Reading novels for A Level: Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Over the summer, students have a great chance to get to grips with the texts they will be examined on the following year. Make the most of it and read for pleasure! Spend indulgent hours with the longer novels (which are harder to fit in later) and be honest about your initial response.

Tess and first impressions

It's difficult not to have strong initial reactions if you are reading Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles as your Victorian novel (appearing on the AQA and OCR papers). It is a tremendous and passionate story, so let yourself be drawn in.

Many of Hardy's descriptions are very cinematographic, but one of the pleasures of reading is using your imagination to create his descriptions in your mind, and then sense the emotions that come with those pictures. They're your emotions, and they form part of your first impressions.

Imagine it for yourself

Although there are several good adaptations of the novel, it is the words on the page that make the difference. However tempting, don't substitute a DVD for your first encounter with the story. A film controls too many of your responses, and maybe edits out some of the parts you will enjoy most when you read it.

Besides, you need some hours to get acquainted with Tess herself. After all, she is one of English Literature's most iconic heroines. If you find things which puzzle you, there is a discussion of Hardy’s heroine at Crossref-it.info, - but don’t look at this until you have read her story for yourself!

Hardy’s poetry

Tess’s figure of a sensuous woman and the theme of missed opportunities recurred in much of Hardy’s poetry, which also appears on the A Level syllabus. For a way into the mind of the poems’ creator, a new mini guide links you to Hardy and his world. Find it at Crossref-it.info > Context links: Selected poetry of Thomas Hardy.

Make reading pleasurable

If you are taking A Level Eng. Lit. this coming year you know that there is bound to be a lot of reading coming your way. What is the best way to approach this?

First reading

Read for fun to start with. By the time the ASs or A2s come round in 2011, you will need to have read your exam texts at least twice, and parts of them three times. It helps to make the first reading a pleasurable experience:

• Find somewhere comfortable (hammock anyone?)
• Allow yourself some l-o-n-g stretches of time: don't just pick up a novel for a few minutes during the commercial breaks of your favourite soaps
• Don't try to make notes - go for a straight through reading
• If there are parts that really stand out, just circle the page number so that you can come back to it later.

First impressions

When you have finished, take a piece of paper and write down your first impressions. They may turn out to be incomplete (or even misguided), but they will still be very helpful later when you want to remember the ‘big picture’ in the midst of literary detail.

Examiners look out for students who are engaged in what they have read and your emotional response will shape how you approach each character. Authors write in order to connect – let their words reach into your heart and mind.

For more detailed information about how to approach novels set for A Level, visit Crossref-it.info > Successful study > Engaging with prose.

Hard Times?

That may be what you feel about reading up for next year’s courses, but at least studying this compact Dickens novel has just got easier! At Crossref-it.info, you can find out everything you need to know about the author and the world he was describing by looking at one simple route-map – Hard Times: Context links puts all the relevant information at your fingertips.

Summertime, and the living is … Victorian?

Life after exams

Now your G.C.S.E.s / AS exams are out the way, you may feel like a well earned rest! Once your brain has stopped feeling like jelly, make sure reading is part of your recuperation. With longer days and a (slight) reduction in pressure, it might remind you why you want to study Eng. Lit. in the first place.

Using the summer

If you are progressing on to AS or A2 English, hopefully you will already have found out from teaching staff which texts are coming up. If they include any Victorian novels it makes good sense to start reading them now.

‘Victorian’ literature refers to anything written between 1837-1901. That includes Dickens, the Brontës and Thomas Hardy, but NOT Jane Austen! To get a sense of what that era was like in Britain, go to Crossref-it.info > The world of Victorian writers, where there is lots of handy information.

Victorian novels tend to be long, mainly because most of them were written for serial publication over a two-year period. Those that weren't, were designed for a 3-volume edition!

Come September, you'll be fighting for uninterrupted time to get them read. So pick up one now, while you have time.

