Term Paper Topics

ENGL 520

Dr. Fike

There are a number of ways of selecting a term paper project. First, you could pursue one of the topics suggested below. If you do so, it would be helpful if you picked a critical perspective (literary theory) to guide and inform your analysis. Second, you could start with a critical perspective (a literary theory perhaps or maybe your minor subject area) and find a text that fits it. Third, you could simply select a work that interests you (e.g., one of Donne's poems) and spend the whole semester exploring it. You need not select something long. In fact, this course is full of short and medium-length poems, many of which would be a fine subject for a term paper. It would also be suitable to focus on a passage from a longer work such as Volpone.

Bunyan

• What are the similarities/differences between Errour in FQ I.i and Apollyon in PP?  Or consider the House of Pride in FQ I.iv-v and Vanity fair in PP.  How do these episodes suggest different Protestant perspectives?
• Consider the death of Faithful on page 964 in terms of Foxe's Book of Martyrs (Acts and Monuments).  What accounts is Bunyan imitating, and does F's death enact the kind of theatricality that is John Knott's thesis?  In other words, how does B engage with F's portrayal of martyrdom?
• Explore B's experience with the women in Bedford from a psychological standpoint.  What psychological mechanisms help explain why it is so powerful for him?  How does it relate to the role of women in PP more generally?  Cf. B's earlier "kind of vision" of these women (not in our anthology).
• How does B's take on despair align (or not align) with Robert Burton's take on melancholy in The Anatomy of Melancholy?

Donne and Herbert

• Write a paper contrasting Holy Sonnet 14 with Herbert’s “Love III.”
• You could pick a group of H's sonnets and discuss them in terms of his use of that structure.
• Write a paper explaining the relevance of Holy Sonnet 14 (page 124) to Robert Oppenheimer (it was his favorite poem).
• You could pick one of D's or H's longer poems and devote your whole paper to it.  For example, a great paper could be written about "A Nocturnal upon S. Lucy's Day being the shortest day" in connection with alchemy.
• Write a paper on D's "Air and Angels," bringing in 17th-century angel lore.
• Consider D's "The Progress of the Soul" in terms of the concept of metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls. You might be able to suggest that the poem was a source for Jonson's use of metempsychosis in Volpone.

Traherne

• One approach would be to write about Traherne’s view of the soul’s journey in connection with Wordsworth’s “Intimations Ode.”  Here is a possible verbal echo to help you get started:  Traherne’s “Great wonders clothed with glory” in “Wonder,” line 45, seems to anticipate Wordsworth’s “trailing clouds of glory” in “Intimations.” 
• Another approach would be to write about Traherne’s view of the soul’s journey in connection with Blake’s concepts of innocence, experience, and organized innocence.  You may also find Traherne’s phrases “Joy, Beauty, Welfare” and “Envy, Avarice / And Fraud” from “Wonder” to anticipate phrases in “The Divine Image” and “The Human Abstract.”  You might search George Robert Guffey’s A Concordance to the Poetry of Thomas Traherne for other echoes of one or the other of these Romantic poets.  Traherne’s influence on Wordsworth and Blake is not a given:  find out when his poems were published.  Could such echoes provide a clue as to which of Traherne’s poems were available in the 19^th century?  And besides, even if you discover that his works could not have influenced them, the similarities are still worth investigating because they should lead you to a conclusion about the course of ideas in literary history.

Behn

• Discuss the relationship between The Rover and Breughel’s painting The Battle of Carnival and Lent.
• Consider the narrator in Oroonoko:  Is she complicit in maintaining slavery even as she sympathizes with Oroonoko?
• NAMES:  Oroonoko is a river in South America, which makes it a bit strange that an African prince would bear that name.  On pages 43 and 45, however, Oroonoko and Imoinda are renamed Caesar and Clemene.  Put these appellations together with his education on page 14 and the reference to the Romans on page 14, Oroonoko’s physical description on page 15, and the reference to Plutarch’s Lives on page 49.  What is going on?  Your answer may well augment the answer to the previous question about racial groups.  For good measure, throw in the reference to “Venus and Mars” on page 16 (cf. “Mars” on 13).  (If you want to write a response or term paper about this question, you will need to read Plutarch’s life of King Cleomenes and figure out parallels between him and Oroonoko.)
• The similarities and differences between the narrator and Behn herself could be discussed in terms of postcolonial theory. It is also possible to write from a psychological point of view: Behn is projecting onto the narrator, who is in turn projecting onto Oroonoko, who projects onto the narrator and Imoinda.

