Write a 5-6 page, double-spaced, typed essay. You may alter the topic slightly, so always make your subject clear from the essay’s title: avoid generic titles like “Blake” or even “Innocence”). Your approach should be literary; broad generalizations about the author, his age, or his tradition are out of place in a short essay; no Wikipedia please! Document your thesis with concrete examples, images, symbols, and/or quotations, and discuss short poems line by line or stanza by stanza. Good use of detail is very important, as are thoughtfulness, originality, and logical connections between ideas. You may exceed the given length or fall slightly short, but cover the topic thoroughly. Mechanics count: all titles of long poems or tales must be underlined or italicized, short ones in double quotation marks. Always cite poetry by line number and NOT page number, like prose. If you quote 3 or more lines, it should look like this:
When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows . . . (Keats, “Fears,” 5-8) NOTE: No quotation marks in indented quote unless someone is quoted speaking. All that you DO cite should looks exactly the way the editors print it, indentations or lack thereof included. If you quote fewer than 3 lines of a poem it should look like this: In Sonnet 116, Shakespeare claims that "Love is not love/ Which alters when it alteration finds" (2-3). A backslash “/” indicates a line break, an ellipsis (. . .) shows omitted words.
Note: NEVER fill the bulk of the paper with quotations, and avoid simple plot summary!
Topic: Discuss any salient aspect of Mary Wollestonecraft’s" Vindication of the Rights of Women" such as its revolutionary implications, its relative traditionalism, or its view of female education.