MID-SEMESTER COURSEWORK
Please note the following:
The deadline for mid-semester coursework for this course is
Please hand in your coursework to the Department Common Room (room 238)
between 14:00 and 16:00 pm
You will need to hand in TWO COPIES of each piece of coursework. All coursework will be signed in using your candidate number, as well as your name. Please bring your candidate number with you.
You must complete a coversheet for BOTH COPIES of your coursework. You will find spare copies of the coversheet in the English Department Undergraduate Office.
Staff will complete an examiner's report form on which they will comment on your coursework. Feedback on mid semester coursework will normally be returned to you in seminars, by candidate number, during the last week of teaching.
You must see or contact the BA Programme Chair, Professor Gordon McMullan (room 216), email gordon.mcmullan@kcl.ac.uk, if you need to apply for an extension or extenuating circumstances.
Notes on Penalties for over-length work:
• An electronic word count should be noted on the front of all pieces of course work.
• Word limits apply to the title, text, and footnotes, including all quotations. They do not apply to references in either the text or the footnotes, or to the bibliography.
• If a piece of work is more than 5% over the prescribed limit, 2 marks will normally be deducted for every further five per cent, until fifty per cent is reached.
• After fifty per cent 3 marks will normally be deducted for each additional five per cent.
Please answer ONE of the following questions by referring to at least TWO of the following texts: Utopia , Measure for Measure, and Bartholomew Fair
Word-Limit: 2,500
1. ‘The fool has turned philosopher.'
How effectively do early modern authors use humour, irony and satire to challenge dominant institutions like the Church and the State?
2. ‘Utopian institutions are cunningly designed to reduce the scope of the ego: avenues of self-aggrandizement are blocked, individuation is sharply limited'.
To what extent do early modern literary texts contradict a traditional view according to which the Renaissance ushered in a stable and confident sense of personal identity?
3. Early modern texts often embark on ‘a searching inquiry into the sources of human misery and the possibilities of human government'.
How confident are early modern authors in suggesting that human misery can be overcome by reforming contemporary models of government?
4. ‘[…] this dry nurse, I say still, is a delicate man'.
To what extent do early modern literary constructions of femininity and masculinity upset or confirm patriarchal expectations?
5. ‘I have begun,/ And now I give my sensual race the rein'.
Are excessive desires ever effectively repressed or contained in early modern literary texts?
6. ‘More than our brother is our chastity'
To what extent is female agency presented as inevitably controversial and problematic by the early modern literary imagination?
7. ‘ Liberty plucks justice by the nose,/ The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart/ Goes all decorum'.
How does genre affect the representation of the interplay between the forces of order and disorder, between virtues and vices, between Carnival and Lent?
8. ‘I should be guiltier than my guiltiness/ To think I can be undiscernible'.
How effective is surveillance as a strategy of subjection in any of the texts which you have studied so far on this course?
9. ‘The fleshy woman, which you call Urs'la, is above all to be avoided, having the marks upon her of the three enemies of man: the World, as being in the Fair; the Devil, as being in the fire; and the Flesh, as being herself'.
In what ways do early modern texts establish a connection between femininity, the material world and death? And to what effect?
10. ‘Earth's worms and honour's dwarfs, at too great odds,/ Prove or provoke the issue of the gods'.
Do early modern texts support or challenge the theory of the divine right of kings preached by Tudor and Stuart propaganda?