A-Level English Literature: the novel from Eliot and Hardy to modernism - narrative form

A level English Literature asks you to analyse how meanings are shaped in prose, and for the novel that means narrative form: who tells the story, whose eyes we see through, how time is handled and how a novel ends. This material traces that question from the great Victorian novels to modernism, using writers who are out of copyright in the UK: George Eliot's 'Middlemarch', Thomas Hardy's 'Tess of the d'Urbervilles', Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness', James Joyce's 'Dubliners' and 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man', and Virginia Woolf's 'Mrs Dalloway'. Every quiz question prints the passage it asks about.

You begin with Eliot's wise, commenting narrator: the pier-glass parable about egoism, the 'roar which lies on the other side of silence', and the last sentence's praise of 'unhistoric acts'. Hardy's ironic comment on Tess's execution shows an omniscient narrator taking sides against society and fate. Conrad's frame narrative on the Thames, with Marlow's doubt that experience can be conveyed at all, marks the move towards modernism. Joyce's child's-eye opening and the epiphany at the end of 'The Dead' show style following consciousness, and Woolf's opening of 'Mrs Dalloway', with Big Ben marking a single June day, shows free indirect discourse and stream of consciousness setting clock time against the time of memory.

Along the way you use the terms examiners reward when they are applied precisely: omniscient and intrusive narration, frame narrative, focalisation, free indirect discourse, stream of consciousness, impressionism and epiphany, together with the contexts that pushed writers away from Victorian conventions.

The material offers a quiz of twelve questions with one defensible answer each and an explanation after every answer, twelve flashcards on terms, techniques and key lines, and a printable written work of eight open questions - close analysis of printed passages from Eliot, Conrad, Woolf and Joyce, Hardy's narrator, a comparison of Eliot and Woolf, the features and contexts of modernism, and the key narrative terms - each with a model answer and the key points a strong response should include.

  • Analyse omniscient and intrusive narration in Eliot and Hardy
  • Explain how Conrad's frame narrative and impressionism shape meaning
  • Identify and analyse free indirect discourse and stream of consciousness in Woolf
  • Explain Joyce's epiphany and style that follows consciousness
  • Use the terms focalisation, frame narrative and epiphany precisely
  • Relate modernist form to its contexts, about 1900–1930

Practice material written by Zestly, based on the DfE A level English Literature subject content (prose; analysis of how meanings are shaped). Quotations from public-domain texts on Project Gutenberg: Eliot, 'Middlemarch' (#145); Hardy, 'Tess of the d'Urbervilles' (#110); Conrad, 'Heart of Darkness' (#219); Joyce, 'Dubliners' (#2814) and 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' (#4217); Woolf, 'Mrs Dalloway' (#71865; Woolf died in 1941).

Sample question

In George Eliot's 'Middlemarch' (1871–72) the narrator writes: Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent—of Miss Vincy, for example. What does this passage show about the narrator's method?

See the answer

An intrusive narrator steps back to give a general parable, then applies it to a character's egoism

The narrator addresses the reader ('Your pier-glass'), cites 'an eminent philosopher', builds an image from optics and then declares it 'a parable': each person's egoism, like a candle, makes random events seem arranged around them. The general truth is then applied to Rosamond Vincy. This is the wise, generalising omniscience characteristic of Eliot.

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