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The Final Exam: Friday, May 6th @ 9:00

FINAL EXAM FOR BRITISH LIT FROM 1800

Part One: Passages

I will give you a passage from each book (and maybe 2 or 3 from the Romantic Poetry book): you have to identify the author OR the work, and then discuss the significance of the passage—in other words, why I’m quoting it here. These will all be significant passages we discussed in class, so no surprises.

Part Two: The Essay

I carefully, consciously chose the works we read in class as a representation of British Literature from 1800. I also specifically focused on a single century, the 19th, and stopped at the very end of it—1898. Why these works, why only this period (no 20th century)? Because I wanted to tell a specific story that only these works could tell, that necessarily excludes many other stories I might have told. However, I felt that if you could see how this narrative is shared by a few key works, you would learn something useful about the literature and the period.

Q: For your essay, I want you to write an Introduction to this our course: not just British Literature from 1800, but the specific version of this course. Imagine that you’re writing a Forward to a book: explain what the general story is, and how the individual works contribute to this story. There can be several themes and ideas or one overarching one, that’s your decision. However, you should help students ‘see’ the invisible threads connecting one work to another, and how each work is responding to similar ideas and expressing the zeitgeist of the era. You must quote from several works to support your ideas, and you may quote from the passages in Part I. However, if these are the only quotes you use, you won’t get full points. I want to see how much you’ve read and how well you can make it ‘speak’ in this essay. So be specific; the more vague you are, the more I’ll wonder how much time you spent reading Spark Notes! :)

You may write the essay before the exam and simply bring it with you, or you can write in in-class. However, everyone has to attend the exam to do Part I in class. Our Final Exam day is Friday, May 6th @ 9:00 (not 8, as the schedule says).


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