Assignment Question
“For this final, thesis-driven essay of 8-10 pages, review your notes from throughout the semester to consider how an abiding Brontë topic, theme, motif, or formal device (of your choice) evolves in the novel Shirley. Does Shirley uphold common elements, deviate from them, or treat them in distinctive ways? Your essay should advance an argument about how this novel compares in specific ways to other works from the Brontës’ oeuvre, centering on the element of analysis you choose. This essay further invites you to take a long perspective on the Brontës’ work by demonstrating awareness of how audiences old and new have regarded it. To this end, your essay must incorporate at least two contemporaneous literary reviews (i.e., from anytime in the nineteenth century) and two more contemporary secondary sources (i.e., from anytime in the twentieth/twenty-first centuries). Whether or not these critics explicitly address your chosen element, you should use their perspectives to clarify your thinking and contextualize your argument. Note that while you might most obviously incorporate secondary sources on Shirley itself, you are also welcome to incorporate secondary criticism of other Brontë texts (for example: if you chose to analyze how heroines are portrayed in Shirley as compared to the other works, you might find it helpful to see how critics analyze the heroines of the other novels, as well). However, bear in mind that your secondary materials must demonstrate independent research on your part; in other words, while you may use the secondary sources we have studied extensively in class together (such as the Bedford critical essays), you must also employ materials located through your own research to meet the required minimum number of sources”