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.