Cambridge Checkpoints VCE Text Guides are an invaluable digital resource for all students of senior English. This guide for Area of Study 2 will help you develop the confidence you need to write essays throughout the year, and to build your skills in creating and presenting in readiness for the end of year exam. Cambridge Checkpoints VCE Text Guides for Area of Study 2 offer you: • Detailed character analysis • Discussion of themes, ideas and values • A focus on the language features and conventions of your text • Writing prompts and an exploration of your text in Context • Comprehensive guide to further reading

A joyful portrait of the summer of the first doll, in which a chance encounter brings Olive and Emma, Roo and Barney, into the shabby Carlton terrace to begin a seventeen year journey of seasonal love and argument. Kid Stakes introduces the fun-loving Nancy, who has left the scene by the seventeenth summer, adding a new poignancy to the story.

An expatriate actor, Alec Ritchie, hoping to save his marriage, returns to Australia for the making of a British film about his country. Questions of divided loyalty arise that force Alec to confront both his regard for his family and his attitude to the homeland he left ten years before. Premiered in 1959, and just as

The twelfth-century French poet Chrétien de Troyes is a major figure in European literature. His courtly romances fathered the Arthurian tradition and influenced countless other poets in England as well as on the continent. Yet because of the difficulty of capturing his swift-moving style in translation, English-speaking audiences are largely unfamiliar with the pleasures of reading his poems. Now, for the first time, an experienced translator of medieval verse who is himself a poet provides a translation of Chrétien’s major poem, Yvain, in verse that fully and satisfyingly captures the movement, the sense, and the spirit of the Old French original. Yvain is a courtly romance with a moral tenor; it is ironic and sometimes bawdy; the poetry is crisp and vivid. In addition, the psychological and the socio-historical perceptions of the poem are of profound literary and historical importance, for it evokes the emotions and the values of a flourishing, vibrant medieval past.