English Literature GCSE

English Literature GCSE glossary

722 key terms for English Literature GCSE, A to Z, each linked to the topic pages that use it.

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A

Abstract Noun: A noun denoting an idea, quality, or state rather than a concrete object.Eduqas
Abundance and mortality: Themes the poem explores, presenting autumn as both a time of fulfilment and a reminder of endings.Pearson Edexcel
Abuse of power: A theme in the cluster, alongside the effects of war, identity and protest, that you can build a mental map of.AQA
Accurate grammar: Subject-verb agreement, consistent tense, correct pronoun use, and avoidance of sentence fragments or run-on sentences.AQA
Adapting writing for different purposes: Adapting tone and structure so that describing uses vivid detail, arguing uses persuasive language, analysing breaks down methods, and evaluating weighs up…AQA
Admiration and idolisation: The child's absolute and unquestioning regard for his father's abilities, leaving no room for doubt about his god-like status.AQA
Admiration and respect: The speaker's attitude of admiration, determination and love as he seeks to understand his grandfather more deeply.AQA
Ageing and role reversal: A complete shift in which the now-ageing father stumbles behind the speaker, showing the cyclical nature of family dependency.AQA
Ageing, illness and mortality: The poem's awareness of approaching loss, presented through the child's perspective on the grandfather's decline.Pearson Edexcel
Alienation: A profound sense of estrangement from the remote setting, expressed through the final declaration deciding to leave the country.Eduqas, Pearson Edexcel
Alienation and isolation: The city's inhabitants are depicted as an anonymous, hurried mass, lacking individuality and connection.AQA
Allegory: A story, poem, or picture that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one.AQA, Eduqas, Pearson Edexcel
Allusion: An indirect reference to another text or historical event.AQA
Ambiguity: When meaning is unclear or open to multiple interpretations.AQA, Eduqas
Ambition: One of the themes the play explores, which you should practise linking short quotations for key moments to.Pearson Edexcel
Ambition and self-improvement: A key theme of the novel, alongside gentility, moral redemption, social class and guilt.Pearson Edexcel
Ambivalence: The state of having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone.Eduqas
Ambivalence in relationships: Shown by balancing love's joyful devotion against its messy, demanding burdens, with unease in the animal imagery.Pearson Edexcel
Anagnorisis: A moment in a plot or story, specifically a tragedy, wherein the main character either recognizes or identifies their true nature, recognizes the other…AQA, Eduqas
Anaphora: The repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses.AQA, Eduqas
Anger and suppression: The poem explores how suppressed anger grows into destructive deceit, contrasting openly expressed anger, which ends, with concealed anger, which grows into a…Pearson Edexcel
Animal imagery and conceit: An extended canine metaphor presents love as a pet that is both loyal and physically troublesome, creating ambivalence and unease.Pearson Edexcel
Anonymity: The state of being unnamed or unidentified.Eduqas
Anthropomorphism: The attribution of human characteristics or behaviour to a god, animal, or object.Eduqas
Anti-climax: A disappointing end to an exciting or impressive series of events.AQA
Anti-pastoral: A perspective that demythologises the natural landscape rather than celebrating natural beauty, offering an unsentimental critique instead of scenic grandeur…Eduqas, Pearson Edexcel
Antithesis: A figure of speech in which an opposition or contrast of ideas is expressed by parallelism of words that are the opposites of, or strongly contrasted with,…AQA, Eduqas, Pearson Edexcel
Aphorism: A concise statement of a general truth or principle.AQA
Apologia: A formal written defence of one's opinions or conduct.Eduqas
Appearance versus inner feeling: The comic discrepancy between the speakers' polite public facades and their anxious inner thoughts.Pearson Edexcel
Art and Objectification: The use of the portrait as a prop to recount the Duchess's supposed failings, critiquing the objectification of women.AQA
Art, ownership and the portrait: The curtain hiding the Duchess's portrait connects to the Duke's obsessive desire for exclusive ownership.Pearson Edexcel
Assonance: The repetition of vowel sounds within closely grouped words.Eduqas
Asyndetic Listing: A list of words, phrases, or clauses that are not connected by conjunctions (like 'and').Eduqas
Asyndeton: The omission of conjunctions (like 'and') between parts of a sentence.Eduqas
Atavism: The reappearance of a trait that had been lost during evolution; reverting to a more primitive state.Eduqas
Audience and time: Different audiences, at different times, receive and engage with a text, so a text may be read differently in the twenty-first century from when it was written.Pearson Edexcel
Audience response: How the audience reacts, which social and cultural context can illuminate without being the only possible interpretation.Pearson Edexcel
Auditory Imagery: Descriptive language that appeals to the sense of hearing.AQA
Author's life and situation: The author's own life and individual situation, including the place and time of writing, only where these relate to the text.Pearson Edexcel

B

Bathos: An anticlimax created by an unintentional or deliberate lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial or ridiculous.AQA, Eduqas
Beelzebub: A biblical name for the devil, translating literally to 'Lord of the Flies'.AQA
Belonging anchored in memory of place: The return to a childhood place reinforces feelings of rooted belonging, with the stream serving as an emotional anchor.Pearson Edexcel
Belonging and cultural inheritance: A speaker negotiating Zambian heritage and a British present, and what this reveals about belonging.Pearson Edexcel
Belonging and displacement: The idea of a 'portable paradise' links to the context of migration and the diaspora experience, where people carry their culture with them to a new country.AQA, Pearson Edexcel
Belonging and dual heritage: The poem's ideas about belonging and a speaker who is asked to choose between two parts of his identity.Pearson Edexcel
Belonging and exclusion defined by speech and pronunciation: The poem meditates on the pronunciation of vowels, showing that belonging is not a fixed category but an ongoing negotiation between words, ancestry, and…Pearson Edexcel
Belonging and home: The idea that belonging is located in ordinary objects, food and routine as well as in a homeland.Pearson Edexcel
Belonging and independence: The single-room setting, the cramped flat and the recurring gasworks view explore identity, confinement and this, alongside an unresolved ending suggesting an…AQA
Belonging to a shared family history and national myth: Shared hero-worship bonds siblings together as the poem explores belonging through shared ideals of adventure and discovery.Pearson Edexcel
Betrayal: A central concern of this lament of bitterness and regret, as the speaker feels deceived by broken vows and the lover's reputation.AQA
Bildungsroman: Jane's journey of this kind, together with her autonomy and moral integrity, must be known thoroughly.AQA, Pearson Edexcel
Birth and growth: The poem moves from the birth of her daughter in a hospital delivery room to a later scene of everyday friction.Pearson Edexcel
Bitterness and resentment: Strong negative emotions the speaker feels, which the poem argues can permanently poison one's perception of the world.AQA
Blank Verse: Unrhymed iambic pentameter, typically used by noble characters.AQA, Eduqas
Boredom: A suffocating response to the island, which is frank rather than a longing for wilderness.Pearson Edexcel
Bourgeoisie / Ruling Class: The capitalist class who own most of society's wealth and means of production.Pearson Edexcel
Boyish freedom and spontaneous joy: The poem depicts splashing, boyish banter and joyful freedom, celebrating the instinctive, unpretentious vitality of rural working-class youth.Pearson Edexcel
Brechtian Alienation: Theatrical techniques designed to remind the audience they are watching a play, preventing them from becoming passively lost in the story.Eduqas
Brechtian Distancing: Techniques (like jazz music between scenes or addressing the audience) that stop the audience from getting lost in the emotion, forcing them to think…Eduqas
Brechtian Techniques: Theatrical devices designed to remind the audience they are watching a play, encouraging critical thought rather than pure emotion.Eduqas
Byronic Hero: A proud, moody, cynical character with a dark past, capable of deep affection.AQA

