ENG 430/545, Spring 1999

Topics for Final Paper


Directions: Please choose one of the following topics to research and write about for your final critical research paper. You should discuss with me possible approaches and useful sources, but, in general, you are required to use at least 3 secondary sources. You should plan to make a 10-minute presentation in class on your topic during the final 6 weeks of the course (dates will be assigned later).

1) Abbot Samson as a figure who "rules."

2) Carlyle’s attack on the dandy.

3) Byronic Man and cross-gender identification (Jane Eyre).

4) Wuthering Heights as male adventure fiction.

5) Wuthering Heights and male violence.

6) Homoeroticism and Homosociality in "In Memoriam": the "problem" of male tears.

7) Thomas Hughes, the "Games" fetish, and Empire.

8) Schoolboy fiction and male bonding (Tom Brown’s Schooldays and Kipling’s Stalky and Co. and The Jungle Books).

9) The Problem of understanding asceticism: Carlyle, Kingsley, and Newman.

10) Muscular Christianity and Empire (Kingsley, Hughes, and Maurice).

11) Aestheticism and sexual preference (Buchanan, "The Fleshly School," Rossetti, Pater, Wilde).

12) Aesthetic poetry and the attractions of death (Keats, Swinburne, and possibly Pater, "The Child in the House").

13) Haggard’s She as imperial "Laus Veneris."

14) She and The Jungle Books as adventure fiction.

15) Conrad and the "aestheticization" of adventure.

16) Darwinism and Decadence.

17) The Wilde Trial and the Closet.

18) Dorian Gray and Lord Jim: the issue of narcissism.


Return to ENG 430/545 Syllabus.