A feminist topic

• Page 673, headnote:  "for the social role of women and issues connected with childbirth (both touched on in the funeral sermon), see the selections from The Gentlewoman's Companion and Elizabeth Clinton."

Browne and Locke

• Focus on segments of each man's works that deal with reason and write a paper about this faculty in connection with the role of religious faith.

Jonson

• How does "On My First Son" relate to Jonson's experiences with fathers?  These include the following:  the biological father whom he never knew, his stepfather (a brick layer), his teacher (Camden), and his heavenly father.  In addition, what about Jonson's role AS a father to "the tribe of Ben"? Jonson's epitaph for his son is also possible to interpret from a wide variety of critical perspectives.
• How does "To Penshurst" illustrate the Great Chain of Being?  That, however, is not enough for a term paper.  Augment your discoveries by ways in which the poem undercuts the GCB and suggests that the economic system that the poem celebrates may yield to another. A Marxist critique might help here.
• Critics have read Jonson's "To the Memory of My Beloved, The Author, Mr. William Shakespeare, And What He Hath Left Us":  as an encomium and as veiled criticism.  See if you can figure out which is the more likely interpretation.  Was Jonson being completely sincere?  Or does his poem betray envy or even criticism of Shakespeare?
• The word "linen" in "To Penshurst" might produce a very fruitful term paper. It would require inquiry into material culture. The sort of things that have been written about Desdemona's handkerchief in Othello might be a useful starting point.
• Lady Would-be in Volpone cites Castiglione's third book of Il Cortegiano (see Hoby's translation, The Courtier). You could figure out what Jonson is doing with what she is doing with that text.
• You could do a similar thing with the play's references to Plato and Pythagoras; Hippocrates and Galen; Venus, Apollo, Helen at 2.2.206-13; Ulysses in Horace's Satire 2.5; Juvenal's Satire 10; or Ovid's Metamorphoses. You might find that some combination would also produce a good paper. Horace and Juvenal are reproduced in the appendix of the Mermaid edition. Eliot's essay "Ulysses, Order, and Myth" might be useful.
• How might Sir Antony Shirley be model for Sir Politic Would-be in Volpone?
• Thomas Coryat's Crudities is also reproduced in the appendix. It postdates Volpone, but you could still get a nice paper out of the comparison. You might think about the social underworld in this connection.

Marvell

• Pick one or two of Marvell's pastoral poems and do two things: consider the the background of the pastoral tradition and evaluate the poem(s) in terms of the narrator's attitude toward his subject.

Cavalier Poets

• Carew, Lovelace, and Suckling are not a major emphasis in your professor's version of ENGL 520 but might supply a nifty term paper topic for someone interested in writing about how amatory poems reflect the Civil War. For example, Lovelace's "To Althea, From Prison" might yield a term paper if you built in the poem's autobiographical, historical, and literary contexts. (Re. the literary context, think Petrarchanism and Elizabethan love poems.) What kind of political statement is being made? If you did tthe paper right, you might be able to challenge the stereotype that cavaliers who fought for the king were heavily into vice, swearing, and other ills. Note: The Cavaliers and the Puritans were on opposite ends of the moral probity scale.

Cavendish

• There is an interesting connection between death of Charles I and the death of Charles Lucas, Margaret Cavendish's brother. See the play called The Famous Tragedie of Charles I (1649). Apparently, the play contains an account of Lucas’s death that would link nicely withCavendish’s statements on the two Charleses in her autobiography.