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Specifications and Assessment Objectives

AQA English Literature A A2 Unit 3 Reading for Meaning: Love through the Ages Examination

Content

Candidates should read at least three texts in order to prepare for a paper which will contain unprepared passages for close study, comparison and critical commentary.

The topic for this unit is Love Through the Ages. ‘Love’ will include romantic love but will not be restricted to that...

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

Studying For The Exam

The title of this AQA A2 Unit is Reading for Meaning – Love through the Ages. It is worth taking a moment to consider the significance of the title. What are your thoughts? What ‘meaning’ exactly is the exam asking you to elicit? Is your interpretation of what a text means necessarily the same as someone else’s?

“Meaning” is created when language works to signify a response in...

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

In this examination you are required to answer two questions. There is no choice and each question carries the same number of marks – 40 for each question, so obviously you need to give them equal time and attention.

You must familiarise yourself fully with what is required of you because if you do not follow the instructions correctly you will lose marks, no matter how brilliant your wrong answer is.

So,...

Austen is well known for her mastery of free indirect discourse, her omniscient third person narration and her heavy use of irony. Northanger Abbey demonstrates all of these things, but is evidently the work of a less experienced author, despite its posthumous publication date. This is partly seen in the more intrusive authorial voice, and the clear acknowledgment of the fictional nature of the ‘fable’. Northanger Abbey is also the most intentionally...

The novel takes place across three locations: Fullerton, Bath and Northanger Abbey itself. Fullerton, her childhood home, is the provincial setting which cannot provide an appropriate hero for Catherine to be a heroine – so she must leave.

As the eponymous location, the Abbey looms large in the reader’s mind, but is in fact the setting for less than half of the novel. It is significant in that it represents the major Gothic element of the novel,...

Growing Up

Northanger Abbey is not a ‘Bildungsroman’ as such, although the first chapter describing Catherine’s early years does begin to approach one. It does, however, deal with the theme of growing up and reaching adulthood far more than other Austen novels, featuring a much younger heroine with far less worldly experience. The Catherine who goes to Bath, despite her amiability, is essentially a naive and unworldly girl. It is noticeable that early...

Catherine Morland

Catherine is not a typical Gothic heroine – as Austen makes clear from the start. ‘No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine.’ She isn’t an orphan, she’s plain rather than pretty, she’s a tomboy, she isn’t clever, she isn’t musical and she isn’t artistic.  The first three make her an untypical Gothic heroine, and the last three make her an untypical romantic...

Satire is a genre, which mocks vices and follies with the intent of making a social point, and improving its target by shaming people into changing. A parody is an imitation of a specific work or type of work, with satirical or ironic intent, but aimed at the art form or text type which it imitates. Northanger Abbey is both a parody (of Gothic texts in general and The Mysteries of Udolpho in particular) and a satire...

The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe

An influential and immensely popular Gothic novel published in 1794, The Mysteries of Udolpho is specifically and repeatedly referenced in Northanger Abbey as one of the main influences on Catherine Morland’s impressionable imagination. The Mysteries of Udolpho features an orphan who is imprisoned by her guardian aunt’s husband, an Italian pirate, in an attempt to force her to marry his friend, rather than the...

1984 Film Artwork by Shepard Fairey

Areas to focus on in Part 3:

• Chapter 1 | Winston’s imprisonment in the Ministry of Love; its description at the opening of the chapter and its contrast with conventional images of love; the lack of emotion Winston shows in relation to his mother now; Winston’s love for Julia stated as fact and then it disappears.
• Chapter 2 | Winston clings to O’Brien; Winston’s love for O’Brien; the death of love in Winston; the betrayal by Julia.
• Chapter 3 | Love...

1984 Film Artwork by Shepard Fairey

Areas on which to focus in Part 2:

• Chapter 1 | Julia’s first message to Winston and his response; their meeting in the crowd at Victory Square.
• Chapter 2 | Winston and Julia meet and consummate their relationship.
• Chapter 3 | Winston and Julia meet several times; the discussion of Winston’s temptation to murder to ideologically orthodox wife, Katharine.
• Chapter 4 | Winston’s plans to use Mr Charrington’s shop as a place for him and Julia to meet; the...

1984 Film Artwork by Shepard Fairey

Love and Relationships in 1984

1984 is commonly studied at A Level and is often cited as a fine modern example of dystopian fiction. At the heart of the narrative lies a relationship between two characters: the protagonist, Winston Smith and his girlfriend and accomplice, known simply as Julia: this has both thematic and symbolic significance. In addition, Winston’s relationship with his mother, his colleagues, and O’Brien, and the relationship between the present and the past, are important, as well as...

