English Literature

Assessment

Component 1: Drama and Poetry Prose pre-1900 (Closed Text Examination) - 40% of total A Level marks Exam: 2 hours 30 minutes One question in two parts about your chosen Shakespeare play (1 hour 15 minutes) and one of six broad, non-text specific questions in which one pre-1900 drama text and one pre-1900 poetry text are compared (1 hour 15 minutes). Section A: Marlowe's Edward II’, Webster's The Duchess of Malfi’, Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer, Ibsen's A Doll’s House or Wilde's ‘An Ideal Husband’. Section B: Chaucer's The Merchant’s Prologue and Tale, Milton's Paradise Lost Books 9 and 10’, Coleridge's Selected poems’, Tennyson's Maud’ or Rossetti ‘Selected poems’. Component 2: Comparative and Contextual Study (Closed Text Examination) - 40% of total A Level marks Exam: 2 hours 30 minutes One compulsory question on an unseen extract from your chosen topic (1 hour 15 minutes) and one question from a choice of three which is a comparison of your two chosen texts from that topic (1 hour 15 minutes). Section A: American Literature 1880-1940, The Gothic, Dystopia, Women in Literature or The Immigrant Experience. Section B: Fitzgerald ‘The Great Gatsby’, Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath’, Stoker ‘Dracula’, Carter ‘The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories’, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four’, Atwood ‘The Handmaid’s Tale, Austen's Sense and Sensibility’, Woolf's Mrs Dalloway’, Roth ‘Call It Sleep’ or Hamid ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’. Component 3: Literature post-1900 (Coursework Folder) - 20% of total A Level marks Coursework: 3000 words maximum One piece that is either close analysis or re-creative writing with a critical commentary and one comparison of two texts. Students are required to study three literary texts. The three texts must include one prose text, one poetry text and one drama text. The texts must have been first published or performed in 1900 or later and at least one of these texts must have been published or performed in 2000 or later.