University of the West of England

C o n t e n t s
Page No.
Instructions ................................................................................................................ 3
Level 1 ...................................................................................................................... 4
UPGPFV-60-1 Writing about Reading / Reading about Writing ......................... 4
UPGPPF-30-1 Beyond the Horizon: Spaces and Places in Literature ............... 5
UPGPPG-30-1 Once Upon a Time: Stories, Children and Literature ...……….....7
Level 2 ...................................................................................................................... 7
UPGPPH-30-2 Reading Forms / Forms of Reading ........................................... 7
UPGPPJ-30-2 Shakespeare and the Renaissance ........................................... 9
UPGPPK-30-2 Romanticism Unbound ............................................................ 10
UPGPPL-30-2 Victorian Frictions .................................................................... 11
UPGPTA-30-2 Exploring the Eighteenth Century ............................................ 12
UPGPTB-30-2 British Writing: 1900-1950 ....................................................... 13
UPGPTL-30-2 The Culture of Dissent: 19 th Century American Literature.........17
Level 3 .................................................................................................................... 19
UPGPEG-30-3 Gender, Sexuality and Writing ................................................. 19
UPGPFD-30-3 Poetry and Power ………………………………………………….20
UPGPFH-30-3 Literature and Culture in Britain, 1885-1915 ............................ 21
UPGPFS-30-3 Gothic Lit erature ………………………………………………… 24
UPGPPA-30-3 Contemporary American Narrative .......................................... 25
UPGPPD-30-3 English Independent Project ………………………………….... 29
UPGPTD-30-3 Children’s Fantasy Fiction since 1900 ................... …………… 30
UPGPTF-30-3 Fiction in Britain since 1970 .................................................... 32
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Instructions
The work you need to do is set out in this booklet in Level and Module Code order. If you have any difficulty understanding what you have to do you must contact a Student Adviser immediately, studentadvisers.hlss@uwe.ac.uk
.
Should you need further information, or assistance with your referral you may be able to contact the module leader by e-mail. Please however, remember that academic staff will not necessarily be available over the summer vacation; you should not expect to receive additional help.
Please submit the work, using the online coversheet, which you can download from myUWE, by Monday 8 th August at 2.00pm
either by hand delivery to the Frenchay or St Matthias reception,
Or, by post addressed to the Faculty Office:
HLSS HLSS
UWE St Matthias Campus
Oldbury Court Road
UWE Frenchay Campus
Coldharbour Lane
Fishponds
BRISTOL
BS16 2JP
Frenchay
BRISTOL
BS16 1QY
If you post the work to us you will need to obtain a ‘proof of posting’ which indicates that it was posted before the 2pm deadline.
Please also remember, it is essential that you keep a copy of the work for your own records.
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Requirement
You are required to complete ALL elements of this component, regardless of whether you have passed any previously. Please refer to your module handbook and to
Blackboard for guidance notes on the assignments.
1. Portfolio of close reading (1,500 words) 10%
This consists of 5 short pieces of close reading (300 words per piece) of literary texts studied in the course of the module.
You will be assessed according to the following criteria:
 the ability to analyse the texts, with reference to formal features and content and the relationship between the two;
 the accurate use of technical language in the analysis;
 the ability to identify an aspect for discussion and explore it consistently, keeping the focus on the central idea in each of the 5 pieces: no waffle, no digressions, no generalisations!
 the correct and accurate use of English: this includes syntax, diction, grammar and punctuation
2. Sustained close reading essay (1,500 words) 10%
You have a choice in this assignment of whether you wish to submit either a piece of extended close reading or a creative writing exercise. These are the details:
 If you decide on the extended close reading, you must write a 1500-word essay analysing in depth one of the texts on the module so far. Remember that the text you choose must not be one of those you used for element one. Make use of all the elements of analysis you have built up on and work on the structure of your essay, in other words on the sequence of what you wish to say about the text. You should not analyse the whole of Macbeth or The Great Gatsby or any lengthy text; you can, however, select a SHORT section from one of the longer texts we studied. If you choose to do so, give exact reference as to which part of the text you are discussing.
 If you choose to submit a creative writing piece, you should write either 500 words of prose or 14-25 lines of poetry, followed by 1000 words of reflection on what you wrote, how you engaged with the conventions of the form, what aspects you deemed relevant and why. In other words, you must demonstrate in your own creative writing that you are aware of what you have studied so far.
3. Research exercise (1,000 words) 10%
This assignment will ask you to compile an annotated bibliography (a list of entries from books, book chapters, scholarly journal articles, electronic resources etc., each accompanied by a brief description of their argument and usefulness) to answer the following essay question:
‘How important is knowledge of the context of a literary text in order to understand its meaning?
’
You must then write a short summary of what your argument will be in the essay. You should dedicate approximately 750 words to the annotated bibliography and 250 words to the summary. In the summary, you should mention which literary text you intend to use in your argument.
Please note: at this stage you are not yet answering the question, but you are doing the preparatory work for it.
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It is essential that you follow the MLA conventions for referencing in your bibliography.
4. Essay (2,000 words) 15%
This element follows on from the preceding one: you will write an essay in answer to the question for element three and you will use the research you have already done and the argument you have already outlined. The emphasis, therefore, will be on the essaywriting strategies, such as the ways in which to construct an argument, how to integrate research, close reading, and original thinking.
5. Essay (3,000 words) 30%
Answer ONE of the questions below. In your answer you MUST make detailed reference to AT LEAST 3 primary texts studied on the module. You MUST make use of relevant critical and theoretical materials beyond those available on Blackboard. You MUST reference fully and accurately. You MUST open your essay with a reflection on the ways in which this module has affected your approach to reading.
1.) To what extent, and in what ways, is authorship a problematic concept in literature and criticism?
2.) To what extent, and in what ways, is the concept of the canon still useful when discussing literature?
3.) How does gender affect the writing and reading of a literary text?
4.) Explore the ways in which the conventions of genre shape literary texts.
Requirement
You are required to complete BOTH Assessment 1 and Assessment 2, regardless of whether you have passed either previously.
1. Close reading (1,500 words) 25%
RUBRIC
Undertake a CLOSE READING of 15-20 lines or of one short passage from the primary material covered in the first six weeks of the module (i.e. 15-20 lines from
‘Bermudas’, from Othello , or one short passage from Isle or Pines ). The extract will be of your own choosing. In your close reading you will analyse the formal features of the passage such as tone, imagery, punctuation, imagery, metaphor, rhythm, voice etc. and relate these to one of the themes highlighted in the lecture headings (‘Exotic Others’ etc.).
2. Critical Anthology (3,000 words) 40%
RUBRIC
Compile an anthology of primary works comprising SIX pieces in all: three texts (or extracts from longer works) that are taught on the module and three of your own choosing. Your anthology must have a specific theme and focus taken from the lecture headings on the module. You will then have to write a total of 2500 words in two parts : a 1000 word general introduction explaining to your reader your chosen title, some of the critical approaches to this heading and the ways in which your pieces relate to the title of your anthology; 1500 words in which you discuss two pieces in detail, relating the pieces’ formal features to the overall title and incorporating criticism into your close reading. Throughout the year you will be encouraged to find your three pieces from a variety of sources including anthologies and web resources.
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An anthology is a collection of texts that have been selected by an editor and brought together (for example, you all have The Norton Anthology ). In this assignment, you are the editor ! Here is a guide for compiling your anthology and composing the accompanying written piece:
1) Pick a THEME taken from the LECTURE HEADINGS.
This theme should be something that you have been particularly interested in such as
‘Europeans go Beyond the Horizon’, or ‘Re-writings and Re-crossings’. This theme will be the title of your anthology.
2) Think of texts that you feel can be placed under this heading and linked together.
Three pieces should be from the set primary reading on the module and three pieces should be of your own choosing . For example, you may choose a section from Othello , an extract from The Isle of Pines and a section from My Ántonia and place these extracts under the heading of ‘Exotic Others’. Then you will need to find three further pieces of your own choosing that you can link meaningfully to the title and your other extracts.
3) Ideas for selecting the three pieces of your own choosing.
We want you to make connections between texts on this module. You can bring in texts that you have studied on other modules, that you have read in your own time or that you have seen referred to on lecture handouts. Ask your tutors for ideas of where to look in the coming weeks and start browsing anthologies in the library on, for example, travel writing, Caribbean poetry, Irish literature etc. to get ideas. As long as the three texts of your own choosing are not listed in the primary reading for this module they will be accepted .
4) Length of extracts.
As a rule of thumb, extracts of prose should be no longer than one A4 page, sections of poetry no longer than 20 lines and extracts from plays no longer than one A4 page .
You do not have to cover all these genres or you may, indeed, incorporate a range of types of writing such as travel writing, letters, journals etc. Your selection is really up to you. This is a general guide and there is flexibility. Just bear in mind that if the pieces are too long it will be difficult to discuss them thoroughly.
5) Composing the 2,500 words.
You need to divide this into two parts . The first part is 1,000 words and it is an introduction that explains why you have chosen the texts you have and how they relate to your title. You should outline some of the approaches to the pieces that you have discussed on the module. For example, if I included an extract of 20 lines from Othello in an anthology called Race and Power I would explain some of the aspects of the play that are relevant to the topic. You do not need to cover everything about the texts, just tell your reader why these pieces are interesting to read in the light of the ideas suggested by your title.
The second part is a 1,500 word close reading that discusses the pieces in your anthology in detail, but that focuses particularly on two pieces. In this section you should relate the pieces’ formal features to the overall title and incorporate criticism into your close reading. Show your reader how these two pieces highlight your theme and engage closely with the language and literary devices. You must include criticism in this section and relate your own ideas to critics’. This means undertaking some research in the library. Use the bibliography in the module handbook and the lecture and seminar handouts as starting points.
6) You must include a full bibliography and reference your writing in line with the MLA style guide. See the English Department Essay Writing Guid e.
Make sure you talk to your tutor about your anthology and get help and feedback on your ideas before the hand-in date!
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UPGPPG-30-1
Requirement
Once Upon a Time: Children, Stories and Literature
You are required to complete ALL THREE Assignments, regardless of whether you have passed any previously.
1. Text comparison exercise (1,000 words) 15%
Compare TWO versions of ONE fairy tale in the Tatar anthology. Comment on how each tale reflects or questions conventional assumptions about childhood, and include brief references to a relevant theoretical approach encountered on the course.
2. Essay (1,500 words) 25%
In Great Expectations how far does the child voice of Pip highlight the hypocrisies of the adult society in which he lives? What does this suggest about the construction of childhood within the text?
3. Creative Writing and commentary (2,000 words) 25%
Length: 1250 words + 750 word commentary
Produce a piece of creative writing and a commentary which explore key themes encountered in the course. You should demonstrate an awareness of literary explorations of childhood studied on the module. Your commentary should explain your aims in creating the piece, the themes which you have dealt with, and how you have used aspects of literary form in your work.
Requirement
You are required to complete BOTH Element 1 and Element 2, regardless of whether you have passed either previously. Both marks count.
1. Essay (2,000 words) 30%
Read the following lines from Book 4 of Paradise Lost (in the prescribed edition) and in
2,000 words assess the extent to which its form (for example, its sentence-structure, vocabulary, syntax, register, imagery, style, rhetoric, idiolect, prosody, punctuation and pattern in general) is appropriate to its content. This is an exercise in close reading, but you will need to situate your analysis of the form and content within the poem as a whole.
As a rule of thumb, spend about two-thirds of the essay on this passage and one-third on its context in the play as a whole. “ Context” here involves not simply plot, theme, characterization, and the like, but the formal elements specified above. How typical of the poem as a whole, for example, is the relationship between form and content in this passage? How text and context is balanced in the essay is down to you; this will form a major part of how the assignment is assessed. You SHOULD explicitly discuss secondary material on the play.
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O For that warning voice, which he who saw
Th' Apocalyps, heard cry in Heaven aloud,
Then when the Dragon, put to second rout,
Came furious down to be reveng'd on men,
Wo to the inhabitants on Earth! that now, [ 5 ]
While time was, our first-Parents had bin warnd
The coming of thir secret foe, and scap'd
Haply so scap'd his mortal snare; for now
Satan, now first inflam'd with rage, came down,
The Tempter ere th' Accuser of man-kind, [ 10 ]
To wreck on innocent frail man his loss
Of that first Battel, and his flight to Hell:
Yet not rejoycing in his speed, though bold,
Far off and fearless, nor with cause to boast,
Begins his dire attempt, which nigh the birth [ 15 ]
Now rowling, boiles in his tumultuous brest,
And like a devillish Engine back recoiles
Upon himself; horror and doubt distract
His troubl'd thoughts, and from the bottom stirr
The Hell within him, for within him Hell [ 20 ]
He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell
One step no more then from himself can fly
By change of place: Now conscience wakes despair
That slumberd, wakes the bitter memorie
Of what he was, what is, and what must be [ 25 ]
Worse; of worse deeds worse sufferings must ensue.
Sometimes towards Eden which now in his view
Lay pleasant, his grievd look he fixes sad,
Sometimes towards Heav'n and the full-blazing Sun,
Which now sat high in his Meridian Towre: [ 30 ]
Then much revolving, thus in sighs began.
O thou that with surpassing Glory crownd,
Look'st from thy sole Dominion like the God
Of this new World; at whose sight all the Starrs
Hide thir diminisht heads; to thee I call, [ 35 ]
But with no friendly voice, and add thy name
O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams
That bring to my remembrance from what state
I fell, how glorious once above thy Spheare;
Till Pride and worse Ambition threw me down [ 40 ]
Warring in Heav'n against Heav'ns matchless King:
Ah wherefore! he deservd no such return
From me, whom he created what I was
In that bright eminence, and with his good
Upbraided none; nor was his service hard. [ 45 ]
What could be less then to afford him praise,
The easiest recompence, and pay him thanks,
How due! yet all his good prov'd ill in me,
And wrought but malice; lifted up so high
I sdeind subjection, and thought one step higher [ 50 ]
Would set me highest, and in a moment quit
The debt immense of endless gratitude,
So burthensome, still paying, still to ow;
Forgetful what from him I still receivd,
And understood not that a grateful mind [ 55 ]
By owing owes not, but still pays, at once
Indebted and dischargd; what burden then?
O had his powerful Destiny ordaind
Me some inferiour Angel, I had stood
Then happie; no unbounded hope had rais'd [ 60 ]
Ambition. Yet why not? som other Power
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As great might have aspir'd, and me though mean
Drawn to his part; but other Powers as great
Fell not, but stand unshak'n, from within
Or from without, to all temptations arm'd. [ 65 ]
Hadst thou the same free Will and Power to stand?
Thou hadst: whom hast thou then or what to accuse,
But Heav'ns free Love dealt equally to all?
Be then his Love accurst, since love or hate,
To me alike, it deals eternal woe. [ 70 ]
2. Essay (2,000 words) 30%
Choose ONE question from below and write on all 3 texts. You must engage with secondary reading and balance your answer between the texts. You must discuss generic form in your answer.
1. Hamlet’s question, ‘To be or not to be’, can be read as a meditation on the differences between being and seeming. Discuss the ways in which the form of each text offers an engagem ent with Hamlet’s questions about being and seeming.
2. ‘Dorothea by this time had looked deep into the ungauged reservoir of Mr.
Casaubon's mind, seeing reflected there in vague labyrinthine extension every quality she herself brought’ ( Middlemarch , Book 1). Write an essay discussing the imagery of reflection, projection and mirrors in all 3 texts and consider the its relationship to form.
3. In your estimation, which of the three texts offers the most coherent representation of character. Why?
Requirement
You are required to complete BOTH the Essay and the Extended Essay, regardless of whether you have passed either previously.
1. Essay (2,000 words) 25%
Answer ONE question
1.) Critically explore the relationship between either the city and the country or the court and the citizen in one text.
2.) Alastair Fowler describes the country house poem as emerging from “a group of genres all related to ceremonies of hospitality and hierarch ic obligation”. To what extent is this an accurate description of Ben Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’?
3.) The texts of the Renaissance frequently explore the conflict between independent thinking and inherited belief. Examine this statement with reference to Donne’s Satire
III and one other text.
4.) “Complexity and mystery are deliberately sought effects in The Faerie Queene … a central part of Spenser’s didactic project”. Examine Elizabeth Heale’s statement with reference to Book One.
What are we to make of the relationship between sex and either politics or religion in the literature of the period? Please refer to two texts in your answer (4 sonnets = 1 text)
2. Extended Essay (4,000 words) 50%
Answer ONE question
1.) “An increased interest in female protagonists in drama of the Jacobean era can be correlated with nostalgia for the reign of Elizabeth I and the values she had
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posthumously come to represent”(Leah Marcus). To what extent do you agree with this statement? Refer in your answer to at least two plays.
2.) Discuss the significance of one of the following in any two texts studied: manliness, beauty, chastity, obedience, reason, exchange. (4 sonnets = 1 text)
3.) Sir John Harrington asserted that, “Tragedies well handled be a most worthy kind of Poesie … [enough to] terrifie all tyrannous minded men from following their foolish humours”. Discuss this statement with reference to at least two texts studied on the module.
4.) Explore the treatment of death and the passage of time in William Shakespeare’s
Sonnets and John Donne’s Holy Sonnets (Analyse at least 4 sonnets of each poet).
5.) In the Duchess of Malfi, Bosola tells the Cardinal:
When thou kill’dst thy sister,
Thou took’st from Justice her most equal balance,
And left her naught bur her sword.
Explore the concept of balance in this and one other play.
Requirement
You are required to complete BOTH the Essay and the Extended Essay, regardless of whether you have passed either previously.
1. Essay (2,000 words) 30%
Find two contrasting interpretations of the same literary text (which should be part of the required reading for the module). Give an account of each critic’s position, commenting on any presuppositions and drawing attention to its strengths and weaknesses, and say which you find most persuasive. You may also, if you wish, give some indication of how your own reading of the text differs from those of the critics.
2. Extended Essay (4,000 words) 45%
With reference to THREE of the writers you have studied on the module, discuss Romantic literature in the light of one or more of the following statements:
 “Romanticism is the true beginning of our modern world.”
 “The tendency of historic Romanticism was away from authority and toward liberty.”
 “Romanticism is one of those terms historians can neither do with nor make do without.”
Please note that you are not allowed to use the same writer for Element 1 and Element
2 of the referral.
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Requirement
You are required to complete ALL elements of this component, regardless of whether you have passed any previously.
1. Synopsis and evaluation of an academic journal article (200 words handout, 800 words written submission) 15%
Select a text/topic from the module’s weekly schedule between weeks 1-12 and find an academic journal article which is relevant to it. Summarise it (as much as possible in your own words) and give a brief evaluation of the critic’s argument. When marking this assignment, we will use the following guiding questions:
Handout:

