Revolution and idealism — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Revolution and idealism
Themes
What you need to know
How Orwell explores the ideals of the Rebellion and how they are betrayed across the text, and why it matters to the text's meaning.
Where it appears, the key quotations that show it, and different ways it can be interpreted.
Evidence from the beginning, middle and end of the text.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Rings shall vanish from our noses, / And the harness from our back', 'Riches more than mind can picture', 'Almost overnight we could become rich and free.', 'Yes, it was theirs—everything that they could see was theirs!', 'the farmhouse should be preserved as a museum', 'an unalterable law by which all the animals on Animal Farm must live for ever after', 'the future Republic of the Animals which would arise when the human race had been finally overthrown', 'In Beasts of England we expressed our longing for a better society in days to come.', 'But that society has now been established.', 'None of the old dreams had been abandoned.', 'Some day it was coming: it might not be soon'.
Hope and disillusion: how the animals keep their faith in the Rebellion even at the end, and what Orwell suggests about revolutions.
Context: the hopes of 1917, and Beasts of England as the Internationale, the revolutionary anthem the Soviet state later dropped.
For Edexcel's essay on this text, link each point to its context and the writer's purpose, which earn as many marks as knowledge of the text (16 of 40); language analysis earns no marks there.
