The most comprehensive guide to studying and revising A Streetcar Named Desire at A Level or AS, the new York Notes Study Guide gives you everything you need to obtain a deeper understanding of Tennessee Williams's classic play about family, alienation and gender politics. Exploring aspects of Williams's unique and ground-breaking work including the play's genre, structure, characters, historical context and symbolism, this invaluable revision guide to A Streetcar Named Desire provides you with everything you need to achieve your very best examination grade. Students that attain the highest marks for their essays and answers to questions on A Streetcar Named Desire are likely to be able to put the play in its historical context and to show their understanding of the techniques and intentions of the playwright. You will need to show the examiner that you have a detailed knowledge of the background to Blanche's breakdown, and the role that music and images play in communicating ideas and tensions. You will also need to be able to draw on a range of contextual and critical details to enhance your own interpretation of the drama, and in the York Notes Study Guide you will find essential help with all of these.
The novel is set in impoverished rural England, Thomas Hardy's fictional Wessex, during the Long Depression of the 1870s. Tess is the oldest child of John and Joan Durbeyfield, uneducated peasants. ... He notices Tess too late to dance with her, as he is already late for his promised return to his brothers.
Written by experienced A-level examiners and teachers who know exactly what students need to succeed, and edited by a chief examiner, Philip Allan Literature Guides (for A-level) are invaluable study companions with exam-specific advice to help you to get the grade you need. This full colour guide includes: - detailed scene summaries and sections on themes, characters, form, structure, language and contexts - a dedicated 'Working with the text' section on how to write about texts for coursework and controlled assessment and how to revise for exams - Taking it further boxes on related books, film adaptations and websites - Pause for thought boxes to get you thinking more widely about the text - Task boxes to test yourself on transformation, analysis, research and comparison activities - Top 10 quotes PLUS FREE REVISION RESOURCES at www.philipallan.co.uk/literatureguidesonline, including a glossary of literary terms and concepts, revision advice, sample essays with student answers and examiners comments, interactive questions, revision podcasts, flash cards and spider diagrams, links to unmissable websites, and answers to tasks set in the guide.
In the quiet cul-de-sac where Keith and Stephen live the only immediate signs of the Second World War are the blackout at night and a single random bombsite. But the two boys start to suspect that all is not what it seems when one day Keith announces a disconcerting discovery: the Germans have infiltrated his own family. And when the secret underground world they have dreamed up emerges from the shadows they find themselves engulfed in mysteries far deeper and more painful than they had bargained for. 'Bernard Shaw couldn't do it, Henry James couldn't do it, but the ingenious English author Michael Frayn does do it: write novels and plays with equal success ... Frayn's novel excels.' John updike, New Yorker 'A beautifully accomplished, richly nostalgic novel about supposed second-world-war espionage seen through the eyes of a young boy.' Sunday Times 'Deeply satisfying . . . Frayn has written nothing better.' Independent
Born out of the journals the playwright kept at the time, Tennessee Williams's Vieux Carre is not emotion recollected in tranquillity, but emotion re-created with all the pain, compassion, and wry humor of the playwright's own 1938-39 sojourn in the New Orleans French Quarter vividly intact. The drama takes its form from the shifting scenes of memory, and Williams's surrogate self invites us to focus, in turn, on the various inhabitants of his dilapidated rooming house in the Vieux Carre: the comically desperate landlady, Mrs. Wire; Jane, a properly brought-up young woman from New York making a last grab at pleasure with Tye, the vulgar but appealing strip-joint barker; two decayed gentlewomen politely starving in the garret; and the dying painter Nightingale, who tries to teach the young writer something about love -- both of the body and of the heart. This is a play about the education of the artist, an education in loneliness and despair, in giving and not giving, but most of all in seeing, hearing, feeling, and learning that "writers are shameless spies," who pay dearly for their knowledge and who cannot forget.
In Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems Tim Armstrong brings together over 180 poems in the first comprehensively annotated selection of Hardy’s poetry. Unlike most previous selections, this edition preserves the shape of the poet’s career by presenting the poems in the order in which they appeared in the Collected Poems of 1930, rather than re-ordering them thematically. Head notes to each poem give the reader information about its composition, publication, sources and metrical scheme; on-the-page notes list significant variants in Hardy’s manuscripts, point out literary and other allusions, and give explanatory glosses. An appendix contains a selection of relevant passages from Hardy’s notebooks, letters, and autobiography; and a bibliography suggests further reading. Tim Armstrong’s critical Introduction discusses Hardy’s career, his poetics, his use of memory and allusion and examines his position in the context of Victorian debates on aesthetics and belief. The generous selection of poems includes many lesser-known poems as well as those which have received most critical commentary, and the important elegiac sequence ‘Poems of 1912-13’ is included in its entirety.