Is the handout clear?
 Does it provide a useful indication of the article’s main points?

Is the bibliographic reference for the article presented in the correct format?
Written submission:

Is the written presentation clear?

To what extent has the student used her/his own words rather than quotations from the article?
 Are quotations from the article and paraphrases of the critic’s argument properly acknowledged?

How appropriate is the chosen article for the seminar text/topic?

Is there evidence of understanding and critical engagement with the critic’s argument?

Is the bibliographic reference for the article presented in the correct format?
Please submit a copy of your chosen article. Do not use the same article that you selected for your first attempt. You will not have to present this assignment orally.
2. Essay (3,500 words) 45%
Choose ONE question from the following.
You must consider at least TWO primary texts in your answer. You may choose your primary texts from this module's set reading for weeks 1-18, and may consider poetry and/or novels for any of the questions. Texts that are not on the module reading list for these weeks must not be made principal subjects of your assignment. You must not repeat material on the assessments for this module. Make sure that you pay careful attention in your essay to the literary FORM(S) of the texts that you have chosen. You must engage with a variety of suitable critical sources.
For further advice on this assignment and essay writing and presentation in general, see the sections on ‘Module Assessment’ and ‘Some Basic Rules on Quoting and
Referencing Titles’ in the Module Handbook, and consult TESS.
1. To what extent is character related to environment in selected novels and/or poems?
2. Examine portrayals of femininity in selected poems and/or novels.
3. Consider the delineation of marriage in selected novels and/or poems.
4. Why do some Victorian poets adopt the voices of historical and/or mythological characters?
5. ‘The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.’ (Oscar
Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest ). How far is this true of novels on this module?
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Requirement
You are required to complete BOTH elements, regardless of whether you have passed either previously.
1. Essay and accompanying self-reflective piece (2,500 words) 25%
500 words of this assessment will be a brief research log in which you reflect on your own approach to the essay outlining your research methodologies, the formation of your argument and your preparative work on essay writing skills.
Please choose one of the following titles. You must focus your answer on at least
TWO of the following novels: Pamela, Joseph Andrews, Roxana and The Monk.
1) In Pamela, the heroine’s parents tell her ‘Our hearts bleed for your distress’. Write an essay considering the role of sympathy in two novels.
2) ‘ Now I was at liberty to go to any part of the world and take care of my money myself’
(Roxana in Roxana ). Consider the relationship between women, money and liberty in two of the novels.
3) In your estimation, do the endings of the novels resolve the dilemmas that are raised?
Discuss two novels.
4) Consider the role of masquerade in any two novels, discussing this term in its broadest possible sense.
Self-Reflective piece (500 words)
For this essay you need to write 500 words as a self-reflective piece. I want you to be able to reflect upon and articulate a response to your own study skills as you prepare for this task. Here are some headings you may want to consider: these questions are suggestions and you may well want to form your own.
Research:
How am I searching for and utilizing secondary material?
In what way is this secondary reading helping me to formulate my own response?
Primary text:
How well do I know my texts?
How am I making intertextual links between them?
Am I citing them usefully?
Writing:
How am I preparing to improve upon my writing skills for this assignment?
How much time am I leaving for editing and redrafting?
Have I learned from feedback on past assignments?
2. Essay (3,000 words) 40%
1) In what ways so slaves and abolitionists engage in the contradictions of eighteenthcentury culture in order to argue for freedom?
2) ‘The East room, as it had been called ever since Maria Bertram was sixteen, was now considered Fanny's, almost as decidedly as the white attic’ ( Mansfield Park ). Discuss the relationship between space and transgression in relation to Mansfield Park, and
Castle Rackrent .
3) In what ways do the texts you have read in the last 7 weeks of the module offer a critique of colonial power? (You may choose any 3 texts).
1. Look closely over marked work you have received and take note of and correct your mistakes: try not to repeat these mistakes.
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2. Take care to answer the question directly: begin immediately with your argument in response to the question. Avoid stand-alone overviews: contextual information and historical detail can be woven into your essay as part of your argument.
3. Begin with the specific and work out to the general: not the other way around.
4. Try to make a clear point in each paragraph and consider this structure:
 Point : say something that is directly related to your argument in response to the title.
 Evidence in primary material: quote from your primary text to support what you are saying.
 Response to the quoted material in which you use your own voice to read the passage and tell your reader what is important. This is the place to show original thinking, to demonstrate your critical skills and to convince your reader.
 Debate . Bring in secondary material to support or debate the argument you have just made. You may want to offer contextual information or historical background at this point.
This is not a rigid format but you may consider it a useful template.
1. CLOSE READING is vital. You should respond fully to literary language. Think of what we do in seminars and lectures as a model of practice.
2. Think of your READER. Guide them through your essay, linking your paragraphs together. Always make sure that the reader knows why they are being told something.
3. Be SELECTIVE: your essay is a finite and bounded space, so do not aim for coverage: aim for detailed and intimate engagement with your text demonstrated through readings of selected pieces.
4. RE-READ your sentences and make sure they make SENSE. Do not allow yourself to be satisfied with half-articulated ideas. Push yourself to be clear and explicit. It is your job to be able to express SOPHISTICATED IDEAS IN A CLEAR
MANNER.
5. Develop your vocabulary so that you arm yourself with the necessary words to express those ideas.
6. UNDERTAKE BROAD RESEARCH to enhance your understanding of the issues.
You must read widely for your own development, not simply as a box-ticking exercise.
7. Be very wary of confusing the AUTHOR and the SPEAKER or NARRATOR. They are not the same thing.
Requirement
You are required to answer ONE question from Part A and ONE from Part B, regardless of whether you have passed either element previously.
1. Essay (1,500 words) 25%
PART A
Write a close reading of ONE of the passages below. In your answer, you should consider the passage in itself (form and content) and also in relation to the text as a whole and, where relevant, to elements of context and/or genre.
1.) Joseph Conrad, ‘Amy Foster’
‘Yes; he was a castaway. A poor emigrant from central Europe bound to America and washed ashore here in a storm. And for him, who knew nothing of the earth, England was an undiscovered country. It was some time before he learned its name; and for all I know he might have expected to find wild beasts or wild men here, when, crawling in the dark over the sea-wall, he rolled down the other side into a dyke, where it was another miracle
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he didn’t get drowned. But he struggled instinctively like an animal under a net, and this blind struggle threw him out into a field. He must have been, indeed, of a tougher fibre than he looked to withstand without expiring such buffetings, the violence of this exertion, and so much fear. Later on, in his broken English that resembled curiously the speech of a young child, he told me himself that he put his trust in God, believing he was not longer in this world. And truly – he would add – how was he to know? He fought his war against the rain and the gale on all fours, and crawled at last among some sheep huddled close under the lee of a hedge. They ran off in all directions, bleating in the darkness, and he welcomed the first familiar sound he heard on these shores. It must have been two in the morning then. And this is all we know of the manner of his landing, though he did not arrive unattended by any means Only his grisly company did not begin to come ashore til much later in the day...’
The doctor gathered the reins, clicked his tongue; we trotted down the hill. Then turning, almost directly, a sharp corner into the High Street, we rattled over the stones and were home.
Late in the evening Kennedy, breaking a spell of moodiness that had come over him, returned to the story. Smoking his pipe, he paced the long room from end to end. A reading-lamp concentrated all its light upon the papers on his desk; and, sitting by the open window, I saw, after the windless, scorching day, the frigid splendour of a hazy sea lying motionless under the moon. Not a whisper, not a splash, not a stir of the shingle, not a footstep, not a sigh came up from the earth below – never a sign of life but the scent of climbing jasmine; and Kennedy’s voice, speaking behind me, passed through the wide casement, to vanish outside in a chill and sumptuous stillness.
‘...The relations of shipwrecks in the olden time tell us of much suffering. Often the castaways were only saved from drowning to die miserably from starvation on a barren coast; others suffered violent death or else slavery, passing through years of precarious existence with people to whom their strangeness was an object of suspicion, dislike or fear. We read about these things, and they are very pitiful. It is indeed hard upon a man to find himself a lost stranger, helpless, incomprehensible, and of a mysterious origin, in some obscure corner of the earth. Yet amongst all the adventurers shipwrecked in all the wild parts of the world, there is not one, it seems to me, that ever had to suffer a fate so simply tragic as the man I am speaking of, the most innocent of adventurers cast out by the sea in the bright of this bay, almost within sight fro m this very window.’ (99-100)
2.) Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer
Arrived at that comforting conclusion, I bethought myself of a cigar and went below to get it. All was still down there. Everybody at the after end of the ship was sleeping profoundly. I came out again on the quarter-deck, agreeably at ease in my sleeping-suit on that warm breathless night, barefooted, a glowing cigar in my teeth, and, going forward, I was met by the profound silence of the fore end of the ship. Only as I passed the door of the forecastle I heard a deep, quiet, trustful sigh of some sleeper inside. And suddenly I rejoiced in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice of that untempted life presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral beauty by the absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose.
The riding-light in the fore-rigging burned with a clear, untroubled, as if symbolic, flame, confident and bright in the mysterious shades of the night. Passing on my way aft along the other side of the ship, I observed that the rope side-ladder, put over, no doubt, for the master of the tug when he came to fetch away our letters, had not been hauled in as it should have been. I became annoyed at this, for exactitude in small matters is the very soul of discipline. Then I reflected that I had myself peremptorily dismissed my officers from duty, and by my own act had prevented the anchor-watch being formally set and things properly attended to. I asked myself whether it was wise ever to interfere with the established routing of duties even from the kindest of motives. My action might have made me appear eccentric. Goodness only knew how that absurdly whiskered mate would ‘account’ for my conduct and what the whole ship thought of that informality of their new captain. I was vexed with myself.
Not from compunction certainly, but, as it were mechanically, I proceeded to get the ladder in myself. Now a side-ladder of that sort is a light affair and comes in easily, yet my vigorous tug, which should have brought it flying on board, merely recoiled upon my body in a totally unexpected jerk. What the devil! ...I was so astounded by the immovableness
