Teaching Wuthering Heights for A Level Eng. Lit

Teachers’ worksheets for Emily Brontë’s masterpiece

Following hot on the heels of last month’s release of teaching resources (for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby), this month Crossref-it.info has produced worksheets to help time-short A Level teachers address significant concepts in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

> Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights downloadable worksheets for teachers


Covering work for a series of lessons and classroom tested, the latest set of downloadable worksheets include the following areas of study:

• The impact of the opening of the novel
• How characters and locations are doubled through the text
• The significance of imagery and symbolism
• The genre(s) covered by Wuthering Heights.

Each sheet can be printed off and used for homework tasks or to help students catch up missed work, and there is also a series of directed questions investigating each chapter of the text.

To help students speedily access helpful information, the downloads also suggest where they can find relevant material in the online guide to Wuthering Heights launched earlier this term. In that you will discover detailed commentaries on each chapter, sections on Narrative, Structure and Imagery amongst others, along with clear explanations of how the novel fits within the literary conventions of its day.

We’re starting to get to that point where everything moves up a gear in preparation for forthcoming examination. Crossref-it is here to help.

Teaching The Great Gatsby

Teachers’ worksheets to tackle Fitzgerald

This week hard pressed A Level Eng. Lit. teachers can breathe a sigh of relief that there are some more helpful resources to take the hassle out of lesson planning. Entirely free and written by UK A Level classroom practitioners, the latest set of downloadable The Great Gatsby worksheets from Crossref-it.info cover topics such as:

• How society operated in the Jazz Age, as depicted in the novel
• The use of colours and symbols in The Great Gatsby
• The effect of the narrative framework
• The impact of the opening and ending of the novel.

Each sheet can be printed off and used for homework tasks or to help students catch up missed work, and there is also a series of directed questions investigating each chapter of the text.

To help students speedily access helpful information, the downloads also suggest where they can find relevant material in the Great Gatsby text guide (launched last September) to Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. In it you’ll discover not just chapter-by-chapter synopses and commentaries, but sections about the social, political and philosophical background to the Jazz Age, as well as the characters and structure of the novel, and recent critical approaches to the text.

If you think you’ve got more teaching ideas about The Great Gatsby you’d like to contribute, please submit them to info@crossref-it.info and they may feature in a future blog!

New Wuthering Heights revision plan

How well do you know your text?

Three weeks ago Crossref-it.info launched a new student guide to help those studying Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights for A Level. Now there is a handy revision plan to help you make sure you are really up to speed when it comes to answering on the novel.

The plan covers all sorts of areas:

> Easy multiple choice questions so that you can be confident you’re familiar with the novel

The revision plan tells you how you’ve done and gives you the chance to try again if you get something wrong, pointing you in the right direction to find the correct answer.

> Directed note-making on important aspects of each chapter

It’s like having your own personal teacher, shining a light onto the key points you need to think about.

> Useful essay questions on character, narrative and theme, with examples of how you might answer

From this point of the academic year onwards, you need to gather together all the strands of what you’ve learnt and weave them into coherent arguments. The plan shows you how (and for more advice about essay and exam writing, check out the ‘How to write a good exam answer’ section at Crossref-it.info). 

Access the Wuthering Heights study plan

If you haven’t already done so, you need first to install the Crossref-it.info English Literature app from the Chrome Webstore using the Google Chrome browser. Once you’ve signed in, for just 79p you can get guided revision help on Wuthering Heights. 

The better you do at each level of the revision app, the more bronze, silver and golden quills you can gains to add to your account.

New Wuthering Heights study guide!

Some characters never die…

You may never have read it, but you probably know something about it. Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë, does not have a complex or particularly original plot. This is not where the interest lies. Instead, Brontë’s powerful characterisation ensures that, without having studied or even read it, people who have heard of the novel are likely to mention Heathcliff and Catherine and their relationship, as opposed to than any particular event in the story.

The powerful account of a passionate love that goes beyond the grave has received all sorts of film / television and musical treatments, but few of these versions fully capture the texture and detail of the novel. Indeed, a bald summary of what various characters get up to (dictated by pressure of airspace etc) might seem incomprehensible, without the solid prose ‘realism’ and measured narration of the observant servant and confidante, Nelly Dean.

Through her, and the newcomer, Lockwood, we believe that Catherine Earnshaw might well walk the moors, twenty years after her early death, and Heathcliff ‘forget to breathe’ in his desire to be with her.

Enduring love

Although society was outraged when the story was first published in 1847, Wuthering Heights has never been relegated to the ‘second division’ of literature – a situation illustrated by that fact that Emily Brontë’s only novel currently features on three A Level Eng. Lit. syllabuses (Edexcel, AQA, WJEC). It still engages readers today, despite our very different culture.

In one sense, the novel stands aside from its times, but it also spoke to – and was a product of - 1840s England, as the shocked reaction demonstrates. To help you see the connections of the story to the context of its creation (AO4), a new Crossref-it.info guide to Brontë’s story has been launched this week.

Comprehensive help

• Struggling to make sense of Joseph’s outbursts? In the detailed commentaries on each chapter you’ll find explanations of what he is referring to.
• Need to get clear about Brontë’s narrative chronology? Sections on Narrative and Structure will help.
• Tracing image clusters and how they play out in the novel’s two main locations? You’ll find everything you need in Imagery.
• Want to get to grips with the novel’s Gothic resonances? Look no further than Literary context.

The new Crossref-it.info guide to Wuthering Heights is there to help.

What if…?

