OCR A Level English Literature H472

Complete Specification — A* Master Notes

Current list rule: This file uses the Component 01 Shakespeare list in force for first A-level assessment in 2027.

Assessment Map

Component 01 — Drama and Poetry Pre-1900

• 2h30
• 60 marks
• 40%
• closed text

Section 1:

• one Shakespeare play

Section 2:

• one pre-1900 drama text
• one pre-1900 poetry text

Component 02 — Comparative and Contextual Study

• 2h30
• 60 marks
• 40%
• closed text

Choose one topic area:

• American Literature 1880–1940
• The Gothic
• Dystopia
• Women in Literature
• The Immigrant Experience

Study at least two whole texts, with at least one from the core set-text list.

Component 03 — Literature Post-1900

• NEA
• 40 marks
• 20%

Study three post-1900 texts:

• prose
• poetry
• drama
• at least one first published/performed post-2000
• no texts in translation

Tasks:

1. close reading OR re-creative writing with commentary
2. comparative essay

OCR A* LITERARY METHOD

AO1

Construct a clear, coherent literary argument.

A*:

• sustained thesis;
• precise terminology;
• embedded references;
• clear conceptual vocabulary.

AO2

Analyse methods:

• form;
• structure;
• language.

For drama:

• stagecraft;
• entrances/exits;
• proxemics;
• dramatic irony;
• audience positioning.

For poetry:

• metre;
• rhyme;
• stanza;
• caesura;
• enjambment;
• sound pattern.

For prose:

• narrative perspective;
• focalisation;
• chronology;
• free indirect discourse;
• symbolism.

AO3

Context should explain textual choices.

AO4

Connections across texts:

• literary tradition;
• genre;
• period;
• theme;
• method.

AO5

Interpretations:

• critics;
• competing readings;
• performance;
• theoretical approaches.

COMPONENT 01 — SHAKESPEARE

Choose ONE:

• King Lear
• Hamlet
• Othello
• Richard III
• The Tempest
• The Taming of the Shrew

King Lear

Core Themes

• kingship;
• authority;
• family;
• ageing;
• madness;
• nature;
• justice;
• suffering.

Lear

A* debate: Does suffering produce genuine moral insight or only belated recognition?

Gloucester Parallel Plot

Mirrors Lear through:

• blindness;
• misjudgement;
• filial betrayal.

Fool

Functions:

• truth-teller;
• licensed critic;
• dramatic counterpoint.

Form

Tragedy: the collapse of political and familial order occurs together.

Hamlet

Themes:

• revenge;
• mortality;
• uncertainty;
• performance;
• surveillance;
• corruption.

Hamlet

Interpretations:

• intellectual paralysis;
• ethical hesitation;
• strategic delay;
• melancholia.

Metatheatre

The play-within-a-play foregrounds:

• performance;
• truth;
• interpretation.

A*: analyse how theatrical form itself becomes a method of knowing.

Othello

Themes:

• jealousy;
• race;
• love;
• reputation;
• misogyny;
• deception.

Language

Track Othello's movement from rhetorical control toward fractured jealousy.

Iago

Dramatic irony gives audience privileged knowledge.

A* debate: individual villainy vs social structures that make his manipulation credible.

Richard III

Themes:

• legitimacy;
• performance;
• tyranny;
• providence;
• disability representation;
• propaganda.

Richard controls audience through direct address and theatrical charisma.

A*: consider relationship between Tudor historiography and Shakespeare's dramatic complexity.

The Tempest

Themes:

• power;
• colonialism;
• freedom;
• art;
• forgiveness;
• mastery.

Prospero

Readings:

• benevolent ruler;
• authoritarian controller;
• artist/director.

Caliban

Postcolonial readings question ownership, language and conquest.

Form

Romance structure moves from conflict toward reconciliation.

The Taming of the Shrew

Themes:

• gender;
• marriage;
• economics;
• performance;
• power.