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of that ladder that I remained stock-still, trying to account for it myself like that imbecile mate of mine. In the end, of course, I put my head over the rail.
The side of the ship made an opaque belt of shadow on the darkling glassy shimmer of the sea. But I saw at once something elongated and pale floating very close to the ladder. Before I could form a guess a faint flash of phosphorescent light, which seemed to issue suddenly from the naked body of a man, flickered in the sleeping water with the elusive, silent play of summer lightning in a night sky. With a gasp I saw revealed to my stare a pair of feet the long legs, a broad livid back immersed right up to the neck in a greenish cadaverous glow. One hand, awash, clutched the bottom rung of the ladder. He was complete but for the head. A headless corpse! The cigar dropped out of my gaping mouth with a tiny plop and a short hiss quite audible in the absolute stillness of all things under heaven. At that I suppose he raised up his face, a dimly pale oval in the shadow of the ship’s side. But even then I could only barely make out down there the shape of his black-haired head. However, it was enough for the horrid, frost-bound sensation which had gripped me about the chest to pass off. The moment of vain exclamations was past, too. I only climbed on the spare spar and leaned over the rail as far as I could, to bring my eyes nearer to that mystery floating alongside. (174-5)
3.) D.H. Lawrence, ‘England, My England’
It was at this point in their history that the war broke out. A shiver went over his soul.
He had been living for weeks fixed without the slightest sentience. For weeks he had held himself fixed, so that he was impervious. His wife was set fast against him. She treated him with ignoring contempt; she ignored his existence. She would not mend his clothes, so that he went about with his shirt-shoulders slit into rags. She would not order his meals. He went to the kitchen and got his own. There was a state of intense hard hatred between them. The children were tentative and uncertain, or else defiant and ugly. The house was hard and sterile with negation. Only the mother gave herself up in a passion of ethical submission to her duty, and to a religion of physical self-sacrifice: which even yet she hardly believed in.
Yet the husband and wife were in love with each other. Or, rather, each held all the other’s love dammed up.
The family was down at the cottage when war was declared. He took the news in his indifferent, neutral way. “What difference does it make to me?” seemed to be his attitude.
Yet it soaked in to him. It absorbed the tension of his own life, this tension of a state of war. A flicker had come into his voice, a thin, corrosive flame, almost like a thin triumph.
As he worked in the garden he felt the seethe of the war was with him. His consciousness had now a field of activity. The reaction in his soul could cease from being neutral; it had a positive form to take. There, in the absolute peace of his sloping garden, hidden deep in trees between the rolling of the heath, he was aware of the positive activity of destruction, the seethe of friction, the waves of destruction seething to meet, the armies moving forward to fight. And this carried his soul along with it.
The next time he went indoors he said to his wife, with the same thin flame in his voice:
“I’d better join, hadn’t I?”
“Yes, you had,” she replied; “that’s just the very thing. You’re just the man they want.
You can ride and shoot, and you’re so healthy and strong, and nothing to keep you at home.”
She spoke loudly and confidently in her strong, pathetic, slightly deprecating voice, as if she knew she was doing what was right, however, much it might mean to her.
The thin smile narrowed his eyes; he seemed to be smiling to himself, in a thin, corrosive manner. She had to assume all her impersonal righteousness to bear it.
“All right -----“ he said in his think, jarring voice.
“We’ll see what father says,” she replied.
It should be left to the paternal authority to decide. The thin smile fixed on the young man’s face.
The father-in-law approved heartily; an admirable thing for Evelyn to do, he thought; it was just such men as the country wanted. So it was the father-in-law who finally overcame the young man’s inertia and despatched him to the war.
Evelyn Daughtry enlisted in a regiment which was stationed at Chichester, and almost at once he was drafted into the artillery. He hated very much the subordination, the being ordered about, and the having no choice over quite simple and unimportant
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things. He hated it strongly, the contemptible position he occupied as a private. And yet, because of a basic satisfaction he had in participating in the great destructive motion, he was a good soldier. His spirit acquiesced, however he despised the whole process of becoming a soldier.
Now his wife a ltered towards him and gave him a husband’s dignity; she was almost afraid of him; she almost humbled herself before him. When he came home, an uncouth figure in the rough kaki, he who was always so slender and clean-limbed and beautiful in motion, she felt he was a stranger. She was servant to his new arrogance and callousness as a soldier. He was now a quantity in life; he meant something. Also he had passed beyond her reach. She loved him; she wanted his recognition. Perhaps she had a thrill when he came to her as a soldier. Perhaps she too was fulfilled by him, now he had become an agent of destruction, now he stood on the side of the Slayer. (170-2)
4.) E.M. Forster, Howards End
Her evening was pleasant. The sense of flux which had haunted her all the year disappeared for a time. She forgot the luggage and the motor-cars, and the hurrying men who know so much and connect so little. She recaptured the sense of space, which is the basis of all earthly beauty, and, starting from Howards End, she attempted to realize
England. She failed – visions do not come when we try, though they may come through trying. But an unexpected love of the island awoke in her, connecting on this side with the joys of the flesh, on that with the inconceivable. Helen and her father had known this love, poor Leonard Bast was groping after it, but it had been hidden from Margaret till this afternoon. It had certainly come through the house, and old Miss Avery. Through them: the notion of ‘through’ persisted; her mind trembled towards a conclusion which only the unwise have put into words. Then, veering back into warmth, it dwelt on ruddy bricks, flowering plum trees, and all the tangible joys of spring.
Henry, after allaying her agitation, had taken her over his property, and had explained to her the use and dimensions of the various rooms. He had sketched the history of the little estate. ‘It is so unlucky’, ran the monologue, ‘that money wasn’t put into it about fifty years ago. Then it had four-five-times the land – thirty acres at least. One could have made something out of it then – a small park, or at all events shrubberies, and rebuilt the house further away from the road. What’s the good of taking it in hand now? Nothing but the meadow left, and even that was heavily mortgaged when I first had to do with things – yes, and the house too. Oh, it was no joke.’ She saw two women as he spoke, one old, the other young, watching their inheritance melt away. She saw them greet him as a deliverer. ‘Mismanagement did it – besides, the days for small farms are over. It doesn’t pay – except with intensive cultivation. Smallholdings, back to the land – ah! Philanthropic bunkum. Take it as a rule that nothing pays on a small scale. Most of the land you see’
(they were standing at an upper window, the only one which faced west) ‘belongs to the people at the Park – they made their pile over copper – good chaps. Avery’s Farm,
Sishe’s – what they call the Common, where you see that ruined oak – one after the other fell in, and so did this, as near as is no matter.’ But Henry had saved it; without fine feelings or deep insight, but he had saved it, and she loved him for the deed. ‘When I had more control I did what I could: sold off the two and a half animals, and the mangy pony, and the superannuated tools; pulled down the outhouses; drained, thinned out I don’t know how many guelder roses and elder trees; and inside the house I turned the old kitchen into a hall, and made a kitchen behind where the dairy was. Garage and so on came later. But one could still tell it’s been an old farm. And yet it isn’t the place that would fetch one of your artistic crew.’ No, it wasn’t; and if he did not understand it the artistic crew would even less: it was English, and the wych-elm that she saw from the window was an English tree. No report had prepared her for its peculiar glory. It was neither warrior, nor lover, nor god; in none of these roles do the English excel. It was a comrade, bending over the house, strength and adventure in its roots but in its utmost fingers tenderness, and the girth, that a dozen men could not have spanned, became in the end evanescent, till pale bud clusters seemed to float in the air. It was a comrade.
(204-6)
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2. Essay (2,500 words) 35%
PART B
Answer ONE of the questions below. You must not write on a text you have already used for the close reading exercise.
1.) To what extent, and in what ways, is The Secret Sharer a Bildungsroman ?
2.) Discuss the ways in which Howards End engages with questions of class.
3.) Examine the representation of masculinity in TWO stories by D.H. Lawrence.
4.) How does Eliot use allusion and intertextuality to convey meaning in The Waste
Land ?
5.) Explore the themes of youth and experience in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway .
6.) What are the respective roles of Hetton and London in A Handful of Dust ?
7.) Do you agree with Daphne Du Maurier’s assessment of Rebecca as ‘containing more of hate in it than love’?
8.) How do poets of the 1930s show their concern with the idea of the nation?
9.) Which ideas inherent in Orwell’s novel are encapsulated in its title, Coming Up for
Air ?
10.) Consider the way in which The Ministry of Fear explores ideas of guilt and redemption.
Requirement
You are required to complete BOTH Element 1 and Element 2, regardless of whether you have passed either element previously.
1. Essay (1,500 words) 25%
Choose ONE of the following two passages and then, in one continuous essay: a) Write a detailed commentary focusing on both what is written (the content) and how
(the style and form). You may find it useful to examine, among other features, the use of language (including phrase and sentence structure), imagery (similes, metaphors, and the like), any significant patterns in the passage as a whole, the use of voice
(narrative or poetic), and the way in which characters/personae are represented. (50 marks) b) Identify significant ways in which the passage relates to the wider themes of the novel/poem/essay, etc. (50 marks)
In answering the above you may refer briefly to other texts on the module and to secondary reading where it seems appropriate to do so.
Please be sure to reference and present your work appropriately, including providing a bibliography at the end of the essay. Please refer to the ‘ iskillzone’ on the library website. The MLA system of referencing is preferred.
A) Herman Melville, from ‘Bartleby, The Scrivener’
Some days passed, the scrivener being employed upon another lengthy work. His late remarkable conduct led me to regard his way narrowly. I observed that he never went to dinner; indeed that he never went any where. As yet I had never of my personal knowledge known him to be outside of my office. He was a perpetual sentry in the corner.
At about eleven o'clock though, in the morning, I noticed that Ginger Nut would advance toward the opening in Bartleby's screen, as if silently beckoned thither by a gesture invisible to me where I sat. That boy would then leave the office jingling a few pence, and
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reappear with a handful of ginger-nuts which he delivered in the hermitage, receiving two of the cakes for his trouble.
He lives, then, on ginger-nuts, thought I; never eats a dinner, properly speaking; he must be a vegetarian then, but no; he never eats even vegetables, he eats nothing but ginger-nuts. My mind then ran on in reveries concerning the probable effects upon the human constitution of living entirely on ginger-nuts. Ginger-nuts are so called because they contain ginger as one of their peculiar constituents, and the final flavoring one. Now what was ginger? A hot, spicy thing. Was Bartleby hot and spicy? Not at all. Ginger, then, had no effect upon Bartleby. Probably he preferred it should have none.
Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance. If the individual so resisted be of a not inhumane temper, and the resisting one perfectly harmless in his passivity; then, in the better moods of the former, he will endeavor charitably to construe to his imagination what proves impossible to be solved by his judgment. Even so, for the most part, I regarded Bartleby and his ways. Poor fellow! thought I, he means no mischief; it is plain he intends no insolence; his aspect sufficiently evinces that his eccentricities are involuntary. He is useful to me. I can get along with him. If I turn him away, the chances are he will fall in with some less indulgent employer, and then he will be rudely treated, and perhaps driven forth miserably to starve. Yes. Here I can cheaply purchase a delicious self-approval. To befriend Bartleby; to humor him in his strange willfulness, will cost me little or nothing, while I lay up in my soul what will eventually prove a sweet morsel for my conscience. But this mood was not invariable with me. The passiveness of Bartleby sometimes irritated me. I felt strangely goaded on to encounter him in new opposition, to elicit some angry spark from him answerable to my own. But indeed I might as well have essayed to strike fire with my knuckles against a bit of
Windsor soap. But one afternoon the evil impulse in me mastered me, and the following little scene ensued:
"Bartleby," said I, "when those papers are all copied, I will compare them with you."
"I would prefer not to."
"How? Surely you do not mean to persist in that mulish vagary?"
No answer.
B) Walt Whitman, from ‘Song of Myself’
Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?
I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.
I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash'd babe, and am not contain'd between my hat and boots,
And peruse manifold objects, no two alike and every one good,
The earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good.
I am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth,
I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself,
(They do not know how immortal, but I know.)
Every kind for itself and its own, for me mine male and female,
For me those that have been boys and that love women,
For me the man that is proud and feels how it stings to be slighted,
For me the sweet-heart and the old maid, for me mothers and the mothers of mothers,
For me lips that have smiled, eyes that have shed tears,
For me children and the begetters of children.
Undrape! you are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded,
I see through the broadcloth and gingham whether or no,
And am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless, and cannot be shaken away.
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2. Essay (2,500 words) 40%
Please answer ONE of the following questions.
If you are using shorter poems (i.e., not ‘Song of Myself’) or short stories ( Benito Cereno does not count as a short story) then please refer to at least THREE texts by each writer.
Please be sure to observe all academic conventions for titles, etc., to properly reference all quotes and to provide a full bibliography. Refer to the “iskillzone” on the library website for more information on referencing. The English Department prefers you to use the MLA style.
1.) Discuss what is distinctively American about the work of any TWO writers on the course.
2.) In what ways have the differences between urban and rural life been represented by any TWO writers on the course?
3.) In what ways has political reform been important to any TWO writers on the course?
4.) In what ways have any TWO writers on the course explored differences of gender in their writings?
5.) In what ways have any TWO writers on the course used humour and/or irony to engage with the condition of America?
6.) Discuss the way that any TWO writers on the course have used different genres.
Requirement
You are required to complete BOTH the Annotated Bibliography and the Extended
Essay, regardless of whether you have passed either element previously
1. Annotated Bibliography (1,500 words) 10%
For this assignment you will be expected to undertake some preliminary research on a topic relating to gender or sexuality, for example, the debate about essentialism, romance or constructions of masculinity, which you need to explain in an introductory sentence or two.
You will need to find between 6 and 10 pieces of secondary material (books or articles) relevant to your chosen topic. A thorough knowledge of the texts is not required but you will be expected to write a paragraph summarising what each text is broadly about and why it is useful for an exploration of your topic.
Marks will be given for: a) an appropriate selection of texts; b) the accuracy of your bibliography which must be set out according to academic conventions (MLA preferred) ; and c) your comments on the usefulness of the texts.
2. Extended Study (4,500 words) 50%
Choose ONE of the options below ensuring that you refer to two or three of the set texts in each case
(you may NOT use the text you wrote on for part B in the January exam)
1) To what extent do your chosen texts reveal masculinity in crisis?
2) Do your chosen texts move beyond stereotypically representing women as either
‘virgins’ or ‘whores’?
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3) Write a short story of 2,500 words based on a topic discussed as part of the module.
Produce a critical rationale of 2,000 words to accompany it referring to two or three primary set texts, utilising secondary material and including a bibliography.
Requirement
You must submit ONE critical commentary on a contemporary poet (Part 1), answer
ONE question from Part 2, and submit ONE anthology (Part 3), paying attention to the word limits for each task. You must not make the same primary text the subject of more than one answer. For further guidance on these assignments, please see the relevant section in the module handbook.
1. Critical commentary on a poet (only written submission, 1,000 words) 10%
Guidance Note
The aim of this exercise is to get you to discover the work of a specific poet for yourself and to offer an accessible introduction to his/ her work. The assignment should NOT be about the poet’s biography (although you are allowed to mention aspects of it if they are really relevant to the work). The focus should be firmly on the poet’s WORK, his/ her style and themes. To prepare for the assignment, you will have to read a sample (as broad as possible) of the poet’s work as well as get an overview of criticism on this author. You should give an insight into the poet’s themes and style and aspects that you found particularly interesting. Your assignment should be clear and engaging and show evidence of thorough research and engagement with the poet’s work and his/her reception.
2. Essay (1,500 words) 25%
Write an essay in answer to ONE of the questions below. You may NOT refer to texts or authors you have studied on other modules. Your essay should make reference to no fewer than TWO POEMS, and observe the usual scholarly conventions of argument and referencing insisted upon by the Department. You should make sure that your answer is illustrated by textual quotations, which you should be careful to reproduce accurately.
Please attach copies of any primary texts discussed, fully referenced, to the back of your essay.
1.) Examine the importance of allusion and/or poetic influence in the work of ONE or
TWO poets you have studied in the course of this module.
2.) ‘To break the pentameter, that was the first heave.’ (Ezra Pound, Canto 81) Explore the significance and use of rhythm in poetry written since 1890. Your answer should make detailed reference to at least TWO of the poets you have encountered in your studies on this module.
3.) ‘We keep coming back and coming back / To the real’ (Wallace Stevens, ‘An Ordinary
Evening in New Haven’). Examine the relationship between reality and the imagination in the work of at least TWO of the poets you have encountered in your studies on this module.
4.) Explore the relationship between form and content in the work of ONE of the poets you have encountered on this module. Your answer should make reference to no fewer than four poems, drawn from at least two collections published by your chosen poet.
3. Poetry anthology with critical introduction and commentary (2,500 words) 40%
This assignment has been designed to give you a fair degree of licence in deciding how to go about it. The ground rules, however, are as follows: You should select between 15 and 20 poems of any length (within reason) by no fewer than 5 poets. You may feature authors, BUT NOT TEXTS, which are included on the reading lists of any other modules
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offered by the Department. Your own contribution to the anthology (excluding the texts of the poems themselves and indexes) should be 2500 words. Your anthology should be properly presented, fully paginated and accurately referenced.
You MUST include (and in this order): a) a title page, including a title (and if necessary a subtitle), signalling your organising principles. This must have been approved by your tutor. b) a prefatory note acknowledging the original sources (i.e. the collections in which they first appeared) for the poems you have included, giving full bibliographical references.
If you cannot find the original place of publication, you can give the source in which you found the poem. c) a table of contents with page numbers for each poem and each part of the anthology d) a critical introduction of no fewer than 1500 words. This should explain your choice of topic and the ordering of your poems, give an insight into key issues surrounding the topic and how it has been covered in literature, poetry or other kinds of writing. It should draw on an appropriate range of critical sources and be followed by a bibliography that lists the critical sources that have been cited. e) the complete texts of the poems f) an index of authors’ names with page numbers, an index of titles and one of first lines, all with page numbers (These indexes can be combined in one index on the model of the Norton Anthology.)
You MAY and are encouraged to include explanatory footnotes explaining allusions, names, uncommon words etc. in the poems on the model of the notes in the Norton
Anthology (no more than 1000 words altogether). If you use fewer than 1000 words for notes, you can make up the overall 2500-word count through a longer critical introduction.
N.B Failure to observe any of the above stipulations will be penalised.
Requirement
You are required to complete ALL THREE assignments, regardless of whether you have passed any previously.
1. Essay (2,000 words) 20%
Please answer ONE of the following:
1. ‘Ghosts exemplifies the overwhelming hold exerted by inherited values.’Discuss.
2. ‘ Hedda Gabler is not so much a play about sexual politics as about the quest for individual fulfilment.’ Discuss.
3. The significant point about The Odd Women is not so much the social questions which it addresses as the artistry with which the subject matter is treated. Do you agree?
4. With reference to at least three stories from Keynotes and Discords discuss Sally
Ledger’s claim that Egerton’s emphasis on ‘psychological “moments”’ in the stories provides a ‘vehicle for giving a voice to the ‘“terra incognita” of womanhood’.
5. Consider the presentation of the idea of marriage in Jude the Obscure .
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6. H.G. Wells said that the aim of his scientific stories was to ‘domesticate the
Impossible hypothesis’. In what respect does The War of the Worlds exemplify this idea?
7. Discuss the importance of the theme of self-discovery in Anna of the Five Towns.
8. ‘The strength of The Secret Agent lies in its psychological complexity.’ Discuss.
9. ‘Only connect’. How is this idea treated by Forster in A Room with a View ?
10. What was new about Lawr ence’s handling of character in The Rainbow ?
2. Contextual Analysis (750 words) 10%
Analyse in detail a short, continuous extract (of up to c350 words) from a contemporary contextual source in order to show either how it enhances your understanding one of the texts which you have studied or are studying on this course, or how it enhances your understanding of a key theme encountered on the module so far.
If necessary, you may refer to a text that you have written on for Assignments 1 and 2, although I wouldn’t advise this approach. If you do, please ensure that you do not repeat any material.
