is really short compared to most other universities, which made our time studying there extremely intense.

We were expected to do a lot of preparatory work and reading during vacation time, but of course we had to read a lot of books during term time too.

We’d get these huge reading lists every week and there would usually be at least two essays a week, though occasionally more. 

2-3 essays a week in an 8-week term.

how to study english language and literature at oxford university

Most students got burnt out half-way through term.

Many would need to go home to recharge for a weekend. Many others would hit the second year of their time at Oxford and have to take an entire year off (like every single one of my close friends there).

Many others would drop out altogether. 

We had a lot of work compressed into small time frames with tight deadlines, so it felt like the pressure was on all the time.

Sure, if you’re studying medicine or law, you need to deal with it and the stress-load is great preparation for your future career.

But English Literature is a love.

Reading is a passion. And Oxford had killed that passion by the time I graduated.

I remember coming out of my last exam, lighting up a cigarette, and telling my friends I would never read another book in my life.

Luckily, I did eventually get my lust for literature back, but it took some time and I had to do it on my own terms.

Never again would someone else dictate what I needed to read or the manner in which I needed to read it.

In addition to several weekly essays and big reading lists, we’d also have exams at the beginning of each term to test how much we had learnt.

We’d discuss our essays and what we learnt in tutorials (affectionately called “tutes”).

Some tutorials would be with the rest of the students (in my class there was just four of us in the class so it was super intimate) and one of your tutors.

Some tutorials would be one-on-one with your tutor. They would guide you through your reading, help you move your ideas along, and then go over your marked work with you.

For all the crap I give Oxford, I’ve got to say that the tutorial system there (although I found some of the tutors abrasive and intellectually elitist) is worth a hefty chunk of what you paid.

As well as tutorials, you have classes and lectures, which are optional but strongly encouraged to go to.

Again, I attended some great lectures and classes that really were worth paying good money for so I can’t be too harsh on Oxford University. 

So how do you get an Oxford University English Literature education all by yourself?

This is how I would do it.

Firstly, the crux of our term time really was around whatever essays we were working on.

So this is what I would prescribe to you:

You will write one book review or literary essay a week.

Sure, if you were actually at Oxford, you’d be writing two or three.

And you’d need to heavily research each one and get them marked by someone.

But we were also advised not to take a part-time job during term-time as we wouldn’t have time for our studies.

If you’re doing this in your everyday life, I assume you have a job and probably a bunch of other things you like doing or obligations you have to take care of.

So we’re using the Pareto Principle here. And we’re being less stringent about what you need to write.

Most people can read a book a week. Most people can also write a book review each week. 

You can learn how to write a book review here:

What I advise you do is for everything you read (or for most of the things you read) write up your notes, impressions, and thoughts in a review.

I’d recommend you do this online.

This way of doing things is actually more valuable than doing it the Oxford way.

oxford university english language and literature

If you put your book reviews online, you’ll have a chance to really hone your writing ability because you’ll get real world feedback.

You could build an audience.

You could rank for keywords and people searching for book reviews will find you.

Having your website will throw a bunch of opportunities in your lap – from job offers to likeminded souls looking to make new friends.

I have a huge portfolio of essays, but they went to waste just being used in tutorials.

I should have been putting them online and building something I could be proud of.

You can see I repurposed one of my essays on the Romantic sublime here and turned it into a blog post, which ranks well in Google (type “Sublime in Romantic poetry” into Google and you’ll see me on page one).

Other reasons to put your book reviews online?

You could earn a little bit of cash.

Sign up to the Amazon Associates affiliate program and you’ll get a commission for books you recommend that people buy. 

So you’re going to write a book review or literary essay each week, which means…

You are going to read a book a week.

Obviously at Oxford we read a lot more than just one book a week.

But we were doing it full time.

You, however, doing it on your own are going to be following the Pareto Principle again and going for those books that give you the most bang for your buck.

A big thing in our reading lists was the divide between primary and secondary reading.

Primary reading is stuff like novels, poems, and plays.

Secondary reading is criticism.

I will recommend to you some core works of criticism that I believe you should read, but what I would say is just try to find out as much about the book you’re reading as you can.

Listen to lectures online, read articles, watch videos around the topic you’re exploring that week. 

Here’s how you choose your books:

We’ll follow the structure I followed at Oxford, but with some tweaks.

You’re not going to wait several years to get into Shakespeare.

He’s simply too amazing to delay reading and you can read the entire Shakespeare canon in under a year easily.

You’ll read a Shakespeare play around every week.

There are 39 Shakespeare plays, so it doesn’t have to be dead on every week, but follow that guideline roughly and you’ll read everything in a year.

If that’s too intense for you, cut it in half.

Read a different Shakespeare play every two weeks.

It will take a little longer to get through everything, but it’s probably better to slow down, understand, and appreciate, rather than just ticking things off and not fully enjoying them.

