AQA A-Level English Literature Revision
Explore AQA A-Level English Literature revision topics. Check the official specification for complete requirements for your exam year and route.
Course details
Assessment The assessment includes Paper 2; see the official specification for the full structure.
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Reviewed course guidance
Revision points, with the explanation beside them
Open a point to read what to know, how to use it in an assessment, a plain-language explanation and a self-check. Answers stay hidden until you choose to reveal them.
Options and source
Paper 2 shared-context option
- Option 2A: WW1 and its aftermath
- Option 2B: Modern times (1945 to present)
§3.2 Texts in shared contexts; students choose one of Option 2A or Option 2B.
Option 2B core prose text
- The Handmaid’s Tale
- Waterland
§3.2.1, Option 2B Section A core set-text prose alternatives.
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Topic group
Reviewed requirements
- Core
Scope: Core · Paper 2 shared-context option: Option 2B: Modern times (1945 to present) · Option 2B core prose text: The Handmaid’s Tale · 7712 §3.2 Option 2B, Modern times, core prose set text The Handmaid’s Tale: analyse how restricted narration shapes one reading of power (not whole-novel coverage).
Open revision guidance
What to know
- Use only for AQA 7712 students who selected Option 2B, Modern times, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale for Paper 2. The first-person narration makes the reader depend on Offred’s limited account; gaps and revisions matter because the regime controls public language, movement and social roles.
What to do in an assessment
- Trace a change in what the narrator can safely say, remember or infer, and connect that restriction to the social structure around her. Distinguish the narrator’s perspective from an all-knowing account of the fictional world. This is one interpretive route into the novel, not a substitute for knowledge of the whole text or a claim that every class selected it.
In plain language
The story makes restricted knowledge part of its form. Ask who can speak, what can be known, and what the narration leaves uncertain.
Self-check
Why should a reader distinguish Offred’s account from an objective overview?
Show the answer
The restricted viewpoint shapes what is disclosed and makes uncertainty part of the reader’s experience.
Earlier topic checklist
These earlier topic ticks are separate from the reviewed points above and do not count towards that progress.
English Literature topic list
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These ticks keep your earlier topic checklist. They do not count towards the new reviewed requirements above. Its numbering may be internal; use the linked references above for the exact reviewed source requirements.
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