C

Caesura: A pause near the middle of a line, often indicated by punctuation.AQA, Eduqas, Pearson Edexcel
Capitalism: An economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit.AQA, Eduqas
Capitalism versus socialism: The play critiques the selfish individualism of capitalism, while the Inspector's final speech embodies Priestley's socialist ideals and post-war hopes.AQA
Care and fostering: Leon is placed with foster carers before moving to a new family, and the social care system is significant in the novel.AQA
Caricature: A description of a person using exaggeration of some characteristics and oversimplification of others.AQA
Categories of context: Different kinds of context which affect authors' work and the reader's response to it.Pearson Edexcel
Catharsis: The purging of emotions (pity and fear) experienced by the audience at the end of a tragedy.Eduqas
Challenging prejudice and anti-immigrant rhetoric: Zephaniah criticises negative attitudes towards refugees, rejecting dehumanising stereotypes.Pearson Edexcel
Changing interpretations: Time and audience change emphasis and interpretation, so one reading should not be treated as simply wrong or as the only correct interpretation.Pearson Edexcel
Character development: Understanding how main characters change across the play, such as following a change by comparing early soliloquies with later scenes.AQA
Character motivation and development: Explaining why characters act as they do, and analysing how characterisation develops and interacts with other elements.AQA
Character pressures: Setting can create pressures on characters, limit their choices and shape the language they use.Pearson Edexcel
Characterisation and motivation: Explaining why characters act as they do, with reference to actions, words or events in the text.Pearson Edexcel
Chiaroscuro: The treatment of light and shade in drawing and painting; in literature, the juxtaposition of light and dark imagery.Eduqas
Chiasmus: A rhetorical or literary figure in which words, grammatical constructions, or concepts are repeated in reverse order.Eduqas
Childhood admiration and shared sibling memories: The speaker recalls how she and her brother shared childhood stories of Captain James Cook's legendary Pacific voyages.Pearson Edexcel
Childhood innocence and family shelter: The blue mists awaken tender childhood memories, carrying the speaker back to safety under a father's sheltering roof.Pearson Edexcel
Childhood innocence and nostalgia: The stream is associated with the speaker's childhood and endures as a symbol of childhood innocence.Pearson Edexcel
Childhood, memory and growing up: Meena's coming-of-age, where the childhood perspective is distinguished from the adult narrator's reflection.Pearson Edexcel
Circular Structure: When a text ends in the same place or with the same imagery as it began.AQA
Clandestine: Kept secret or done secretively, especially because illicit.AQA
Class and social expectation: The play explores this through Jo, a working-class teenager in Salford, and through the limited social and economic opportunities available to working-class…AQA
Class and social inequality: The play frames the tragedy as the inescapable consequence of class inequality, distinguishing Mickey's working-class struggle from Edward's sheltered,…AQA, Pearson Edexcel
Class conflict: The tension between working-class identity and middle-class judgement, presented as a social rather than military conflict.Pearson Edexcel
Class, rank and social mobility: Class and social rank govern behaviour, from Lady Catherine's condescension to Darcy's initial reserve at the assembly.AQA
Classical Unities: The Aristotelian rules for drama requiring unity of action, time, and place.AQA
Clear and coherent written communication: Writing that is organised logically, with an introduction, developed paragraphs and a conclusion that follow a planned line of thought.AQA
Code-switching: Alternating between two or more languages or varieties of language in conversation.AQA
Collective Action: The concluding metaphor transforms the image of a school assembly into a military formation, showing the girls as a powerful, unified army ready to fight for…AQA
Collective Voice: The use of plural pronouns ('we', 'our') to represent a group.AQA
Colloquialism: The use of ordinary or familiar words or phrases.AQA, Eduqas
Colonialism and Cultural Theft: The lasting trauma explored through a direct address to a Nigerian pot in a British museum, exposing the violent reality of colonial appropriation.AQA
Colonisation and otherness: Contextual ideas about exploration and colonialism connect to Caliban's claim to the island and debates about the rights of indigenous peoples.AQA
Comfort found in peaceful recollection: The speaker reflects that the gentle weather foretells no storm tomorrow, and the mist provides comforting solace through memory.Pearson Edexcel
Commemoration and collective identity: The poem memorialises the sacrifice of six hundred British cavalrymen, honouring the extraordinary bravery and unquestioning discipline of the regiment.Pearson Edexcel
Communication and Miscommunication: The poem's central conflict of difficult communication within a specific, noisy urban setting, where the d/Deaf speaker struggles in the cafe.AQA
Comparative analysis: Comparing and contrasting texts studied, referring where relevant to theme, characterisation, context, style and literary quality, and comparing two texts…AQA
Comparison: Exploring how two poems present similar or different ideas about power and conflict, and how poets use form, structure and language to shape meaning.AQA, Pearson Edexcel
Compound Adjective: Two or more words joined by a hyphen to modify a noun.Eduqas
Compound Noun: A noun made up of two or more existing words.Eduqas
Conceit: An extended, elaborate metaphor that governs an entire poem or passage.Eduqas
Conflict: A struggle between humanity and nature, or a psychological conflict, which the poem can be read as exploring through an extended metaphor.AQA
Conflict and control: The contrast between rigid structures of power and a gentler, more human alternative, with man-made systems seen as ultimately fragile and weak.AQA
Conflict and military imagery: Military and wound imagery shape the presentation of care and conflict, and should be analysed rather than read as a literal account of gardening.Pearson Edexcel
Conflict and reconciliation: The couple move from silence and separation towards physical reconnection, though 'somehow' preserves uncertainty about how fully their conflict is resolved.AQA
Conflict and Suffering: The speaker laments the conflict, cruelty and suffering that humanity inflicts upon itself, famously asking what man has made of man.AQA
Conflict and trauma: The physical and psychological wounds after conflict that the speaker, Laura, gradually explores in her husband.Pearson Edexcel
Conflict and Violence: The poem re-frames the ordinary sound of a school bell as a military signal, establishing that seeking education is a dangerous act of war against oppressive…AQA
Conflict in relationships: A theme poets present in the cluster, alongside desire, separation and memory.AQA
Connection and isolation: A hopeful plea for reconnection with the natural world as a remedy for emotional isolation and sadness.AQA
Connotation: The ideas or feelings associated with a word, beyond its literal meaning.Eduqas
Constancy of nature versus human mortality and aging: The natural stream remains perpetually fresh and clear while human life is subject to aging, grief, and shifting fortune.Pearson Edexcel
Construct: The idea that characters are not real people, but artificial creations built by the writer to represent ideas.AQA, Eduqas
content: The ideas and messages a poet presents, which students should analyse rather than merely summarise as a story.AQA
Context: The social, historical and cultural factors that shaped the text, which should be integrated into analysis rather than treated as separate.AQA
Context and meaning: Who the audience is, what they bring to the text, and how their expectations, beliefs and circumstances shape meaning.Pearson Edexcel
Contextual influence on meaning: Using understanding of writers' social, historical and cultural contexts to inform evaluation, without letting it overshadow the text.AQA
Contextual influences: Referring where relevant to context, such as the historical or social background that influenced the texts, and comparing how social, historical or cultural…AQA
Contextual influences on poetry: Relevant contextual information is integrated into your analysis to deepen interpretation, rather than added as separate background.AQA
Contextual meaning: Using the surrounding context to fix the meaning of a word, phrase, sentence or whole text.Pearson Edexcel
Contextual understanding: Understanding of relevant contextual factors that should be integrated into the analysis of the writer's choices and the reader's response.AQA
Control and restriction in the city: The city is marked by restriction, with chartered streets and the chartered Thames showing how commercial greed controls both human streets and the natural…Pearson Edexcel
Couplet: Two lines of verse, usually in the same meter and joined by rhyme, that form a unit.AQA, Eduqas
Courage and obedience: The poem honours the extraordinary bravery and unquestioning discipline of six hundred British cavalrymen ordered to charge directly into devastating Russian…Pearson Edexcel
Courage and Resilience: The simple, active verb placed at the end of a line emphasises the girl's relentless determination and resilience despite the violence she faces.AQA
Craftsmanship and Skill: The precision, discipline and control fundamental to the jewellery maker's highly skilled craft, conveyed through similes such as 'neat as soldiers'.AQA
Creole Dialect: A stable natural language developed from a mixture of different languages.AQA
Crime and detection: Doyle uses the detective genre to explore crime, with Holmes and Watson investigating the Agra treasure.AQA
Critical terminology: Subject terminology that supports AO2 analysis, rather than being labelled as AO4.AQA
Cuckold: A man whose wife is unfaithful to him, traditionally mocked and depicted with horns.AQA, Pearson Edexcel
Cultural Difference: The poem examines forming human connections across cultural and religious differences in 1950s Britain, where stereotypes shape how a society is navigated.AQA
Cultural dual identity and diaspora experience: Being caught between two worlds, belonging to two places simultaneously, as the Caribbean immigrant in London is.Pearson Edexcel
Cultural expectations: What different cultural groups are expected to do, and these can differ between groups and classes.Pearson Edexcel
Cultural heritage and language: Cultural inheritance is fragile and must be actively preserved against forces that seek to erase it, with the speaker feeling her Punjabi heritage becoming…AQA
Cultural Hybridity: The blending of elements from different cultures to create a new, mixed identity.AQA
Cultural Identity: The poem reflects and challenges stereotypes about arranged marriages or traditional roles within immigrant communities, exploring British-Asian identity.AQA
Cultural identity and heritage: The complexities of cultural identity and the legacy of the Windrush generation, which Pinnock explores in the lives of Enid and her British-born daughters.AQA, Pearson Edexcel
Cultural pride: A call for cultural and historical self-determination, celebrating ignored Black historical figures and asserting the speaker's own history.AQA
Culture and heritage: The presents symbolise family, culture and belonging for a girl of Pakistani heritage living in England.Pearson Edexcel
Cyclical Structure: A narrative or structural device where the end mirrors or repeats the beginning.AQA, Eduqas

D

Dactylic Dimeter: A metre consisting of two dactyls per line (a dactyl is one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed: DUM-da-da).AQA
Death and the Afterlife: The whitening sky and the title's allusion to paradise allow the scene to be read as an imagined afterlife, with the stream representing the boundary between…AQA
Death, silence and memory of home: Imagery of ice, silence and water is central, as the frozen soldiers drift into exhausted, dreamlike thoughts of home and dawn.Pearson Edexcel
Death, violence and reconciliation: A theme the play explores, with contrasting imagery such as light and dark used to explore the central themes of love and death.AQA
Deceit and hypocrisy: The speaker waters the tree with fears, suns it with smiles and deceitful wiles, showing how pretence feeds resentment.Pearson Edexcel
Deception and misunderstanding: A central concern shown through Don John's deception, which ruins the wedding of Claudio and Hero, and through eavesdropping and disguise.AQA
Declarative Sentence: A sentence that makes a statement or 'declares' something.Eduqas
Dehumanisation: The dehumanising way the victim is treated, shown through the casual, almost careless verb 'tosses' contrasting with the horrific image described.AQA
Denouement: The final part of a narrative in which the strands of the plot are drawn together and matters are explained.AQA
Desire and self-presentation: The speaker's desire may be tender, possessive or self-effacing, and the poem links to the anthology theme of relationships.Pearson Edexcel
Deus Ex Machina: An unexpected power or event saving a seemingly hopeless situation.AQA
Devotion and service: The speaker offers to become everyday objects and appliances for the beloved, serving and staying close to them.Pearson Edexcel
Dialect / Register: The specific variety of language used by a particular group or class.Eduqas
Diction: The choice and use of words and phrases in speech or writing.Eduqas
Didactic: Intended to teach, particularly in having moral instruction as an ulterior motive.AQA, Eduqas
Direct Address: Speaking directly to the reader or a specific audience.Eduqas
Disappointment and Alienation: The shift from joy to disappointment and anxiety, with the speaker feeling alienated and retreating from the scene.AQA
Disillusion and the end of love: Hardy depicts love's demise and mutual disillusionment through a desolate winter setting, reflecting on the bitter termination of a romantic relationship.Pearson Edexcel
Disorientation and entrapment: Confusion conveyed through fragmented syntax, together with the speaker's trapped perspective.Pearson Edexcel
Distance and closeness: The couple's hands have 'swum the distance between us' and folded together, so touch rather than speech completes the reconciliation.AQA
Distance and Connection: The poem meditates on distance, communication, and what constitutes a 'real' life, suggesting that true connection can transcend lifestyle and location.AQA
Distance and responsibility: The gap between those who witness images of conflict and those who view them from a distance, implicating readers who view images of suffering from safety.Pearson Edexcel
Divine power and judgement: Conflict is presented as divinely judged, with Assyrian aggression defeated by a supernatural power rather than human resistance.Pearson Edexcel
Divine Right of Kings: The belief that a monarch derives their right to rule directly from the will of God.Eduqas
Domestic Imagery: Words and phrases related to the home, family, and everyday household life.AQA
Domestic objects, food and routine: The mother's kitchen is a site of family belonging, memory and displacement, presented through domestic life such as objects, food and routine.Pearson Edexcel
Doppelgänger: A literary archetype of a double or alter-ego, often representing the darker side of a character.AQA, Eduqas, Pearson Edexcel
Dramatic Irony: When the audience knows something the characters do not.AQA, Eduqas, Pearson Edexcel
Dramatic Monologue: A poem in the form of a speech or narrative by an imagined person, in which the speaker inadvertently reveals aspects of their character.AQA, Eduqas
Dramatic Monologue / Persona: A poem written in the voice of a character rather than the poet.AQA
Dreams and aspirations: Connected with wider political events through a structure moving between domestic scenes and fantasy sequences.AQA
Dual heritage and cultural identity: The poet explores his mixed English and Kashmiri heritage through acute linguistic sensitivity, examining personal and cultural identity.Pearson Edexcel
Duality: A theme Stevenson explores through language, form and structure across the novella, focusing on a single case of duality.AQA, Eduqas
Dynamic Verbs: Verbs that indicate an action, process, or sensation.AQA

