Love through the ages - wider reading suggestions?

emmah1992

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I'm doing the AQA English Literature A exam in a couple of weeks and I'd like some more suggestions for wider reading that isn't just on passionate/sexual straight love. Any suggests?

The revision guide suggests looking at these areas for revision
- Romance and passion
- Love and marriage
- Illicit love
- Meetings and partings
- Parents and family
- God, nature and country

Thanks

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Rfc_07

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A View From the Bridge - Arthur Miller

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gigglesgalore

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Thomas Hardy's 'Emma' poems?

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Angela_Beth

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Lady Chatterly's Lover.

Does Jane Austen count? She falls into some of those categories, but is pretty conventional, I know. Definitely fits "Love and Marriage". Maybe Mansfield Park? It's got examples of a few different types of marriages in it. And Northanger Abbey is a bit gothic.

Some of Edgar Allen Poe's poems are good for the obsessive, dark side of love. Ditto Porphyria's Lover by Robert Browning. Tennyson's The Lady of Shalott would be good as well.

Gerald Manley Hopkins has a lot of metaphysical poems praising God that use romantic language.

Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde hints at homosexual love, but it's never explicit.

Oh, and John Donne does a good line on illicit love. Check out "the flea".

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Mia:x

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(Original post by emmah1992)

The revision guide suggests looking at these areas for revision
- Romance and passion
- Love and marriage
- Illicit love
- Meetings and partings
- Parents and family
- God, nature and country

Thanks

So considering the specimen was on meetings and partings, and the january paper covered illicit love, do you reckon it would be pretty safe to assume that the exam for this topic will cover one of the other four?! then again, I guess it's a revision guide and not an official list..

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emmah1992

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(Original post by Mia:x)
So considering the specimen was on meetings and partings, and the january paper covered illicit love, do you reckon it would be pretty safe to assume that the exam for this topic will cover one of the other four?! then again, I guess it's a revision guide and not an official list..

I guess you could say that, also it's a pretty safe bet (almost deffinate) that the first part of the exam will not be poetry and is most likely to be prose as it's the only one that hasn't been covered

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hplummer1

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(Original post by Mia:x)
So considering the specimen was on meetings and partings, and the january paper covered illicit love, do you reckon it would be pretty safe to assume that the exam for this topic will cover one of the other four?! then again, I guess it's a revision guide and not an official list..

That's risky, last year on the victorian literature AS paper, the specimen was on the theme of women so we all thought it wouldn't come up in the exam, and it did. Just a warning.

For this exam you're best off learning about 5 prose, 5 drama and 5 poems in detail, making sure that you've got each theme covered and a wide range of time covered by at least one thing for every genre, for example:

Prose:
Henry VIII's love letters to Anne Boleyn
John Keat's letter to Fanny Brawne
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Testament of Youth - Vera Brittain
The Collector by John Fowles
Atonement by Ian McEwan

Drama:
Othello
Anthony and Cleopatra
The Way of the World by William Congreve
Tis A Pity She's a Whore by John Ford
A Woman of No Importance by Oscar Wilde
Look Back in Anger by John Osborne
Bent by Martin Sherman

Poetry:
Sonnet 130 by Shakespeare
She Walks in Beauty by Lord Byron
Keats: Bright Star, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Eve of St Agnes
Donne: The Relic, To His Mistress Going To Bed
Carol Anne Duffy: Warming Her Pearls, First Love, Mrs Quasimodo
One Flesh by Elizabeth Jennings

Hope this helps somebody

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frozzylove

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I appreciate this is late, but as this is one of the first hits on google I thought I'd add some for anyone who is looking for ideas for the 2011 exam!

Poetry -
Chaucer, 'The Millers Tale'
John Donne, 'The Flea', 'a valediction forbidding mourning'
Andrew Marvell, 'To his coy mistress'
Ben Jonson, 'On my last sonne'
Carol Ann Duffy, 'Anne Hathaway'
Lord Byron, 'She walks in beauty'

Prose -
'Atonement' by Ian McEwan
'The English Patient' by Michael Onjjadtie
'Oranges are not the only fruit' Jeanette Winterson
'Toast' by Nigel Slater
'Wuthering Heights' Emily Bronte
'Jane Eyre' Charlotte Bronte
'We need to talk about Kevin' Lionel Shriver
'Lady Chatterlys Lover' D.H Lawrence
'Lolita' Vladmir Nabokov

Drama -
'Tis pity she's a whore' John Ford
'Spring Awakening' Frank Wedekind
'Bent' Martin Sherman
ANY Shakespeare
'Blood Brothers' Willy Russell

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Google4

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I am doing the exam 2 weeks today.. I'm pretty much aiming to get a C, I'd love a C! I have quite a lot of Carol Ann Duffy and contemporary quotes, is there like a restriction to which books you can quote from?

I was obsessed with Malorie Blackman's Noughts and Crosses I reckon I could easily get quotes from there under 'Forbidden Love' - do you think that would be 'appropriate' for the exam?

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OmicronPersei8

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I did this exam last year and I remember I read:

The Great Gatsby
Wuthering Heights
A Room With A View
Anthony & Cleopatra
The Glass Menagerie (family love)
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Craploads of poetry and I managed to get a C!

