English Literature (9675)

12 sections available · 48 chapters available

Free English Literature (9675) study notes for Oxford AQA International A-level students. Each chapter covers a key topic with examples and practice prompts you can continue inside the thinka app.

Aspects of dramatic tragedy

  • William Shakespeare - King Lear

Unit 1 Section A: Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy

  • William Shakespeare - Othello

  • William Shakespeare - King Lear

  • William Shakespeare - Hamlet

  • Christopher Marlowe - Doctor Faustus (B text)

  • Thomas Middleton - The Changeling (from June 2028)

  • John Webster - The Duchess of Malfi

Place in literary texts

    Elements of crime and mystery In Elements

      Unit 1 Section B: Later dramatic tragedies

      • Arthur Miller - Death of a Salesman

      • Tennessee Williams - A Streetcar Named Desire

      • Henrik Ibsen - Hedda Gabler

      • Samuel Beckett - Waiting for Godot

      • Brian Friel - Translations

      • Wole Soyinka - Death and the King’s Horseman (from June 2028)

      • Caryl Churchill - Top Girls (from June 2028)

      Literary representations

        Unit 2 Section A: Place in prose texts

        • Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness

        • F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby

        • Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Americanah

        • Andrea Levy - Small Island

        • Aravind Adiga - Last Man in Tower

        • Kazuo Ishiguro - Remains of the Day

        • Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights (from June 2028)

        • Elif Shafak - The Island of Missing Trees (from June 2028)

        Unit 2 Section B: Place in poetry

        • William Wordsworth selection: Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, Nutting, A Narrow Girdle of Rough Stones and Crags, Michael, Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, Yarrow Unvisited, Daffodils, Elegaic Stanzas.

        • Robert Frost selection: Mending Wall, The Black Cottage, After Apple-Picking, The Wood-Pile, The Road Not Taken, Birches, “Out, Out –”, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, A Brook in the City, On Looking Up by Chance at the Constellation, Desert Places, An Unstamped Letter in Our Rural Mailbox.

        • Thomas Hardy selection: Neutral Tones, At an Inn, At a Lunar Eclipse, To an Unborn Pauper Child, The Darkling Thrush, The Self-Unseeing, Channel Firing, The Convergence of the Twain, The Going, After a Journey, Beeny Cliff, At Castle Boterel, Places, The Oxen, In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’.

        • Seamus Heaney selection: Mid-Term Break, Personal Helicon, The Peninsular, Requiem for the Croppies, Bogland, Anahorish, A New Song, The Tollund Man, Westering, North, Bog Queen, The Graubelle Man, Punishment, Act of Union, The Toome Road.

        • Imtiaz Dharker selection (from June 2028): The Haunted House, At the Lahore Karhai, Number 106, Waiting for Crossrail, Rapt, The City, Speech Balloon, London Bells, Meanwhile at the Irani Bakery, Passport Photo, Midnight Christmas Eve, Talisman, Digging up the Bones, Leaving Fingerprints, Bombil Bumia Bummalo.

        • Kathleen Jamie selection (from June 2028): The Sea House, Mr and Mrs Scotland are Dead, The Wishing Tree, Water Day, The Cave of the Fish, Pipistrelles, The Tree House, Bosegran, Forget it, Lochan, Hackit, The Galilean Moons, Moon, Glacial, The Hinds.

        Unit 3: Crime and mystery in drama and poetry

        • William Shakespeare - Macbeth

        • Samuel Taylor Coleridge - The Rime of Ancient Mariner

        • Robert Browning - The Laboratory, My Last Duchess, Porphyria’s Lover, The Patriot, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, The Confessional, Time’s Revenges, Count Gismond

        Unit 3: Crime and mystery in prose

        • Charles Dickens - Oliver Twist

        • Edgar Allan Poe - The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Man of the Crowd, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Black Cat, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Purloined Letter, The Fall of the House of Usher

        • Robert Louis Stevenson - Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Body Snatcher, Markheim, A Lodging for the Night

        • Agatha Christie - The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

        • Qiu Xiaolong - Death of a Red Heroine

        • Kate Atkinson - When Will There be Good News?

        Unit 4: Literary representations

        • Representations of childhood

        • Representations of war

        • Representations of women/men

        • Representations of race/class/culture

        Skills: Essay and unseen response

        • Passage-based response on Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy (Unit 1 Section A)

        • Open-book essay: selecting and using quotation (Unit 2)

        • Closed-book comparative essay on crime and mystery texts (Unit 3)

        • Unseen prose analysis, including literary non-fiction (Unit 4a Section A)

        • Unseen poetry analysis (Unit 4a Section B)

        • Genre, significance and context in argument (AO1)

        • Authorial methods and literary terminology (AO2, AO3)

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