E

Economic Hardship: The harsh reality of financial struggle set against the celebration of craftsmanship, showing the disparity between intrinsic worth and economic reward.AQA
Education and Empowerment: The poem argues that the fight for girls' education is a modern form of warfare, transforming violent imagery into a new battle for knowledge and freedom.AQA
Effects of conflict: Themes of loss and remembrance resonated with families affected by contemporary conflicts, giving voice to those on the 'home front'.AQA
Elegy: A poem of serious reflection, typically a lament for the dead.Eduqas
Emotional restraint: Withheld feeling that shaped the relationship, with the poem presenting grief through what is withheld as much as what is shown.Pearson Edexcel
Emotional struggle: The central conflict is internal and relational rather than military, presenting love as both binding and painful.Pearson Edexcel
Empathy, solidarity, and shared belonging: Through rhythmic repetition and direct address, the speaker builds an inclusive community of empathy and shared identity.Pearson Edexcel
Empire and racial otherness: Victorian attitudes towards race and imperialism shape the portrayal of characters like Tonga, an Andaman Islander.AQA
Enchantment: One of the experiences Keats presents through the knight's account of meeting a beautiful lady and being lulled to sleep.Pearson Edexcel
Enclosed Rhyme: A rhyme scheme of ABBA, where the outer lines enclose the inner lines.AQA
Encounter with the sublime and mysterious: The speaker's imaginative journey to the seashore brings her into contact with a personified ocean and its creatures, which seem fascinated by her.Pearson Edexcel
Enjambment: The continuation of a sentence without a pause beyond the end of a line, couplet, or stanza.AQA, Eduqas, Pearson Edexcel
Entailment: A legal restriction on property that dictates it can only be inherited by a specific line of heirs (usually male).Eduqas
Epistolary: Relating to the writing of letters.AQA, Eduqas
Epistolary Form: A piece of literature written in the form of a letter or series of letters.AQA, Pearson Edexcel
Epistolary Structure: A narrative told through a series of documents, letters, or diary entries.AQA
Epithet: An adjective or descriptive phrase expressing a quality characteristic of the person.Eduqas
Equality and its betrayal: The novella's themes include equality and the betrayal of ideals, reflected in the systematic alteration of the commandments.Pearson Edexcel
Equivocation: The use of ambiguous language to conceal the truth.AQA, Eduqas
Ethereal: Extremely delicate and light in a way that seems not to be of this world.AQA
Etymology: The study of the origin of words and the way in which their meanings have changed throughout history.Eduqas
Eulogy: A speech or piece of writing that praises someone highly, typically someone who has just died.Eduqas
Euphemism: A mild or indirect word or expression substituted for one considered to be too harsh or blunt.AQA
Eurocentric: Focusing on European culture or history to the exclusion of a wider view of the world.AQA
Evaluation and impact: Weighing how far a choice shapes meaning and impact, rather than merely naming the technique.AQA
Everyday devotion and intensity of feeling: The poem's movement from daily quiet necessity to an all-encompassing, unconditional emotion.Pearson Edexcel
Everyday imagery: The accumulation of domestic images, from a vacuum cleaner and coffee pot to a car and a raincoat, which shift from useful to protective.Pearson Edexcel
Evidence-based argument: Supporting a point of view by selecting relevant quotations or references and using them to back up an interpretation.AQA
Exile and loss of home: The speaker's situation of having left her home country as a child and now living apart from her lost homeland.Pearson Edexcel
Existentialism: A philosophical approach emphasizing the individual's freedom and the lack of inherent meaning in the universe.AQA
Explicit versus implied meaning: Separating what a text states explicitly from what it implies or suggests.Pearson Edexcel
Extended Metaphor: A comparison sustained across the poem, here the speaker's thoughts as living vines and her lover as a strong tree.AQA, Eduqas, Pearson Edexcel

F

Fable: A short story, typically with animals as characters, conveying a moral.AQA, Pearson Edexcel
Familial bonds: The unbreakable connection that persists despite the role reversal, as suggested by the ambiguous final phrase.AQA
Family and Ancestry: The suppressed family dialect that the speaker wishes to recover and proudly carry forward.AQA
Family and belonging: The novel explores care, race, class, family and loss as Leon's understanding of his family situation changes.AQA
Family and community: Themes the play explores against a backdrop of racial prejudice.AQA
Family and cultural expectation: Family values and dual cultural heritage that Meena navigates in the novel.Pearson Edexcel
Family and generational conflict: Generational conflict within the family, which Pinnock examines alongside cultural identity in the lives of Enid, Del and Viv.AQA
Family and the mother-daughter relationship: The speaker's relationship with her mother carries the poem's emotional weight.Pearson Edexcel
Family Bonds: The parents beckon and call to the speaker, supporting an interpretation of death as a transition towards reunion with parental figures of guidance and…AQA
Family love between child and grandparent: The affectionate address in which a child speaks to a grandfather who is ill, moving between tender reassurance and remembered shared pleasures.Pearson Edexcel
Family loyalty and conflict: A theme the play explores, including the feud that causes the tragedy and the conflict between Juliet and her father relating to Elizabethan patriarchal norms.AQA
Family memory and self-discovery: Kunial meditates on childhood nicknames and family memories, reflecting on family and heritage as sources of belonging.Pearson Edexcel
Family relationships: The speaker negotiates a new marital identity while still living and working within the family business structure, creating a playful tension with parental…AQA, Pearson Edexcel
Family, loyalty and tragedy: The play contrasts the lives of the Johnstone and Lyons families and builds towards the tragedy of the ending.Pearson Edexcel
Fate and free will: A theme the play explores, with the Prologue's sonnet form establishing love and fate as intertwined and Renaissance ideas about fate and astrology emphasised…AQA
Fate and superstition: Russell explores fate and superstition in the tragic story of the twin brothers.AQA
Fate and the supernatural: A theme to study alongside ambition and kingship, explored through the witches' paradoxical language, which creates ambiguity that Macbeth misreads.AQA
Father-child relationships: The relationship between a father and child, presented in the poem as shaped by emotional restraint and withheld feeling.Pearson Edexcel
Fear: A psychological response to an invisible, powerful enemy, suggesting the most profound conflict may be with fear itself rather than a physical threat.AQA
Fear and awe: The boy's confidence turns to fear, and the peak seems to stride after him as a projection of his fear and awe.Pearson Edexcel
Fear and Entrapment: The bride's terror and withdrawal within a restrictive, rural marriage, intensified by the isolated setting and the power of social expectations.AQA
Fear and terror: The poem is a visceral depiction of fear and confusion, where man becomes little more than a weapon driven by terror's touchy dynamite.AQA
Fear and vulnerability in modern travel: An adult passenger's acute apprehension and vulnerability during a first aeroplane journey, exposing human fragility through travel as an estranging,…Pearson Edexcel
Female autonomy: A key theme of the novel, alongside social class, moral integrity, passionate love versus spiritual restraint, and Victorian institutional hypocrisy.Pearson Edexcel
Female experience and solidarity: The poem finds solidarity and strength in shared female experience, suggesting a deep, spiritual bond between women who share similar struggles across time…AQA
Fin de siècle: French for 'end of the century'; refers to the anxieties of the late 19th century regarding moral decay and the decline of the empire.AQA
First-person narrative: A narrative mode where a story is told by one character at a time, speaking for and about themselves ('I').AQA
First-person Persona: A constructed narrative voice ('I') that is not necessarily the author's direct autobiographical voice.Eduqas
Foil: A character who contrasts with another character to highlight particular qualities of the other character.AQA, Eduqas
Foreshadowing: A warning or indication of a future event.AQA, Eduqas
Forgiveness and reconciliation: The play's movement from revenge to forgiveness fits the genre of Shakespeare's late romances, while noting the uneasy reconciliation.AQA
Form and structure: The writer's choices of form, structure or language, which literary context can be linked to.Pearson Edexcel
Form, rhythm and repetition as emotional methods: The shaping of the poem's emotional register through form, rhythm and repetition, creating emotional effects.Pearson Edexcel
Frame Narrative: A story within a story.Pearson Edexcel
Framing Device: A narrative technique in which a story is surrounded by a secondary story, creating context.Eduqas
Free Indirect Discourse: A style of third-person narration which uses some of the characteristics of third-person along with the essence of first-person direct speech.AQA, Eduqas
Free Verse: Poetry that does not rhyme or have a regular meter.AQA, Eduqas, Pearson Edexcel

G

Galvanism: The historical scientific theory that electricity could reanimate dead tissue.AQA, Pearson Edexcel
Gender and Social Class: Porphyria's actions, such as travelling alone and letting her hair down, would have challenged Victorian ideals of female passivity and modesty, perhaps…AQA
Gender expectations: A contextual factor about 19th-century life that can be related to the novel where this illuminates the task.AQA
Gender Inequality: The limited legal rights and social expectations of women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where a wife was expected to obey her husband.AQA
Generational conflict and change: Priestley explores generational divides, shown in how Sheila's response to the Inspector contrasts with her parents'.AQA
Genre conventions: The specific features of a kind of text, such as the tragic hero's flaw or the comic resolution, that shape how the text is understood.Pearson Edexcel
Gothic: A genre characterized by mystery, horror, gloomy settings, and supernatural elements.AQA, Eduqas
Gothic Literature: A genre that combines fiction and horror, death, and at times romance.AQA
Greed and the corrupting power of wealth: The pursuit of the Agra treasure drives the plot, and Doyle uses the genre to comment on the corrupting influence of wealth.AQA
Grief and loss: The poem presents grief through what is withheld as much as what is shown, following the speaker's recollection of a father's death.Pearson Edexcel
Group identity and peer pressure: Fear, group pressure and self-interest distort individual morality within a leaderless teenage group, linked to social anxieties about youth alienation.AQA
Growth and destruction: The poem traces the growth of the tree and its deadly fruit, showing how hidden anger causes destruction.Pearson Edexcel
Guilt: One of the themes the play explores, which you should practise linking short quotations for key moments to.Pearson Edexcel
Guilt and conscience: A central concern of the tragedy, tracked through blood imagery from Duncan's murder to Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking.AQA
Guilt and memory: The speaker's deep-seated guilt and doubt about the necessity of the killing, which he is forced to relive in vivid detail.AQA
Guilt and responsibility: The play exposes these through a group whose panicked cover-up escalates to calculated murder, with the intended killing happening offstage.AQA

H

Half-caste: A derogatory term that the speaker directly confronts, using colloquial Creole idiom, humour and sharp logic to expose its absurdity.Pearson Edexcel
Half-rhyme: A rhyme in which the stressed syllables of ending consonants match, however the preceding vowel sounds do not (e.g., shape/keep).AQA, Eduqas
Half-rhyme (Pararhyme): Words that have similar, but not identical, sounds (e.g., 'knive us' / 'nervous').AQA
Hamartia: A fatal flaw leading to the downfall of a tragic hero.AQA, Eduqas
Healing and restoration: Nature offers solace, inspiration and healing, and its restorative power can restore the human spirit.AQA
Heritage and diaspora: A young speaker's movement between Zambian heritage and a British present, asking what it means to belong to a culture he knows partly at a distance.Pearson Edexcel
Heritage and Identity: The speaker’s complex relationship with her Guyanese heritage, including a sense of proud, rightful inheritance and later feeling like a detached outsider.AQA
Heroism, empire, and maritime exploration: The thrilling heroism of global maritime exploration is contrasted with the tragic vulnerability of Cook's violent death in Hawaii.Pearson Edexcel
Historical setting: Includes the period, the political and social conditions of that time, and the physical or geographical location.Pearson Edexcel
Homesickness and longing: The exiled speaker in Italy longs passionately for an English springtime, and the poem is emotionally charged with this feeling rather than being purely…Pearson Edexcel
Honour and reputation: A central concern linked to the wedding accusation, Elizabethan expectations of female chastity and the way a woman's worth was tied to her family's honour.AQA
Honour and Shame: Garland questions honour and bravery, contrasting state ideology with the human instinct to live, while failure brings great shame in Japanese honour culture.AQA
Hope and Resilience: Despite his oppressive environment, the ancestor is shown to 'stack his dreams' and crave 'a wider view', representing a universal human desire for space,…AQA
Hubris: Excessive pride or self-confidence that leads to a character's downfall.AQA, Eduqas, Pearson Edexcel
Human boundary versus the vast power of nature: The shoreline acts as a threshold between domestic control and wild nature, where the tide rises past shoes, apron and bodice.Pearson Edexcel
Human Connection: The poem explores the possibilities and difficulties of forming connections across cultural and religious differences through a conversational encounter on a…AQA
Human interaction with the environment: The relationship between the natural elements (marsh, sky, sea, twilight) and human emotion is explored in the poem.Pearson Edexcel
Human pride vs. nature's power: Youthful arrogance confronted and humbled by the terrifying power of nature, teaching a humbling lesson about the true scale of power.AQA
Human resilience and vulnerability: A balance of practical resilience and a growing sense of vulnerability shown by a community preparing for and enduring a powerful storm.AQA
Human rights and moral responsibility: The poem insists that compassion and refuge are fundamental human rights.Pearson Edexcel
Humanity and nature: The conflict between human confidence and the overwhelming force of the natural world.Pearson Edexcel
Humour and sincerity: The poem mixes humour with genuine devotion, so the sincere devotion beneath the humorous list should be recognised.Pearson Edexcel
Humour and vulnerability: Light-hearted quatrains and alternate rhyme satirise modern romantic anxieties, exposing universal dating vulnerabilities.Pearson Edexcel
Hybridity: A cross between two separate races, cultures, or cultures.AQA
Hyperbole: Exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally.AQA, Eduqas