A*: Katherine's final speech should be evaluated as:

• submission;
• irony;
• strategic adaptation;
• metatheatrical performance.

COMPONENT 01 — PRE-1900 DRAMA

Choose ONE:

• Marlowe — Edward II
• Webster — The Duchess of Malfi
• Goldsmith — She Stoops to Conquer
• Ibsen — A Doll's House
• Wilde — An Ideal Husband

Edward II

Themes:

• kingship;
• sexuality;
• favourites;
• aristocratic power;
• legitimacy.

A*: distinguish political critique from modern identity categories imposed retrospectively.

The Duchess of Malfi

Themes:

• patriarchy;
• corruption;
• sexuality;
• class;
• death.

Duchess: private desire challenges dynastic control.

Webster's stage imagery produces a world of surveillance and decay.

She Stoops to Conquer

Themes:

• class;
• courtship;
• social performance;
• mistaken identity.

Comedy exposes artificial manners through role-play.

A Doll's House

Themes:

• marriage;
• gender;
• money;
• law;
• selfhood.

Nora's transformation is encoded structurally through movement from performed domestic role toward independent decision.

An Ideal Husband

Themes:

• public reputation;
• private morality;
• marriage;
• political hypocrisy.

Wilde uses epigram and comedy to test absolutist morality.

COMPONENT 01 — PRE-1900 POETRY

Choose ONE:

• Chaucer — The Merchant's Prologue and Tale
• Milton — Paradise Lost Books 9 & 10
• Coleridge — Selected Poems
• Tennyson — Maud
• Christina Rossetti — Selected Poems

Chaucer

Themes:

• marriage;
• gender;
• authority;
• sexuality;
• fabliau;
• social satire.

A*: distinguish narrator, pilgrim voice and Chaucerian irony.

Paradise Lost 9 & 10

Themes:

• temptation;
• free will;
• gender;
• obedience;
• fall;
• blame.

Form: blank verse, epic simile, invocation, elevated syntax.

A* debate: Eve as source of fall vs rational agent within patriarchal hierarchy.

Coleridge

Study:

• Romantic imagination;
• nature;
• supernatural;
• guilt;
• isolation.

Tennyson's Maud

Form: monodrama / sequence.

Themes:

• unstable psyche;
• love;
• class;
• war;
• masculinity.

Rossetti

Themes:

• desire;
• renunciation;
• faith;
• women;
• death;
• temptation.

Analyse:

• devotional tradition;
• symbolism;
• lyric form.

COMPONENT 02 — COMPARATIVE AND CONTEXTUAL STUDY

OCR rewards:

• unseen extract analysis;
• comparative contextual essay.

A*: prepare the genre/topic as a tradition, not only two novels.

Topic 1 — American Literature 1880–1940

Core options:

• Fitzgerald — The Great Gatsby
• Steinbeck — The Grapes of Wrath

Contextual Field

• industrialisation;
• immigration;
• race;
• class;
• capitalism;
• American Dream;
• modernity;
• Depression.

Great Gatsby

Themes:

• class;
• desire;
• reinvention;
• wealth;
• memory.

Methods: Nick's partial narration, symbolism, temporal reconstruction.

Grapes of Wrath

Themes:

• poverty;
• migration;
• family;
• capitalism;
• collective action.

Form: Joad narrative alternates with intercalary chapters, expanding private suffering into social critique.

Topic 2 — The Gothic

Core:

• Angela Carter — The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories
• Bram Stoker — Dracula

Gothic Conventions

• transgression;
• uncanny;
• sublime;
• imprisonment;
• monstrosity;
• taboo;
• unstable boundaries;
• sexuality.

Dracula

Form: epistolary assemblage creates multiple competing documents.

Themes:

• foreignness;
• sexuality;
• modernity;
• degeneration;
• gender.

Bloody Chamber

Revisionist Gothic:

• rewrites fairy tale;
• exposes patriarchal violence;
• female desire/agency;
• metafictional awareness.

