How to compare two prose texts

AO4 is not a list of similarities. The examiner wants an argument in which the two texts illuminate each other.

1. Lead with a thematic proposition, not a text: e.g. both books ask whether new knowledge liberates society or merely re-tools its old cruelties.
2. Interleave. Argue in theme-paragraphs (the creator; nature; the crowd) that draw on both texts, rather than doing text A then text B.
3. Prize the productive difference. Similarity is cheap; the marks lie in the divergence.
4. Honour the pre-1900 text’s otherness — its science, its God, its class order are not ours.

Sentence stem: “Where [A] locates the danger in the individual overreacher, [B] relocates it in the system that funds him.”

What AO4 rewards

The creator and the created

The theme’s oldest pattern is the Promethean overreacher — the figure who steals a divine or forbidden power and is punished for it. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is the classic English touchstone here (used as an illustration of the archetype, not the lesson’s subject).

• Playing God — usurping the power to create or extend life.
• The abandoned creation — the made being who turns on, or seeks, its maker, forcing the question of responsibility.
• Hubris and isolation — the lone experimenter cut off from human bonds.
• Nature versus nurture — is a mind formed by its making or by its treatment?

Comparative angle: ask whether each text blames the individual scientist or the society that rewarded the experiment.

The archetype

Knowledge, limits and the sublime

A second strand pits science against nature and ethics:

• Forbidden knowledge — the idea that some things ought not to be known or done, and the cost of crossing that line.
• The sublime — following Edmund Burke’s Enquiry (1757), nature’s vastness and obscurity inspire terror and awe that human science cannot master.
• The body — vivisection, disease, reproduction and the ethics of experiment on the living.
• Dehumanisation — the reduction of persons to specimens, data or labour.

Eco-critical hook: does the text treat nature as a resource to be conquered, or as a power that answers back?

Whose idea is the sublime?

Industry, crowds and control

The third strand widens from the laboratory to the social order:

• Industrialisation — machinery and the factory reshaping human life, often dehumanising the worker.
• Progress and its costs — who benefits from a new technology, and who pays?
• Utopia and dystopia — the dream of a perfected, rationally engineered society and its shadow of social control.
• Evolution and heredity — after Darwin, anxieties about descent, degeneration and eugenics.

Marxist hook: science in these texts is rarely neutral; it is funded, owned and directed by particular class interests.

The social lens

Sort the motif

Tap a motif, then tap the strand of the Science and Society theme it belongs to.

The changing science of each period

AO3 must track how the science itself differs between your texts’ periods:

• Enlightenment and Romantic era — galvanism, the fear of reason without feeling.
• Victorian — Darwinian evolution, industrial capitalism, degeneration theory.
• Twentieth century onward — the atomic age, genetics and reproductive technology.

Reception matters too: a nineteenth-century warning about creation reads differently after Hiroshima or in the age of genetic engineering.

Weld it: because the pre-1900 text was written before the gene was known, its anxiety attaches to the soul where the modern text’s attaches to the code — a difference worth an AO3 and AO4 paragraph at once.

Context that compares

Critical lenses for the theme

Choose a lens that yields a textual claim:

• Eco-critical — the text’s attitude to the natural world and to ecological consequence.
• Feminist — male science appropriating creation and the female reproductive body; who is experimented on?
• Post-humanist — where the text draws, and blurs, the line between the human and the made.

Discipline: not “a feminist would dislike this”, but “the novel lets a man manufacture life while every woman in it is confined to dying or grieving — creation is gendered before it is judged.”

Using a lens well

Match the frame to its focus

Tap a description on the left, then the critical frame or concept it names.

The big ideas to take into the exam

You now have a theme-and-method framework for comparing any Science-and-Society pairing. Press Finish to see your score.