ENGLISH 2225: British Literature II 
Longer Essay Topic Suggestions

This essay assignment is intended to get you more deeply into a topic about British literature of your own choosing.  The idea behind any topic choice is to see connections or patterns in what we have read.  Select a topic that shows reflection on an issue or an idea that crosses boundaries of authors or works or both and discuss this in detail. You are to compose somewhere in the range of 4 pages or so, so you will need to go into some depth to treat your subject well for this paper length.

In your essay, you will argue for a particular interpretation, and so you must support your claims with specific examples from the text.  Please remember that in addition to citing specific lines or passages of text, you must explain those passages/lines to your readers.  Never assume that the text speaks for itself. You must always let readers know precisely what you want them to take away from any given example. To help you compose a well-constructed, well-organized literary analysis paper, consider the advice from the UNC Writing Center website. For this assignment, you are to include at least two outside sources (beyond the biographical) in your analysis. This is in addition to any primary source citations (which just require line or page numbers from our text).

Since you will consult secondary sources, please remember to cite them properly in your paper using MLA guidelines. I have included the Purdue University Online Writing Lab website to give you specific help with documenting sources for your Works Cited page. Ask questions if you are unsure. (Don't guess, turn the paper in, and hope for the best!)

The paper assignment is not considered completely submitted until a copy has been uploaded into the website turnitin.com. Please do this as soon as you complete the paper and follow the prompts on the website to do this. Ask me for information about submitting if you stumble in completing the process. I cannot grade your paper until this submission has been completed. Failure to submit your paper to turnitin.com by the deadline may result in a half-grade penalty. This assignment is due on Thursday, April 23rd, at the beginning of class. 

Specific Criteria:

In grading your essays, I will consider all of the following: 

           1.  Quality of the argument: Is it interesting? Is it clear? Is it fully developed? 

2.  Organization: Are thoughts organized clearly and effectively? 

3.  Use of examples: Do you choose appropriate examples? Do you use them effectively? 

4. Were good and a sufficient number of sources used for the analysis? Were they documented properly?

5.  Quality of the prose: Do you write clearly? Effectively? Do you make mechanical (grammar, spelling, punctuation) errors? Quality of diction & syntax?

6.  Presentation: Did you come up with a title that is both interesting and informative? Did you proofread? Did you number your pages?  

Remember to double-space the paper, include page numbers, and use only single-sided printing. You should include a cover page, but it's not required. Just staple it once in the upper left-hand corner. You should be in the vicinity of three to five pages for this project. And again: please submit into turnitin.com.

Here is a short list of some possible topics:

1.  One influence that seemed to be strong in the formation of the writers of the Romantic era was the French Revolution.  If the motto was "equality, liberty, and fraternity" how do you think that is seen in the works of, for example, Wordsworth or Coleridge or Shelley?

2.  Choose two writers and discuss their portrayal of men and women in their work. How do they view the roles of men and women in society? In marriage? Do their writings address sexual issues directly or do they make their point in less direct ways (using satire or humor or irony)? 

3.  As the discovery of time and space expanded (with the discoveries in evolution, geology, and astronomy), how did two or more authors explain or describe humankind's role in the cosmos? What assumptions do the writers ask their readers to make about the universe?

4.  A corollary topic might be: given the changes that occurred in politics and science, what happened to faith as demonstrated by two or more authors? Blake or even Hopkins might be considered traditional and writers like Eliot or Yeats or even Larkin show us a much less orthodox view. Tennyson seems to move from one form to the other. Describe and explain the religious impact of an expanded view of the cosmos as illustrated by two or more of our writers.

5.  Jane Austen wasn't a revolutionary, but she did see things differently: about women, about class, and about English society. Make an argument that Austen was (or was not) revolutionary in her thinking, using Pride and Prejudice as your principle source.

 6. Compare and contrast a poet from each significant period: Romantic and Victorian, or Victorian and Modern, and show us the differences and similarities in how each uses literature to represent the times. Identify the chief characteristics and then illustrate them with works from the period.

7. A variation on the preceding question might be: how would you define a Romantic? a Victorian? a Modern? We've discussed some attributes, but are there others or are there dominant traits that you believe best demonstrate what you have come to understand the era to be? Use authors we've read as your evidence to illustrate your key terms and compile a specific definition of one of these eras in English literature using writers as your evidence.

8. How is a hero defined in Romanticism? What sort of qualities do poets use to describe and define a hero? How does each one differ from the others?  Was a lesson to be learned by their behaviors? What about heroes in other eras: what characteristics did these heroes have that differed from the Romantic (or Byronic) hero?

9.  Discuss the impact one major author from our syllabus had on some characteristic of English literature, history or culture.  Candidate writers include Wordsworth (and the invention of the self), Keats (and his ideas of beauty or consciousness), T. S. Eliot (and the invention of the modern), Wilde (and his attitudes about conventions), or Woolf (and her discussion of the role of women).

10. You could tackle a technical issue: discuss poetic forms and how they shape content: the sonnet vs. the lyric . Or poetry vs. prose. Or even blank verse vs. rhymed verse. Also, free-form modern verse or the dramatic monologue. What can we learn about the content and purpose of a work of literature by examining the form it takes? Does form help tell a story better or just differently? Give at least two examples.

11. How might we define what it means to be a modern looking through the lens of several writers? T.S. Eliot is an obvious choice, but others (both ones we've read and others we haven't) might be included, too. This addresses more than what might be called a modern hero, but rather what makes us modern?

12. Identify the three periods in Victorianism by using a writer from each period to define and illustrate that period. Make a case for articulating one overarching statement for each period by using the themes from the representative writer to compose that statement.