A2 English Literature AQA Book Help!

Hey there,
Just wondering what books you guys are choosing to compare for the controlled assessment essay that is required for A2? Im thinking of choosing the theme of race and comparing 12 years a slave as my pre 1900 book and to kill a mockingbird as my post 1900 book.
But to be honest, I want to consider other options at least and gain some inspiration into something that might interest me a bit more??
I would love to hear what themes and books you are choosing, and why.
Thank you!

I would stay away from Mockingbird because of two reasons: A it's considered a GCSE text so it would not be wise to choose it for A2 and B even though one of the theme is based on race, that's not the whole reason of the novel - the race only covers about 1/3 of the novel. The novel is more about the ignorance of childhood and its innocence, or the corruption of childhood innocence through the misguided world of adults and adulthood.

If you want something to do with race, other slave narratives like Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet A. Jacobs. Or novels like Uncle Tom's Cabin, Huckleberry Finn, Another Country and plays such as Cloud 9 by Caryl Churchill, Fences August Wilson, The Emperor Jones by Eugene O'Neil. You could look at post-colonial (how British Empire dominated the world and looking at the social, cultural and psychological effects of colonialism) texts like Purple Hibiscus, Things Fall Apart, Heart of Darkness.

For coursework I did the corruption of morality and its consequences!

I was actually looking at life of a slave girl because then i can link the themes of slavery, but also gender within slavery. However, looking at the oppression of women interests me more, and 12 years a slave + another slave narrative are last resorts if I don'f find anything else. (Despite being great books with great messages.)
The only themes we are allowed to choose from are:
*struggle for identity (was thinking the book thief as post 1900 but cant find one pre)
*crime and punishment - no books interest me here? Suggestions?
*minds under stress
*nostalgia and the past
*gothic
*satire and dystopia
*war and conflict
*race and ethnicity
*representations of sexuality
*representations of women
*representations of men
*representations of social class an culture

Ant suggestions for pre and post 1900 books for any of these themes would be greatly appreciated.

Does anyone have any post-1900 suggestions an what to compare with pre-1900 'Tis pity she's a Whore? Thanks.

Well it depends on what you want to focus on darling. Tis Pity mainly focuses on the incestuous love of siblings. So the major theme would be illicit (illegal) love. Other themes focus on the corruption of law and justice as well as free will and determinism (things will happen, no matter what you do).

You could focus on how the play represents the corruption of society and morality perhaps?

Lolita is a prose novel about an adult man being infatuated with a young girl. He even kills for her. So this novel is basically about pedophilia and illicit love between adult and child. So you can compare the way illicit love is presented through both texts. Also, Lolita criticizes the inadequacy of psychiatry which is similar to Tis Pity as Ford based a lot of his plays including Tis Pity on renaissance psychology of Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. So you compare how both texts use the form of psychology to present their texts by using Psychoanalysis as a critical theory.

A similar thing is the play Equus by Peter Shaffer. This play is about a teenager who hears a voice that tells to blind 6 horses with a metal stick. He is sent to a psychiatric hospital to be evaluated. The play focuses on what it means to be normal, how psychiatry does not help people who need help and also the subjectivity of a value system. As Dysart (the psychiatrist) evaluates Alan Strang (teenager), Dysart starts to doubt his own value system as his own can be right to him, but be seen as wrong to the audience (the same as the incestuous relationship in Pity as it seems right for the characters but shown as wrong to the audience). So you can look at the what it means to be normal.

You could also study We Need to Talk About Kevin. A 16 year old kills many of his classmates and a few staff. The mother makes contact through an epistolary form of letters with his father who is in prison. They begin to contemplate whether they were good parents and whether her lack of love towards her son caused him to rebel against society and morality.

Another is The Wasp Factory a very complex storyline but it's roughly looking and gender and societal institutions and how they control us. It's a great read. Very disturbing as it has a lot of grotesque descriptions of animal abuse and cruelty.

American Psycho is always a great one for the lack of morality due to the pressure of cultural materialism and consumerism.

That's all I can think of atm. All these texts are post-1900.

Hey there,
Just wondering what books you guys are choosing to compare for the controlled assessment essay that is required for A2? Im thinking of choosing the theme of race and comparing 12 years a slave as my pre 1900 book and to kill a mockingbird as my post 1900 book.
But to be honest, I want to consider other options at least and gain some inspiration into something that might interest me a bit more??
I would love to hear what themes and books you are choosing, and why.
Thank you!