English 375 —British Romanticism 1770-1830

Professor
J. Jennifer Jones

Please choose ONE of the following topics and sufficiently narrow the topic from within the prompt you choose to write a focused essay. The primary aims of this paper are to demonstrate your ability to read a text closely, to recognize stylistic as well as thematic features of a text that serve as evidence for your argument, and to write a clear and coherent essay. Write on a topic that interests you.

1. The concepts of liberty and nature are important to the political writers Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Godwin as well as the poet William Wordsworth. Choose one prose essay and one poem by Wordsworth and write a comparative essay about their definitions, explorations, and defenses of liberty OR nature. In what ways are their conceptions of the given term similar? different? Are the two texts ultimately conversant and/or complementary? Does one text complicate, expand, or otherwise enrich the other? Do they contradict or otherwise resist one another? How, precisely? Be specific.

2. Write an essay that puts William Godwin’s Political Justice in productive dialogue with Caleb Williams. Does Godwin’s novel ultimately augment his political philosophy or draw it into question? How so? Be specific.

3. Choose any two poems and discuss the ways in which each poem theorizes and/or renders the idea of imagination. How do the poems define imagination? What is the value of imagination? What is its purpose or goal? In what ways does imagination bear on the problem of representation itself (on representing the other, nature, the self)? Are the poems optimistic about the possibilities of imagination? Do the poems theorize the limitations of imagination? Be specific.

4. Several of the poems we have read so far are concerned with the concept of identity and with memory. Choose two poems from among those we have read. Put the two poems in productive dialogue in terms of their meditations on identity and its relation to memory. A few questions to consider, though you may also create your own questions: What is the value of memory? What are its limitations? Does memory have soothing qualities? frightening qualities? How? Be specific.

5. If you wish to write on a topic of your own devising, I will consider it, but you MUST discuss and clear your topic with me at least one week prior to October 18, and you must be able to clearly articulate why you wish to write on the given topic you choose.

*Note:
If you submit your essay on time (October 18), you will receive full commentary on your work, including marginalia that addresses your argumentation, close reading, rhetorical style, and grammatical correctness. After that time, you have one week to submit the essay late. Late essays will receive a letter grade only – no commentary. Essays received later than one week after the original deadline will receive an F. Please keep in mind that you cannot pass this course without submitting all formal written materials, so skipping an essay is not an option.