English 562
Dr.Morillo
Eighteenth-Century Literature
Third Paper
Assignment.
Due Friday, March 27 printed
out on paper, in the folder on
my office door, at noon.
5-7 pages, double-spaced typed/printed
text.Standard margins (top &
bottom 1" margins; right and left 1.25" margins).If
you have any other format questions, ask me.
Critical
Review of Recent Scholarship on an
Eighteenth-Century Text
For this 5-7 page paper, first choose any work on the syllabus that you
would like to explore further, and then select one published criticism
of that work. It may be in print or online, but it needs to be
from
no earlier than 1995 if at all possible. Evaluate the chosen
critical essay.
You
will need to do several things before you can write your paper:
be
able to summarize the critic’s argument and address its strengths and
weaknesses. Although you will weigh the argument against
your
own interpretation of that primary text, your own interpretation is not
the focus of this paper and needs to be brought in judiciously enough
to keep the main focus on the argument of the critic you are
evaluating. Also consider the
following
issues: how to structure your paper; how to include adequte summary
of the critical piece ; how to evaluate the author’s assumptions,
claims, theoretical stance, evidence etc.; how to evaluate its prose
style and
readability.
Be critical but also respectful of other peoples’ ideas.
Criticism need
not be synonymous with attack.
The genre for this paper is a review. Most academic journals
publish reviews of books in every issue, and you can model your text on
that by reading some. You'll see that whether the target text is a long
book or shorter essay, the critical review of it is frequently between
500 and 1500 words. Though the review is certainly a genre, there's
good room for variation within it.
Along with your critical review, be
sure to turn in a Xerox or other
copy
of the published criticism if it is a short essay or book
chapter, or
turn
in a copy of the journal number or the book if it is too long to copy
easily.
Suggested sources for criticism:
Print Journals
PMLA
Eighteenth-Century Life
Eighteenth-Century Studies
The Age of Johnson
Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-
1700
1650-1850 : Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern
Era
British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies
The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation
Studies in English Literature
English Literary History
Books
see the research list here
For more sources and descriptions of these, see http://www.c18.org/so/revues18.html
For the latest studies, and an excellent search engine for browsing
them, see the Selected Readings link at C18-L:
http://www.personal.psu.edu/special/C18/sr/sr.htm