EN 275 essay questions
All answers should discuss at least two authors, with the exception of 8.
1. Discuss the usefulness of ‘sensibility’ as a category for understanding the
poetry of the final decades of the eighteenth century.
2. Discuss the role of Christianity in abolitionist writing of the period
3. ‘I flatter myself that I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty ‘ (Burke).
Compare and contrast two ideas of ‘liberty’ from the prose of the period.
4. How do the categories of the sublime and the beautiful inform Burke
and/or Wollstonecraft’s political writing?
5. What is the relationship between style and politics in the political prose of
the period?
6. Discuss the importance of one or more of the following categories to the
political prose of the 1790s: ‘manners’, ‘nature’, ‘reason’, ‘feeling’.
7. How do the associations between ‘the bard’ and ‘liberty’ work in the
poetry of any one or more poet of the 1780s and/or 90s?
8. How far does Caleb Williams fulfill the political principles of Godwin’s
Political Justice?
9. Discuss the role of visual and/or verbal satire in the culture of Britain in
the 1790s.
10. ‘Conversation poems have long been taken as typical of that broad
transition in voice and vision that defines romanticism: from public
genres, to private lyric modes, from the world of radical political activism,
to the solitary, transcendent realm of imagination’. (Judith Thompson).
Discuss the relationship between the ‘political’ and the ‘transcendent’ in
any two poets from the period.