I

Iambic Metre: A rhythm of unstressed followed by stressed syllables.AQA
Iambic Pentameter: A line of verse with five metrical feet, each consisting of one short (or unstressed) syllable followed by one long (or stressed) syllable.AQA, Eduqas
Iambic Tetrameter: A meter in poetry consisting of four iambs (one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable) per line.AQA, Eduqas
Idealisation: Representing something as perfect or better than in reality.Eduqas
Idealised and spiritual love: A love that moves from youthful idealism to religious piety and is expressed through spiritual language.Pearson Edexcel
Identity and belonging: The poem suggests that a person's sense of place and identity is constructed through memory and emotion, which cannot be erased by political power.AQA, Pearson Edexcel
Identity and Diaspora: The pain of communities separated from their history, with the pot symbolising a culture removed from its roots, silenced and imprisoned behind glass.AQA
Identity and Heritage: The exploration of borders, cultural division and fluid identities, linked to Dharker's background of being born in Pakistan and raised in Scotland.AQA
Identity and home: The poem's structure and language reflect the speaker's search for a settled identity in a new country.Pearson Edexcel
Identity and labels: The poem tests how far national labels can capture a person and exposes the pressure of being defined by others.Pearson Edexcel
Identity and names: The poem explores how a name is central to identity and cultural heritage, and the pressure to assimilate is symbolised by the difficulty English speakers…AQA
Identity and pride: The speaker's dignity and defiant tone in asserting working-class worth against assumptions about superiority.Pearson Edexcel
Identity and self-discovery: Pip's journey as a bildungsroman, in which the older, wiser narrator reflects on his youthful naivety and moral errors.AQA
Identity and selfhood: The poem is a tribute to the mother as an individual, separate from her parental role.AQA
Identity and shared experience: The speaker's reflections on connection, emotional safety and personal belonging with a specific person.Pearson Edexcel
Identity and Society: The poem relates to Caleb Femi's wider work exploring the lives and identities of young Black men in contemporary London, and to the social context of racial…AQA
Identity shaped by a remembered place: The speaker's sense of self maintained through an untainted memory of her city, kept unnamed and idealised.Pearson Edexcel
Ideology: A system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy.AQA
Idiolect: The distinct, unique language and speech habits of a specific character.AQA
Imperative verb: A command such as 'Renew', 'Rustle' and 'Drop' that shows the speaker's agency and conveys urgent desire.AQA
Imperialism: A policy of extending a country's power and influence through colonisation.AQA
In media res: Starting a narrative in the middle of the action.AQA
Independence and Growing Up: The child's move towards independence is marked by a key moment of separation, framed as a natural, necessary part of life's cycle.AQA
Industrialisation and Urban Life: The poem's descriptions of 'smoke-filled' Leeds and 'twelve hours combing flax' link to the historical context of the Industrial Revolution.AQA
Informed personal response: A response developed and supported by textual evidence, explaining how different readers might respond to the text.AQA
Inherited Wisdom and Connection: Intergenerational wisdom and cultural inheritance, as the Māori woman's grandfather's aphorism proposes that connection with nature offers companionship that…AQA
Injustice and inequality: The poem uses place to explore injustice, exposing continuing inequality and racial division through sensory imagery, repetition and a controlled, bitter tone.Pearson Edexcel
Injustice and Prejudice: The poem focuses specifically on the experience of racial profiling, where a young Black boy is targeted because of his race, and on the injustice of this…AQA
Innocent rebellion against formal routine: Village boys steal away from Sunday school or farm chores on a scorching day to bathe in a secluded, willow-shaded brook.Pearson Edexcel
Internal Conflict: The struggle within the pilot between duty and personal desire, as he abandons his suicide mission and returns home.AQA
Internal panic versus external composure: The dramatic contrast between the passenger's anxious internal panic and the calm, corporate airline announcements of the pilot and cabin crew.Pearson Edexcel
Internal Rhyme: A rhyme involving a word in the middle of a line and another at the end of the line or in the middle of the next.AQA
Intertextuality: The relationship between texts, especially literary ones; quoting or referencing other works.Eduqas
Irony: The expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect.AQA, Eduqas
Irony and psychological realism: Colloquial understatement, irony, and parenthetical thoughts create humour and realism, satirising the flight experience rather than celebrating its wonder.Pearson Edexcel
Irony, satire and social critique: Austen uses irony and satire to expose Regency marriage-market values, inheritance laws and class snobbery, with a comic yet critical treatment of women's…AQA
Isolation and solitude: The poem evokes late Victorian impressions of isolation alongside nature and atmospheric beauty as the speaker walks across the Kentish marshland toward the…Pearson Edexcel

J

Jealousy and Possession: The Duke's extreme jealousy and possessiveness, interpreting the Duchess's innocence as a slight and framing her as one of his possessions.AQA
Jealousy and the objectification of a wife: The Duke's pathological jealousy and possessiveness, shown through his treatment of the Duchess as an object he owns.Pearson Edexcel
Jingoism: Extreme patriotism, especially in the form of aggressive or warlike foreign policy.Eduqas
Joy and Sadness: A profound sadness strikes the speaker while relaxing in a beautiful natural grove, prompted by the contrast between his mood and the joyful scene.AQA
Justice and morality: Small's long confessional flashback reframes the reader's understanding of justice and crime.AQA
Justice, crime and punishment: The justice system whose contextual understanding is vital, linked to Victorian penal practices like transportation and the use of prison hulks.AQA
Juxtaposition: The fact of two things being seen or placed close together with contrasting effect.AQA, Eduqas, Pearson Edexcel

K

Kingship: One of the themes the play explores, which you should practise linking short quotations for key moments to.Pearson Edexcel
Kingship and tyranny: The movement from Macbeth's rise to king to his tyrannical rule and downfall, linked to legitimate rule and Jacobean anxieties about regicide and succession.AQA
Kitchen Sink Realism: A cultural movement in the late 1950s featuring angry, young, working-class protagonists in cramped domestic settings.Eduqas

L

Language analysis: Examining a writer’s deliberate choices of vocabulary and grammatical features, and judging how they create quality and impact.AQA
Language and accent: Colloquial language and accent used to assert identity and to question the idea that one accent or background is superior to another.Pearson Edexcel
Language and breakdown: The breakdown of communication during conflict, with punctuation and typography suggesting explosions and interrupted thought.Pearson Edexcel
Language and figurative language: The words a writer chooses, including figurative devices, which candidates must analyse and evaluate for how they contribute to quality and impact.Pearson Edexcel
Language and Voice: The authentic way of speaking that was hidden away due to social pressure to conform to a 'correct' way of speaking.AQA
Language, etymology, and the power of words: Kunial uses wordplay and etymology to examine the word 'us', turning words inside out to discover hidden connections between past and present.Pearson Edexcel
Language, food and family as markers of identity: Dharker uses language, food and family imagery to test how far belonging is chosen, inherited or imposed.Pearson Edexcel
Language, music and identity: Chingonyi uses memory, family, music and language to test inherited identity against lived experience.Pearson Edexcel
Lexical Field: A group of words that share a similar meaning or theme.AQA
Light and dark imagery: Imagery blended to suggest harmony and balance, with a contrast between 'night' and 'day'.Pearson Edexcel
Liminal space: A transitional or threshold space between two states.AQA
Liminality: The state of being between two distinct stages, spaces, or classes.AQA
Literal versus inferential meaning: Understanding a word, phrase or sentence in context, and distinguishing between what is stated explicitly and what is implied.AQA
Literary movements: Traditions that a text belongs to or reacts against, which may experiment with form.Pearson Edexcel
Literary terminology: Precise linguistic and literary terms such as metaphor, metre, irony, persona, synecdoche and pathetic fallacy, used as tools to explain how choices shape…Pearson Edexcel
Location and place: The physical or geographical location, such as the court, city or island in which the drama unfolds.Pearson Edexcel
Long marriage and estrangement: The poem presents an ageing married couple and the distance that has grown between them over a long marriage.Pearson Edexcel
Longing and Authenticity: The speaker reveals insecurity about her own lifestyle and an idealised view of his, exposing a yearning for a more authentic, grounded existence.AQA
Loss and absence: The city becomes a metaphor for a lost childhood or past that remains vivid within the individual's mind, even when the external reality may have been…AQA
Loss and absence in love: The poem mourns the sudden cooling and loss of an intimate friendship, contrasting past affection with present emotional distance.Pearson Edexcel
Loss and grief: The enduring, secret sorrow of a speaker mourning a clandestine affair, whose grief must be hidden and produces isolation.AQA, Pearson Edexcel
Loss and isolation: Experiences Keats presents through the knight waking to a desolate hillside.Pearson Edexcel
Loss and separation: The speaker grapples with feelings of loss and protectiveness, and the separation is framed as a painful, mechanical wrenching from orbit.AQA
Loss of innocence and freedom: Corruption is traced through all stages of life, from the cry of the infant to the soldier's sigh and the prostitute's curse.AQA
Loss of love: The end of a romantic relationship, presented as an emotional death that leaves the speaker trapped in a cycle of resentment and disillusionment.AQA
Loss of nature: The modern city severs its population's connection to nature, contrasting with the purity of the natural world.AQA
Loss, grief, and bereavement: The poem evokes bereavement and nostalgia through a specific geographical setting, reflecting mournfully on the four friends who once gathered.Pearson Edexcel
Love and care: Presented in the poem as patient care for a partner affected by conflict, shown through the speaker's gradual exploration of her husband's wounds.Pearson Edexcel
Love and desire: Explored through the dual affectionate and frustrating nature of romantic love, balancing joyful devotion against messy, demanding burdens.Pearson Edexcel
Love and honesty: Duffy presents love as truthful, complex and sometimes painful, carrying both affection and warning.Pearson Edexcel
Love and independence: The tension between love and the struggle for independence, as the mother wants to hold on while the daughter pulls away.Pearson Edexcel
Love and marriage: Central concerns of the play, interweaving the witty courtship of Beatrice and Benedick with the troubled romance of Claudio and Hero.AQA
Love and romantic idealism: A theme the play explores, shown in the lovers' shared sonnet at their first meeting, which presents their relationship as both romantic and doomed.AQA
Lyric Poem: A short, highly musical poem that expresses intense personal emotion rather than telling a story.AQA

