HSC Texts
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Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts by George Bernard Shaw
Drama Buy From Amazon- HSC Year 12 Prescribed Texts
- Standard Module A
- Language, Identity and Culture
- Drama
Pygmalion both delighted and scandalized its first audiences in 1914. A brilliantly witty reworking of the classical tale of the sculptor who falls in love with his perfect female statue, it is also a barbed attack on the British class system and a statement of Shaw’s feminist views. In Shaw’s hands, the phoneticist Henry Higgins is the Pygmalion figure who believes he can transform Eliza Doolittle, a cockney flower girl, into a duchess at ease in polite society. The one thing he overlooks is that his ‘creation’ has a mind of her own.
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Rosemary Dobson Collected by Rosemary Dobson
Common Module Buy From Amazon- HSC Year 12 Prescribed Texts
- Common Module: English Standard, English Advanced and English Studies
- Texts and Human Experiences
- Poetry
‘Young Girl at a Window’, ‘Over the Hill’, ‘Summer’s End’, ‘The Conversation’, ‘Cock Crow’,
‘Amy Caroline’, ‘Canberra Morning’The Collected Works of an Australian Literary Luminary Since the publication of her first book in 1944, Rosemary Dobson has built a reputation as one of Australia’s most important poets. This volume celebrates her long and distinguished career, bringing together a vast and striking body of work.
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Shafana and Aunt Sarrinah by Alana Valentine
Drama Buy From Amazon- HSC Year 12 Prescribed Texts
- Standard Module A
- Language, Identity and Culture
- Drama
What do you do when you profoundly disagree with someone you love? Wearing a hijab is a touchstone of religious identity, but it is also imbued with a complex array of historical and contemporary meanings. The cultural meaning of the hijab has become a wedge between generations. At the heart of Shafana and Aunt Sarrinah is the relationship between an aunt and her niece. Both devout Muslims, the younger woman wants to put on a headscarf, the older woman tries to dissuade her. For Aunt Sarrinah, the hijab represents a world from which she has escaped; for her niece, Shafana, it is a personal statement of renewed faith.
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Small Island by Andrea Levy
HSC Year 12 Buy From Amazon- HSC Year 12 Prescribed Texts
- Standard Module A
- Language, Identity and Culture
- Prose Fiction
It is 1948, and England is recovering from a war. But at 21 Nevern Street, London, the conflict has only just begun. Queenie Bligh s neighbours do not approve when she agrees to take in Jamaican lodgers, but Queenie doesn t know when her husband will return, or if he will come back at all. What else can she do? Gilbert Joseph was one of the several thousand Jamaican men who joined the RAF to fight against Hitler. Returning to England as a civilian he finds himself treated very differently. It s desperation that makes him remember a wartime friendship with Queenie and knock at her door. Gilbert s wife Hortense, too, had longed to leave Jamaica and start a better life in England. But when she joins him she is shocked to find London shabby, decrepit, and far from the golden city of her dreams. Even Gilbert is not the man she thought he was.
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Stasiland by Anna Funder
Close Study of Literature Buy From Amazon- HSC Year 12 Prescribed Texts
- Standard Module B
- Close Study of Literature
- Nonfiction
Truth can be stranger – and more fascinating – than fiction. Anna Funder tells extraordinary stories from the underbelly of the most perfected surveillance state of all time, the former East Germany. Funder meets Miriam, the sixteen-year-old who might have started World War III. She visits the regime’s cartographer, obsessed to this day with the Berlin Wall, then gets drunk with the legendary ‘Mik Jegger’ of the east, once declared by the authorities ‘no longer to exist’. And she finds spies and Stasi men, still loyal to the Firm as they wait for the next revolution. Stasiland is a lyrical, at times funny account of the courage some people found to withstand the dictatorship, and the consequences for those who collaborated. Funder explores the daily chaos and harsh beauty of Berlin, a place where some people are trying to remember, and others just as hard to forget. Stasiland is a brilliant debut by a prodigiously gifted writer.
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Summer of the Seventeenth Doll by Ray Lawler
Drama Buy From Amazon- HSC Year 12 Prescribed Texts
- Standard Module A
- Language, Identity and Culture
- Drama
Ray Lawler’s revised script (2012) of his (and Australia’s) most famous play, in which two larrikin cane cutters and their women awaken to middle-age. The impact of The Doll cannot be overstated. Its success both here and abroad was quickly recognised as a defining moment in Australian theatre history.