My recommendation to you is to not just read the text, but to watch each of the plays.

If you can go to the theatre for this, tremendous! Do it!

I understand not everyone has the budget for the theatre though, so you can find movie versions online.

Watch them either with the text alongside, or read the text first then watch, or watch first and then read.

Experiment and do whatever works for you.

With Shakespeare, you’ll need to read a little bit around this area as he is difficult to break into – but such a joy when you do!

So check out some secondary reading here:

I recommend the Arden Shakespeare series.

Hands down they are the most gorgeous and have the best histories, analyses, and notes. 

To get you started with your first Shakespeare plays, here are three I recommend for you to see/read this month:

  • Much Ado About Nothing (my favourite comedy – I recommend either the Joss Whedon film version or the Kenneth Branagh version)
  • Othello (a great tragedy – check out the Lawrence Fishburne film version)
  • King Lear (one of the most important plays of all time – check out the Peter Brook film)

If you go for Romeo and Juliet, try comparing the Baz Lurhman film version to the Franco Zeffirelli film version. 

So that covers Shakespeare.

Read the Bard regularly.

Even if it’s not every week.

You could do one or two a month.

Take it at whatever pace your enthusiasm dictates.

Next we’re going to move through the big literary ages.

But, as you do, keep your eye open for authors you want to deep dive into and great ideas you may want to explore.

I believe the reason we tackled special authors and topics in our final year is because we needed the first two years to go wide so we knew where we really wanted to go deep.

Once you have a bird’s eye view of the entire sweep of English Literature, you can zoom in on the stuff that really excites you.

Term times were eight weeks, but we spent practically the same amount of time during our vacation with each topic so this is how we’ll break your reading program down:

  • Each literary age/movement is three months of the year. 
  • Each week you’ll alternate between the movements.
  • Feel free to juggle several books at once.

So one week you’re reading something from the Victorian period.

The next week you’re reading something from Modern Literature.

The next week you’re reading something critical about English Literature.

Then you’ll repeat.

Once you’ve read enough books from each age, you’ll move onto the next one. 

How many is enough books?

Let’s say around twelve from each module. 

Twelve is the magic number.

So you’ll read:

  • 12 books from the Victorian era
  • 12 books from Modern literature
  • 6 books of criticism 
  • 6 books of Old English literature

I’ve halved the Old English requirement because there aren’t that many to get stuck into.

Plus they’re damn hard and unless you are really going to specialise in them or find them super fascinating, just read the important ones.

I also halved the amount required for criticism.

But, really, if you want to read more of either, go for it.

These are just suggestions.

I’d also recommend you read more from the Victorian and Modern era too, because there are some fabulous books here.

Then in the next cycle, you’ll read:

  • 7 books from the Middle English Era 
  • 12 books from the Renaissance 
  • 12 books from the Restoration 
  • 12 books from the Romantic Era 
  • 3-4 books on the English language

Then by the time you’ve done that, you may have found an author you want to deep dive into.

If you’ve already found one, start reading your special author early if you have the time.

If you haven’t found your special author, choose one that seems interesting to you from this list:

  • (Old English): The Beowulf Poet, Alfred, The Exeter Book
  • (Middle English): Chaucer, Langland, The N-Town Play
  • (Renaissance): Spenser, Milton, Jonson
  • (Restoration): Marvell, Dryden, Bunyan
  • (Romanticism): Wordsworth, Austen, Byron
  • (Victorianism): Tennyson, Dickens, Wilde
  • (Modernism): Conrad, Yeats, Woolf
  • (Postcolonial): Walcott, Roth, Friel
  • (American): Emerson, Dickinson, Faulkner

Tastes will obviously differ, but if it was me I would choose to deep dive either Conrad, Dickinson, Faulkner, Woolf, Dickens, Wilde, Wordsworth, or Chaucer.

Pick one of these and read everything you can get your hands on from them and read around the topic too.

So what exactly do you read?

Follow your interests.

I can’t tell you exactly what to read.

But I can give you some prompts and point you in the right direction of key works.

Here’s my recommended Oxford University English Literature reading list:

These are the books that will give you the biggest bang for your buck.

I’ve chosen the seminal books, plays, and poems by the most important writers in each time period.

Feel free, however, to swap my suggestions for a different one by these authors if you like.

If you’ve already read Dickens’ Great Expectations, try Bleak House instead.

If you’ve already read Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, try his drama on for size and check out Salome or The Importance of Being Earnest.

You get the picture. 

Victorian Era Recommended Reading List:

It’s a travesty to cull the list down to just those.

But I’ll advise a couple of things.

First, I picked these on an author basis.

If you’d rather read a different Dickens or you’d prefer to check out Wilde’s plays instead of his prose, please do so.

Of course, the more you read the better.