M

Macabre: Disturbing because concerned with or causing a fear of death.Eduqas
MacGuffin: An object or device in a movie or a book that serves merely as a trigger for the plot.AQA
Machiavellian: Cunning, scheming, and unscrupulous, especially in politics.AQA, Eduqas
Madness and Morality: The poem examines the mind of a speaker who calmly justifies a horrific act, with the final line offering a chilling confirmation of his madness and his break…AQA
Magic, art and illusion: Prospero's magic, derived from his books, and his creation of the masque link to Renaissance interest in magic and learning.AQA
Malapropism: The mistaken use of a word in place of a similar-sounding one, often with an unintentionally amusing effect.AQA, Pearson Edexcel
Malthusian: Relating to the ideas of Thomas Malthus, who believed population growth would lead to poverty and starvation, and that charity only worsened the problem.AQA
Marginalization: Treatment of a person or group as insignificant or peripheral.Eduqas
Marriage, love and financial security: The marriage plot is linked to Regency social realities, showing how financial security and inheritance shape the characters' choices.AQA
Masque: A form of amateur dramatic entertainment, popular among the nobility in 16th- and 17th-century England, involving dancing and acting.AQA, Eduqas
Mechanisation: The introduction of machines into a process, especially farming.Eduqas
Melancholy: A feeling of pensive sadness, typically with no obvious cause.Eduqas
Memory: The speaker's recollection of a painful parting, the present bitterness of hearing the former lover's name, and the dread of a future meeting.AQA
Memory and bitter reflection: The circular structure, returning to the pond in the final stanza, underscores how memory permanently taints the speaker's view of love.Pearson Edexcel
Memory and change in a relationship: The speaker recalls an ever-flowing, sparkling fountain of affection and sets it against the present reality of a silent, hidden well.Pearson Edexcel
Memory and displacement: The poem explores memory and displacement through the domestic space of a mother's kitchen.Pearson Edexcel
Memory and growth: A boyhood memory of stealing a boat shows a moment of moral and psychological growth.Pearson Edexcel
Memory and guilt: The internal conflict in the photographer's conscience and memory, and the emotional or moral burden carried by the photographer.Pearson Edexcel
Memory and heritage: The storm symbolises cultural memory and belonging, and the speaker draws on ancestral beliefs to make sense of her new home.Pearson Edexcel
Memory and legacy: The poem immortalising the soldiers as heroes and asking the reader to remember their noble sacrifice, separating their valour from their leaders' incompetence.AQA
Memory and Loss: The 'lost words' held back over years, waiting to be heard and celebrated after being almost erased.AQA
Memory and nostalgia: The poem conveys a sense of nostalgia and connection rather than being purely descriptive, reflecting on a moment within landscape.Pearson Edexcel
Memory and nostalgic longing: The speaker is carried back to the safety of youth, exploring nostalgic comfort through tender childhood memories.Pearson Edexcel
Memory and reflection: The speaker recalls a father's death in a reflective, controlled tone, presenting grief through what is withheld as much as what is shown.Pearson Edexcel
Memory and the idealised past: An immutable, glowing memory of the former city retained despite reports of war, tyranny, and destruction.Pearson Edexcel
Memory and the past: The poem can be read as a recollection, with precise domestic details suggesting a cherished memory that has been revisited often.AQA, Pearson Edexcel
Memory, Guilt and Trauma: The photographer is haunted by what he has seen, and the poem explores traumatic memories resurfacing in a safe, domestic setting, as in 'Remains'.AQA
Memory, longing, and dislocation: The man's sense of displacement and longing for his homeland as consciousness returns and the dream dissolves.Pearson Edexcel
Meta-theatre: Aspects of a play that draw attention to its nature as drama or theatre.AQA
Metaphor: A figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.AQA, Eduqas
Metatheatre: Theatre that draws attention to its own unreality or artificiality.Eduqas
Metre: The regular rhythmic pattern of syllables in a line of poetry.Eduqas
Metrical Disruption: A deliberate break in the established rhythm of a poem.AQA
Microaggression: Everyday, subtle, intentional or unintentional interactions that communicate bias.AQA
Microcosm: A community, place, or situation regarded as encapsulating in miniature the characteristics of something much larger.AQA, Eduqas
Migration and belonging: The poem explores migration and belonging as the speaker feels connected to both Guyana and England at once.Pearson Edexcel
Migration and displacement: The speaker's personal experience of cultural displacement is framed as not just a physical move but a spiritual and emotional ordeal, linking her journey to…AQA
Migration and Heritage: The poem adds a layer of meaning related to migration and the British Empire through the great-great-grandfather's Sri Lankan heritage.AQA
Migration and Identity: The poem explores this through a Jamaican migrant speaker whose identity is met with clumsy assumptions during a train encounter in 1950s Britain.AQA
Military blunder and leadership: A catastrophic command error sent the soldiers into the valley of Death, and the poem implicitly critiques the military blunder.Pearson Edexcel
Minor Sentence: A sentence that does not necessarily contain a main verb but functions as a sentence.Eduqas
Misanthrope: A person who dislikes humankind and avoids human society.AQA, Eduqas
Mixture as richness: The idea that mixture generates richness, harmony and wholeness rather than incompleteness, shown through Picasso mixing colours, the English weather blending…Pearson Edexcel
Modern texts: The component of AQA GCSE English Literature 8702 in which the AQA Anthology Telling Tales is a set text option.AQA
Monotony and conformity: Identical houses and a smoke-filled sky create a suffocating atmosphere of oppressive uniformity in the urban landscape.AQA
Monotony and endurance: Soldiers endure extreme cold and tedium in the trenches, conveyed through repetition and half-rhyme that create monotony and unresolved tension.Pearson Edexcel
Moral integrity: A key theme of the novel, alongside social class, female autonomy, passionate love versus spiritual restraint, and Victorian institutional hypocrisy.Pearson Edexcel
Morality Play: A drama with a clear moral message, where characters often represent abstract concepts (like Greed or Hope).AQA
Mother-daughter conflict: The tension between a mother and her growing daughter, and the struggle for independence.Pearson Edexcel
Motherhood and family: Delaney examines this through Jo's relationship with her neglectful mother Helen and through Jo's own development into a vulnerable mother-to-be.AQA
Motif: A recurring image, idea, or symbol that develops or explains a theme.AQA, Eduqas
Mourning and loss: The final stanza focuses on the aftermath, including the dead soldiers, the silent horses and the mourning widows of Ashur.Pearson Edexcel
Multiculturalism and diversity: The diversity and community that the poem generally celebrates rather than treats negatively.Pearson Edexcel
Multiple interpretations and evaluation: Recognising the possibility of different responses to a text and assessing their strengths and weaknesses using textual evidence.AQA

N

Narrative perspective: One of the ways a writer shapes meaning, alongside language and structure, which should be analysed in the exam response.AQA
Narrative voice: The movement between a speaker who questions a pale knight and the knight's own first-person account.Pearson Edexcel
National identity and belonging: Themes of national identity, displacement and landscape can be compared with another anthology poem, as the speaker's situation abroad shapes the emotional…Pearson Edexcel
Naturalism: A style of theatre that attempts to create a perfect illusion of reality through everyday speech and gritty settings.Eduqas
Nature: The association of the mother's hair with wheat suggests health, nature and sustenance, reinforcing the idealised memory of her as a source of life and comfort.AQA
Nature and human emotion: A landscape drained of colour and life that serves as a powerful metaphor for the emotional death of love.AQA
Nature and humanity: The joyful harmony the speaker observes in the birds, flowers and budding trees contrasts sharply with his thoughts on human society.AQA
Nature and its cycles: A central Romantic concern, with the poem reflecting on nature, mortality and the passage of time.Pearson Edexcel
Nature and place: The hurricane becomes a bridge between Guyana and England, and the storm imagery links to the theme of place and the speaker's dual heritage.Pearson Edexcel
Nature and the Environment: The poem’s focus on environmental decay, moving from natural riches to pollution and wider anxiety about climate change and ecological disaster.AQA
Nature and the natural world: The extended metaphor of the grandfather as a mountain, blending human and geographical features such as 'ridge' and 'summit'.AQA
Nature as a soothing, reflective presence: The gentle weather mirrors past days of weeping and the mist provides comforting solace through memory.Pearson Edexcel
Nature as an enemy: The true adversary is not the enemy army but the freezing weather, with personified nature portrayed as a cruel, active enemy.Pearson Edexcel
Nature versus nurture: One of the play's key themes, which students should recognise alongside class, superstition and the tragedy of the ending.AQA, Pearson Edexcel
Nature vs. Modern Life: Contrasting imagery of natural versus man-made and rural versus technological highlights the different worlds the two people inhabit.AQA
Nature vs. Urban Environments: The contrast between the noisy, isolating coffee shop and the peaceful, connective world of nature, including urban trees that prompt reflection.AQA
Nautical Metaphor: A comparison using imagery related to ships, sailing, and the sea.AQA
Non-linear Narrative: A narrative that does not follow a direct chronological order.AQA
Nostalgia: The opening establishes a nostalgic, story-like tone, suggesting the speaker's memory of her home is now more like a myth or a lost ideal than a tangible…AQA
Nostalgia for childhood innocence: Wistful recollection of specific details of the childhood home, balanced against adult disappointment.Pearson Edexcel

O

Objectification: The action of degrading someone to the status of a mere object.AQA, Eduqas
Observation and perspective: The couple are seen through the eyes of their adult child, who reflects on the distance between them.Pearson Edexcel
Obsessive Love: A deeply unsettling exploration of love in which the speaker's need for absolute ownership and control leads him to kill Porphyria to preserve her complete…AQA
Octave and Sestet: The two main sections of a Petrarchan sonnet (8 lines, then 6 lines).AQA, Eduqas
Ode: A formal lyric poem that addresses and often celebrates a person, place, thing, or idea.Eduqas
Omniscient Narrator: An all-knowing narrative voice that can see into the minds of all characters and offer moral judgements.AQA, Eduqas
Onomatopoeia: The formation of a word from a sound associated with what is named.AQA, Eduqas
Oppression and control: The biased curriculum is a form of oppression that controls knowledge and blinds the speaker to his own identity.AQA
Outward beauty and inner goodness: The movement in the poem from a woman's appearance to her character, valuing her mind and heart.Pearson Edexcel
Oxymoron: A figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction.AQA, Eduqas

