suggested research paper topics

• The research paper is a synthesis of critical perspectives about your topic. You will explore various perspectives and compare, contrast, and/or combine them in your paper. Your paper should explain why and how the text is important to the author’s body of work and to British literature as a whole.

• The following texts are represented in the Poetry for Students and Novels for Students reference series in our library. The information in these volumes can serve as several different sources for your research paper—the introductory material is one source, and the essays by particular scholars count as individual sources. The volume number for each text is designated with a ‘v’ after the title.

• Topics not on this list are permitted, but you must discuss feasibility with me before you make a decision.

• Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale, v4

• Austen Emma, v21

• Pride and Prejudice, v1

• Sense and Sensibility, v18

• Beowulf—Epics for Students

• Blake “The Lamb” v12

• “The Tyger” v2

• “A Poison Tree” v24

• Bronte Jane Eyre, v4

• Chaucer The Canterbury Tales v14

• Coleridge “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” v4

• Conrad Heart of Darkness, v2

• Defoe Robinson Crusoe, v9

• Dickens A Tale of Two Cities, v5

• Great Expectations, v4

• Donne Holy Sonnet 10 v2

• “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” v11

• du Maurier Rebecca, v12

• Forster A Passage to India, v3

• A Room with a View, v11

• Huxley Brave New World, v6

• Ishiguro The Remains of the Day, v13

• Milton Paradise Lost—Epics for Students

• Orwell 1984, v7

• Paton Cry, the Beloved Country, v3

• Shakespeare Sonnet 130 v1Sonnet 29 v8

Sonnet 116 v3

• Twelfth Night

• Julius Caesar

• Romeo and Juliet

• Shaw Pygmalion, v1

• Sophocles Oedipus Rex, v1 (Drama for Students)

• Swift Gulliver’s Travels, v6

• Tennyson“The Lady of Shalott” v15

• Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray, v20

• Woolf Mrs. Dalloway, v12