You need to submit:
1. Your 750-word commentary (heading it with the name of the contextual source and the text or theme to which you wish to apply it.
)
2. An attached photocopy or printout of the extract (marking the passage clearly, where appropriate).
Your source may be in one of these forms: an extract from a book, e.g:
Herbert Spencer, Education (1861), Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859),
J.S.Mill, On the Subjection of Women (1869); Edward and Eleanor Marx-Aveling, The
Woman Question (1886); William Booth, In Darkest London and the Way Out (1889);
T.H.Huxley, Evolution and Ethics (1893), Max Nordau, Degeneration (trans. 1895). an extract from an essay, e.g:
Henry Maudsley, ‘Sex and Mind in Education’ Fortnightly Review 15 (1874); Ella
Hepworth Dixon, ‘Why Women are Ceasing to Marry’, Humanitarian , 14 (1899): 391-6;
William Barry, ‘The Strike of a Sex’ Quarterly Review 179 (1894), 317; Oscar Wilde, ‘The
Soul of Man Under Socialism’, Fortnightly Review (1891): 292-319;Thomas Hardy,
‘Candour in English Fiction’, New Review (January 1890):15-21; Hugh E.M.Stutfield,
‘Tommyrotics’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1895), 837; H.G.Wells, ‘On Extinction’,
Chamber’s Journal 10 (30 September 1893):6234; George Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and
Mental Life’ (1903).
You can draw on extracts from your own reading, or, perhaps, from the lecture handouts for this module. Another good place to look is in the Anthologies of writing, listed in your
Module Handbook Bibliography, notably Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst (eds.), The
Fin de Siècle : A Reader in Cultural History c.1880-1900 (Oxford: 2000) (from which some of the above suggestions have been taken).
3. Essay (4,000 words) 45%
This essay offers you an opportunity to discuss the range of work covered in the module as a whole and to explore further your particular interests. You will be expected to write on a minimum of two texts taken from the focus texts of the module. You should not choose texts which you have written on for earlier assignments on this module. You are encouraged to cross-refer to other texts you have studied if this assists the presentation
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of your argument. You are expected to show familiarity with appropriate secondary material but you also need to avoid producing summaries of received critical wisdom since you are very much encouraged to draw on your own thinking about how particular texts engage with the main concepts of the course and to articulate fresh responses to them.
Choose ONE of the following:
1. What was Ibsen's contribution as a dramatist to the opening up of discussion about the situation of women in the late nineteenth century?
2. How do The War of the Worlds and either The Time Machine or The Island of Doctor
Moreau conform to the genre of science fiction?
3. What strategies do writers deploy to bring challenging, even scandalous, subject matter to the attention of their readers?
4. Examine how writers examined the concept of gender relations at the end of the nineteenth century.
5. How do writers on the course treat ‘decadent’ themes, and why?
6. Why does some writing become more difficult and obscure at the turn of the century?
7. ‘Man's most open actions have a secret side to them’. (Joseph Conrad). Examine how and why works on the course are preoccupied with the ‘secret side’ of the self.
8. How do writers treat the institution of the family in their texts?
9. How does an understanding of the values and aesthetic predispositions of contemporary readers and readerships help you evaluate the significance of texts you have studied on the course?
10. How exactly do works you have studied offer a critique of materialist values and how effective is their treatment of this idea?
11. Examine the extent to which writers turn to myth-making in a post-Darwinian climate,
12. How do writers contribute to the deepening and extending of the treatment of consciousness in the period 1885-1915? and evaluate how successfully they deploy mythic structures and ideas.
13. Discuss the relationship between narrative form and psychological exploration in the texts you have studied.
14. 'The lure of modernity'. Examine how works you have studied open up the moral and ideological contradictions of the modern world.
15. In discussing the ‘struggle for existence’ and the ‘survival of the fittest’, Raymond
Williams observes that ‘nobody had to invent these as descriptions of nineteenthcentury society, they were most people’s everyday experience’. Examine how writers handled these common terms alongside their commitment to representing ‘everyday experience’ in their works.
16. Examine how writers treat the idea of ‘vulgarity’ and account for their preoccupation with it.
17. Examine ways in which texts engage with the sincerity and authenticity of the subject in this period.
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Requirement
You are required to answer ONE of the following questions with reference to at least
THREE texts by THREE different writers.
1. Extended Essay (4,500 words) 60%
You are expected to include at least ONE text covered in semester 2. You may use a text you wrote about for your controlled conditions test provided that you do not duplicate the same material. You may include the short stories found in Digitised Materials but not the extracts from novels included in the Digitised Materials (although you may refer to them).
1) The mirror world is “a sort of immense museum peopled with immobile statues,
“images” of stone, and hieratic forms”. It is “the most inhuman of possible worlds, the most unheimlich ” (Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen). Discuss the use of mirrors and/or mirroring with reference to The Uncanny in two or more texts.
2) Show how Angela Carter challenges Freud’s theories in one or more of her wolf stories.
3) “Dr Moreau’s efforts to evolve animals into humans suggest a dark but generally accurate reading of Darwinian evolution because his project appears largely openended, subject to chance, and associated with struggle, suffering and death” (John
Glendening). Discuss the role of the Gothic in relation to the ethical dilemmas faced by scientists in two or more texts of your choice.
4) “Dracula’s desire to fuse with a male…dangerously suffuses this text” (Christopher
Craft). To what extent are homoerotic tensions displaced by heterosexual interventions? Discuss with reference to at least two texts.
5) “The ghost is a statement and a resolution of a problem that cannot be faced or solved realistically” (Shirley Jackson). Comment upon this claim with specific attention to the non-realist form of two or more texts.
6) “The limited trajectory of the short narrative concentrates its meaning. Sign and sense can fuse to an extent impossible to achieve among the multiplying ambiguities of an extended narrative” (Angela Carter). Discuss the effectiveness of the short story within the context of Gothic Literature with reference to at least two texts.
7) “The term [Gothic] continues to spread like the infection or disease it has represented and been represented as, to “gothicise” (in the way that St ar Trek’s Borg
“assimilate” other species) a host of different sites”. (Fred Botting) How successful is the Gothic in assimilating and/or negotiating with other genres? Discuss in relation to two or more texts.
8) In what ways is our consumption of Gothic texts influenced by the form of their publication?
9) All Gothic texts are ultimately considerations of sexuality. Discuss.
10) Write your own ghost story (of 2,500 words) which can be either imitative, interventionist or contemporary. You should also provide a rationale (of approx. 1,500 words) of why you wrote the story referring to at least THREE texts and secondary material.
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Requirement
You are required to complete ALL THREE assignments, regardless of whether you have passed any previously.
1. Seminar 750 Word Report (only written submission) 10%
INSTRUCTIONS TO STUDENTS:
You are required to write a 750 report. For the subject of the report you can choose from
ONE of the following:
1.
Jayne Anne Phillips’ Machine Dreams and Brian Jarvis,
“Machinescapes/Dreamscapes” in Postmodern Cartographies , London: Pluto,
1998.
2.
Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and Phillip E. Wegner, “Introduction.” Life Between
Two Deaths, 1989-2001: US Culture in the Long Nineties. Ed. Phillips E.
Wegner. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009: 1-15.
Both critical essays by Jarvis and Wegner are available on Blackboard.
The report must contain the following:
 A summary of the critic’s argument (approx. 250 words).
 A critical account of how useful you found the article in your reading of the novel, providing specific examples of scenes/characters/events that, in your opinion, it either clarified or confounded (approx. 500 words).
2. Coursework Essay (2,000 words) 20%
You are required to choose ONE extract from the selection of excerpts attached. You should apply this extract to TWO passages from ONE of the texts on the module. Neither of your chosen passages should exceed a page (of the printed text) in length.
Pay considerable attention to your choice both of an extract and of the passages. Your choice of passages forms part of the marking criteria so if you choose passages that have been discussed in detail in seminars or lectures you must ensure that you build upon, and enhance, those discussions.
Throughout the assignment you are expected to analyse your chosen material in close detail, focusing on the use of key words, phrases as well as the structure and rhythm of the prose.
You should give your essay a title – this may be a question or a statement – it does not matter as long as it gives the reader a clear sense of the argument you are going to make. Although this is a close analysis exercise, you should not lose sight of the fact that you must make an argument.
Secondary reading is NOT required for this assignment, but you are still required to submit a bibliography alongside the essay.
Extract taken from Kirmayer, Laurence J, “Landscapes of Memory: Trauma, Narrative and Dissociation.” Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. Eds Paul Antze and Michael Lambek. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Memory is anything but a photographic record of experience; it is a roadway full of potholes, badly in need of repair, worked on day and night by revisionist crews. What is registered is highly selective and thoroughly transformed by interpretation and semantic encoding at the
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moment of experience. What can be veridically recalled is limited and routinely reconstructed to fit models of what might have – must have – happened. When encouraged to flesh it out, we readily engage in imaginative elaboration and confabulation and, once we have done this, the bare bones memory is lost forever within the animated story we have constructed.
…There are, of course, many forms of memory. The dominant cultural prototype of memory is declarative: we are able to describe what we know (semantic memory) and what we have experienced (episodic memory). The emphasis on declarative memory as the exemplar follows from our models of consciousness as representation. But we do not always have pictures for memories: often we have knowledge, skills, or disposition to act which are represented by an image only after the fact. We are unable to remember the details of most of what we have lived through, although these events have surely formed us. There is much that we commemorate through our accent, posture, habits of gesture and thought – things we be unaware of and forever unable to describe except in vague, abstract, or secondhand terms.
These fo rms of nondeclarative or implicit memory have been called “procedural” – they can be shown but not described (176-177).
Registration, rehearsal, and recall are governed by social contexts and cultural models for memories, narratives, and life stories. Such cultural models influence what is viewed as salient, how it is interpreted and encoded at the time of registration and, most important for long-term memories that serve autobiographical functions, what is socially possible to speak of and what must remain hidden or unacknowledged.
The distinction between forget, repress, ignore, and dissociate is not simply an arbitrary choice of metaphor. Each is a phenomenologically distinct form of not-remembering.
