Choose one of the following questions and write an essay in answer that is at least 1,500 words. You should use your book for quotations and other supporting material, but do not use any other outside sources.

1) Throughout the semester, we have returned to the idea of otherness and how difference periods have dealt with the separation between self and other. Choose two authors (each from a different period) and the differences and similarities in the ways in which those two authors cope with this issue. Be sure to address how each author’s attitudes reflect or challenge the general view of the Other in her or his particular literary age.

2) We have read a variety of writers who write in English and yet are excluded from the English literary tradition in terms of gender, race (the Colonies, Irish, Welsh, Scottish) and class. Choose two of these authors and discuss how they ways in which they dealt with their position in relation to English “proper” was effected by the literary ideas and theory of their specific period.

3) In the span of time we have covered in this class, industry and science have wrought great change upon the physical and psychic landscape of England. Choose two authors (each from a different period) and compare/contrast their attitudes towards scientific and/or industrial progress. How did these writers express their anxieties regarding these changes in their works? How do these writers represent the attitudes of their age and/or how are they asking for specific changes in those attitudes?

4) Although we have discussed the traumas of war with Modernism a great deal, war affected English literature throughout the other periods that we have studied in this class. Choose two authors (each from a different period) who address the major war of her or his particular period and compare/contrast the ways in which particular texts by your chosen authors reflect a shift in aesthetics caused by the war.

5) Throughout the semester we have discussed the ways in which literary texts (de)construct England as a nation. In the context of the British Empire, these texts seek to define what it means to be English and what Englishness itself means or attempts to mean. Using two authors from separate periods, discuss how these constructions have changed over time and how they have effected and reflected literary movements.

6) Almost all of the women writers we have read this term, discuss (if sometimes indirectly) what it means to be women and, specifically, what mean to be a woman writer in their own particular time and literary milieu. Using two authors from separate periods, discuss how constructions of femininity have changed and/or remained the same and how those changing constructions are created as well as reflected within their texts.

*NOTE: Many of these questions ask to contextualize authors with their particular literary time period. However, you should remember that such distinctions often get rather messy and that many figures are part of more than one age. Be sure to avoid making over-generalizations in this area