British Literature II: Final Exam Study Guide

This document explains:

1. How the final exam is structured
2. What you are responsible for knowing
3. How to prepare
4. How to write successful answers

Nothing on the exam comes from outside the course. If you have kept up with the period lessons, the Read Alongs, and your reading journal, you have already done most of the preparation.

I. Structure of the Final Exam

The final is a single timed attempt in D2L: 80 points in 120 minutes. It is cumulative, covering all five periods, and it is open book: keep your Norton and the Read Alongs open. Nothing on it rewards memorization. It rewards knowing where to look and what to say about what you find.

You have a choice in every part.

Part A: Identification

For each passage you choose, name the work and the author, place the passage (who is speaking, and where in the poem or story it falls), and say in two or three sentences why it matters.

Every passage on the exam is one the Read Along commentary stops on.

Part B: Short Analytical Responses

Two or three paragraphs each. Each question takes a single work and asks you to make an argument about it. Any poem or story with a page in D2L is fair game.

Part C: Intertextual Responses

Four or five paragraphs each, with evidence from both works. This is where the points are, and it is the part worth preparing deliberately. It is what the whole term has been building toward: the course is one long argument carried by five period lessons, and the connections are already drawn for you in them.

II. What You Must Know

The five periods

• Romantic (1785–1832): Blake, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Wollstonecraft, Byron, Shelley, Keats
• Victorian (1830–1901): Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Arnold, Hopkins, Wilde
• Edwardian and World War I (1901–1918): Joyce, Forster, Brooke, Sassoon, Owen
• Modern (1918–1945): Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Woolf, Thomas
• Contemporary (1945–present): Heaney, Larkin, Mansfield, Gordimer, Rushdie, Atwood

You are not responsible for every work equally. You are responsible for knowing a handful of works well enough to argue about them, and for knowing where the rest of the course sits around them.

For each work you plan to write about, ask yourself:

1. What problem drives the poem or story?
2. What changes by the end, or refuses to change?
3. What does the work decline to say outright?
4. Which passage best captures its central idea?

If you cannot answer those four questions for a work, choose a different one.

What the exam does not require

• Memorizing passages. It is open book. Locate, don’t recall.
• Outside sources. Nothing comes from beyond the assigned reading and the D2L material.
• Covering everything. You choose five identifications from eight, three responses from ten, and two comparisons from seven. You are never required to write about a work you disliked or found impenetrable.
• Biographical detail. Dates and lives matter only where the course made something of them.

Quote from our text

Every quotation must come from the Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major Authors, volume 2 (tenth edition), or from the text posted in D2L. Cite poems by line number and prose by page number.

III. How to Prepare

1. Reread the Read Alongs

Every assigned poem has a Read Along page, and the prose works have background pages that serve the same purpose.

• The gloss level marks the lines the course thinks matter. The Part A passages are drawn from exactly that pool. For each, be able to say three things: which work, who is speaking, and where in the poem it falls.
• The Analyze level models a Part B answer. It is not a summary. It is an argument with the lines attached.

2. Choose your works for Part B

Pick a handful of works you actually have something to say about. You need only three, from at least two periods. For each, be able to name:

• One passage you could find in thirty seconds.
• One thing the work refuses to do. Blake’s “The Tyger” refuses to answer its own question; Keats’s odes refuse the escapes they propose; Gordimer refuses to state her central fact until the last line. Naming a refusal is usually a stronger opening than naming a theme.

3. Learn the threads for Part C

If you read nothing else before the exam, reread the five period lessons. Four threads run through the whole term:

The poet’s I. This is the spine of the course.

Browning’s Duke and Eliot’s Prufrock are the clearest single pairing available: total confidence with no self-knowledge, against total self-knowledge with no confidence.

Birds, and what poets want from them. Keats’s nightingale, Shelley’s skylark, Yeats’s golden bird. Three poets, three answers to one question about what it would mean to stop being human.

The body as a problem. Yeats, Eliot, and Heaney each give us a speaker who wants something other than the body he has.

Suffering at the edge of attention. Auden’s ploughman, Blake’s London, Mansfield’s party, Gordimer’s newspaper readers. Each writer has a different way of making the reader notice what the characters do not.

Other comparisons are worth having in reserve: what a work leaves unsaid at its center; innocence, and the people who make use of it; and the writers of Week 14, who wrote in English from South Africa, New Zealand, Kashmir, and Canada, and what they do with the language and forms the empire exported.

4. Rehearse a comparison

Choose two works you know well, from different periods, and rehearse:

1. What do they genuinely share? Not “both are about death,” but something specific.
2. Where do they part company? This is the answer. The difference is the argument.
3. One quotation from each, with speaker and context.

You do not need to have prepared the exact pairing the exam offers. If you have worked through two or three of the threads above, you will have material for whichever question you choose.

5. Practice under the clock

Part B answers get about fifteen minutes each; Part C answers about twenty-five. Write one of each with a timer running before the exam, so the pace is familiar when it counts.

IV. How to Write Strong Exam Answers

Every answer needs:

1. A direct quotation, copied accurately.
2. The speaker and the context: who says it, to whom, at what moment.
3. An explanation of how the passage supports your claim.
4. Analysis, not summary.
5. A citation: line numbers for poems, page numbers for prose.
6. Titles presented correctly: italics for long works (The Importance of Being Earnest, A Room of One’s Own), quotation marks for poems, stories, and essays (“Dover Beach,” “Araby”). Work that doesn’t present titles correctly cannot earn an A.

Weak answer:

Ozymandias was a proud king and the poem shows that pride doesn’t last.

Stronger answer:

The only words left in Shelley’s desert are the king’s own boast, carved on the pedestal: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” (10–11). The joke is that the command still works, but not as he meant it. Readers do despair, because there are no works left to look at. What survives Ozymandias is not his power but the sculptor’s record of his sneer.

Write your answers in the exam itself. D2L records every save during an attempt. Answers that arrive whole, pasted in from somewhere else, are treated as not written during the exam. Complete the AI statement honestly.

V. Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Retelling the poem or story instead of analyzing it.
• Quoting without explanation.
• Misquoting, or attributing a line to the wrong work. A fabricated or misattributed quotation is an integrity matter.
• In Part C, writing two separate mini-essays instead of a comparison.
• Comparing works without quoting both.
• Choosing two works from the same period in Part C.
• Spending forty minutes on Part A and running out of time for Part C.
• Making vague claims (“This shows the human condition.”).

VI. The Big Picture

Across the semester, we have asked:

• Where does a poem’s authority come from: the poet, an invented speaker, or the tradition?
• What do writers want that being human can’t give them?
• Who notices suffering, and who looks away?
• What can’t be said aloud, and how does literature say it anyway?
• What happens to English when it is written from somewhere else?

The final exam asks you to demonstrate that you can:

• Recognize these questions in specific works.
• Support your claims with evidence, citing the specific line or page.
• Think across periods.
• Articulate your ideas clearly and precisely.

If you have been writing your reading journals with a quotation and an argument attached, you have been practicing for this exam all term.