Even where the mechanisms underlying the metaphor are unknown, the way we understand memory influences remembering itself, giving life to each metaphor. And each of these methods of evading memory is related to larger social and political circumstances surrounding memorable events and the circumstances of their recounting. As remembering is a social act, so too is forgetting. The contemporary landscape of memory is created through the modern ars memoria , which involve not so much feats of hypermnsia as of strategic forgetting (191).
Extract taken from: Lauret, Maria. “African American Fiction” in Grice, Helena et al.
Beginning Ethnic American Literatures. Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2001.
Both of the major anthologies of African American literature published in the late
1990s, The Norton Anthology of African American Literature and Call and Response: the
Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition come with a CD of songs, political speeches, and poems read aloud to supplement the written word. We might wonder why the editors found it necessary to do such a thing – after all, literary texts are usually assumed to be able to stand on their own feet and to function in their own right as forms of cultural expression. Yet in the case of African American literature this is both true and false; true, in the sense that African American novels, poems and plays were composed as written texts to be read, but false because another part of what is regarded as the African American literary tradition consists of, or derives from, oral forms such as songs of folktales or sermons which were meant to be heard and responded to there and then; that is, as they were being performed. ‘Performed’ here may even be the wrong term to use, for the songs and speeches, stories and verbal competitions had a use-value in African American daily life that was not primarily theatrical or aesthetic, but rather part of worship or work practices, the education of the young, or a means of maintaining community life. For much of literary history these ‘vernacular texts’ as they are called, these creative expressions from everyday life, did not have the status of literature at all – indeed, they were hardly recognised as a part of culture either by white or by black Americans. What we are faced with then from the outset of exploring African American literature are at least two strands of cultural production: one which is oral and performative (in the broad sense of having an element of improvisation in it which is unique to the occasion and which anticipates and demands a response from the audience) and another which is self-consciously part of a written tradition, designed to appear in print for an anonymous readership which is often interracial. All of these qualities in their opposing pairs (audience present and known or not, flexible performance versus stable and fixed printed form, community setting or public sphere, use-value or aesthetic appeal) are important
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in the interpretation of African American literature […] It is equally important to realise however that these are not separate traditions, or forms of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture which never mix. Rather, they are streams which at times have been quite separate, but at other times have merged in single texts, in a particular author’s work, or in a whole literary movement – such as the Harlem renaissance in the 1920s for example, or black women’s writing since the
1970s. George Lipsitz puts this well when he writes that to talk about African-American writing separate from other forms of cultural expression misrepresents the guiding aesthetic behind black literature. Popular speech informs the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Langston Hughes, while blues and jazz influences pervade the writing of Ellison and Ishmael Reed … Toni
Morrison’s magnificent novels carry this inter-textuality and inter-referentiality to extraordinary heights, writing the history of an entire community through its stories and songs, through its rhymes and remedies. (‘Race and Racism’, in Mark Gidley, ed.
Modern American Culture: An Introduction , Longman, 1993, p. 136).
We see the two strands of African American literary expression, the oral/musical and the written/literary, represented from the very beginning in the work [of African Americans] (64-5).
Extract taken from: Tanner, Tony. City of Words: A Study of American Fiction in
the Mid-Twentieth Century. London: Jonathan Cape, 1971.
There is an abiding dream in American literature that an unpatterned, unconditioned life is possible, in which your movements and stillnesses, choices and repudiations are all your own; and that there is also an abiding American dread that someone else is patterning your life, that there are all sorts of invisible plots afoot to rob you of your autonomy of thought and action, that conditioning is ubiquitous. The problematic and ambiguous relationship of the self to patterns of all kinds – social, psychological, linguistic – is an obsession among recent writers. It has long been recognized that there is a tenacious feeling in America that while other, older countries are ridden by conventions, rules, all sorts of arbitrary formalities which trap and mould the individual, in America one may still enjoy a genuine freedom from all cultural patterning so that life is a series of unmediated spontaneities. But the social anthropologist has now told the American individual that ‘man has no direct contact experience per se but … there is an intervening set of patterns which channel his senses and his thoughts’; the Behavioral psychologist has insisted that ‘the situation we are in dominates us always’; while the linguist has asserted that ‘the forms of a person’s thoughts are controlled by inexorable laws of pattern of which he is unconscious’.
Such theories or assertions have certainly helped to enhance the American writer’s dread of all conditioning forces to the point of paranoia which is detectable not only in the subject matter of many novels but also in their narrative devices. Narrative lines are full of hidden persuaders, hidden dimensions, plots, secret organizations, evil systems, all kinds of conspiracies against spontaneity of consciousness, even cosmic take-over. The possible nightmare of being totally controlled by unseen agencies and powers is never far away in contemporary American fiction. The unease revealed in such novels is related to a worried apprehension on the part of the author that his own consciousness may be predetermined and channelled by the language he has been born into.
Here then is the paradox for a writer. If he wants to write in any communicable form he must traffic in a language which may at every turn be limiting, directing and perhaps controlling his responses and formulations. If he feels that the given structuring of reality of the available language is imprisoning or iniquitous, he may abandon language altogether; or he may seek to use the existing language in such a way that he demonstrates to himself and other people that he does not accept, not wholly conform to the structures built into the common tongue, that he has the power to resist and perhaps disturb the particular
‘rubricizing’ tendency of the language he has inherited. Such an author … will go out of the way to show that he is using language as it has never been used before, leaving the visible marks of his idiosyncrasies on every formulation (15-16).
It is my contention that many recent American writers are unusually aware of this quite fundamental and inescapable paradox: that to exist, a book, a vision, a system, like a
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person, has to have an outline – there can be no identity without contour. But contours signify arrest, they involve restraint and the acceptance of li mits …. Restraint means the risk of rigidity, and rigidity, so the feeling goes, is just about the beginning of rigor mortis . Between the non-identity of pure fluidity and the fixity involved in all definitions – on words or in life – the American writer m oves, and knows he moves …. Between social space and private, inner space, there is a third or mediating area in which the writer searches for his freedom and his form – and that of course is verbal space (18-19).
It is in the weaving, the patterning power of his art, that the writer demonstrates his independence from other people’s naming of things …. One of the main struggles of the
American writer is to hold out against all such recruiting assaults on his own consciousness, if only to secure space in which to experience his own powers of mental arrangement and construction (28-29).
Extract taken from: James Annesley, Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the
Contemporary American Novel. London: Pluto Press 1998.
There’s an emphasis on the extreme, the marginal and the violent. There’s a sense of indifference and indolence. The limits of the human body seem indistinct, blurred by cosmetics, narcotics, disease and brutality.
The contemporary American scene is littered with imagery of this kind and it’s hard to escape the conclusion that culture is taking a new direction, exploring new kinds of experiences and moving towards new forms and subjects. Identifying this culture is one thing, but defining or explaining it is another. It’s easy to recognise this scene, but harder to read it.
This portrait of contemporary American culture can be developed by considering the specific implications raised by its preoccupation with violence, indulgence, sexual excess, decadence, consumerism and commerce. These obsessions, so much a part of the general flow of late twentieth-century culture, find a particularly precise expression in recent American writing (1).
There is, quite clearly, both a common context and a common vision and, while there is no
‘blank manifesto’, these affinities suggest the existence of a ‘blank scene’.
The coherence of this account of the emergence of blank fiction is not, however, reflected in the range of explanations that have developed around these texts …. More familiar and perhaps more persuasive is the well-worn suggestion that this modern mood can be explained in relation to ‘postmodern culture’. Blank fictions are read, in these terms, as the product of a postmodern condition, their twists and turns interpreted as reflections of the material structures of late twentieth-century American society (4).
Loaded with references to the products, the personalities and the places that characterise late twentieth-century American life, blank fiction is profoundly aware of its own time and place. This emphasis means that, despite anxieties about the usefulness of arguments based on mechanical readings of the relationship between literature and society, any attempt to move away from a contextual reading of these novels would be problematic.
An analysis of the shape and character of late twentieth-century American social and material conditions would, with this in mind, appear to provide an appropriate foundation for any reading of this particular literary form. The point is, however, as Vološinov’s remarks make clear, that the analysis of fiction in contextual terms demands an approach that does not look, straightforwardly, at the ways in which a novel depicts its own period, but concern itself with the processes through which a text thematises contemporary conditions on structural, stylistic, linguistic and metaphorical levels (6).
3. Extended Essay (4,000 words) 45%
INSTRUCTIONS TO STUDENTS:
You are required for the extended study to develop your own essay question. In this assignment you must refer to THREE texts, one of which may be a text not on the module, but which is written by an author on the module. In the case of the short stories
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on the module Kenan’s story constitutes ONE text whereas if you write on Butler or Alexie then TWO stories by either author will constitute ONE text.
When you have some ideas about your topic, you should email your seminar tutor to confirm a suitable essay title. You are not permitted to write on any title which has not been approved by your seminar tutor or the module leader. Requests for approval of a title must be given to your tutor at least TWO weeks prior to the deadline.
Your topic should relate closely to the work you have been doing on the module and should make use of appropriate critical and theoretical material.
You may answer on texts used in Component A (the controlled conditions test), in the
Report, and in the Coursework Essay.
We would encourage you to explore your own interests as far as possible in developing your essay title. The titles below are merely examples of appropriate questions:
 “Economics both enables and inhibits American freedom.” Discuss.

