Academic Writing (English Literature)

Word Count: 1500 (+/-10%) Weighting 30% Deadline: Within 12 hours after accepting In 1500 words answer one of the questions below. (Except for the final question) support your argument with reference to appropriate secondary critical material that has been peer-reviewed. You may use online material accessed through the library catalogue, e.g. MLA, JSTOR or Literature Online. An extended bibliography of secondary material relevant to the period 1750 to 1890 is given in the module booklet posted on Weblearn. Recommended reading for each week’s lecture is also given in the module booklet. Use an appropriate prose style, presentation and academic convention for citing material. Guidance on correct academic referencing can be found on the library website:[login to view URL] . Do not substantially reproduce any ideas, research or arguments in this essay that you have submitted for assessment in earlier work. 1. Explore the portrayal of gender in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘Jenny’ AND/OR Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’, paying particular attention to language, voice and poetic form. 2. What was radical about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood? What qualities of attention and feeling did they hope to provoke in the viewer and why? Illustrate your answer with reference to one or two works of art by the PRB. 3. What are the characteristics of Victorian Gothic and what do the architects, designers AND/OR critics associated with Victorian Gothic set out to achieve? 4. Discuss how Tennyson’s In Memoriam and/or Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ are seen as significant poems in the context of mid-Victorian Britain, with reference to developments in scientific and religious thought. 5. Examine Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetics (stylistic and thematic concerns) with reference to either The Wreck of the Deutschland or a selection of his other poems. 6. ‘H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines reveals the imperial mindset of the Victorian period, illustrating its ambitions and fantasies as well as its anxieties and limitations.’ Discuss. 7. What are some major points of similarity or difference between Romantic and Victorian poets? Focus on a few representative poems by one poet studied in Semester 1 and one studied in Semester 2. (You may return to a poet you discussed in your first or third assignment providing you do not repeat material.) 8. Discuss the legacy of either Romantic or Victorian literature in contemporary literature and culture (since the 1960s). Focus on one particular writer or stylistic or thematic concern we have studied during the module, and make links with named examples of writers or texts from the contemporary period. 9. Creative Writing option: Write a fictional account of an important moment in the life of any one writer studied on the module. You will need to research historical, cultural, thematic and stylistic material as relevant. Your account should be fully fictionalised and include use of setting, characterisation, dialogue, imagery and a sense of story.