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Evangelica

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(Original post by emmah1992)
I'm doing the AQA English Literature A exam in a couple of weeks and I'd like some more suggestions for wider reading that isn't just on passionate/sexual straight love. Any suggests?

The revision guide suggests looking at these areas for revision
- Romance and passion
- Love and marriage
- Illicit love
- Meetings and partings
- Parents and family
- God, nature and country

Thanks

If you're looking specifically for texts that portray love other than straight love Captain Corelli's Mandolin is perfect looking at the character of Carlo. He goes to war in world war two, hoping that he will find love, which in turn he hopes will make him a more honourable soldier. Warning, I cried reading some of his chapters; there's an extreme amount of pathos in there. Katherine Phillips' poetry, which is among the metaphysicals, and thus less contemporary portrays Sapphic love.

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Colour Me Pretty

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Prose:
Jane Eyre
Wuthering Heights
Enduring Love
The Yellow Wallpaper
Oranges are not the only fruit

Drama:
Romeo and Juliet
Educating Rita,
A Streetcar Named Desire
A Doll's House

Poetry
Shakespeare's Sonnets
Keats
Browning's Monologues
and some metaphysical ones.

Since wider reading is only 30% I'm not going crazy, also
I won't remember loads of quotes so I'm just sticking to the texts I've done indepth at A level.

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lovely_me

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(Original post by emmah1992)
I'd like some more suggestions for wider reading that isn't just on passionate/sexual straight love.

I'd recommend Oranges are not the only fruit.

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booksnob

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I've covered a lot--probably too much--wider reading but found several texts that cover most of the themes of love. These are Wuthering Heights, The Merchant's Tale, King Lear and Oranges are not the only Fruit.

By all means stick mainly to the themes in the OP, but there is a chance they could be more obscure. Love as sickness, honeymoons, demonic love for example. Also, love at first sight -- which i guess comes into 'meetings'. A paper last year had 'the nature of love' as it's theme, which is awful.

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Rachel_Leah

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What sorts of things are people using from Streetcar Named Desire? I have Stella and Stanley's sexual relationship as one major quotebank, then the rape, but my teacher's say that we should include Blanche's forbidden relationship but there's hardly anything worth saying about this :/ x

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Language_student

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(Original post by Caina)

I was obsessed with Malorie Blackman's Noughts and Crosses I reckon I could easily get quotes from there under 'Forbidden Love' - do you think that would be 'appropriate' for the exam?

Sorry, but I don't think it would. I have read it and yes, it's a good series but I don't think it is fitting for an A Level Literature exam. You could ask your teacher though - I might be completely wrong but I would be wary of using that as a reference.

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Language_student

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(Original post by booksnob)
I've covered a lot--probably too much--wider reading but found several texts that cover most of the themes of love. These are Wuthering Heights, The Merchant's Tale, King Lear and Oranges are not the only Fruit.

By all means stick mainly to the themes in the OP, but there is a chance they could be more obscure. Love as sickness, honeymoons, demonic love for example. Also, love at first sight -- which i guess comes into 'meetings'. A paper last year had 'the nature of love' as it's theme, which is awful.

These are the texts that I know really well:

Othello by Shakespeare
A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen
Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Emma and Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Atonement by Ian McEwan
On Chesil Beach by McEwan
Shakespeare sonnets 18, 116, 130
4 - 5 Thomas Hardy poems
To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell
A Valediction: forbidding mourning by John Donne
Bright Star by Keats
A couple of Bronte poems
Funeral Blues by W.H. Auden
Spared by Wendy Cope
First Love by Carol Ann Duffy

+ other extracts from prose, drama and a few more poems. Do you think they will be sufficient? I struggle with drama but I know Othello very well and there's quite a few different themes of love in that so hopefully I will manage with that and the other extracts that I have made notes on.

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QUINNTASTIC

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1984 is actually a surprisingly good one to read about - probably the only thing that contributed to getting a high A in the exam, because examiners love you bringing in socio-political liteature, don't ask me why. Tess of the D'Urbervilles is also brilliant! Othello again is good. A View from the Bridge is pretty cool in terms of the fact that it's short (meaning less reading! chortle!) Possession by AS Byatt is hard to get into but worth it in the end for some good links

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Christien

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The Canterbury Tales (as well as Troilus and Criseyde) offer pretty much every variation on the theme of love imaginable. To name a few: The Miller's Tale deals with illicit love, The Wife of Bath's with marriage, love, respect, etc., and The Clerk's examines an unhealthy, paranoid sort of love based mostly on manipulation, control, etc. Takes a while to get to grips with the language, and truth be told his work isn't really that enjoyable to read, but the tales are generally short enough and easy to mine for this sort of exercise.

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reggaeinyourjeggae

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Wife of bath with SEX. I'm not even slightly exaggarating, its all sex and transaction,love and sex, misogynistic attitudes and the church and sex. Crikey

And, Language_student, I'd say that is unbelievably a huge bank of texts! You're sorted! While the rest of us grapple with the few bits of knowledge we have :/

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