Ethnicity enters into every American novel whether at a conscious or subconscious level. Discuss in relation to any three texts on the module.

To what extent do contemporary American authors challenge conventional constructions of gender?

Whilst contemporary American writing now addresses issues of ethnicity and race, middle-class subjects remain its primary focus. Discuss.
 “Secrecy and lies conceal, they camouflage, but they certainly don’t hide everything”
(White). With White in mind, consider the ways in which the hidden surfaces in contemporary American narratives.
Requirement
You must submit a Topic Proposal and a Project.
The Topic Proposal is worth 10% of the overall mark and the word limit is 1,000 words.
Full details of what should be included in the Proposal are in the module handbook available on Blackboard.
The Project is between 8,000-10,000 words depending on the Project undertaken and is worth 90% of the overall mark. The Projects options are:
1. The Dissertation allows you to investigate a topic of your choice. You will develop your own title and research questions as you create a sustained, and critically rigorous piece of work. 10,000 words
2. The Research-based Creative Writing option allows you to develop creatively as well as critically. From selecting a genre to reflecting on the writing process, you will be developing and refining key skills. 8,00010,000 words
3. Module Design: By now, you have successfully completed a number of undergraduate modules. This option allows you to devise your own module and to challenge your critical and decision making skills. Those of you considering a career in teaching may find this option of particular interest. 10,000 words
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4. Criticism and Review: Throughout the degree you have encountered literary criticism and reviews. This is your opportunity to review a body of writing of your choice, and to critically assess the reviewing process. 10,000 words
5. Editing and Anthologising: Anthologies have played a crucial role in your reading throughout your degree. Here you get the opportunity to create your own anthology based around a topic/genre of your choice. 10,000 words
Full Option Details are available on Blackboard.
The resit Project takes one of the following forms:
1. If you hand in no Project at all, you will be required to hand in as a resit a completed
Project on the original subject.
2. If you hand in a Project which fails, you may be required to do some more work on it and hand in as a resit an improved Project on the original subject.
3. If your submitted Project fails very badly (i.e. earns a mark of less than 30), your tutor may ask that you hand in as a resit a Project on a new topic.
If you have failed the Project, you MUST contact the module leader to be informed whether 2 or 3 applies to you. You may then contact your specific tutor to be provided with some notes for guidance.
Requirement
You are required to complete the Report, the Short Essay and the Extended Essay, regardless of whether you have passed any element previously. You must not write on the same primary text twice.
1. Report (1,500 words) 15%
Answer ONE question
Report Task: Writing a Critical Introduction
You have been asked to write a short critical introduction to a new edition of a children’s novel for a major publisher. Your primary audience should be imagined as consisting of intelligent adults with an interest in books, but without specialist knowledge of fantasy or of children’s literature.
You may write about Northern Lights , OR Time to Get Out of the Bath Shirley OR The
Changeover .
In researching this assignment you should of course consider the usual sources of information, such as the critical books listed in the Bibliography of the module handbook; but you should also take advantage of the various encyclopaedias, year-books and guides in the
Reference section in the library, as well as considering online sources of information. Note that, where you find information in a non-moderated source (such as Wikipedia), you should always check it against a more reliable source such as a published book or peer-reviewed journal, or an authoritative online source. Quotations should, where possible, always be checked against their original source.
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This assignment will be marked on the usual criteria, but with particular emphasis on: factual accuracy and relevance; scholarly presentation; an awareness of literary and non-literary contexts; clarity of writing; and awareness of audience.
There is no set formula for the structure of critical introductions. However, here are some suggestions as to the kind of material it is appropriate to include:
Book History
Can you say anything about this book’s history? (This will be far more complex for some books than others). Does it exist in different versions? Has it been revised or abridged (and if so, by whom)? Has it had different illustrators? Has it been adapted for stage, TV or film? Has it gone through periods of popularity and/or neglect?
Contexts
Some biographical information about the author, especially as it seems relevant to understanding the book.
Information about the author’s other work (where applicable). Where does this one ‘fit’ in the author’s overall output?
Where does the book stand in the tradition(s) of fantasy and children’s literature? Is it part of an established tradition, or sub-genre? Does it betray any obvious influences, or has it been influential itself?
Analysis
Aspects you might consider include:

