OxfordAQA A-Level English Literature: Place in Literary Texts (9675)

This guide covers Unit 2 Place in Literary Texts, the second of two units forming the International AS half of OxfordAQA International AS & A-Level English Literature (9675), Version 5.3. Where Unit 1 organises texts around the mainstream genre of tragedy, Unit 2 takes a less conventional approach: it connects a prose text and a poetry text through the shared cultural genre of place – how specific settings shape a text’s story, structure, worldview and meaning.

Where this fits in 9675

Unit 2 is an open-book written exam lasting 2 hours, worth 50 marks and 50% of the International AS grade (20% of the full International A-level once combined with the A2 units). Candidates study one prose text and one poetry text and answer two essay questions, one from each section. Because the exam is open book, the emphasis in preparation should be on building a genuine analytical framework for “place” that can be applied under exam conditions with the text in hand, rather than on memorising quotations.

Syllabus coverage

OXFORDAQA INTERNATIONAL AS & A-LEVEL ENGLISH LITERATURE (9675) — UNIT 2 PLACE IN LITERARY TEXTS

The specification does not give an exhaustive list of what “place” can mean in a text, but identifies areas worth exploring, including:

• Specific geographical locations and their significance, from individual houses and villages to whole countries
• The locations, and sometimes the time periods, in which a story is set
• The significance of the natural world – its beauty, and sometimes its despoliation or destruction
• The representation of social identity and how people are positioned within society
• Ideas of social class as expressed through place
• Place as a setting for personal and human relationships
• Place as a political space
• The idea of home and homeland
• The language a text uses to represent place

Section A: Prose — candidates study one text, chosen by their centre from: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, Andrea Levy’s Small Island, Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower, or Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day.

Section B: Poetry — candidates study one poet’s selection, chosen from: a William Wordsworth selection (including Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, Michael, Composed Upon Westminster Bridge and Daffodils); a Robert Frost selection (including Mending Wall, The Road Not Taken, Birches and Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening); a Thomas Hardy selection (including Neutral Tones, The Darkling Thrush, The Convergence of the Twain and The Oxen); or a Seamus Heaney selection (including Mid-Term Break, Bogland, The Tollund Man and Punishment).

Exam structure

The 2-hour paper has two sections, each worth 25 marks:

• Section A — one essay question on the candidate’s prose set text.
• Section B — one essay question on the candidate’s poetry selection.

How to approach it

Because “place” is deliberately not defined as a fixed checklist, the strongest preparation is building a personal bank of textual evidence organised by the specification’s own suggested angles – geography, the natural world, social identity and class, relationships, politics, home and homeland, and language – rather than a single generic essay plan. For the prose text, track how the setting changes (or fails to change) across the narrative, and what that shift reveals about characters or themes. For the poetry selection, since candidates study a body of poems by one writer rather than a single poem, practise comparing how place functions differently across two or three poems in the selection, since strong answers tend to range across the set poems rather than relying on just one. Because the exam is open book, spend revision time deepening understanding of the text’s use of place-related language and imagery, since these are quick to locate in the exam but easy to under-analyse without prior practice identifying them.

Worked example: reading place across a text

Take The Great Gatsby as an example of how the specification’s angles combine in a single prose text. The geographical contrast between West Egg and East Egg maps directly onto social class (old money versus new money), while the Valley of Ashes sits between them as a third space representing the human cost of that divide. The green light across the water functions as a place-based symbol of an unreachable home or future, tying the “home and homeland” angle to the novel’s central longing. A strong Unit 2 essay does not simply describe these locations but explains how Fitzgerald’s language constructs them – the recurring imagery of light, water and distance – and connects that construction to the text’s wider concerns about class and aspiration. The same method applies to the poetry selection: a Thomas Hardy essay on place might trace how a poem’s physical landscape becomes inseparable from memory and loss, using the specification’s own “natural world” and “language and representation of place” angles as the analytical spine of the response, rather than treating setting as background detail.

Common mistakes

Treating “place” as if it only meant physical geography, and missing the specification’s broader angles – social identity, political space, home and homeland, and the language used to represent place. Writing about the poetry selection using only one poem, when strong answers typically draw on the breadth of the set poems. Bringing an annotated copy of the set text into the open-book exam, which is not permitted. Spending equal revision time on both sections without checking that each is genuinely worth the same 25 marks – both deserve full preparation.

Quick revision checklist

• Know which prose text and which poet’s selection your centre has chosen for Unit 2.
• Build evidence under each of the specification’s suggested “place” angles: geography, the natural world, social identity/class, relationships, politics, home/homeland, and language.
• For the poetry section, practise comparing place across multiple poems in the selection, not just one.
• Bring a clean, unannotated copy of both set texts to the open-book exam.
• Revise Unit 1 and Unit 2 separately – they assess different genres (tragedy vs place) with different text types (drama vs prose/poetry).

Related resources

• Place in Literary Texts revision notes
• Place in Literary Texts practice questions

Official specification

OxfordAQA International AS and A-Level English Literature (9675) specification PDF, Version 5.3, pages 12-13 — oxfordaqa.com.