Stories of Ourselves, Volume 2 (set stories)

For Paper 1 of CIE IGCSE World Literature (0408), candidates study ten short stories from Stories of Ourselves, Volume 2, the Cambridge anthology of stories in English. The set stories range across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and many moods: Walter Scott's grim Border tale of pride and grief ('The Death of the Laird's Jock'); Dickens's sombre psychological confession ('George Silverman's Explanation'); Wilde's bitter-sweet fairy tale of love and sacrifice ('The Nightingale and the Rose'); a Sherlock Holmes mystery of hidden cruelty (Conan Doyle's 'The Copper Beeches'); Oliphant's quietly subversive study of marriage and freedom ('A Story of a Wedding Tour'); Walter Besant's light romance ('The Shrinking Shoe'); Saki's comic-horror werewolf tale ('Gabriel-Ernest'); M. R. James's classic ghost story ('A Warning to the Curious'); Wodehouse's social comedy ('Indian Summer of an Uncle'); and Woolf's delicate study of a marriage sustained and destroyed by a shared fantasy ('Lappin and Lapinova'). Across the ten run shared concerns: deception and hidden truth, sacrifice, the uncanny, marriage and the position of women, class and respectability, and a pervasive irony between appearance and reality.

Note on sources and quotations: the verbatim quotations given in this guide are grounded in the public-domain texts of the stories we hold (Wilde, Conan Doyle, Saki and Dickens); for the remaining stories the analysis is based on the works themselves and quotations should be checked against your copy of Stories of Ourselves, Volume 2. Walter Besant's 'The Shrinking Shoe' is included here only in brief outline, as we were not able to source or study it closely enough to comment in detail; learn it directly from the anthology.