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A300 20th Century Literature: Texts and Debates

Question: Option B: ‘All art is quite useless’ (Oscar Wilde, A Twentieth Century Literature Reader, p 8). Debate this proposition in relation to Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song.

Answer: Sunset Song has recently been voted Scotland’s favourite book at a poll announced at last years Edinburgh International Book Festival. One university professor, although agreeing with the result, called it an “uncontroversial, so-what choice” (Professor Maley, Sunday Herald, 28 August 2005). Of course, at the time of its publication in 1932 the novel was anything but uncontroversial.......(short extract) to download the full answer, please Sign in or Register then make a payment or submit an essay

Question: ‘Popular literature is a mass moral and political analgesic’ (p38). To what extent can this be said of Rebecca?

Answer: There are two questions to be addressed here: whether or not Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca can be classed as ‘popular literature’, and if it can, if it is a moral and political ‘painkiller’. The term ‘popular’ has proven a hard one to define – it could include all or some of the following characteristics: it is well liked by many people, it appeals to the undiscriminating mass......(short extract) to download the full answer, please Sign in or Register then make a payment or submit an essay

Question: ‘The attitudes of modernist writers to the present shaped their attitudes to the past.’ Discuss with reference to at least two poems from T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.

Answer: T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf are both regarded as ‘modernist’ writers’ however, this idea of modernism is an extremely difficult one to comprehensively define; but in the case of these two it could be said that their works were concerned with the modern or ‘present’, and that they reflected and even intervened with the social concerns of the time. The poems in Eliot’s Prufrock and Ot......(short extract) to download the full answer, please Sign in or Register then make a payment or submit an essay

Question: ‘The Cherry Orchard rejects marriage as a solution to social problems’. Discuss, with reference to at least two scenes in the play.

Answer: The Cherry Orchard is a play with change as its central theme and examines various personal responses to that change. Being set in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century, meant that it was set before a backdrop of social upheaval: the old feudal system was dying and had been so ever since the Emancipation Manifesto in 1861 had freed the serfs from their old ownership, and there was talk......(short extract) to download the full answer, please Sign in or Register then make a payment or submit an essay

Question: The Nobel Prize for Literature is awarded to the writer ‘who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction’. To what extent do Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Seamus Heaney’s New Selected Poems conform to this requirement?

Answer: The word ‘ideal’ set out in Nobel’s will to stipulate how the literature prize should be awarded has caused interpretation problems for over one hundred years. It has even been said that “the history of the literature prize is in some ways a series of attempts to interpret an imprecisely worded will” (Espmark, 1999) In 1995 when Heaney was awarded the Prize, the Academy highlighted the......(short extract) to download the full answer, please Sign in or Register then make a payment or submit an essay

Question: Option B: Select two poems from the Skelton anthology that you have found particularly interesting. You should avoid the poems that are discussed in detail in Book 1 Chapter 4. Write an essay on them that considers: the relationship between the form of each poem and its content; how you think these poems reflect the 1930s.

Answer: Cecil Day Lewis’ poem ‘Newsreel’ and John Lehmann’s ‘This Excellent Machine’ are both poems of the thirties dealing with the subject of war. Although both poets were known for their left-wing political leanings, and their work reflects this, these poems look at war from two entirely different perspectives. Lewis is condemning the cinema newsreels for allowing the public to avoid faci......(short extract) to download the full answer, please Sign in or Register then make a payment or submit an essay

A300 20th Century Literature: Texts and Debates

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