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

Symptoms of Love

Robert Graves 1895-1985

To end this wider reading resource, here is a poem by Robert Graves, more famously known for his First World War poetry, where love, romantic love in this case, is treated as an illness.

‘Love is a universal migraine,
A bright stain on the vision
Blotting out reason.

Symptoms of true love
Are leanness, jealousy,
Laggard dawns;

Are omens and nightmares -
Listening...

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

On Chesil Beach

Ian McEwan 1948-

All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them. Love and patience – if only he had had them both at once – would surely have seen them both through. And then what unborn children might have had their chances, what young girl with an Alice band might have become his loved familiar? This is how...

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

The First Tooth

Mary Lamb 1764-1847

Sister:
Through the house what busy joy,
Just because the infant boy
Has a tiny tooth to show!
I have got a double row,
All as white and all as small;
Yet no one cares for mine at all.
He can say but half a word,
Yet that single sound’s preferred
To all the words that I can say
In the longest summer day.
He cannot walk, yet if he put
With mimic motion out his foot,
As if...

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

The Deserter

Winifred M. Letts 1882-1972

There was a man, — don’t mind his name,
Whom Fear had dogged by night and day.
He could not face the German guns
And so he turned and ran away.
Just that - he turned and ran away,
But who can judge him, you or I ?
God makes a man of flesh and blood
Who yearns to live and not to die.
And this man when he feared to die
Was scared as any frightened child,
His knees were...

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

The Soldier

Rupert Brooke 1887-1915

If I should die, think only this of me:
  That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
  In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
  Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
  Washed by the rivers, blest by the suns of home.
And...

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

A Lady of Letters

Alan Bennett 1934-

Bennett is famous for his dramatic monologues – short sketches spoken by a single character that with wry humour reveal aspects of humanity and society. In A Lady of Letters we see through Bennett’s creation of the character of Irene Ruddock, a middle-aged and lonely woman, what can occur when seemingly harmless actions lead to things getting out of hand.

I ought to be...

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

Sonnet 130

William Shakespeare 1564-1616

Shakespeare, in his numerous sonnets, has written about different types of love, and shows an original, somewhat subversive view of romantic love, devoid of the usual romantic comparisons. In fact in Sonnet 130 he mocks the conventional language of love. How does the language used show that he is mocking conventional notions of beauty? Consider also aspects of...

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

Measure for Measure

William Shakespeare 1564-1616

The play Measure for Measure deals with the love between siblings. An old law has been reinstated which states that the penalty for pre-marital sex is death. Claudio has made his girlfriend pregnant and has been arrested and sentenced to death. He has a sister, Isabella, who is about to become a nun, whom he asks to plead for his life to the new ruler, Angelo....

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

Hamlet

William Shakespeare 1564-1616

In the play, Hamlet, the protagonist, Prince Hamlet’s, anger towards his mother – too suddenly and recently married, he believes, to his uncle, now King Claudius, following the death of his father – spills out in the famous ‘bedroom scene’ where Hamlet confronts and berates his mother. This time we have mother and son, not father and daughter as in King Lear....

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

Othello

William Shakespeare 1565-1616

Othello is a very suitable play for the examination of several types of love. Because of the link with Lear, it would be a good idea to start an exploration of the different types of love dealt with in Lear by once more looking at the parent / child bond. Desdemona, a high class Venetian white woman has married, without her father’s knowledge, Othello, a black general of...

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

King Lear

William Shakespeare 1564-1616

Still on the theme of love between parent and child, in the stage play King Lear, Shakespeare presents this type of love, a theme that exists in several other of his plays. In fact Shakespeare’s plays and poetry merit close examination as every form of human love is explored. In King Lear, the audience witnesses the mental breakdown of an old man, Lear himself, who...

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

Equus

Peter Shaffer 1926-

This is an extract from the play Equus by Peter Shaffer, written in 1973. Alan, a young man who has an obsession with horses and has blinded six of them, is being treated by Dysart, a psychiatrist. In this extract Alan’s mother, Dora Strang, has arrived. Her visit is not welcome. She feels she is being blamed for how her son is behaving. This of course is an age-old theme –...

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

Great Expectations

Charles Dickens 1812-1870

Miss Havisham has adopted a girl, Estella, to avenge the heartache she suffers at having been jilted by her fiancé. However, though Miss Havisham has contrived to bring Estella up in a way that has rendered her heartless, she expects her to love her adoptive mother. Pip is the narrator of this novel and he falls hopelessly in love with Estella, who, in this extract,...

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

Enduring Love

Ian McEwan 1948-

This passage is taken from Ian McEwan’s novel Enduring Love of 1997. The title itself here is interesting because of its ambiguity. At first glance the title suggests a love which lasts. It may then strike you that the word ‘enduring’ here could also be taken to mean putting up with love, an unwelcome or unreciprocated love. That ambiguity works well here for McEwan, as...