Prose style: is this book densely written or discursive? Is it poetic? Humorous? Does it play with language, or tell its story as simply as possible?

Is it set in, or does it evoke, a particular time and place?

What kind of fantasy is it?

Characterization, and characters.

Plot: action-packed and suspenseful, or dreamy and atmospheric?
 While we are not looking for a conventional essay, you might also wish to ‘flag up’ any questions that your chosen text seems to you to raise (intentionally or otherwise) concerning such matters as, for example, gender representation, class and race; any ways in which it ventures into taboo areas (such as sex or violence).
This list is of course suggestive rather than prescriptive or exhaustive. Each book has its own unique features, and you should also mention any other aspects of your chosen text that you think it would be useful or appropriate to include in a critical introduction.
2. Essay / imitative writing (2,000 words) 25%
Answer ONE question.
1.) ‘Peter Pan is one of the most troubling figures in children’s literature’. Do you agree?
2.) ‘Representations of women in children’s literature are deeply flawed’. Is this a fair comment? Answer with reference to TWO texts studied on the course.
3.) ‘Telling the truth to children, or at least some of it, sounds a severe brief for any writer’ (Nicholas Tucker, The Child and the Book , 150). To what extent are children
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sheltered from the realities of death in children’s literature? Refer to TWO texts on this course in your answer.
4.) To what extent are The Secret Garden and The Wind in The Willows fantasy fiction?
Is one more fantastic than the other?
5.) Rewrite EITHER the episode of Laura’s changeover (in The Changeover ), OR
Matilda’s parrot-up-the-chimney (in Matilda ), in the style of ONE of the following books: Peter and Wendy , The Owl Service , The Wind in the Willows (1,000 words). In the light of this exercise, discuss the importance of prose style in determining tone and the relationship between narrator and narratee within your chosen texts (1,000 words).
3. Essay (3,000 words) 35%
Answer ONE question.
1.) Children’s literature can be radical and thought-provoking. It is a genre full of flexibility and possibilities. To what extent do you agree/disagree with this statement? Answer with reference to TWO or THREE texts studied on the module.
2.) Discuss the importance of ONE of the following, in relation to any TWO of the texts you have studied this year: friendship: food: time.
3.) To what extent do children’s books reflect the world as adults would like it to be?
Answer with reference to TWO or THREE text studied on the module.
4.) The father figure in children’s literature remains absent, vilified, or a figure of fun. Is this true of the fiction you have encountered on the module? What does children’s literature suggest more widely about the father/child relationship? Discuss with reference to TWO or THREE texts studied on the module.
5.) Fantasy fiction often offers an escape into another world. To what extent are these fantastical places spaces of liberation? Discuss with reference to TWO or THREE of the following: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe , Northern Lights, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, The Secret Garden, Where the Wild Things Are, Time to Get Out of the Bath Shirley or Peter and Wendy.
6.) ‘Children’s fantasy fiction, with its stereotypical heroes and villains, simply sets good against evil. The implications for the reader are an overly simplified and damaging view of the world.’ Discuss with reference to TWO or THREE texts studied on the module.
Requirement
You are required to answer ONE question from section 1 and complete the task set in section 2, regardless of whether you have passed either element previously.
1. Essay (3,000 words) 35%
Answer ONE question
1. To what extent, and in what ways, is A Fairly Honourable Defeat concerned with
‘moral endeavour’ as ‘the attempt to overcome illusion and selfish fantasy’
(Acheson)?
2. Discuss the relationship between ideology and history in The Siege of Krishnapur .
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3. Do you agree with Kiernan Ryan’s assessment of The Child in Time as ‘telling a new kind of experience, the liberation of men from masculinity’?
4. Explore the intersection of public duty and private desire in The Remains of the Day .
5. To what extent, and in what ways, is race the defining subject of The Buddha of
Suburbia ?
2. Essay (1,500 words) 20%
Write a review of ONE of the novels studied in semester two. Please refer to the module handbook, the lecture handouts and notes, and the seminar activities for guidance. This counts for 20% of the mark for the module.
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