Wuthering Heights

If your chosen Victorian fiction is this dramatic novel, there’s something to help you get the lowdown on Emily Brontë’s life and imagination. Launched this week is a handy guide to link you to all the relevant information at Crosssref-it.info > Wuthering Heights: Context links.

Shakespeare’s Scottish play

See Macbeth live this summer

If any of you are expecting to study or teach Macbeth for A Level, then there is nothing to beat seeing a live production for a fresh perspective on the play. And there are some interesting ones to catch:

• Until this weekend there is as authentic a version as you are likely to get at Shakespeare’s Globe www.shakespeares-globe.org
• The Pantaloons Theatre Company’s national tour is taking the play beyond the confines of the regular theatre circuit around East Anglia and central England in July, before heading north in August www.thepantaloons.co.uk
• An open air production is being staged by the Regent’s Park Company at their Open Air Theatre, London, from 3 – 24 July http://openairtheatre.org
• In Guildford Castle, an unusual promenade performance of the tragedy runs from the 9th – 17th July by The Pranksters Theatre Company www.pranksterstheatre.org.uk
• For a more erudite take on the drama, The Shakespeare Institute Players are performing in Stratford from 8 – 10 July. www.shakespeareinstituteplayers.co.uk

Digging around the original

Of particular interest to A Level English and/or Theatre Studies groups are upcoming adaptations which explore the characters from a slightly different angle:

• Mastering Macbeth explores key scenes in terms of character, language, theme and theatrical technique at the Salisbury Playhouse, 9th-11th November www.salisburyplayhouse.com
• A Season before the Tragedy of Macbeth is at the Camden People's Theatre, 4-8 August and offers a groundbreaking new perspective on Macbeth and Lady Macbeth and the tragedy that befalls them. www.facsimileproductions.co.uk

Essential backup

Of course any advanced study of Macbeth is going to require some in depth exploration of the world Shakespeare was writing for. Launched this week, at Crossref-it.info, a handy guide tailored to the play takes you to all the most helpful sections of the website. Look out for Macbeth: Context links. Either before going to see a production, or when you come to investigate it later, this one stop resource will really help you to understand the zeitgeist the bard was tapping into.

Literature help over the next few months

Just like fashion magazines, who prepare their Christmas issues in the summer and do swimsuit spreads in November, so here at Crossref-it.info we are preparing materials which won’t hit your screens for a while. But we thought it might help to know what’s in the pipeline, so that you can see what will be available when you come to learn, revise, or teach texts in your chosen syllabus.

Comprehensive text guides

In the next 12 months there will be new text guides on these works, set by the following exam boards:

• Summer 2010: Selected poems of Christina Rossetti (AQA, OCR)
• Autumn 2010: Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rys (AQA, Edexcel, OCR)
• Winter 2010/11: The Wife of Bath’s Prologue & Tale, by Geoffrey Chaucer (AQA, Cambs. Pre U., Edexcel)
• Spring 2011: The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Attwood (AQA, Edexcel)
• Summer 2011: Persuasion, by Jane Austen (Cambs. Pre U., OCR)

Quick context guides

If you can’t wait that long, we are soon to produce some ‘quick links’ pages, showing you where you can find helpful contextual material, relevant to selected texts. Currently under development, these include:

• Hard Times, by Charles Dickens (AQA, CIE)
• The Return of the Native, by Thomas Hardy (Cambs. Pre U.)
• Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë (AQA, Edexcel, OCR)
• The Mayor of Casterbridge, by Thomas Hardy (CIE)
• Selected poems of Thomas Hardy (AQA, CIE, Edexcel)
• Selected poems of Coleridge, Keats, Wordsworth (AQA, CIE, OCR)
• Selected poems of the Brontës (AQA)

Your suggestions?

Alongside all of the above, articles on different aspects of context and literature keep being added to Crossref-it.info.

If you have got suggestions of works or aspects of literature that you would like to see featured on the site, please email us at admin@crossref-it.info.

We want to do whatever helps you!

Something out of nothing?