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

Mid-Term Break

Seamus Heaney 1939-

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o’clock our neighbors drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying—
He had always taken funerals in his stride—
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake...

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

Your Last Drive

Thomas Hardy

Here by the moorway you returned,
And saw the borough lights ahead
That lit your face—all undiscerned
To be in a week the face of the dead,
And you told of the charm of that haloed view
That never again would beam on you.

And on your left you passed the spot
Where eight days later you were to lie,
And be spoken of as one who was not;
Beholding it with a cursory eye
As alien from...

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

The Going

Thomas Hardy 1840-928

Why did you give no hint that night
That quickly after the morrow’s dawn,
And calmly, as if indifferent quite,
You would close your term here, up and be gone
  Where I could not follow
  With wing of swallow
To gain one glimpse of you ever anon!

  Never to bid good-bye,
  Or lip me the softest call,
Or utter a wish for a word, while I
Saw morning harden upon the wall,...[ read full article ] »

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

The Waste Land

T. S. Eliot 1888-1965
Extract from A Game of Chess

When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said,
I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself.
HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME
Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart.
He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you
To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.
You have them all out. Lil, and get a nice set,
He said, I...

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

Some Suggestions

Poetry

• John Donne 1572–1631 The Good Morrow, Song, Woman’s Constancy, The Sun Rising, The Flea, A Valediction - Forbidding Mourning
• George Herbert 1593-1633 Death, Redemption, Easter Wings
• Andrew Marvell 1621-678 The Definition of Love, To His Coy Mistress
• Richard Lovelace 1618-1657 To Althea from Prison - Song
• Sir John Suckling 1609-1642 Love’s Clock, The Constant Lover
• Wordsworth...

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

Daunting as the requirements of this examination might seem when you consider the range and scope of it, your success will largely depend upon how successfully you can analyse, compare and discuss unseen texts form the three major literary genres of poetry, drama and prose. You will also need to read as widely as you can and begin doing so as soon as possible, all the time making links and connections about...

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

You will find below several extracts or entire pieces from plays, poetry and novels from different ages.  As you read and after you have read them all, try to make links between the texts as well as with other texts you have read and studied on the theme of love. To do well in your exam, you will need to use your wider reading in ways that will help inform your understanding of the unseen exam texts – and to...

A problematic section of the play in some ways where the themes are much closer to tragedy than comedy.

Scene 1

Contrast between Isabella’s expectations about her brother’s attitudes and the reality of prison and the fear of death!

Duke as Friar presents Claudio with the traditional Christian ‘consolation’ about death (a literature genre of the Renaissance AO4) which Claudio initially accepts with fortitude. However, Isabella’s hint that there could be a way of escape prompts Claudio’s vivid and emotional expression of his...

Why teach ‘Measure for Measure’?

Measure for Measure is certainly not the easiest of Shakespeare’s dramas nor is it probably one of the most popular choices when teachers are thinking about AS and A2 level specifications; however, the degree of challenge involved in teaching it is easily matched by the degree of satisfaction in teaching it when you have got to grips with this intriguing play. Students really do enjoy reading this play!

Currently, the play is a choice for teaching on several AS specifications and as a choice for...

Hamlet: tragic hero?

Hamlet is usually regarded as the finest of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and one of the greatest tragedies ever written; however, it is frequently defined as ‘tragedy’ with little or no reference to tragic tropes, either Greek, Renaissance or later theories of tragedy, or with insufficient consideration of other useful theoretical approaches.

The aim of this teaching guide is to trace Shakespeare’s development of his eponymous hero through the play looking at aspects of language, form and structure as well as genre,...

Hamlet: tragic hero?

Hamlet is usually regarded as the finest of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and one of the greatest tragedies ever written; however, it is frequently defined as ‘tragedy’ with little or no reference to tragic tropes, either Greek, Renaissance or later theories of tragedy, or with insufficient consideration of other useful theoretical approaches.

The aim of this teaching guide is to trace Shakespeare’s development of his eponymous hero through the play looking at aspects of language, form and structure as well as genre,...

Hamlet: tragic hero?

Hamlet is usually regarded as the finest of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and one of the greatest tragedies ever written; however, it is frequently defined as ‘tragedy’ with little or no reference to tragic tropes, either Greek, Renaissance or later theories of tragedy, or with insufficient consideration of other useful theoretical approaches.

The aim of this teaching guide is to trace Shakespeare’s development of his eponymous hero through the play looking at aspects of language, form and structure as well as genre,...

Hamlet: tragic hero?

