Literature Essay

Choose one short story and one play that you believe share a similar theme, and write an essay that explains how both works deal with this theme.

All allowable stories/plays are listed in this table of contents: 

*Most of these stories/plays can be found online without a textbook. 

Requirements: 

• The paper must use quotations from the primary sources (this is discussed below)
• The paper should contain a minimum of four full pages. That’s a minimum; to engage fully with your topic in a way that would earn an A or a B, you will need to go beyond the minimum.
• The paper should follow the formatting guidelines listed below.

Formatting Guidelines

• Double-space the text of your paper, use 12 point Times New Roman
• Leave only one space after periods or other punctuation marks.
• Use standard 1-inch margins.
• Indent the first line of paragraphs one tab space.
• Put page numbers at the top right of each page except for the first one.
• Use italics throughout your essay for the titles of longer works like plays, novels, and epic poems. The titles of short works like lyric poems and short stories should be surrounded by quotation marks.
• In the upper left-hand corner of the first page, provide a proper heading by listing your name, then your instructor’s name, then the course number, then the date (in other words, the heading should contain four separate lines).
• Center the title over the first paragraph of your essay. Do not underline or italicize or boldface your title.

A note about how to use the term “theme”:

It’s important to remember that while a theme can be considered a subject of a work, it’s not a subject in a literal sense. Bishop’s poem “The Fish” and Melville’s Moby Dick may both be about aquatic creatures, but “aquatic creatures” is not a theme—it’s a literal subject, not a conceptual one.

What you’re looking for are two works that seem to treat the same idea, concept, or aspect of life. For example, a student might analyze “Story of an Hour” and “Trifles” by showing how both works present the theme of female oppression (now that we’ve used it as an example, please avoid using this as the topic of your paper). In doing this, however, the student wouldn’t just point out that both works address that issue; he/she would show specifically and thoroughly some things that these works have in common, and also some things that they do differently, in regard to how they present the theme.   The student might go on to pose arguments or theories about why these authors approach the theme in different ways—what their differences in approach might have to do with their historical context, the limitations of their genre, their personal lives, et cetera.