Nature and the sublime — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Nature and the sublime
Themes
What you need to know
How Shelley explores the natural world, the sublime landscapes of the Alps and the Arctic, and nature's power to restore and to overwhelm 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: 'A serene sky and verdant fields filled me with ecstasy', 'spoke of a power mighty as Omnipotence', 'maternal nature bade me weep no more', 'These sublime and magnificent scenes afforded me the greatest consolation that I was capable of receiving', 'the awful and majestic in nature', 'Nought may endure but mutability!', 'the only object that I could distinguish was the bright moon', 'Happy, happy earth! fit habitation for gods', 'I seemed to drink in a tranquillity to which I had long been a stranger', 'the roarings of the giant ocean', 'the everlasting ices of the north'.
Context: Romanticism and the sublime, the awe and terror that vast landscapes inspire, and nature as a healer.
Edexcel's novel question has two parts, and neither marks context: part (a) on the printed extract marks language, form and structure (AO2); part (b) on the novel elsewhere, from memory, marks the argument and its references (AO1), not language analysis. Use context only where it explains a reading, and say which part each worked paragraph and exam tip is for.