Life after life after life

The recently announced winner of the Costa novel of 2013 is Kata Atkinson’s Life after life. Rather like the films Groundhog Day (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog_Day_(film)) and Sliding Doors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sliding_Doors), Atkinson weaves a narrative about her central character, Ursula Todd, in which all manner of alternatives present themselves.

A variety of narratives

Traditionally, a novel tells an ‘enclosed’ tale about a particular group of characters who make choices and face the consequences. Protagonists generally behave consistently and the novelist structures the account so that it ends by fulfilling the reader’s expectations, whilst maintaining an aura of ‘reality,’ and provides a sense of closure. (Click for more detail on aspects of narrative).

In the last fifty years or so, authors have disrupted the idea of realism and that their stories portray the one ‘true’ account of ‘real’ events. In 1969 John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman consciously provided alternative versions of how protagonists behaved and commented directly to the reader that the ‘reality’ inhabited by characters was purely the fictional artifice of the novelist.

Since then many more authors have experimented in this way or developed multiple, interweaving perspectives and disjointed chronologies. Atkinson simply stops and restarts her story, expecting the reader to skate from one ‘life of Ursula’ to a different ‘life’. She plays with the idea that we all have the power of choice – things don’t have to happen the way they do.

Atkinson meets Brontë

It can be interesting to try applying some of these modern multiplicities of interpretation to ‘traditional’ novels. For example, although she employs time shifts and a variety of narrative voices, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a typically ‘enclosed’ tale where characters seem destined to act in the ways in which the novel depicts. But what if things turned out differently?

Let your imagination fly as you consider:

• If Heathcliff had stayed to hear the whole of Catherine’s confession to Nelly, would he have left, and if he hadn’t, how would Edgar have fared as a suitor?
• How might Hareton have turned out if Nelly had brought the youngster with her to grow up at the Grange as she desired? Would a son educated in his rights have avenged the degradation of his father?
• How would Catherine’s story have unfolded if she had decided to leave Edgar for Heathcliff, after Edgar gave her his ultimatum? Would Heathcliff have looked after Edgar’s baby? Might Edgar have gone after his wife?
• If Linton had not died when he did, how would Cathy have coped if she became disillusioned with her husband – and what actions might an amorous Hareton have taken?

You, the author

If you can email in some alternative scenarios (to info@crossref-it.info), we’d love to hear what you come up with and could share them on this blog.

Meanwhile, for more on the original version of Brontë’s classic, watch this space….

Western culture the easy way

Slump back and watch

It’s had mixed reviews – positive in America, cynical in the UK - but if you want an easy way to assimilate the core stories of Western culture, it’s worth recording Channel 5’s mini-series on The Bible for those empty, post-Christmas days when it’s cold and miserable and you want a day on the sofa. In 10 hours (shorter if you can skip through interminable adverts) you will get an understanding of some of the core events and people which literature has referenced over the last thousand years.

Assessment Objective 4

A quarter of the marks given at A Level for English Lit. are based on your understanding of: ‘the significance and influence of the contexts in which literary texts are written and received’. Any student who doesn’t know the great extent to which the Bible and classical myths have infiltrated almost every play, novel, poem and even newspaper article you’ll ever come across is hugely disadvantaged. The stories they include and the views they contain have shaped politics, history, society and culture.

• To take a light-hearted example - why is the duplicitous lover in Tom Jones’ famous song called Delilah? You’ll find out from The Bible.
• Why Is Margaret Attwood’s latest bestseller called Maddaddam? She takes endless references from the Bible.

A reason for the season

In the midst of that general feeling of having been over-faced by food, wrapping paper and winter sale adverts, it’s easy to wonder what the festive season has all been about. The narrative of Episode Three of The Bible might also provide a helpful perspective on why the West celebrates Christmas (the clue is in the name).

Ten hours means that, inevitably, some well-known events have had to be left out, but, from what has been released so far, the account of biblical events at least bears a good resemblance to the contents of the Good Book – unlike the BBC Saturday entertainment series Atlantis, which is great fun but plays fast and loose with classical myths.

Of course, for real detail about how context is reflected in the texts you’ll study for Eng. Lit. there’s nowhere better than Crossref-it.info. But to get a grand sweep, why not sit back and enjoy the mini-series (aired Saturdays at 9pm on Channel 5 if you want to record)?

HAPPY CHRISTMAS to one and all!

Our Inevitable End

Free to talk?

In the UK we have freedom of speech. We are happy talking about anything and everything – except that one day we will be able to speak no more. That subject we avoid, despite the fact that it is an experience we will all face. Right now, I am doing what our culture always does – politely skirting around the unmentionable… We don’t want to be morbid do we!

Start engaging with literature and you’ll find previous generations had no such issues. Everybody dies, authors proclaim, get used to it!

> Every parent expected some of their offspring not to make it

> Wives knew that childbirth might kill them one day

> Men frequently found their 50’s to be their final decade

> Illness rarely had a remedy.

Death wasn’t an avoidable ‘unmentionable’, but in your face.

So literature engages with death. It faces it, does not flinch from examining the impact of dying on the person involved and those left behind. Characters ponder what it will be like and what they might expect on the other side of the grave.

Only connect

Earlier this term Crossref-it.info launched Only connect. The Crossref-it.info team have taken a series of themes and then looked at how each runs through and unites various texts, providing hundreds of helpful links to a variety of onsite sources.

This week sees the release of Attitudes to death. It helps students explore how cultures alter through time in the way they approach the end of life. It enables readers to trace how perspectives from the classical world and the Christian Western worldview have affected attitudes reflected within texts. Currently covering the genres of poetry and drama, after Christmas it will also feature prose.

The inescapable cannot, by definition, be escaped, but at least literature can mediate the experience to us. So instead of running or skirting around, why not try connecting?