And I’ve recommend a tremendous Victorian Poetry anthology that has all the great Victorian poets from Robert Browning to Alfred Tennyson.

I recommend you read a poem a day throughout, rather than trying to read the whole thing in a week. 

Also, although I suggested a book a week I know that’s completely unrealistic given the length of some of these novels.

These aren’t rigid rules, rather guidelines.

Don’t sacrifice understanding and enjoyment in order to meet an arbitrary deadline (which I did many times over during my time in Oxford, leaving many books read completely lost to my recollection now).

If it takes you three weeks to finish Middlemarch, so be it.

Modern Literature Recommended Reading List: 

My personal favourite here is Heart of Darkness.

If you’ve already read it, treat yourself to another Joseph Conrad like Lord Jim or The Secret Agent.

There is so much great literature to choose from when it comes to Modern stuff, and Modern is anything from the turn of the last century all the way up to the present day.

So if none of these books do it for you, do you’re own exploring and find some authors you might want to check out.

Off the top of my head, I’d recommend you explore these writers:

  • Kazuo Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go is one of my favourite novels)
  • Christopher Logue (War Music is my favourite long poem)
  • Ted Hughes 
  • Ezra Pound
  • Philip Larkin
  • Sylvia Plath
  • Wilfrid Owen 
  • Arthur Conan Doyle
  • Henry James
  • Ian McEwan 
  • Muriel Spark
  • Zadie Smith
  • Virginia Woolf
  • Alan Bennett
  • Samuel Beckett
  • Harold Pinter
  • John Osborne 

Try to get a good mix of plays, poems, and novels. 

English Literature Criticism Recommended Reading List:

Out of these, James Wood’s book and John Mullen’s book were the most rewarding to me personally. 

The first book is part of a series called The New Critical Idiom, which has a bunch of books on different literary topics like character and metaphor. Explore what interests you.

Old English Literature Recommended Reading List:

Old English is very hard. It’s a whole new language. You’ll either geek out and love it, or never want to look at it again. Start with Beowulf. Luckily you are spoilt for choice when it comes to translations and commentaries. I recommend either starting with J.R.R. Tolkien’s translation and commentary or starting with Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf.

You can find a lot of Old English literature in just one volume.

Middle English Era Recommended Reading List:

Pearl is one of the most gorgeous poems you’ll ever read. You definitely need a good version that will explain everything though. For Gawain and the Green Knight, Simon Armitage has a wonderful translation. The Morality Plays are a lot of fun, as is Le Morte D’Arthur. Of course, The Canterbury Tales are wonderful, but I personally loathed Troilus and Criseyde. 

Like Old English literature, you can find a lot of Middle English literature in one volume. And a complete works of Chaucer is a good investment.

Renaissance Recommended Reading List:

My favourites here are The Unfortunate Traveller, anything by John Donne (try to read his religious sermons), Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, and ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore. 

A note:

Do not worry if you absolutely cannot stand some of these books. Give them a fair crack, but if it’s torturing you, flick through them, get the gist, then abandon them. I did that many times throughout the course. For me, during the Renaissance semester, I could not get through Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. My peers enjoyed it, but I didn’t. It comes down to personal interest.

Restoration Recommended Reading List:

Daniel Defoe is superb and I really love his A Journal of the Plague Year.

Paradise Lost is wonderful, but will take you some time to get through. I recommend you find a good audio reading like the one by Sir Ian McKellen and a book with lots of notes and commentary.

Swift is good, but make sure you check out his satirical works beyond Gulliver’s Travels, like A Modest Proposal.

And, as for poets, I loved everything by the cheeky little devil John Wilmot. For plays, one of my favourites is The Country Wife.

Romantic Era Recommended Reading List:

A great era for poetry. Enjoy!

There’s a lot of poetry, so obviously you don’t have to read everything by each of the major ones. Focus on the important works. For Wordsworth that would be things like Tintern Abbey, the Lyrical Ballads, and his poems about childhood. For Blake, that would be his Songs of Experience and Innocence.

Frankenstein is also one of my favourite books (my review here).

Feel free to substitute a different Jane Austin (like Northanger Abbey) if you’ve already read Pride and Prejudice. 

English Language Recommended Reading List:

What you may notice is that these lists only have English language books. 

Of course, because this is the study of English Literature, that makes sense.

For me, this was the biggest tragedy of studying English.

What I really wanted was to study literature more broadly because I loved so many works from different cultures.

What I would suggest, if you’re the same, is to mix things up and for each era, pick a couple of works from different cultures that you want to explore.

If you want to read some Dostoyevsky, read some Dostoyevsky.

If you want to read some Murakami, read some Murakami.

If you want to read Dante, you should damn well read Dante’s Inferno too.

There we have it – an Oxford University English Literature Education.

I just gave you the keys to an Oxford University English Language and Literature education for free!