English 579                                                                                         
Restoration & 18th-Century Drama                                                               
Dr.  Morillo
Tompkins 270
 
Second Paper Assignment: Critical Review of Recent Scholarship on an Eighteenth-Century Work
 
Due as emailed file Friday, March 25 by noon. 
Please submit all papers in file form thus:

Be sure your last name is in the file name. Be sure the file format is either *.doc  or  *.rtf if you are using a Mac.  Although *.pdf is great for exacting formats, it is harder to for me to comment directly in the file and copy & paste via your text, so please avoid it. I will comment on your work via word/comment function.

Along with your critical review, be sure to turn in a file copy (usually pdf) of the published criticism . *.pdf is fine for this because I don't have to commnent in it.
 
For this 5-6 page paper, first choose any play on the syllabus that you would like to explore further, and then select one published criticism of that work. If a secondary work of interest is focused on a playwright rather than a single play, or addresses different plays than we've read, this can still work if you take what is argued about that playwright's work in other plays and apply it to the one play you've read by the same playwright. Your chosen criticism may be in print or online, but it needs to be from no earlier than 1994. 
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; weigh the argument against your own interpretation of that primary text.  Also consider the following issues: how to structure your paper; whether to include an explicit summary of the critical piece or not; how to evaluate the author’s assumptions, claims, theoretical stance, evidence etc.; how to evaluate style and readability.  Be critical but also respectful of other peoples’ ideas. Criticism need not be synonymous with attack.
 

Some sources for criticism beyond the reserve list:
 
Print Journals

PMLA

Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-   1700
Eighteenth-Century Life
Eighteenth-Century Studies
1650-1850 : Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era
British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies
The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation

For more sources and descriptions of these see the MLA Directory of Periodicals, an online database in the library's alphabetical database menu
     
 
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
For example, by searching "congreve" in it you find this book from 1997:

* Young, Douglas M. The Feminist Voices in Restoration Comedy: The Virtuous Women in the Play-Worlds of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve. University Press of America, 1997. 278 pp. ISBN: 0761806806 (cloth); 0761806814 (paper).

If you don't find a work in our library don't stop there. You can search UNC Davis Library and Duke and use our TripSaver to get the work delivered to the NCSU Hill Library Desk.

Further questions? email me morillo@unity.ncsu.edu
 

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