English Literature / Unit 20 ENL 1908 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
The Twentieth Century in Review
The idea
Review twenty-five percent of the exam, the largest share, in three parts. Modernism: Conrad, Yeats, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Forster, Mansfield, Eliot, the war poets, Imagism and the Irish Revival, with fragment, stream of consciousness, epiphany and myth. After nineteen thirty: Auden, Dylan Thomas, Orwell, Huxley, Waugh, Greene, Golding, Beckett and the absurd, Osborne, Pinter, Stoppard, Larkin, Hughes, Plath, Heaney, Lessing, Spark, Carter and the Booker novelists. Beyond Britain: Achebe, Soyinka, Ngũgĩ, Gordimer, Coetzee, Walcott, Naipaul, Rhys, Rushdie, Desai, Roy, Atwood, Munro and White. Works after nineteen thirty appear by description, so use the distinctive detail the question gives, and confirm with nationality and date.
In practice
Modernism, after Modernism, beyond Britain.
Where people slip
Separate realist from absurd drama, and check whether a postcolonial work answers a classic.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Builds on
Unlocks
- Nothing yet depends on this.
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