English
496A
Prospectus for the Term Paper
A prospectus is the plan for your research project
that you submit before actually writing the essay or completing the research.
It should accomplish these tasks:
-
State the research question (or questions): "I
want to investigate the relationship between early modern maps and attitudes
towards landspace and power as expressed in country house poems and other
writings of the period. I am most interested in how maps offered a new
perspective on England's place in the world and how the English--particularly
the elite who produced most of the writings--processed that new perspective
in contemporary poetic and other works. I will pay close attention to the
ways in which gender, class, and race determined and enabled the re-establishment
of political power and legitimacy."
-
Delineate the main areas of your proposed research:
"In order to answer these questions, I will try to determine which maps
of the period were most influential and how they were discussed and understood
in contemporary works. I will also seek out recent scholarly articles and
books addressing the role of maps in early modern England."
-
Provide an annotated bibliography of at
least five sources in addition to those assigned as class readings
(though you may include those in your list in addition to the five), listed
with correct citation form following either MLA
or
Chicago
(Turabian) style, each of them annotated with 2-3 sentences summarizing
the author's argument. At least two of the sources should be from scholarly
journals, but no more than one of the five required sources can be a web
site (though you may use any number of online scholarly journals). (If
you don't know the difference between a popular magazine and a scholarly
journal, look here.)
Here's an example of an annotated bibliographic item (in this case, the
form is identical for both MLA and Chicago):
McBride, Kari Boyd. Country House Discourse
in Early Modern England: A Cultural Study of Landscape and Legitimacy.
Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. The author argues for the existence of a "country
house discourse" that mediated early modern English concerns about political
legitimacy, particularly concerning the aristocracy, and that can be discerned
in country house poems, political protest, architectural plans, and oil
paintings, to name only a few of the sites where McBride locates the expression
of this discourse. McBride argues that country house discourse was a product
of the social and economic changes of the period, and she shows its evolution
over a period of two centuries. The book provides new readings of many
country house poems and links them to this political, social, and economic
shift.
The prospectus is due in class Monday, 23 June,
and counts 5% of your total grade.