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EnglandEnglish LiteratureQuick questions
Component 02: Comparative and contextual study
Quick questions on The Gothic: conventions, contexts and set texts - OCR A-Level English Literature
7short Q&A pairs drawn directly from our worked dot-point answer. For full context and worked exam questions, read the parent dot-point page.
What is the conventions of the Gothic?Show answer
The Gothic works through a recognisable repertoire. Hold these as a frame you apply, not a list you recite.
What are the contexts the Gothic encodes?Show answer
The Gothic's terrors are rarely just terrors; they encode the fears of the society that imagines them. This is the high-mark move and the heart of AO3 for the topic. The genre's anxieties shift with its periods: fears about science and the limits of knowledge, about sexuality and the body, about class and inheritance, about empire and the foreign, and about the decline of religious certainty. Decoding a monster or a haunted space through the relevant anxiety is what lifts analysis above the literal.
What is a model context-led Gothic point?Show answer
"The text's monster is less a creature than a cultural fear made visible. Constructed through imagery of contamination and a narrative that approaches it only obliquely, the threat embodies its period's anxiety about a force, scientific, sexual or foreign, that the society cannot control and dare not name directly. Read this way, the horror of confronting the monster is the horror of confronting the repressed fear it stands for, and the supernatural becomes a coded account of its own moment's dread."
What is a weak point upgraded?Show answer
A literal answer might write "The monster is scary and kills people, which makes the book Gothic." Upgraded, it becomes conceptual: the monster, built through imagery of contamination and an oblique narrative, encodes the period's fear of an uncontrollable force, so the horror is the return of a repressed cultural anxiety.
What is q1?Show answer
What is the difference between terror and horror in the Gothic? [2 marks]
What is q2?Show answer
What is the high-mark move when analysing a Gothic monster? [2 marks]
What is q3?Show answer
Compare how your two Gothic texts present transgression and its consequences, exploring the significance of contexts. [30 marks]
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