ENG 345 Week 5 Final Paper

Choose a primary text studied during the course. Analyze how your chosen text is both influenced by and influential to the

cultural values of the time in which it was written. What are the political, philosophical, and religious implications within the text, and how does it use literary conventions to address them?

Some possible topics:

•   Beowulf: How does the mix of pagan and Christian beliefs within Beowulf illuminate the political and
  philosophical systems of the Middle Ages?
•   “The Wife of Bath”: How does the Wife’s behavior (as well as those of the characters in her “Tale”) reflect and/or
  reject common ideas and practices of Chaucer’s era?
•   Paradise Lost: What can we learn from Satan, Adam and Eve, the angels, and God about the way Milton viewed
  the human condition and 17th century British society?
•   Renaissance Love Poetry (Sidney, Spencer, Shakespeare, Marlowe, etc.) : What do the Renaissance poets teach us
  about the major issues of the day such as the status of women?
•   A Modest Proposal: What does Swift teach readers about the relationship between the impoverished Irish
  Catholics and their wealthy British landlords?
•   The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself:
  How does Equiano use his own experiences to shed light on the British slave trade as well as society in the late 18thcentury?
  Note: Many of the works above are read during the weekly readings as excerpts. In the interest of writing a more robust character essay, you may want to read more than an excerpt of the literary work to which your paper pertains.