AQA A Level English Literature A set texts 2026 to 2027

English Literature A is the AQA A level built around reading literature in its historical moment. The examined half has two papers. Love through the ages pairs a Shakespeare play with a prose text and a poetry anthology, one of the two comparative texts being written before 1900, and adds unseen poems on the day. Texts in shared contexts asks the school to pick a period, either the First World War and its aftermath or writing since 1945, and to study a novel, a play and a poetry collection from it, at least one published after 2000. The Shakespeare question is answered from memory, but clean copies of the other set texts may go into the exam room. A non-exam essay comparing two texts of the student's own choosing makes up the rest of the grade.

In practice departments choose texts they can teach in combination: Othello with The Great Gatsby, or The Handmaid's Tale beside A Streetcar Named Desire and Top Girls, are familiar pairings. The 2027 update is gentle. AQA has added three optional modern novels, Elif Shafak's The Island of Missing Trees, Anna Hope's Wake and Bernardine Evaristo's Mr Loverman, and taken nothing away, so a school teaching the course since 2015 need change nothing.

The collecting interest here is unusually strong because the prose list is a run of famous firsts. The Great Gatsby (Scribner's, New York, 1925) in its celestial-eyes jacket is one of the most expensive American novels of the century. Jane Eyre (Smith, Elder, 1847) and Wuthering Heights (Thomas Cautley Newby, 1847) are three-volume Victorian rarities, and Tess (Osgood, McIlvaine, 1891) is close behind. Rebecca (Gollancz, 1938), A Room with a View (Edward Arnold, 1908) and The Go-Between (Hamish Hamilton, 1953) are within reach of a determined collector, while Atonement (Jonathan Cape, 2001), Birdsong (Hutchinson, 1993) and Regeneration (Viking, 1991) are modern firsts that still turn up in charity shops. All Quiet on the Western Front first appeared in English from Putnam in 1929 in an earlier translation than the one AQA sets.

The copy a student carries into the exam is a modern paperback worth a few pounds. Each row links to the book's page, where the first edition is identified against two sources and a value band appears once we hold recorded sales.