P

Pantheism: The belief that the divine (God) encompasses all things in the universe.AQA
Paradox: A seemingly absurd or contradictory statement which, when investigated, may prove to be well founded or true.AQA
Parataxis: The placing of clauses or phrases one after another, without words to indicate coordination or subordination.Eduqas
Parent-child relationships: Explored through a daughter addressing her mother, with family bonds shown as shaped by time and sacrifice.AQA
Parental love: A father's response to his son's injury explores this, together with protectiveness and the limits of protection.AQA, Pearson Edexcel
Past and Present: The poem explores the connection between past and present through the speaker's imaginative reconstruction of her ancestor's life.AQA
Pastoral: Literature that portrays an idealised version of country life.Eduqas
Pathetic Fallacy: The attribution of human feelings and responses to inanimate things or animals, especially in art and literature.AQA, Eduqas, Pearson Edexcel
Pathos: A quality that evokes pity or sadness in the reader.AQA
Patience and recovery: A gradual process of recovery and discovery traced by the poem's sequence and structure, ending in tentative hope.Pearson Edexcel
Patriarchy: A social system in which men hold primary power and predominate in roles of political leadership, moral authority, and property control.AQA, Eduqas, Pearson Edexcel
Patriotism and honour: The poem's purpose as a piece of patriotic writing, intended to boost public morale and honour the soldiers' noble sacrifice.AQA
Peripeteia: A sudden reversal of fortune or change in circumstances.Eduqas
Persona: The character or voice adopted by the author in a literary work.AQA, Eduqas
Personification: Giving human qualities to non-human things.AQA, Eduqas
Perspective and point of view: The paired dramatic monologues offer humorous, parallel perspectives from a woman and a man on their first date.Pearson Edexcel
Petrarchan Sonnet: A 14-line poem consisting of an octave (8 lines) and a sestet (6 lines), traditionally used for love poetry.Eduqas
Petrarchan sonnet form: The sonnet structure Browning uses dynamically, with the volta occurring conventionally at line 9 and shifting the poem to the sestet.AQA
Philosophical Pessimism: A worldview that highlights the negative aspects of existence and the indifference of the universe.AQA
Phonetic Spelling: Spelling words exactly as they sound when spoken (e.g., 'wha' for 'what', 'bout' for 'about').AQA
Physical versus emotional intimacy: The couple lie apart, each engrossed in separate thoughts, contrasting physical proximity with emotional separation.Pearson Edexcel
Physiognomy: The Victorian pseudoscience of judging character from facial characteristics.AQA
Place and Belonging: The tension between love for a place and the painful realities of its present condition, questioning the fate of our planet.AQA
Place and displacement: The contrast between Pakistan and England is central to the poem's meaning, and place shapes self-perception.Pearson Edexcel
Place and identity: The poem explores the connection between place, tourism and identity, showing how the speaker's obsessive rejection of others defines their precarious identity.Pearson Edexcel
Place and memory: The poem presents a place as shaped by politics and history, and shows the speaker's personal memory of District Six clashing with what he sees now.Pearson Edexcel
Place and time of writing: Where and when the author wrote, which can shape an author's choices, for example through censorship, available theatre spaces or contemporary events.Pearson Edexcel
Place, landscape and nation: Dharker uses place imagery to present a speaker caught between a Welsh setting and an imagined Italian identity.Pearson Edexcel
Plosive: Harsh consonant sounds (like p, b, t, d, k, g) created by completely stopping the airflow and then releasing it.Eduqas
Plosives: Harsh consonant sounds like 'b', 'p', 'd', 't'.Eduqas
Plot and sequence: The order in which events unfold and how one action or event causes or shapes another.Pearson Edexcel
Plot structure and cause-effect relationships: Tracing the sequence of events and explaining how one action causes another, including the relationship between actions or events.AQA
Poet Laureate: The official poet appointed by the monarch, expected to write poems for national occasions.AQA
Poetic techniques and their effects: You explore form, structure and language, select and embed short quotations, and explain their effects.AQA
Polysyndeton: The repetition of conjunctions in close succession (e.g., 'and...AQA
Possessive Pronoun: A pronoun indicating ownership (e.g., mine, yours).AQA
Possessiveness and danger: The possessive or dangerous imagery the poem moves towards, describing the onion as clingy and lethal.Pearson Edexcel
Post-Colonial Reading: Analyzing literature to explore the impacts of European colonization and the power dynamics between colonizer and colonized.Eduqas
Postcolonialism: A critical approach that examines the impacts of European colonization.AQA
Poverty and social injustice: Dickens presents this through the allegorical figures of Ignorance and Want, who deliver a direct social warning.AQA
Power and Conflict: One of the AQA poetry clusters studied within the anthology, containing 15 poems written between 1789 and the present day.AQA
Power and Conflict cluster: A group of poems about power and conflict, in which you might compare how two poets present the effects of conflict on ordinary people.AQA
Power and Control: The desire for absolute power and control within a relationship, shown when the speaker reduces Porphyria to an object through the repetition of the…AQA
Power and control in marriage: The Duke's desire for absolute control, revealing possessiveness, jealousy and the corrupting effect of patriarchal power.Pearson Edexcel
Power and corruption: Shelley systematically condemns the ruling classes, criticising the army as a tool of oppression, the law as unjust, and the Church as godless.AQA, Pearson Edexcel
Power and Powerlessness: The poem immerses the reader in the boy's fear and powerlessness, exposing how systemic prejudice can violently erase childhood innocence and destroy a young…AQA
Power and Repatriation: An urgent political demand for the return of stolen cultural heritage, challenging the authority of the museum through an unresolved final question.AQA
Power of authority and obedience: The tension between blind obedience to authority and the tragic consequences of military blunders, with soldiers following a fatal command without question.AQA
Power of nature: The force of the natural world presented as an antagonist, explored through the conflict between humanity and nature.AQA
Prejudice and Misunderstanding: Well-intentioned but clumsy assumptions can be read as possible unintentional prejudice, while politeness and a desire for harmony coexist with cultural…AQA
Prejudice and the power of language: The assumptions behind the term 'half-caste' are challenged through direct address and repeated demands for explanation, putting the listener on trial to…Pearson Edexcel
Present Participle: A verb ending in '-ing' used to show continuous action.AQA, Eduqas
Present Tense: A tense expressing an action that is currently going on.AQA
Presentation and impact: How presentation contributes to thematic resonance and artistic quality, and how specific choices shape readers' and audiences' responses.Pearson Edexcel
Pride and Arrogance: The ruler's hubris, revealed in his boastful imperative command and his self-love and arrogance, which the sonnet form is used to explore.AQA
Pride and downfall: The poem shows the sudden, eerie destruction of a boastful army and the grief that follows, rather than celebrating war.Pearson Edexcel
Pride and humility: The poem presents conflict between human pride and a sense of awe or fear.Pearson Edexcel
Pride, prejudice and self-knowledge: Elizabeth and Darcy overcome initial prejudice and pride, misjudgement and social pressure, and their moral education is tracked through self-questioning and…AQA
Primogeniture: The right, by law or custom, of the firstborn legitimate child (usually male) to inherit the parent's entire or main estate.AQA
Problem Comedy: A play that has the structure of a comedy but deals with dark, complex moral issues.AQA
Prolepsis: Foreshadowing or anticipating a future event.Eduqas
Proleptic Irony / Foreshadowing: A narrative device where a future event is hinted at or anticipated.Eduqas
Proletariat: Workers or working-class people, regarded collectively (often used with reference to Marxism).Pearson Edexcel
Proofreading: Checking your work to demonstrate control and secure marks, since frequent errors can obscure your argument.AQA
Propaganda: Information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view.AQA, Pearson Edexcel
Propaganda and language: The manipulation of language, seen in Squealer's speeches, which manipulate the animals through rhetorical devices.AQA, Pearson Edexcel
Prose: Ordinary written language without metrical structure.AQA, Eduqas, Pearson Edexcel
Protection and vulnerability: The poem explores protectiveness and the limits of protection through a father's response to his son's injury.Pearson Edexcel
Protest: A theme in the cluster, alongside abuse of power, the effects of war and identity, that you can build a mental map of.AQA
Pseudonym: A fictitious name, especially one used by an author.Eduqas
PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder): An anxiety disorder caused by very stressful, frightening or distressing events.Eduqas
Public Indifference and Apathy: The poem critiques the public's fleeting, superficial response to suffering, consumed briefly before normal life resumes, ending with the weary acceptance…AQA
Punctuation of quotations: Using punctuation to mark clauses and quotations precisely, embedding and punctuating short quotations as part of your own sentence.Pearson Edexcel

Q

Quatrain: A stanza of four lines, especially one having alternate rhymes.AQA
Quotations: Short extracts from each poem that you memorise and are ready to analyse in detail.AQA

R

Race and identity: A mixed-heritage boy in 1980s Britain, Leon's story reflects racial tensions and explores ideas about identity and belonging.AQA
Race, racism and community: Late 1960s British racism and South Asian diaspora experiences that Syal explores through Meena's narration.Pearson Edexcel
Reader expectations: What readers expect from a kind of text, which a text may confirm or challenge.Pearson Edexcel
Reality of war: The extreme danger faced by the soldiers and the feeling that they are being devoured by the conflict, making their bravery even more remarkable.AQA
Rebellion and Non-conformity: The wife's modern, rebellious spirit and the couple's shared defiance of the older generation's traditional expectations form the foundation of a joyful,…AQA
Rebellion and resistance: The speaker's defiant act of reclaiming his own history and carving out his identity challenges the power structures that control knowledge.AQA
Reception of texts: The way in which texts are received and engaged with by different audiences, at different times.Pearson Edexcel
Redemption and forgiveness: Moral redemption is a key theme, shown in Pip's moral trajectory towards true redemption.Pearson Edexcel
Redemption and personal change: Scrooge's transformation from miser to benefactor is traced across the five staves, prompted by moments such as the sight of his own neglected grave.AQA
Reflexive Verb: A verb whose direct object is the same as its subject (e.g., 'reduced itself').Eduqas
Refrain: A repeated line or number of lines in a poem, typically at the end of each stanza.AQA
Regular rhyme and metre: The controlled form that shapes the poem's tone of serene praise and its sense of harmony.Pearson Edexcel
Rejection of convention: The speaker's deliberate refusal of clichéd romance and conventional Valentine's Day gifts.Pearson Edexcel
Relationships and Communication: The poem's central focus is on human connection and communication, using the different settings as a way to explore how relationships can be maintained.AQA
Relevance to the text: Biographical context applied only where it relates to the text, rather than listing unrelated facts about the author.Pearson Edexcel
Religious language and love beyond death: Spiritual imagery and vocabulary used to express an all-encompassing love that culminates in the declaration of loving better after death.Pearson Edexcel
Repression: The psychological process of suppressing unacceptable desires or impulses.AQA, Eduqas
Reputation: A theme Stevenson explores in relation to Victorian society, linked to Jekyll's charitable public reputation and Victorian middle-class values.AQA
Resilience and Hope: This internalised heritage is not just a comfort but a source of hope and renewal that can be deployed anywhere, at any time, to counteract external stress.AQA
Retrospective First-Person Narrator: A narrator who looks back on past events from a later point in time.AQA
Retrospective Irony: When words or events take on a different, often tragic, meaning when looked back upon after a later event.Eduqas
Retrospective Narrative: A story or poem told from the perspective of someone looking back on past events.AQA
Retrospective Narrator: A narrator who is looking back on past events with the benefit of hindsight.AQA
Revolution and hope: The final couplet offers a glimmer of hope, suggesting that from this decay a 'glorious Phantom' of revolutionary change might emerge, bringing light and…AQA
Revolution and its aftermath: The plot moves from the animals' rebellion against Mr Jones through the windmill conflicts to the pigs' final gathering with humans.Pearson Edexcel
Revolution and its betrayal: The tracking of how the revolution's ideals are betrayed as the pigs gradually seize control of the farm.AQA
Rhetoric: The art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing.AQA, Eduqas
Rhetorical Question: A question asked in order to create a dramatic effect or to make a point rather than to get an answer.AQA
Rhythm as imitation of action: Driving dactylic rhythms and powerful refrains imitate the galloping charge of the six hundred cavalrymen.Pearson Edexcel
Ritual, memory and coming of age: A coming-of-age initiation rite, with memory, family, music and language testing inherited identity against lived experience.Pearson Edexcel
Romantic intuition over book learning: Urging his sister to set aside books and household tasks and experience nature directly rather than academic study.Pearson Edexcel
Romantic love: The poem champions this over commercial duty and parental authority, presenting a joyful, modern marital relationship.AQA
Romantic protest against corruption: A fierce protest poem concerned with human suffering and social injustice, critiquing institutions such as the Church, the Crown and marriage.Pearson Edexcel
Romantic response to place and nature: A Romantic interest in nature, emotion and the extraordinary moment, finding sublime beauty in an urban setting.Pearson Edexcel
Romantic-period ballad: A form with quatrains, a regular metre and repetition that gives the poem a song-like, haunting quality.Pearson Edexcel
Romantic-period lyric: A text from the Romantic period, studied as a lyric in which a speaker admires a woman's appearance and character.Pearson Edexcel
Romantic-period poetry and the dramatic voice: A Romantic-period text in which a child speaker, distinct from Baillie as writer, addresses the grandfather.Pearson Edexcel
Romanticism: A literary movement emphasizing inspiration, subjectivity, and the primacy of the individual and nature.AQA, Eduqas
Romanticism and the natural world: The context in which the poem reflects Romantic concerns with nature, mortality and the passage of time.Pearson Edexcel
Rural working-class community life: The poem celebrates the instinctive, unpretentious vitality of rural working-class youth immersed in their local countryside.Pearson Edexcel

