RENAISSANCE LITERATURE

‘Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth/ Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep’. (John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), Book 4, ll. 667-668) ‘[…] men not knowing that such apparitions are nothing else but creatures of the Fancy, think

ASSESSED ESSAY QUESTIONS
Your essay is due in by midday on Wednesday 13 January 2016.
Please submit one copy to the drop-box on the 14th floor, and submit one copy via
the Turnitin site on Blackboard under ‘Assignments’ on the EN2020 page. You will
need to complete a cover sheet for the hard copies. Failure to submit either a hard copy or an
electronic copy will result in lateness penalties being applied.
Answer one question. You are required to make substantial and detailed reference to
the work of at least two authors of the period: the intellectual framework of your
essay and the depth of textual analysis should reflect a substantial amount of the
reading and thinking you have done over the semester. Credit will also be given
where there is evidence of an informed engagement with scholarly editions and/or
the original print and/or manuscript sources. The word limit is 3000 words (this
means you are strictly limited to 3000 words and must not go beyond that). You may
include images of print and/or manuscript materials where appropriate.
Make sure that you understand the regulations on plagiarism and guidelines on the
presentation of work (see the Study Skills Guide), and that you leave sufficient time
to check you have appropriately credited all works used.
If you have any questions, please contact your seminar tutor or Professor Knight as the
module convenor (sk218@le.ac.uk).
Please note the following points, since failure to do so could affect your mark:
1) Since Renaissance Drama is a core course on the English BA, the focus of
the EN2020 Renaissance Literature module is prose and poetry: you should focus
your responses on these forms, and in particular should not discuss the drama of the
period at all.
2) If you write on Utopia, you should use Ralph Robinson’s sixteenth-century translation
as a main source; this is available in modern editions and on the Early English Books
Online (EEBO) resource via the Library website. Robinson’s translation is different
from the modern translation in the Norton Anthology.
3) When a question contains a quotation, that quotation is an important part of the
question. To write an answer that is marked well on ‘relevance to the question’ (one
of the marking criteria), you must address the issues raised by the quotation, even if
you choose not to write at any length about the work from which the quotation comes.