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Literary Study
Quick questions on Genre and context in Literary Study: SQA Advanced Higher English
6short 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 treat genre as a set of conventions to analyse?Show answer
Each genre has conventions: prose fiction has narrative voice, focalisation and structure; poetry has form, metre and sound; drama has staging, dialogue and dramatic irony; prose non-fiction has argument, rhetoric and persona. Analyse how the writer uses, stretches or subverts these conventions. The interesting essays often turn on a convention being broken: a comedy that turns bleak, a sonnet that refuses to resolve.
What is bring in context that earns its place?Show answer
Context comes in four kinds: literary (movement, period, genre tradition), social (class, gender, power), historical (the events and conditions of the time) and cultural (beliefs, values, language varieties such as Scots). Use a contextual point only when it changes how you read a passage. The test is whether you can return immediately from the context to the text and read a technique more sharply because of it.
What is keep the text central?Show answer
However sophisticated your knowledge of genre and context, the marks come from close analysis of the text. Genre and context should occupy a minority of the essay, framing and deepening the textual analysis rather than crowding it out. A useful discipline is to follow every contextual or generic point with a piece of close analysis it has unlocked.
What is q1?Show answer
What is the difference between labelling a play a tragedy and analysing its tragic conventions? [2 marks]
What is q2?Show answer
Name the four kinds of context Advanced Higher recognises. [2 marks]
What is q3?Show answer
What is the test for whether a contextual point earns its place? [1 mark]
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