S

Sadness and grief: The addressee's inner regions dark of grief and despair, from which the speaker persuades them to turn away.AQA
Sardonic tone: A dry tone that deflates tourist expectations of scenic perfection, working with conversational dialogue to debunk romanticised views of nature.Pearson Edexcel
Satire: The use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics.AQA, Eduqas, Pearson Edexcel
Satire and humour: The poet uses irony and exaggeration to satirise the speaker's self-righteous elitism and superficial cultural superiority, with a comic and mocking tone.Pearson Edexcel
Science and religion: A conflict Stevenson explores in Victorian society, with Lanyon's horror raising anxieties about scientific experiment overreaching its limits and challenging…AQA
Seasonal contrast between summer joy and winter desolation: The contrast between summer warmth and winter chill mirrors emotional loss, as the speaker returns alone in bleak winter.Pearson Edexcel
Secrecy and Deception: Because the relationship was secret, the sorrow must also be hidden, producing isolation, and the speaker feels deceived by broken vows.AQA
Selecting and using textual evidence effectively: Choosing the most relevant moments or quotations rather than listing everything you know, and embedding short, precise quotations that directly support your…AQA
Self-preservation and returning to civilisation: Sensing an overwhelming, possessive engulfment, the speaker retreats on foot toward the solid ground of the town, whereupon the sea bows politely and withdraws.Pearson Edexcel
Semantic Field: A set of words grouped by meaning referring to a specific subject.AQA, Eduqas, Pearson Edexcel
Semi-autobiographical: A fictionalised account that is heavily based on the author's own life experiences.AQA
Sensory celebration of water and summer heat: Earthy sensory imagery depicts the boys' splashing and banter on a scorching day at a secluded, willow-shaded brook.Pearson Edexcel
Sensory Imagery: Descriptive language that appeals to the five senses.AQA, Eduqas
Sensory Perception and Deafness: The speaker's d/Deaf identity and sensory experience, including turning off a hearing aid to find a silence that was not an absence.AQA
Sentence control: Writing in complete sentences with consistent tense and subject-verb agreement, rather than in note form or fragmented sentences.Pearson Edexcel
Serialisation: The practice of publishing a work in sequential instalments.AQA
Sexuality and identity: Delaney examines this through Jo's relationships with her boyfriend Jimmie and her gay friend Geof, relating the treatment of sexuality to the social…AQA
Shakespeare's dramatic methods: Recognising dramatic methods such as soliloquy, imagery and dramatic irony.AQA
Sibilance: The repetition of 's' sounds, creating a hissing effect.AQA, Eduqas, Pearson Edexcel
Sibling companionship and shared experience: Tender affection between William and Dorothy, whose personal bond enhances the universal celebration of nature.Pearson Edexcel
Simile: Comparing one thing to another using 'like' or 'as'.AQA, Eduqas
Social and political change: The poem uses place to explore social change, contrasting the speaker's anger and the physical decay of the place with the wealth and exclusivity of those who…Pearson Edexcel
Social attitudes: The beliefs and values held in society, which may or may not match the author's own views.Pearson Edexcel
Social class: A key theme of the novel, alongside female autonomy, moral integrity, passionate love versus spiritual restraint, and Victorian institutional hypocrisy.AQA, Pearson Edexcel
Social class and snobbery: The speaker is a pretentious travel snob whose self-important boasting and hypocritical obsession with social status are satirised by the poet.Pearson Edexcel
Social class and social mobility: The Victorian class system that the novel critiques, and the movement between classes that Pip's ambition to become a gentleman relates to.AQA
Social injustice and inequality: A society in which human potential and joy are systematically destroyed by man-made systems of control, creating a relentless cycle of suffering.AQA
Social injustice and oppression: The poem paints a bleak picture of a nation where the people are oppressed and suffering, with the army's brutal treatment described as 'starved and stabbed'.AQA
Social prejudice: Assumptions about class, accent and worth that the speaker challenges through direct address and rhetorical questions.Pearson Edexcel
Social responsibility and charity: Dickens presents this through Scrooge's movement from miser to benefactor, linking private redemption to public duty towards the poor.AQA
Social responsibility and community: The play exposes the Birling family's collective responsibility for the suicide of a young working-class woman, critiquing selfish individualism.AQA
Socialism: A political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated…AQA, Eduqas
Soliloquy: A speech given by a character alone on stage, revealing their inner thoughts.AQA, Eduqas, Pearson Edexcel
Solitude versus past companionship: Four original picnickers gathered, two have moved far away, one has died, and only the solitary speaker remains.Pearson Edexcel
Sonnet: A 14-line poem with a strict rhyme scheme, traditionally associated with romantic love.AQA, Eduqas
Spindrift: Spray blown from the crests of waves by the wind.Eduqas
Spirituality and Morality: Nature is seen as operating according to a benevolent principle of pleasure and peace, a moral and spiritual order humanity has abandoned.AQA
Spot of Time: Wordsworth's term for a vivid, formative childhood memory that retains its emotional power and shapes adult identity.Eduqas
Spring renewal and the vitality of nature: Nature waking from winter on the first mild day of March, celebrated as a 'silent laws' of joy and renewal.Pearson Edexcel
Stillness and movement: The poem captures the atmosphere of sudden stillness and pastoral serenity, with sensory imagery of steam, clearing heat, willow-herb and cascading birdsong.Pearson Edexcel
Stillness and the pause before the day begins: The city appears beautiful, calm and almost asleep in the early morning light, silent and still.Pearson Edexcel
Structural devices: Features such as repetition, contrast and shifts in focus, whose contribution to impact should be evaluated.AQA
Structural Fatalism: A narrative structure that suggests an inevitable, unavoidable tragic outcome.AQA
Structural Parallelism: The repetition of similar structural elements to create contrast or comparison.Eduqas
structure: A key feature including form, line length, stanza breaks and rhyme, whose effects should be examined and linked to meaning.AQA
Structure and form: Elements such as enjambment, volta, stanza transitions, metre, sonnet form, caesura or dramatic monologue, whose impact candidates must evaluate.Pearson Edexcel
Style and literary quality: Style includes the writer's use of language, structure and form, while literary quality involves evaluating the texts' artistic merit and effectiveness.AQA
Subject terminology: Technical terms such as soliloquy, dramatic irony and stage direction, which should be spelled correctly.Pearson Edexcel
Sublime: A Romantic concept describing the feeling of awe, terror, and beauty inspired by the overwhelming power of nature.Eduqas
Subversion: The undermining of the power and authority of an established system or institution.AQA, Eduqas
Suffering: The poem depicts the soldiers' suffering from extreme cold, boredom, and the gradual decay of their hope and humanity.AQA
Suffering and social injustice: Universal misery and exploitation afflict Georgian society, and the crying figures link to poverty, child labour and oppression.Pearson Edexcel
Superstition and fate: A key theme of the play, alongside class, nature versus nurture and the tragedy of the ending.Pearson Edexcel
Sustaining a critical point of view: Consistently referring back to your central argument throughout the response, avoiding drifting into unrelated points.AQA
Symbolism: The use of objects or characters to represent abstract ideas.AQA, Eduqas
Synaesthesia: A technique adopted by writers to present ideas, characters, or places in such a manner that they appeal to more than one sense at a given time.AQA, Eduqas
Synecdoche: A figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole.Eduqas
Syntactic Parallelism: Repetition of sentence structure for emphasis.AQA
Syntax: The arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences.AQA, Eduqas

