A-Level English Literature: genre - crime writing and political and social protest writing

Some A level English Literature specifications organise study around genres - for example AQA's English Literature B, whose second paper offers either elements of crime writing or elements of political and social protest writing. Genre questions ask how texts from different periods and forms use and vary shared conventions, so they reward wide reading and close analysis together. This material practises both genres on out-of-copyright texts, printing the lines each question asks about.

For crime writing you work through Charles Dickens's 'Oliver Twist', with its workhouse satire and its roots in the Newgate novel; Wilkie Collins's 'The Moonstone', told through the narratives of witnesses beginning with the 'Robinson Crusoe'-loving steward Gabriel Betteredge, and its unsettling professional detective, Sergeant Cuff; Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and his rule never to theorise before one has data; and Oscar Wilde's 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol', whose refrain spreads guilt from one condemned man to everyone. You compare the whodunnit's withheld revelation with a novel that shows its criminals openly.

For protest writing you read William Blake's 'The Chimney-Sweeper' and 'Holy Thursday' from 'Songs of Experience', where a child's voice and a string of rhetorical questions accuse Church, state and a 'rich and fruitful land', and the opening of Dickens's 'Hard Times', where Gradgrind's creed of 'Facts' condemns itself. You consider what is being protested, whose voice is heard and which methods - irony, satire, the voice of the victim - do the work.

Throughout, genre is treated as a lens that raises questions rather than a box: several texts, such as 'Oliver Twist' and Wilde's ballad, belong to both genres at once.

The material offers a quiz of twelve questions with one defensible answer each and an explanation after every answer, twelve flashcards on conventions, contexts and key lines, and a printable written work of eight open questions - close analysis of printed extracts from Dickens, Blake and Wilde, a comparison of narrative in 'Oliver Twist' and 'The Moonstone', crime conventions across periods, Blake and Dickens on children, and the usefulness of genre - each with a model answer and the key points a strong response should include.

• Identify the conventions of crime writing and explain how texts vary them
• Analyse satire and irony as methods of social protest in Dickens
• Explain how Blake's voices and questions accuse those in power
• Compare multiple-narrator detection in 'The Moonstone' with the open criminality of 'Oliver Twist'
• Explain how 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' combines crime writing and protest
• Evaluate genre as a lens for reading

Practice material written by Zestly, based on the DfE A level English Literature subject content and genre-based study as organised, for example, in AQA English Literature B (elements of crime writing; elements of political and social protest writing). Quotations from public-domain texts on Project Gutenberg: Dickens, 'Oliver Twist' (#730) and 'Hard Times' (#786); Collins, 'The Moonstone' (#155); Doyle, 'The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' (#1661); Wilde, 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' (#301); Blake, 'Songs of Innocence and of Experience' (#1934).