English Literature

Assessment

The course encourages students to respond with knowledge and understanding to a variety of literary texts, of different genres and from different centuries. For the A level, students will study a range of poetry, prose and drama texts and analyse a further two texts independently against a background of critical theory. The theme of the first exam will be Aspects of Tragedy and the second exam will focus on Elements of Political and Social Protest Writing. In addition to this, students will be required to write two pieces of coursework on a poetry collection and prose text. A love of reading and analysing texts is central to the course as over the two years students will have studied a minimum of 8 substantial texts including: - 2 from each of the genres of poetry, prose and drama - 3 pre-1900 texts including 1 Shakespeare play - 1 text first written or performed post-2000 In addition, students will respond to an unseen text in the examination.