Recommended essay topics (British Literature Seminar – BA)
(You can write an essay on a DIFFERENT topic, but in that case consult your
tutor before you start working on it.)
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The Portrait of a Woman in Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath Prologue and
Tale”—Medieval Female Images
The Significance of Role Playing and the Play-within-the-Play in Hamlet
The Motif of Revenge in the shadow of father-and-son relationships—a
psychoanalytic interpretation of Hamlet
Instruments or Executors?—The Significance of Female Figures in Hamlet
A Comparative Analysis of Translations of a Shakespeare-sonnet
Aspects of Paternity in Robinson Crusoe
The Representation of the Female Body in “The Flea” and “To His Coy
Mistress”
Fearful Asymmetry: William Blake’s “The Lamb” and “The Tyger”
Attitudes of Man to Nature in Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”
Landscape Poetry, Pantheism and the Sonnet Form in Wordsworth’s
“Composed Upon Westminster Bridge”
The Symbolism of Dogs in Wuthering Heights
Climatic Metamorphosis as the Reflection of the Psychic and/or
Emotional Sphere of the Characters in Wuthering Heights
Cycles of Destruction and Construction in Wuthering Heights
Bertha Mason as Jane’s Doppelgänger in Jane Eyre
Power and Resistence in Shelley’s “Ozymandias”
Love and Death in Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”
A Shakespearean Sonnet: John Keats’ “When I Have Fears”
Poetry, Escape and Death in Keats’ “Ode to the Nightingale”
Ambivalence of Spaces/Places in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the
D’Urbervilles—The Transformation of Rural England
Colour Symbolism and Blood Scenes in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the
D’Urbervilles
Miss Havisham’s Gothic Space in Dickens’s Great Expectations
Language and Communication as the Means of Subjectivity (identity
formation) in Dickens’s Great Expectations
Maggie’s Female Bildung as the “Voyage In” in George Eliot’s The Mill on
the Floss
Glasses and Mirrors: An Analysis of One or More Encounters Between the
Governess and the Ghosts in The Turn of the Screw
The Turn of the Screw as a Modernist Text—Narrative Technique,
Language, the Ambivalence of Spaces (Gothic vs Psychic), the Role of the
Reader
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The Function of the Back Door in Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde
Disintegration and Fragmentation in Yeats’ “Second Coming”
Gender Anxieties in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
The Ambiguous Relationship between Paul’s Mother and Miriam in D.H.
Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers
Flora and Fauna in Sons and Lovers—D.H. Lawrence as a Symbolist
The Sky as a Symbol in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India
The Function of Art—Music, Painting, Architecture, Sculptures—in E.M.
Forster’s A Room with a View
E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View as a Representative of Travel Literature
The Relevance of Pozzo and Lucky to the Main Theme of Beckett’s Waiting
for Godot
A Psychoanalytical Reading of Meg and Stanley’s Relationship in Pinter’s
Birthday Party
For further details see your syllabus or consult your course tutor.