Context — An Inspector Calls — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Context
Introduction
What you need to know
The contexts of An Inspector Calls: the play set in 1912 and first performed in 1945, class and capitalism before the First World War,
the Titanic and the coming wars, Priestley's socialism and the post-war welfare state, and the role of women.
The 1945 audience: the Labour victory that year and the welfare state that followed.
Priestley's fascination with time (Ouspensky's idea that life recurs), and the morality play tradition, for the ending.
In OCR's exam, this background earns no marks of its own: part (a) credits the context you can infer from the two printed extracts and their introductions, and part (b) doesn't mark context. Know it to understand the text, and use it in an answer only where it explains a reading.
OCR's question on this text has two parts on the same text. Part (a), 20 marks, compares a printed extract from it with an unseen extract of the same genre, and weights your response (AO1) and context (AO3) twice as heavily as language analysis (AO2), where context means the social and cultural situations you can infer from the two extracts and their introductions; an answer on only one of the two extracts cannot go above Level 3. Part (b), 20 marks, explores another moment in the same text from memory, with response and analysis of language, form and structure (AO1 and AO2) equally weighted and no marks for context. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the part it is for.
