Context — Animal Farm — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Context
Introduction
What you need to know
The contexts of Animal Farm: the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Soviet Union under Stalin, the rivalry between Stalin and Trotsky,
the purges and show trials, the Second World War, Orwell's democratic socialism and purpose, the book's publication in 1945, and allegory and fable.
How to use this context in an answer about the novella rather than as background.
The Russian Revolution of 1917: the Tsar's fall, Lenin's Bolsheviks taking power in October, and the civil war that followed.
Stalin's rule: his struggle with Trotsky after Lenin's death in 1924, Trotsky's exile, the five-year plans, collectivisation and the famines it caused, and the Great Terror of the 1930s with its purges and show trials.
The Second World War: Stalin's pact with Nazi Germany in 1939, the German invasion of 1941, and the Tehran Conference of 1943.
Orwell's purpose: a democratic socialist who saw Stalinist propaganda at work in the Spanish Civil War, and who believed that destroying what he called the Soviet myth was essential to reviving socialism.
Writing and publication: written in 1943–44, while Britain and the Soviet Union were allies, turned down by several publishers, and published by Secker and Warburg on 17 August 1945 as Animal Farm: A Fairy Story.
Allegory and fable: a fable told through animals, whose characters stand for real people and events, and why that lets the story speak about power beyond Russia.
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.
