Rules and Advice for Assessed Essays Novels Catherine Cookson’s classic Kate Hannigan (1950) Maeve Binchy’s Circle of Friends (1990) Rosamunde Pilcher’s

Rules and Advice for Assessed Essays

Novels

Catherine
Cookson’s classic Kate Hannigan (1950)

Maeve
Binchy’s Circle of Friends (1990)

Rosamunde
Pilcher’s The Shell Seekers (1987).

Length c.6000 words.

This does not include a cover sheet, table contents, and
bibliography.

Follow The MLA Style sheet 7-8th edition (do not mix
them up) It is up to you to use footnotes or brackets in the text for
references.

Your bibliography should contain around 10 to 20 entries. Use
monographs and collections of essays as well as from periodicals. Avoid
overusing and be critical of Internet sources.

Topics: to be agreed with the course tutor. One of the three novels
of the seminar must be covered. You may compare and contrast two or three, if
you wish, or compare and contrast a novel from the course with another or an
adaptation. Please remember: if you use a different media format ( e.g a film
or a graphic novel) you must also use the relevant concepts and terminology for
its analysis.

Your essay should display methodological and theoretical awareness.
This means that you should know-and say-what you are doing, either in the
introduction or, if more suitable, a section on the method. If you do a gender
analysis; for example, you need to say which gender concepts you use. If you do
one on class, the same applies, etc.

Be specifical and historical. Do not generalize about “women” or
“people” I remember you talking about fictional characters in history that have
a specific position in terms of class, education, wealth, income, religion,
etc. Do not apply modern attitude and views uncritically on characters form
earlier periods.

Remember that you are dealing with literature. Which strategies are
used to create sympathy, atmosphere, etc ? Use what you have learned in your
introductions

Your essay should have a question or hypothesis, and in a thesis or
statement. This can be open and ambivalent,
but it has to be there. It is reached by logical argument and the analysis of
selected passages from the text (s). This means that you should plan your essay
carefully before starting to write it. Simply re-telling the story
and making your own value judgment is not a critical analysis.

Your essay must display correct and idiomatic use of English.
Employ a good dictionary, and do not rely on an automatic spellchecker.

Your statements

Romance can be a flexible genre. Romance novels can be deal with
relevant contemporary socio-political and religious themes alongside the more
conventional romantic plot.

Modern Romance can turn out to be quite complex and thus, offer themselves for careful literary analysis. If read
against the backdrop of its temporal/ geographical setting, a Romance novel can
tell its readers quite a lot about the circumstances, behavioral expectations,
assumptions, beliefs, gender roles, etc of that particular time and place and
also something about their subversion.

I was surprised about the different gender roles presented in each
of the books, i.e that a fixed role regarding gender for either woman or men
does not exist.

Your remaining questions and issues

·        
Can
circle of Friends still be considered a romance novel? Where are the limits of
romance if a love story is usually part of almost all novels?

·        
Is
modern Romance a static or a progressive genre?

·        
Are
the romance novels that we have discussed in our seminar applicable for
teaching at school, e.g in 11th or 12th grade? Which
novel (of the three we read) would you recommend to discuss with students at
school? How could I persuade my studies to lay down their prejudices and
actually read a book like those we read in this seminar?

Your remaining questions and issues

·        
What
makes any literature or writing “worthy” of being analyzed in an academic
setting?

·        
Why
are the movie adaptations of the novels we read so flat?

·        
Why
was Rosamunde Plicher more or less an “one hit wonder” everywhere else but in
Germany?

Seminar:

The seminar addressed a much-maligned genre
that is often denounced as trivial. It examined three popular examples to
challenge (but perhaps also partly confirm) stereotypes: Catherine Cookson’s
classic Kate Hannigan (1950), Maeve Binchy’s Circle of Friends (1990),
and Rosamunde Pilcher’s The Shell Seekers (1987). Issues addressed  included gender and sexuality, class, and
region, but also age. Moreover, the seminar used this popular mode of fiction
to ask general questions about prose narrative, characterisation, and reader
guidance that can also be applied to other forms of fiction.