Hamlet is usually regarded as the finest of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and one of the greatest tragedies ever written; however, it is frequently defined as ‘tragedy’ with little or no reference to tragic tropes, either Greek, Renaissance or later theories of tragedy, or with insufficient consideration of other useful theoretical approaches.

The aim of this teaching guide is to trace Shakespeare’s development of his eponymous hero through the play looking at aspects of language, form and structure as well as genre,...

Hamlet: tragic hero?

Hamlet is usually regarded as the finest of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and one of the greatest tragedies ever written; however, it is frequently defined as ‘tragedy’ with little or no reference to tragic tropes, either Greek, Renaissance or later theories of tragedy, or with insufficient consideration of other useful theoretical approaches.

The aim of this teaching guide is to trace Shakespeare’s development of his eponymous hero through the play looking at aspects of language, form and structure as well as genre,...

Although analysing a text at the level of narrative is a direct requirement of some English Literature courses, such as AQA’s LITB1, it is an analytical technique that can be quite generally applied across many texts – even non-fictional and media texts.

Associated Resources

A Guide to Teaching Othello

Click on the link below to download this resource.

Othello Guide Part 2 EnglishEdu.doc

Othello Guide Part 2 EnglishEdu.docx

Associated Resources

How to improve grades when writing for Othello

This EnglishEdu guide on Shakespeare’s popular A Level play, Othello, aims to supplement rather than replace other readily available Internet and printed material for the teaching of the play.

The guide explores the issues, themes and characters in the play that are particularly relevant to the current (2010) A Level Literature specifications. To add to the usefulness, and with an eye to the central AO requirement of close textual analysis of form, structure and...

Introduction

The tenth in the EnglishEdu series on ‘frameworks’ for A Level English Literature.

This guide explores how to analyse narrative viewpoint in novels, short stories or prose extracts in order to allow students access to the highest grades.

Narrative viewpoint: Atonement by Ian McEwan

The most straightforward way of demonstrating how to analyse a text closely in terms of narrative viewpoint is to exemplify it. The extract below is followed by a series of bullet points which demonstrate how to analyse closely using carefully...

Introduction

The fifteenth in the EnglishEdu series on ‘frameworks’ for A Level English Literature.

This guide explores how to analyse the genre of novels, short stories or prose extracts in order to allow students access to the highest grades.

Genre: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (gothic); Hamlet by William Shakespeare (tragedy); As You Like It by William Shakespeare (pastoral)

NB Whilst the EnglishEdu Literature Frameworks generally analyse novels, short stories or prose extracts, the specific nature of the tragic and pastoral genres...

Introduction

The fourteenth in the EnglishEdu series on ‘frameworks’ for A Level English Literature.

This guide explores how to help students analyse the context of novels, short stories or prose extracts in order to allow them access to the highest grades.

Context: On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

The most straightforward way of demonstrating how to analyse a text closely in terms of context is to exemplify it. The extract below is followed by a series of bullet points which demonstrate how to analyse closely using carefully chosen...

Introduction

The thirteenth in the EnglishEdu series on ‘frameworks’ for A Level English Literature.

This guide explores how to analyse the symbolism in novels, short stories or prose extracts in order to allow students access to the highest grades.

Symbolism: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

The most straightforward way of demonstrating how to closely analyse a text in terms of the theme above is to exemplify it. The extract below is followed by a series of bullet points which demonstrate how to analyse closely using carefully chosen...

Introduction

This is the twelfth in the EnglishEdu series on ‘frameworks’ for A Level English Literature.

This guide explores how to analyse the narrative presentation of time in novels, short stories or prose extracts in order to allow students access to the highest grades.

Time: The Time Machine by H G Wells

The most straightforward way of demonstrating how to closely analyse a text in terms of the theme above is to exemplify it. The extract below is followed by a series of bullet points which demonstrate how to analyse closely using...

Introduction

The eleventh in the EnglishEdu series on ‘frameworks’ for A Level English Literature.

This guide explores how to analyse how authors create a convincing sense of realism or ‘verisimilitude’ in novels, short stories or prose extracts.

An analysis at a level like this is capable of revealing the kind of subtle insights that allow students access to the highest grades.

Verisimilitude: Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

The most straightforward way of demonstrating how to analyse a text closely in terms of verisimilitude is...

Introduction to the Literary ‘Frameworks’ Guides

At EnglishEdu our wish is always to try to help you, the often stressed and overworked English teacher, with something that you will feel is both very useful and – where possible – very different from what might be found elsewhere, either on the Internet or in print.

All of the guides, schemes of work and classroom materials on EnglishEdu have been written and produced by experienced and well-respected English teachers.

The guides are based on their best experience of teaching...