Where does literature ‘come from’? One of the requirements of the English A Level specifications is that students can:

‘Demonstrate understanding of the significance and influence of the contexts in which literary texts were written and received’ (AO4).

Signs of the times

Everything an author creates cannot help but reflect the nature of its creator and the times in which it was composed. Last week, just in time for these final weeks of revision a new web guide to Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus went live at Crossref-it.info.

Dr Faustus is a play which interestingly straddles the interconnection of the Medieval and the Renaissance minds, both in terms of its subject matter, its worldview and its theatrical heritage.

So, what were the ‘times’ against which we should view the play? It is interesting to see what was going on during the life of its creator.

1564 – a significant year

For example, did you know that 1564, the year Marlowe was born, also saw:

• The arrival of Italian scientist Galileo and dramatist Shakespeare
• The death of religious reformer John Calvin and artist Michelangelo?

When Marlowe was eight (1572), poets John Donne and Ben Johnson were born, and he was twelve (1576) when the first permanent theatre was built in London by James Burbage. On the international front, explorer Francis Drake set off to sail around the world the following year (1577) returning in 1581 and the first English colony was established in Virginia by Walter Raleigh when Marlowe was twenty (1584).

Tension throughout England

Marlowe was only seventeen (1581) when he became a spy for England’s secret service at a time of high political tension. There were plots to put the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots on the English throne instead of Protestant Elizabeth I, which came to a head when Mary was tried for treason in 1586. Marlowe was just 22, writing his first play, Dido, Queen of Carthage.

Elizabeth’s execution of Mary the following year (1587) sent shock waves through Europe – it was the year that Marlowe wrote Tamburlaine the Great, aged 23, while Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy was also performed.

Catholic retaliation against Protestant England came in the shape of the mighty Spanish Armada, which attacked the coast in 1588 and was memorably defeated. Alert to the threat of invasion, with warning beacons ringing the kingdom, the possible doom of such a small country cannot have escaped influencing Marlowe as, aged 24, he produced Dr Faustus that year.

Literary developments

Within the next three years (by the end of 1591), Edmund Spenser had published the initial sections of The Faerie Queene, Philip Sidney’s petrachan sonnet sequence Astroplil and Stella appeared and Shakespeare’s early plays such as Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors and Richard III were being performed. Marlowe himself was busy, getting imprisoned for a street fight and writing The Jew of Malta, all before he was 27.

Drama and facts

To get a sense of the tumultuous times which Dr Faustus reflects, why not take time out to watch Elizabeth: The Golden Age (with Cate Blanchett). This dramatises (though with a degree of licence) the world in which Marlowe operated.

For the more accurate information which A Level teachers know you need, go to www.crossref-it.info where you will find detailed commentary on the text as well as the background. Literature never emerges ‘out of nothing’.

New A Level Dr Faustus resources

Launched this week at Crossref-it.info is the long anticipated guide on one of the texts being examined this summer, Dr Faustus.

By its very subject matter (a man selling his soul to the devil in return for 24 years of unlimited wealth and power) Dr Faustus is a text steeped in religious language, which can be daunting to the uninitiated. Where many resources fear to tread, Crossref-it.info jumps right in and provides clear, easy to understand explanations of these terms and ideas. If you chose it can take you to the background refs without you having to turn a page!

Whether you are exploring the A Text or B Text, the new guide tells you everything you need to know about the demonic Doctor, such as:

• The development of the Faust legend through the centuries
• Scene synopses and commentary
• Characterisation
• Theatrical, social and religious background
• Themes, imagery and symbolism
• Critical interpretations of the text

As usual with Crossref-it.info materials, this is backed up by:

• An interactive timeline
• Guidance on how to do well with essays and exams
• Zillions of pop-ups providing literary and cultural definitions, including classical and biblical references.

Coming soon – something for the teachers

To help classes explore key topics (before exams swamp the timetable), there are free, downloadable, teachers' ideas sheets. Look out for them in May!