I read English at Selwyn College, the University of Cambridge, from 2001 to 2004. I have made some of my undergraduate essays available here online. Each is organised according to the paper from the Cambridge English Tripos (2004) for which it was written. Please note that in most cases these essays have not been changed in response to teaching. They do not necessarily represent either my current opinion on any idea or work of literature, or my current ability in literary writing.

I hope that these essays may be of interest, and that they might provide some ideas and examples to English students. It might be morally important that I attempt to prevent their access by those who might feel the need to plagerise them in a hurry, but I'm going to try leaving them unprotected for the time being. If you are a student planning to use my work, please cite it with reference to this internet address.

The Medieval period (1300- 1500)
The 'great poet's ability to disturb' in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde
Courtesy in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Chaucer's 'romance' tales (Sir Thopas, The Knight's Tale, The Squire's Tale)
Dreams in Pearl and Chaucer's The Book of the Duchess
The Economy of Ideology in Chrétien de Troyes' Erec and Enide
Henryson: in search of balance among conflicting points of view (Henryson's

Christ's Body in The Vision of Piers Plowman, Passus XVIII
The Private and the Public as the Basis of Tragedy in Mallery's Morte Darthur

Shakespeare
Fragmentation and Reconciliation in Shakespearean Comedy
Shakespeare's Response to 'The Tudor Myth' in his Second Tetralogy (Richard

The comic in Shakespeare's four big tragedies (Hamlet, King Lear, Othello,

and MacBeth)

The Restoration
John Dryden's Presentation of the Court in Marriage A La Mode
Restoration Drama and Self-Determination

The Age of Reason and Romantic Period (eighteenth and early ninteenth centuries)
Character development and 'Moral' in Moll

Alexander Pope's poetry and landscape gardening
The narrator and the reader in Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
Nature and Humanity in the poetry of James Thomson and Thomas Gray
Beauty and Pain in Keats
Science in Literature (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein)
The Importance of 'Improvement' in Mansfield Park in Relation to the Theme of

Landscape

Form in Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads and Blake's Songs
Dissertation: 'Evacuations' of Wit: Jonathan Swift's Grub-street Satire

The Victorian Period
Art and Purpose in Dickens' Bleak House
Collins' Villain in The Woman in White
Portfolio essay: Faith, nature, and the Victorian world (Arnold, Tennyson,

Portfolio essay: Darwinian Chaos and Tragic Fatalism in Tess of the

D'Urbervilles

Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse
Portfolio essay: Dramatic monologue in Robert Browning's 'Porphyria's Lover'

Modern Period dissertation: W. Somerset Maugham and Orientalism

Literary Criticism (including Theories of Versification) and 'Practical Criticism'
'The Wild Swans at Coole' (William Butler Yeats): A Practical Criticism
The Role of the Narrator in Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of

Form and Freedom of Expression in Louis MacNeice's 'Elegy for Minor Poets'

and E. E. Cummings' 'as freedom is a breakfastfood…'

John Berryman's 'A Professor's Song' and Thom Gunn's 'Shit': in the light of

their relations to literary history?

Poetry and Prose (extracts from Coleridge's 'Biographia Literaria', William

Carlos Williams' 'Spring And All', and Frank O'Hara's 'Zhivago And His

Poems')

Extracts from Pinter's 'The Celebration' and Stoppard's 'Jumpers'
Letter writing: John Keats and Wilfred Owen

Tragedy
Sympathy and Alienation (Oedipus the King, Hippolytus, Agamemnon)
Aeschylus' The Oresteia
Sophocles' Heroes (Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone)
Euripides: the gods, convention, and the individual (The Bacchae and others)
The Fall of Troy (Agamemnon and Philoctetes)
Obsession with Tragic Heroes and the General Human Agon (King Lear)
Mankind as the conscious vicitims of nature (Ibsen, A Doll's House, Ghosts,

Is modern self-consciousness incompatible with tragic experience, thought, or

art? (Antigone, The Bacchae, A Doll's House)

Shakespeare in Performance
The importance of Theatrical Vocabulary (The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing,

The Importance of Visual Stagecraft (The Tempest, Julius Caesar, The Winter's

Tale, Twelfth Night, Macbeth)

Moral Philosophy
Plato, after reading from Phaedrus, Symposium, Gorgias, and Protagoras
Happiness and Virtue in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics
In relation to Hume: 'Philosophy is the finding of bad reasons for what we

Arnold: The Moral Function of Criticism
Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morals

© 2008 Kevin Joyner. All Rights Reserved