Cambridge IAL English Literature cheat sheet

Narrative voice: distinguish first-person homodiegetic (narrator inside the story) from third-person heterodiegetic (narrator outside it); an unreliable narrator's account must be tested against other textual evidence before being accepted.

Free indirect discourse fuses a character's idiom and judgements with third-person narration, typically without reporting clauses; it signals intimacy with a character's consciousness and shifting authorial irony.

Focalisation (Genette) concerns what is seen rather than who speaks: zero focalisation is omniscient, internal focalisation is filtered through a character's perception, external focalisation reports only observable behaviour.

Structural markers to cite: chapter divisions, temporal shifts (analepsis/flashback, prolepsis/flash-forward), framed narratives, and epigraphs; connect each to theme rather than merely listing it.

Setting functions as more than backdrop: it can encode social class, psychological state, or historical pressure; ask what the setting makes possible or forbids for the characters.

Characterisation is built through direct presentation (authorial comment) and indirect presentation (speech, action, dress, others' reactions); track whether a description is endorsed or ironised.

Point of view and sympathy are not identical: a text may focalise through a character while withholding moral approval; assess tone through diction, syntax, and narrative commentary.

AO-focused prose answer: AO1 terminology and coherent argument, AO2 close analysis of language, structure and form, AO3 contextual factors, AO4 connections between texts; quote briefly and analyse densely.

Metre: iambic pentameter = five iambic feet (unstressed-stressed), ten syllables per line; a trochee reverses the foot (stressed-unstressed) and often signals disruption or emphasis.

Caesura is a pause within a line (punctuation or syntax); enjambment runs syntax past the line break. Both control pace and can set lineation against sentence structure.

Sonnet forms: Petrarchan/Italian = octave plus sestet, volta often after line 8; Shakespearean/English = three quatrains plus a couplet, volta often at line 9 or in the couplet.

Rhyme and sound: full rhyme, half/slant rhyme, internal rhyme, assonance (vowel repetition), consonance (consonant repetition), alliteration, sibilance, onomatopoeia; link effects to mood and meaning.

Stanza forms: couplet, tercet, quatrain, sestina (six six-line stanzas plus three-line envoi), villanelle (nineteen lines, five tercets plus quatrain, two refrains), ode, elegy, dramatic monologue.

Figures: metaphor, simile, personification, metonymy (attribute for thing), synecdoche (part for whole), oxymoron, hyperbole, litotes, apostrophe (address to absent or abstract addressee).

Voice and address: identify speaker versus poet, the addressee, and the implied listener; a dramatic monologue reveals character through self-betrayal and irony.

Comparison method: choose a shared point of departure (theme, form, or technique), analyse text A closely, then move to text B for convergence or divergence; keep AO3 context relevant to the chosen point.

Dramatic terms: soliloquy (alone on stage, inner thought spoken), aside (audience-only remark within dialogue), monologue (extended speech with others present), dialogue; each changes what the audience knows versus what characters know.

Dramatic irony arises when the audience holds knowledge a character lacks; track how staging, eavesdropping scenes, and asides manufacture it.

Structure in five acts: exposition, rising action, climax/turning point, falling action, resolution; Shakespearean tragedy typically places the crisis at the midpoint and the catastrophe in Act 5.

Tragedy conventions: hamartia (error or flaw), peripeteia (reversal), anagnorisis (recognition), catastrophe, and the restoration of order; apply as interpretive tools, not tick-boxes.

Genre markers: comedy often ends in marriage or union and uses disguise and mistaken identity; tragedy ends in death and often in a transfer of power; history plays dramatise chronicle material and political legitimacy.

Stagecraft evidence: setting and props, entrances and exits, off-stage action reported by messengers, music, costume, lighting (in modern staging), and the physical space of the stage (above, below, discovery space).

Verse and prose in drama: blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) usually marks elevated or aristocratic speech; prose often signals lower status, madness, comedy, or emotional collapse.

AO3 for drama: performance conditions (open-air amphitheatre, daylight, minimal scenery), censorship and patronage, gender and boy actors, and the expectations of the playhouse audience.