English Resources

Simon Armitage and the problematic representation of Intimacy in the post-modern world.   Simon Armitage’s poetry in The Dead Souls Collection offers the reader a highly ironic and often problematic… Read More »Simon Armitage and the problematic Representation of Intimacy in the Modern World.

Pride and Prejudice and the Art of the Tease. Elizabeth Bennet teases Darcy and he cannot resist her.: ‘Indeed I do not dare…’ I have long regarded this exchange as… Read More »Pride and Prejudice: Despise me if you dare!

Macbeth: Act One.     ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair.’ (sc.I)   1)      Consider the effects of the strange supernatural figures who greet the audience at the opening… Read More »Macbeth: Act One

Nature and death in Heaney’s ‘Storm on the Island,’ Clarke’s ‘October ,’Tennyson’s ‘The Eagle,’ Whitman’s ‘Patrolling Barnegat’ and Clare’s ‘Sonnet.’   Heaney’s ‘Storm on The Island’ begins with a very… Read More »Nature and Death In Seamus Heaney et al: GCSE AQA ENGLISH

PLATH AND CARY:SHORT NOTES.   1)      Think of the implications of the titles? Do they contextualise or signpost the stories? ‘Growing Up’   suggests in its open way the ambiguity surrounding change in terms… Read More »Sylvia Plath's Superman and Paula Brown's New Snowsuit and Joyce Cary's Growing Up.

DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE: Short Notes.         ‘Clearly Stevenson’s work is a great success as a horror story but it goes well beyond that.’    … Read More »Robert Louis Stevenson: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

‘I stink and remember.’ Duffy, Dickens and the scent of solitude.       ‘In an arm-chair, with an elbow resting on the table and her head leaning on that… Read More »Carol Ann Duffy Havisham: 'I stink and remember.'

HITCHER     Consider the subversive aspects of the poem. These might be in terms of the register employed by the speaker as much as the ‘event’ of the poem… Read More »Simon Armitage: Hitcher

AQA English Anthology- Browning: The Laboratory.     I NOW that I, tying thy glass mask tightly, May gaze thro’ these faint smokes curling whitely, As thou pliest thy trade… Read More »Robert Browning: The Laboratory

  All Lost things: A study of Gillian Clarke’s Cold Knap Lake. Cold Knap Lake We once watched a crowd pull a drowned child from the lake. Blue lipped and dressed in water’s long green silk she lay for dead. Then kneeling on the earth, a heroine, her red head bowed, her wartime cotton frock soaked, my mother gave a stranger’s child her breath. The crowd stood silent, drawn by the dread of it. The child breathed, bleating and rosy in my mother’s hands. My father took her home to a poor house and watched her thrashed for almost drowning. Was I there? Or is that troubled surface something else shadowy under the dipped fingers of willows… Read More »Gillian Clarke : Cold Knap Lake

Great Expectations and the Enigma of Authorship.   ‘And yet the ways we miss our lives are life’ (Randall Jarrell)   ‘What is it that can tell me who I… Read More »Great Expectations: The Enigma of authorship

Discuss the final verdict of Malcolm on Macbeth and Lady Macbeth: ‘this dead butcher and his fiend –like Queen.’   Malcolm’s final pronouncement on Macbeth and Lady Macbeth seems a very direct  verdict… Read More »Macbeth: 'This dead butcher and his fiend-like Queen.'