Choosing NEA Texts and Developing a Task

The decisions you make at the start of the NEA process — which texts to study and what question to answer — will shape every paragraph you write. Poor choices can make the task almost impossible; strong choices make compelling comparison nearly inevitable. This lesson guides you through selecting texts that compare productively and developing a task title that meets AQA's requirements while giving you the analytical freedom to write a sophisticated essay.

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Selecting Texts That Compare Productively

The most important criterion is not whether you like the texts individually, but whether they compare productively. Two texts compare productively when:

1. They share enough common ground to sustain comparison (a shared theme, genre, or concern)
2. They differ enough to generate analytical contrast (different periods, forms, perspectives, or conclusions)
3. Both texts are rich enough to reward close analysis at A-Level

Good Pairings vs Poor Pairings

Pairing	Why it works / doesn't work
Jane Eyre (1847) + Rebecca (1938)	Works well: Shared Gothic mode, female protagonist, marriage plot, but different periods and radically different treatments of female agency
Frankenstein (1818) + Never Let Me Go (2005)	Works well: Both explore what it means to be human through the lens of created beings, but in very different scientific and ethical contexts
Pride and Prejudice (1813) + Bridget Jones's Diary (1996)	Risky: The connection is well-known and tempts superficial comparison. You would need to go beyond the obvious Darcy parallels to produce fresh analysis
The Great Gatsby (1925) + Death of a Salesman (1949)	Works well: Both critique the American Dream, but through different genres (novel vs drama), offering rich cross-genre comparison
Two short lyric poems by different authors	Doesn't work: Insufficient substance for 2,500 words of comparison

The Pre-1900 Requirement

At least one text must be pre-1900. Strong pre-1900 choices include:

Genre	Examples
Novels	Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Frankenstein, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dracula, Great Expectations
Poetry collections	Selected poems of Keats, Shelley, the Brontës, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Tennyson, Blake
Drama	The Duchess of Malfi, Doctor Faustus, The Rover, A Doll's House (1879 — just qualifies!), Shakespeare plays not studied as set texts

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AQA-Suggested Themes

AQA provides a list of suggested thematic areas for the NEA. You are not required to use these — you may develop your own theme — but they are useful starting points:

Suggested theme	Possible angles
The Gothic	Fear, the uncanny, transgression, monstrosity, doubles, haunted spaces
Identity	Self and other, masks and performance, social roles, psychological fragmentation
Crime and detection	Guilt, justice, moral ambiguity, the law, the criminal mind
War	Conflict, trauma, heroism, propaganda, aftermath, the body in war
Gender	Masculinity, femininity, power, desire, domesticity, subversion of norms
Love	Romantic love, obsessive love, unrequited love, familial love, love and power
Social class and status	Wealth, poverty, mobility, snobbery, revolution, aspiration
Nature and the environment	Landscape, pastoral, the sublime, ecological crisis, human-animal relations
Childhood and growing up	Innocence, experience, education, family, loss, memory
Power and corruption	Political power, tyranny, resistance, moral compromise, ambition

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Developing a Focused Question or Title

Your task title is the question or statement that your essay responds to. It must be:

1. Comparative — requiring analysis of both texts
2. Focused — specific enough to sustain a coherent argument, not so broad that you can't cover it in 2,500 words
3. Analytical — inviting exploration of methods, meanings, and interpretations, not just thematic summary
4. Approved — your teacher must confirm it meets AQA's requirements

Weak vs Strong Task Titles