Term Paper Topics

ENGL 520

Dr. Fike

It would be helpful if you picked a critical perspective (literary theory) to guide and inform your analysis.

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.

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

• 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.)

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 heavenly father.  In addition, what about Jonson's role AS a father to "the tribe of Ben"?
• 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.
• 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.