T

Tabula Rasa: The idea that individuals are born as a 'blank slate' and their character is formed entirely by experience.AQA, Pearson Edexcel
Tactile Imagery: Descriptive language that appeals to the sense of touch.AQA
Technical accuracy: Accurate spelling, punctuation and grammar, assessed in Paper 1 Section A (Shakespeare) and Paper 2 Section A (Modern texts).AQA
Technology and the loss of human control: Mundane aviation terms are defamiliarised through the passenger's heightened sense of dread, fixating on strange engine sounds, turbulence, and fragile human…Pearson Edexcel
Textile Metaphor: Using language related to sewing and fabric to describe something else.AQA
The allure and danger of the unknown: The sea is personified as an alluring, potentially overwhelming force, combining childlike fantasy with underlying psychological menace.Pearson Edexcel
The beauty of nature as a trigger for memory: Budding elms, clover and native birdlife such as the chaffinch, the whitethroat and the wise thrush evoke the speaker's nostalgia for English nature.Pearson Edexcel
The beauty of the city at dawn: The speaker is overwhelmed by the majestic, unspoiled beauty of London at sunrise before the city awakens.Pearson Edexcel
The body as landscape: An extended metaphor in which the body is presented as a damaged landscape, shaping meaning in the poem.Pearson Edexcel
The contrast between home and abroad: The bright, homely charm of rural England is set against the dry, foreign Mediterranean landscape, and this contrast is central to the poem's meaning.Pearson Edexcel
The cries of ordinary people: Harrowing auditory imagery includes the chimney-sweeper's cry, the soldier's sigh running in blood down palace walls, and the youthful harlot's curse.Pearson Edexcel
The daily struggle to adjust to migration and routine: The dull necessity of beginning another working day, connected to weariness, resignation and fractured belonging.Pearson Edexcel
The dramatic monologue and self-revelation: A form that lets the reader infer the duke's character from what he chooses to say, revealing his monstrous vanity without external authorial comment.Pearson Edexcel
The emotional impact of place: A serene garden setting magnifies human grief and emotional loss.Pearson Edexcel
The fragility of human power: The idea that human constructions and records are delicate and temporary, shown through paper and structures 'never meant to last'.AQA
The futility of waiting: The poem exposes the futility and passive agony of modern warfare, with the recurring question about the purpose of the soldiers' suffering.Pearson Edexcel
The glory versus tragic mortality of adventurers: The poem acknowledges the perils of adventure while contrasting adventurous glory with the tragic reality of violent death far from home.Pearson Edexcel
The Great Chain of Being: A strict, religious hierarchical structure of all matter and life, believed in by Jacobeans.AQA
The impact of war on nature: The hare symbolises the natural world, caught up and destroyed by human conflict, its terror mirroring the soldier's own primal fear.AQA
The individual versus the state: In the heat of battle, abstract ideals like patriotism and honour become meaningless when confronted with the primal instinct for survival.AQA
The limits of care: The nettles' return qualifies the father's resolve, giving the ending a sense of limited protection.Pearson Edexcel
The Literary Heritage treatment of relationships: Hardy's pessimistic, anti-romantic tone examines fractured love or emotional estrangement, to be compared with another poem in the Relationships cluster.Pearson Edexcel
The moral and spiritual influence of the natural world: A single hour of communion with spring nature can tune the human heart to virtue and love.Pearson Edexcel
The negative impact of urbanisation: The modern city traps and dehumanises its population, severing their connection to nature and to each other.AQA
The pain of adult disillusionment and grief: Adult fatigue, sorrow and mournful recognition of lost joy, not unmixed nostalgia.Pearson Edexcel
The passage of time: The poem stands as a poignant pre-war pastoral commemoration, contextualised within the summer of 1914 as a bittersweet eulogy for an idyllic, endangered…Pearson Edexcel
The passage of time and change: The poem contrasts tranquil rural landscape with encroaching evening darkness, evoking late Victorian impressions through luminous twilight.Pearson Edexcel
The passage of time and physical reminders of the past: The burnt circle of grass from their campfire remains visible as a lasting trace of ephemeral happiness.Pearson Edexcel
The Petrarchan sonnet and its argument: A sonnet form with a regular rhyme scheme and structural shifts between octave and sestet, shaping a movement from everyday devotion to love beyond death.Pearson Edexcel
The power and vastness of nature: Davidson evokes late Victorian impressions of nature through vast salt marshes and luminous twilight, contrasting tranquil rural landscape with encroaching…Pearson Edexcel
The Power of Art and Language: The suggestion that the sculptor's art has outlasted the ruler by capturing his sneer of cold command, preserving a truth about character that power cannot.AQA
The power of images: The poem questions the value and cost of such images rather than celebrating war photography.Pearson Edexcel
The power of institutions: The monarchy, the Church and commerce are held responsible for the misery of the city's inhabitants, imposing physical and psychological chains on the people.AQA
The power of memory: Drawing on Trinidadian sensory memory, the speaker uses imperatives to instruct the reader on how to consciously access this inner resource.AQA
The power of nature: The beauty of nature persuades the pilot to choose life, and natural imagery such as the celebratory simile 'strung out like bunting' explains his decision to…AQA
The Power of Nature and Time: The force shown as a slow, eroding presence over centuries, with the lone and level sands symbolising oblivion and erasing human achievement.AQA
The psychological effects of conflict: The enduring trauma and inescapable guilt that continue within the soldier's mind long after the fighting has stopped.AQA
The reality and brutality of conflict: The poem contrasts the violent, chaotic war zone with the peaceful, mundane 'Rural England', and the photographer's steady hands in the field with their…AQA
The reality of conflict: Owen's poem exposes the brutal reality of trench warfare in World War I, contrasting it with the patriotic propaganda that glorifies war.AQA
The reality of modern warfare: The brutal reality of a soldier's experience and the profound, lasting mental scars that conflict inflicts.AQA
The relationship between place and identity: Thomas transforms a momentary, mundane pause into an epiphany of tranquil English pastoral beauty at the deserted Cotswold station.Pearson Edexcel
The relationship between presence and absence: The paradox that absence is felt as an active, overwhelming presence.Pearson Edexcel
The restorative calm of water and rural landscape: The stream's unchanging purity and calm flow provide solace and timeless beauty.Pearson Edexcel
The river and the city as living presences: Personification endows the city with life, as in the river gliding at its own sweet will and the mighty heart lying still.Pearson Edexcel
The role of setting in shaping meaning: Exploring aspects of settings and analysing how they develop and interact with plot, characterisation and events to contribute to meaning.AQA
The Role of the Observer and Media: The photographer is a solitary, almost priestly figure caught between two worlds, and the poem critiques the media and its consumers, shifting focus to the…AQA
The Romantic lyric and personal feeling: A poignant lyric by William Wordsworth in which the speaker expresses bewilderment, emotional impoverishment and deep grief rather than anger.Pearson Edexcel
The state of the nation: Shelley's sonnet is a furious political protest against the state of England in 1819, personifying England as a 'fainting country' on the brink of collapse.AQA
The Sublime: A Romantic concept describing nature as vast, awe-inspiring, and terrifying, making humans feel insignificant.AQA, Eduqas, Pearson Edexcel
The supernatural: One of the themes the play explores, which you should practise linking short quotations for key moments to.Pearson Edexcel
The Transience of Human Power: The idea that all pride, ambition, and empire eventually fall, explored through the ruined statue of a once-mighty pharaoh.AQA
The Troubles in Belfast: The chaos of the Troubles, which form and language mirror in the poem.Pearson Edexcel
The Value of Art vs. Commerce: The tension between the intrinsic, personal value of the maker's art and its low economic value in the wider world.AQA
Thematic links between poems: The poems in each cluster are thematically linked, and you should link poems by theme, context and technique.AQA
theme: A key feature of a poem that can be varied and should be analysed alongside content, structure and language.AQA
Theme identification and distinction: Accurately naming a central theme and separating it from other themes, explaining how they differ.AQA
Themes and characterisation: Comparing and contrasting how themes are presented and how characters are developed and their roles, exploring similarities and differences across two texts.AQA
Themes and ideas: Identifying and explaining key themes and how they are presented throughout the play.AQA
Theurgy: White magic or 'high' magic, achieved through study and intellectual pursuit.Eduqas
Time and ageing: The poem observes an ageing married couple and questions whether their unity has survived the passage of time.Pearson Edexcel
Time and change: A theme the poem explores, moving from the ripening of crops to the harvest and finally to the approaching winter.Pearson Edexcel
Time of the action: When the action is set, which may be a different period from when the text was written.Pearson Edexcel
Tonal Shift: A change in the writer's or speaker's attitude toward the subject.Eduqas
Totalitarianism: A system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state.AQA, Pearson Edexcel
Tragedy and loss: The musical tells the tragic story of twin brothers, and the deaths are connected to Russell's critique of class and fate.AQA
Tragic Irony: A situation where the audience/reader is aware of a tragic reality that the character is not, or when an outcome is cruelly contrary to what was hoped.Eduqas
Transience: The state or fact of lasting only for a short time; impermanence.Eduqas
Travel and authenticity: The speaker boasts about having avoided ordinary tourists and conventional resorts, and Hannah exposes this as superficial cultural superiority.Pearson Edexcel
Truth and deception: Teenagers build an elaborate cover-up, and the theme of constructing a shared narrative relates to storytelling and propaganda shaping reality.AQA

U

Uncanny: Something that is strangely familiar, yet unsettling or eerie.AQA, Eduqas
Understatement: Presenting something as being smaller or less important than it actually is.Eduqas
Unfulfilled Desire: The farmer's growing frustration and obsessive longing, revealing his confusion and deep emotional turmoil over a marriage that has never truly begun.AQA
Unities (Classical): The rules of drama stating a play should have one action, occur in one place, and happen within one day.Eduqas
Universal human vulnerability to displacement: The poem stresses that anyone can become a refugee due to sudden war, environmental catastrophe, or political oppression.Pearson Edexcel
Unreliable Narrator: A narrator whose credibility has been seriously compromised.AQA
Urban conflict: A moment of violence in Belfast, where everyday objects and language itself become weapons or obstacles.Pearson Edexcel
Urban life and place: The real London location of Peckham Rye Lane, in which the poem is rooted.Pearson Edexcel
use of language: A key feature including imagery, figurative devices and word choice, whose impact on meaning should be explored.AQA
Usurpation: Taking someone's power or property by force.AQA, Eduqas
Usury: The practice of lending money at unreasonably high rates of interest.AQA
Utilitarianism: The doctrine that actions are right if they are useful or for the benefit of a majority; in education, focusing only on measurable, practical outcomes.Eduqas

V

Vivid domestic memory versus present sorrow: Sensory memories of the childhood home and garden contrasted with heavy adult sorrow.Pearson Edexcel
Voice and Silence: The speaker acts as a voice for the displaced artefact, demanding the pot 'growl' to give expression to a silenced object.AQA
Voice, defiance and cultural idiom: A conversational, Caribbean-influenced voice with non-standard spelling, whose rhythmic, punchy performance style reinforces the speaker's confident defiance.Pearson Edexcel
Voice, repetition and resistance: Antrobus uses repetition, direct address, questions and shifts in tone to expose the pressure of being defined by others.Pearson Edexcel
Volta: The turn at line 9 that marks the shift from problem, obsessive thoughts, to solution, physical presence.AQA, Eduqas

W

War and destruction: The poem shows the Assyrian army advancing confidently and then being suddenly destroyed overnight by the Angel of Death.Pearson Edexcel
Whole text: The entire set text, which students should study and demonstrate detailed knowledge of, including key events, characters, themes and settings.AQA
Whole-text study: Reading and revising the complete play from the six set texts, not extracts or a shortened version.AQA
Widespread human suffering: The speaker walks through the city and witnesses the universal suffering of its inhabitants, a misery visible and permanently etched onto every person.AQA
Winter setting and colourless imagery: An oppressive, drained atmosphere is created through muted colour imagery, fallen ash leaves and a dead smile beside a desolate winter pond.Pearson Edexcel
Witnessing conflict: Recording scenes of conflict and suffering, and the gap between those who witness such images and those who view them from a distance.Pearson Edexcel
Writer’s craft: The deliberate choices a writer makes in words, sentence structures, overall organisation and presentational devices, judged for quality and impact.AQA
Writer's methods: The writer's use of language, structure and form to create effects and convey ideas, analysed using subject terminology accurately.AQA
Written accuracy: Producing clear, controlled prose with accurate spelling, punctuation and grammar in your Component 1 answers.Pearson Edexcel

Y

Youth and Innocence: The poem explores the violent destruction of childhood innocence, with phrases like 'you're thirteen' and 'powerless - plump' highlighting the boy's…AQA

Z

Zoomorphism: Applying animal characteristics to humans.AQA, Eduqas

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L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

Y

Z

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