English Lit - The Bloody Chamber - How to achieve a top grade?

I'm aiming for an A in English Lit and I am studying The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter. I was wondering if anybody had any tips on achieving an A grade in this part of the course. How many quotes did you memorise and which quotes? Also how did you revise for what was going to come up in the exam when it is such a broad spectrum in terms of what question you are going to be asked in the exam. I absolutely adore this book so revision isn't a strenuous task, I'm just unsure how to, and also what to revise.

Hi there which exam board is this for?

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It is for the exam board OCR

Hey, I'm also studying the Bloody Chamber on OCR. I'm doing the reformed A Level, i.e. no AS this year. My other books are Dracula for Gothic, and for coursework we're doing Brideshead Revisited and Jerusalem (play) what about you?

I'd similarly appreciate any tips as my mocks this year will be the basis of our A2 predictions.

I loathe The Bloody Chamber & Other Stories and Angela Carter is one of a kind, I don't like her writing style and she is so obsessed over weird themes. I've been achieving D grades so I can't help you there but if you want to discuss this with me, I'd be happy to chat to someone because so far no one on this forum that I've spoken to is doing that novel. Are you with the OCR board?

yeah, we're doing the reformed A Level also, next year we're doing The Bloody Chamber and 'A Streetcar named Desire' our coursework is on Streetcar also. My mock this year is going to be on the Bloody Chamber and 'A Streetcar Named Desire' and then from my mock result the teachers will formulate a predicted grade for universities so I'm determined to do well in these mocks. So far I've found that for The Bloody Chamber, York Notes is amazing. I had to buy a revision guide though it wasn't too expensive though i think it was £7.99 and some of the stuff is free on their website. In terms of actual revision I've been using flashcards to memorise certain quotes from TBC and then on the back of the flashcard i have put certain interpretations of the quote and thats how I'm revising for the mock. How do you revise for English Lit?

That sounds like a great way to revise! I've never had to learn quotes before, so I'm unsure about that- I'll probably download audiobooks and listen to them on repeat whilst doing other tasks, so quotes subconsciously go in. Definitely will try out your flashcards idea though, that sounds great. Other than that this year I've made mindmaps on different themes and supporting quotes for them. Last year, I had to learn Romeo and Juliet for my exam so I made a massive powerpoint on what happened in each scene, dramatic devices, structure, quotes etc so something like that might be useful when I do Shakespeare later in the course

My mock isn't until June thankfully, but we haven't even started TBC yet, we're still on Dracula. We're going to start writing our coursework soon though! I might want to do English at uni, what about you?

Yeah I'm with OCR. I don't know though I really like Carters writing style. It's very poetic and unique making the quotes easier to learn in my opinion. one thing i do find really hard though is remembering quotes from every single story in TBC and i even find it hard to remember the plot of each story in TBC. Besides that I do quite enjoy the book.

We haven't finished the book yet, we did the main novella and several others and now we will self teach ourselves the rest. My teacher has asked people to do a presentation on the novellas they have chosen so we all learn from each other. The quotes is the hardest part and applying it correctly. I was worried I memorised the wrong quotes for the type of question. For my AS mocks, I used quotes from The Bloody Chamber, The Company of Wolves and Wolf Alice as those were the novellas we had learnt so far. One of my teachers assigned us 80 questions to do with the Bloody Chamber. I haven't even finished yet. He said he got 'carried away'.

wow it seems a bit mad that he's assigned you 80 questions to do. is he a decent teacher at least? But yeah I'm worried about memorising the wrong quotes. It's like how do you know what quotes you should memorise when we don't know what question is going to come up in the exam.