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The Boy Behind the Curtain by Tim Winton
Common Module Buy From Amazon- HSC Year 12 Prescribed Texts
- Common Module: English Standard, English Advanced and English Studies
- Texts and Human Experiences
- Nonfiction
‘Havoc: A Life in Accidents’, ‘Betsy’, ‘Twice on Sundays’, ‘The Wait and the Flow’, ‘In the
Shadow of the Hospital’, ‘The Demon Shark’, ‘Barefoot in the Temple of Art’‘Being a copper’s son, I’ve always got one eye out for trouble. I can’t help it. But I don’t go looking for it anymore.’
In Tim Winton’s fiction, chaos shapes the lives of his characters. So too Winton’s own life. The extraordinarily powerful true stories that make up The Boy Behind the Curtain take us behind the scenes, revealing the accidents, both serendipitous and traumatic, that have influenced his view of life and fuelled his distinctive artistic vision.
By turns impassioned, funny, joyous, astonishing, this is Winton’s most personal book to date, an insight into the man who’s held us enthralled for three decades and helped us reshape our view of ourselves. Behind it all, from risk-taking youth to surprise-averse middle age, has been the crazy punt of staking everything on becoming a writer. -
The Crucible: A Play in Four Acts by Arthur Miller
Common Module Buy From Amazon- HSC Year 12 Prescribed Texts
- Common Module: English Standard, English Advanced and English Studies
- Texts and Human Experiences
- Drama
Arthur Miller’s classic parable of mass hysteria draws a chilling parallel between the Salem witch-hunt of 1692 – ‘one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history’ – and the McCarthyism which gripped America in the 1950s. The story of how the small community of Salem is stirred into madness by superstition, paranoia and malice, culminating in a violent climax, is a savage attack on the evils of mindless persecution and the terrifying power of false accusations.
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The Curious Incident of the Dog In the Night-time by Mark Haddon
Close Study of Literature Buy From Amazon- HSC Year 12 Prescribed Texts
- Standard Module B
- Close Study of Literature
- Prose Fiction
Christopher is 15 and lives in Swindon with his father. He has Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of autism. He is obsessed with maths, science and Sherlock Holmes but finds it hard to understand other people. When he discovers a dead dog on a neighbour’s lawn he decides to solve the mystery and write a detective thriller about it. As in all good detective stories, however, the more he unearths, the deeper the mystery gets – for both Christopher and the rest of his family.
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The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
Common Module Buy From Amazon- HSC Year 12 Prescribed Texts
- Common Module: English Standard, English Advanced and English Studies
- Texts and Human Experiences
- Drama
An improved, larger-format edition of the Cambridge School Shakespeare plays, extensively rewritten, expanded and produced in an attractive new design. An active approach to classroom Shakespeare enables students to inhabit Shakespeare’s imaginative world in accessible and creative ways. Students are encouraged to share Shakespeare’s love of language, interest in character and sense of theatre. Substantially revised and extended in full colour, classroom activities are thematically organised in distinctive ‘Stagecraft’, ‘Write about it’, ‘Language in the play’, ‘Characters’ and ‘Themes’ features. Extended glossaries are aligned with the play text for easy reference. Expanded endnotes include extensive essay-writing guidance for ‘The Merchant of Venice’ and Shakespeare. Includes rich, exciting colour photos of performances of ‘The Merchant of Venice’ from around the world.
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The Penguin Henry Lawson Short Stories by Henry Lawson
HSC Year 12 Buy From Amazon- HSC ear 12 Prescribed Texts
- Standard Module A
- Language, Identity and Culture
- Prose Fiction
‘The Drover’s Wife’, ‘The Union Buries Its Dead’, ‘Shooting the Moon’, ‘Our Pipes’, ‘The
Loaded Dog’One of the great observers of Australian life, Henry Lawson has become part of the Australian national psyche, and his short stories and verse have come to affect how Australian’s view their country. Yet at his best Lawson transcends even the very bush, the very outback, the very up-country, the very pub or selector’s hut he conveys with such brevity and acuity- he makes specific places universal.
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Unpolished Gem by Alice Pung
HSC Year 12 Buy From Amazon- HSC Year 12 Prescribed Texts
- Standard Module A
- Language, Identity and Culture
- Nonfiction
This story does not begin on a boat. Nor does it contain any wild swans or falling leaves.
In a wonderland called Footscray, a girl named Alice and her Chinese-Cambodian family pursue the Australian Dream – Asian style. Armed with an ocker accent, Alice dives head-first into schooling, romance and the getting of wisdom. Her mother becomes an Aussie battler – an outworker, that is. Her father embraces the miracle of franchising and opens an electrical-appliance store. And every day her grandmother blesses Father Government for giving old people money.