A*: compare how Carter inherits and subverts Gothic conventions.

Topic 3 — Dystopia

Core:

• Atwood — The Handmaid's Tale
• Orwell — Nineteen Eighty-Four

Dystopian Conventions

• authoritarian control;
• surveillance;
• language manipulation;
• memory;
• resistance;
• restricted sexuality;
• distorted history.

Handmaid's Tale

Methods: fragmented first-person narrative; reconstruction; Historical Notes destabilise authority.

Nineteen Eighty-Four

Methods: limited focalisation; Newspeak; doublethink; documentary appendix.

A*: dystopia usually extrapolates from existing tendencies rather than predicts literally.

Topic 4 — Women in Literature

Core:

• Austen — Sense and Sensibility
• Woolf — Mrs Dalloway

Contextual Themes

• marriage;
• property;
• gender;
• work;
• public/private space;
• female voice;
• social expectation.

Sense and Sensibility

Elinor/Marianne provide competing models of emotional expression.

Free indirect style creates nuanced judgement rather than simple endorsement.

Mrs Dalloway

Modernist stream of consciousness connects:

• gender;
• class;
• trauma;
• public/private self.

A*: formal experimentation is central to representation of women's consciousness.

Topic 5 — The Immigrant Experience

Core:

• Mohsin Hamid — The Reluctant Fundamentalist
• Henry Roth — Call It Sleep

Themes

• migration;
• belonging;
• language;
• assimilation;
• racism;
• identity;
• home;
• cultural hybridity.

Reluctant Fundamentalist

Dramatic monologue and unnamed American listener create interpretive uncertainty.

Call It Sleep

Multilingual urban experience and child focalisation represent dislocation.

A*: analyse how form makes cultural translation visible.

COMPONENT 02 — UNSEEN EXTRACT

Approach:

1. identify genre conventions;
2. locate extract within topic tradition;
3. analyse form/structure/language;
4. infer contextual tensions;
5. avoid guessing author biography.

A*:

“The passage mobilises recognisable Gothic conventions but unsettles them by locating threat within domestic intimacy rather than an external monster.”

COMPONENT 03 — LITERATURE POST-1900

Requirements:

• one prose;
• one poetry;
• one drama;
• all post-1900;
• one post-2000;
• no translation.

Task 1

Either:

• close reading OR
• re-creative writing + commentary.

Task 2

Comparative essay using two texts.

Close Reading

Choose a passage/poem that supports:

• close method analysis;
• significance within whole text;
• context;
• interpretations.

Re-Creative Writing

Must demonstrate literary understanding, not merely creative skill.

Commentary explains:

• perspective;
• diction;
• syntax;
• imagery;
• structural imitation/transformation.

Comparative Essay

A* structure:

• conceptual thesis;
• integrated comparison;
• close analysis;
• contextual distinctions;
• competing readings.

CRITICAL APPROACHES

Feminist

Power, gender, agency, representation.

Marxist

Class, ideology, labour, property.

Psychoanalytic

Desire, repression, doubling.

Postcolonial

Empire, othering, hybridity, language.

Ecocritical

Human/nature relationships.

Queer

Normative sexuality, performativity, instability.

Use selectively.

A* COMPARISON

Bad: Text A paragraph → Text B paragraph.

Better:

“Both writers use domestic spaces to dramatise power, but while Ibsen turns the bourgeois home into a restrictive theatrical set, Woolf dissolves physical boundaries through free indirect consciousness…”

COMMON OCR LOST MARKS

• treating closed-book exam as quotation-memory contest;
• context bolted on;
• Shakespeare passage not linked to whole play;
• critics named without engagement;
• Component 02 essay only compares two studied texts and ignores wider genre context;
• Gothic reduced to “scary”;
• dystopia treated as science fiction prediction only;
• unseen extract described rather than analysed;
• NEA re-creative task lacks stylistic rationale;
• comparative essay split into two separate mini essays.