With reference to two stories of your choice discuss how the authors use imagery and other literary devices to convey their message.

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☺ English Essay-GCSE Anthology Prose ☺

With reference to two stories of your choice discuss how the authors use imagery and other literary devices to convey their message.

Literary devices are used to show the feelings of the author, within the context of the prose, and to convey their message to the author, in various, often subtle ways. These can be through strong imagery, symbolism, personification or anthropomorphism, the uses of analogy, or other textual devices such as alliteration. In both Sylvia Plath’s “Superman and Paula Brown’s New Snowsuit” and Penelope Lively’s “The Darkness Out There” a variety of literary techniques are used to convey the central message of the short story. Plath uses a variety of ideas, often as analogies for the events which are taking place in the narrators’ life, while most obvious theme used by Lively is the contrast between appearance and reality, how things seem and actually are.

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The essential message of “Superman and Paula Brown’s New Snowsuit” is a young girl’s realisation of the adult world, in which she is forced to admit responsibility for a crime she did not commit, just to please the adults around her. In “The Darkness Out There” the central message, is similar, when a girl, Sandra, realises the evil in human nature, as she is exposed to the dark side of a member of the older generation, whom she expected to be “really nice…really sweet”. The general purpose of both the stories is to show the malicious, cruel side of ...

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