Prospectus

1 page
Due April 3

Discovery: Pick a writer from the syllabus about whom you want to focus, and consider as well the following:

• A more limited scope in the writers work–e.g. a single poem or section of a poem, or a characteristic style or literary device of the writer, or a very specific motif/concern in the writing
• The conceptual issues that arise out of the more limited scope that you have chosen.  You might get ideas for these conceptual issues from class discussion, class readings–either early modern or contemporary criticism–or your own close reading of the text at hand
• A second, non-canonical (or substantially less canonical) author who adds a point of comparison to the work and issues you’re exploring (see below on strategies for finding this work).

Note that no order of discovery is implied in these three points above, or even in your initial choice of a writer.  You might start with a conceptual issue or an interest in a particular aspect of style or a literary quality that leads you to pick a writer and your more limited focus.  Or you might start with a writer, and compare the writer to a second writer, and out of that comparison find an issue/style that interests you, and from that decide on your more limited scope.  Or you might start looking at one issue, and find you’re really interested in something else.  Rather than a series of steps, think of the above as as circular or spiral process, with each kind of approach to the topic informing and reshaping the others.  Indeed, if you get stuck on one point, try to get going by starting with another.

There are several strategies for finding a relevant companion work.

• In EEBO a number of different kinds of searches are possible.  You can search for the author’s name in the “keywords” box, to see if your canonical author was published with other, less well known authors, as was often the case.  You could also put the name of the author’s publisher in the “keywords” box; sometime (though not always) publishers specialized in a particular type of writing.  Or you could try genre terms (e.g. “pastoral”) in the keywords search box.  Whichever search strategy you pursue, two further suggestions: use the date limit function (scroll down on the search page) to limit to your search to a span of years relatively close to the canonical poet you’re working with.  Second, choose “earliest publication first” in the pull down menu for “sort results by.”  You can do the latter either before the search or, if you forgot, once you get your search results (the default is an alphabetical sort).
• Another approach would be to read skim works either about your author or the genre of your canonical work.  Such literary biographies or literary histories may point you to lesser known writers who would part of your canonical writer’s world.  Finally, some overviews of the period may also mention less canonical writers.
• Try the online reference books in the Gale Dictionary of biography, to which Mason subscribes:

Composition:

In a first paragraph (or section) describe the following: your choice of the writer from our syllabus and more delimited aspect of that writing (passage, stylistic feature, motif, etc.), the conceptual issue(s) that arise out of your choices, and the less or non-canonical writer with whom you’re going to pair your choice.  In addition, explain why the issue you’ve chosen interests you, and why it would be of significance to others.

In a second paragraph (or section) describe the work to be done done going forward.    What new questions develop from it?  What do you need to learn that you do not know now?  What kind of criticism or theoretical work are you interested in pursuing? Where else in your writer’s work might you wish to read?