Quick questions on American Literature 1880 to 1940: concerns, contexts and set texts - OCR A-Level English Literature

The topic works through a set of recurring concerns. Hold these as a frame you apply.

This topic rewards real historical knowledge more than most, and that is the heart of AO3 for it. The period runs from the Gilded Age of industrial wealth and stark inequality, through the mass immigration that reshaped the nation, the 1920s Jazz Age, and into the Great Depression of the 1930s. Race (the aftermath of slavery, segregation, the Great Migration), class (new money against old) and region (the closing frontier, the rural and the urban) all bear directly on the literature. Reading a text's treatment of the Dream through the specific economic and social moment is what lifts analysis above slogan.

"The text exposes the American Dream as a promise the period's economy could not keep. Through a narrative that follows a striver's reach and fall, and imagery that gilds aspiration only to tarnish it, the text stages the gap between the ideal of self-made success and the era's hardening inequality. Grounded in the speculative excess and class division of its moment, the striver's ruin reads not as personal failure but as the Dream's structural betrayal of those it claims to include."

A slogan answer might write "This text shows that the American Dream does not always come true." Upgraded, it becomes historical: the striver's fall, narrated through tarnished imagery and grounded in the period's speculative inequality, exposes the Dream as structurally unavailable to those it claims to include.

Why is this topic unusually context-dependent? [2 marks]

What question should you ask of a text's treatment of the American Dream? [2 marks]

Compare how your two texts present the American Dream and its costs, exploring the significance of contexts. [30 marks]