Texts

Texts can be written, spoken or multimodal, and in print or digital/online forms. Texts provide important opportunities for learning about aspects of human experience and about aesthetic appeal. Teachers may select whole texts and/or parts of texts depending on units of study, cohorts and level of difficulty.

‘Literary texts’ refer to past and present texts across a range of cultural contexts that are valued for their form and style and are recognised as having enduring or artistic value. While the nature of what constitutes ‘literary texts’ is dynamic and evolving, they are seen as having personal, social, cultural and aesthetic value and potential for enriching students’ scope of experience. Literary texts include a broad range of forms such as novels, poetry, short stories, plays, fiction, multimodal texts such as film, and non-fiction.

Sample text list

The following texts are examples of texts suitable for the study of Literature and are intended to stimulate thinking about teaching resources in relation to the content of the curriculum. The following examples are not meant to be prescriptive.

Fiction
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (novel)
A Fringe of Leaves by Patrick White (novel)
Tales from Firozsha Baag by Rohinton Mistry (short stories)
Ten Canoes directed by Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigirr (film)
Hotel Sorrento by Hannie Rayson (play)
Hamlet/Othello/Antony and Cleopatra by Shakespeare (plays)
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (novel)
Bright Star directed by Jane Campion (film)
Antigone by Sophocles (play)
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan (novel; film directed by Wayne Wang)
That Dead Man Dance by Kim Scott (novel)
Hamlet by Nicki Greenberg (graphic novel)
Poetry
Donne
John Keats
T.S. Eliot
Gwen Harwood
Australian Poetry Library http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/
Romaine Moreton
Ouyang Yu
John Kinsella
Non-fiction
Spotty-Handed Villainesses by Margaret Atwood (speech)
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf (essay)
Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands by Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Stasiland by Anna Funder (true stories based on interviews)
This Boy’s Life: A Memoir by Tobias Wolff
Patrick White: A Life by David Marr (biography)
On Dangerous Ground by Bruce Scates (imagined history)
Hare with the Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal (creative non-fiction)
Mabo - Life of an Island Man directed by Trevor Graham (film)