‘Much American literature is characterised by the importance of hope in adversity.’ By comparing at least two texts prescribed for this topic, discuss how far you have found this to be the case.

It is always worth bearing in mind the grounds upon which an answer responding to this question will be marked and I will meditate upon the use of context, which the criteria specifies, and this in two senses. Primarily, an answer must bear in mind the context in which the text was written. This means considering what was happening in the country where it was written/set at the time when it was written/set, in terms of the political, social and economic conditions. For example, for a text like John Steinbeck's 'The Grapes of Wrath', the student must acknowledge the Great Depression and how this occurred after the 'Jazz Age' years in which a text like Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' is set. A student should be able to tie this contextual knowledge to their response to the question, so in this case the suffering of the Joads can be situated among the issues that were facing thousands of farming families in the Dust Bowl states and that contributed to an immense migration away from these states. Furthermore, the mark scheme details that an answer should consider how the time in which the text is received is important, which ties into modern critics' perspectives because reading a text after it was written and after those political and economic conditions changed allows insight. For example, one might suggest that Fitzgerald's personal mental health issues, that we are now more aware of, were perhaps symptomatic of the larger moral emptiness that underlay the hedonism and materialism by which the lives of the Nouveau Rich seemed to be controlled in the 1920s in cities like New York. As such, a student might reach the conclusion that, based on an analysis of various contexts, much American literature was characterised by the importance of hope in adversity but while John Steinbeck was responding to adverse economic conditions, Fitzgerald was depicting a less visible, moral struggle against a larger elitist negligence and egotism, which essentially responds to the criterion that answers must integrate analysis between two or more texts.