AQA A-Level English Literature A Component 2: Texts in shared contexts overview quiz quiz

WWI and its aftermath, and Modern times (1945 to the present)

Love through the ages, and the Crime writing element of the specification

The Gothic tradition, paired with the literature of The pastoral

Tragedy as a dramatic genre, set against the genre of Comedy

All of the set texts in the grouping happen to have been written by exactly the same single named author across their careers

Texts written in and around a shared historical moment form a conversation and respond to common pressures

The texts share the same plot

The texts must all be poems

AO1 (informed, personal and creative response)

AO2 (analysis of the writers' methods)

AO3 (context)

AO5 (differing critical interpretations)

Only the years of active fighting in the trenches on the Western Front and nothing else

The peace treaties signed at the close of the conflict, and nothing at all whatsoever beyond those documents

A single named battle and its immediate outcome on that one stretch of the front line

The war's long consequences: bereavement, trauma, remembrance and the questioning of authority

Decolonisation and migration

The invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century

The Norman Conquest of England in the year 1066

The English Civil War of the seventeenth century

Decide which single genre out of the three is ultimately the most powerful and moving

Compare how each form shapes meaning, grounded in the shared concerns of the context

Only ever compare texts that happen to belong to one and the same literary genre

Compare the texts purely by the total number of pages that each of them runs to

One long self-contained section devoted to each text in turn, dealt with completely separately

A summary of every text's plot

A conceptualised, idea-led comparison that moves between texts within each paragraph

A plain chronological list of the events as they happen across the texts

Recent texts have only one single agreed meaning that every critic accepts without dispute

Recent texts simply cannot be interpreted at all because not enough time has yet passed

AO5 does not apply in any way to recent texts and is reserved only for older works

Their meanings are still contested, so plural interpretations are easy to engage with

Irony against patriotic propaganda and the elegiac mode

Division of the work into numbered chapters

Stage directions guiding the actors and the staging

The technique of free indirect discourse in prose fiction

Stating it perfectly accurately, but parking it in its own separate background paragraph

Using it to change how a specific moment in the text reads

Listing as many accurate historical facts as you possibly can

Putting all of it neatly in the introduction at the very start

Two (AO1 and AO2)

Three (AO1, AO2, AO3)

All five (AO1 to AO5)

Four

Always a fully reliable, all-knowing omniscient third-person narrator throughout

No narrating voice present in the text at all, of any kind whatsoever

Only ever sustained second-person address aimed directly at the reader

Unreliable or plural narration and non-linear structure