Part 1: Research Paper Schedule (see handout); 2% of grade; Due Wed. 4/15
Part 2: Topic Selection
Chose one (or more) of (1) any work upon the syllabus
(2) any work not on the syllabus but in Great Short Stories or Women Poets
(3) any short poem or short story (under ten pages) that you photocopy for me
(4) any one of the following literary works

Elizabeth von Arnim, Enchanted April, Elizabeth and Her German Garden, Christopher and Columbus, The Solitary Summer, The Caravaners, Princess Priscilla's Fortnight
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Mansfield Park, Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice
Jane Barker, Love Intrigues
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, The Rover I, Love Letters from a Nobleman to His Sister, Sir Patient Fancy
Judy Blume, Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret
Anne Bronte, Agnes Grey
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, Shirley
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
Frances Brooke, The History of Emily Montague
Mary Brunton, Self- Control, Discipline
Frances Burnett, A Little Princess, The Secret Garden, The Lost Prince, Little Lord Fauntleroy, In the Closed Room, The Shuttle
Frances Burney, Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla, The Wanderer
Ada Cambridge, The Three Miss Kings
Willa Cather, The Professor's House
Susanna Centlivre, A Bold Stroke for a Wife
Isabelle de Charriere, Letters of Mistress Henley Published by Her Friend
C. J. Cherryh, Merchanter's Luck, Downbelow Station, Tripoint, Rimrunners, Cyteen, The Faded Sun, Forty Thousand in Gehenna
Kate Chopin, The Awakening
Agatha Christie, Evil Under the Sun, Murder on the Orient Express, The Body in the Library, Murder on the Nile
Ruth Chew, What the Witch Left
Caryl Churchill, Top Girls, Cloud 9
Jo Clayton, Diadem from the Stars, Ghosthunt, Irsud, Lamarchos, Maeve, The Nowhere Hunt, Quester's Endgame, Shadow of the Warmaster, Shadowkill, Shadowplay, Shadowspeer, The Snares of Ibex, Star Hunters
Mary Collyer, Felicia to Charlotte
Susan Coolidge, What Katy Did, What Katy Did at School
Hannah Cowley, The Belle's Stratagem
E. M. Delafield, Thank Heaven Fasting
Emily Eden, The Semi-Attached Couple, The Semi-Detached House
Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent, The Absentee, Belinda, Ennui, Patronage, Harrington
George Eliot, Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, Silas Marner, The Lifted Veil
Elizabeth Enright, Gone-Away Lake
Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate
Susan Ferrier, Marriage
Hannah Foster, The Coquette
Mary Gaskell, Mary Barton
Anna Katherine Green, The Leavenworth Case
Mary Hays, Emma Courtney, The Victim of Prejudice
Eliza Haywood, Love in Excess, The History of Betsy Thoughtless, Lasselia, Fantomina
Elizabeth Helme, Louisa, or The Cottage on the Moor
Georgette Heyer, April Lady, The Masqueraders
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story, Nature and Art
Erica Jong, Fanny, Witches
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
Jayne Ann Krentz, Deep Waters; Absolutely, Positively; Sweet Starfire
Marie Lafayette, The Princess of Cleves
Lady Caroline Lamb, Glenavon
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland
Le Guin, Ursula K., The Farthest Shore, The Tombs of Atuan, A Wizard of Earthsea
Sophia Lee, The Recess
Tanith Lee, Don't Bite the Sun; Drinking Sapphire Wine; The Birthgrave; Day by Night; East of Midnight; Electric Forest; Kill the Dead; Lycanthia: or, The Children of Wolves; The Silver Metal Lover; Volkhavaar
Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote, Euphemia
R. A. MacAvoy, Tea with Black Dragon
Anne McCaffrey, Coelura, Dragonflight, The Ship Who Sang, The Rowan
Colleen McCullough, The Ladies of Missalonghi
Ann Maxwell, Timeshadow Rider
Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
Lady Morgan, The Wild Irish Girl
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
Pat Murphey, The Falling Woman
Elizabeth Nesbit, Five Children and It, The Phoenix and the Carpet, The Railway Children, The Story of the Amulet, The Wouldbegoods, The Treasure Seekers, The Wonderful Garden
Andre Norton, Wheel of Stars, Lavender-Green Magic
Margaret Oliphant, The Perpetual Curate
Baroness Emmuska Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Old Man in the Corner
Mollie Panter-Downes, One Fine Day
Elizabeth Peters, Crocodile on the Sandbank
Jane Porter, Thaddeus of Warsaw, The Scottish Cheifs
Amanda Quick, Ravished
Ann Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance, Romance of the Forests, Mysteries of Udolpho, The Italian
Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire
Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market
Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple
Vita Sackville-West, All Passion Spent
Cornelia Otis Skinner and Emily Kimbrough, Our Heart Were Young and Gay
Joan Slonczewski, A Door Into Ocean
Charlotte Smith, Emmeline, Marchmont, The Young Philospher
Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club
Angela Thirkell, Summer Half; Cheerfulness Breaks In: A Barsetshire War Survey
Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Jean Webster, Daddy-Long-Legs
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods, Farmer Boy
Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary, Wrongs of Women, Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Mrs. Henry Wood, East Lynne
Virigina Woolf, Mrs. Dallaway, A Room of One's Own, The Years
Charlotte Mary Yonge, The Daisy Chain, The Clever Woman of the Family, Countess Kate

Part 3: Bibliography, Due Wed. April 22 (5% of final grade)
Once you decide on the literary works you will study, you need to research the author
and the work. Because so often women authors change their names many times, you must find
out all the names under which your author has written. You will probably need to consult the
reference librarian, The Master Genealogy Index, The Feminist Companion to Literature in
England, Books in Print, and other specialized reference books on children's writers, romance
writers, women writers, mystery writers, poets, or science fiction writers (depending on your
choice of topic).
You must check the following sources on your writers: The Humanities Index, MLA
Bibliography, Opac, Melvyl, The Dictionary of Literary Biography, Yahoo Search Engine, and
The New York Times Index. It may be necessary to use Lexus-Nexus, RLIN, OCLC World
Catalogue, or The Library of Congress Database.
You need to find at least three biographical pieces on your author, at least two book
reviews on your literary work(s), and at least five critical articles on the author's works
published in the last ten years. You should find a minimum of twelve sources. If you cannot
meet these requirements, you can present evidence of a lack of sources (such as printouts of
failed searches on the above databases or a signed note from one of the Cal State reference
librarians that no such sources exist at present). The bibliography must be typed according to the
MLA style of the 4th edition. The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 4th ed., is
sold at bookstores and available in the reference section of the library.

Part 4: Getting and Reading Your Sources
Place ILL orders immediately after you determine Cal State does not have a book or
article you need. Recall any books that you need at Cal State that are checked out. Consider
buying sources from online databases or bookstores if necessary.

Part 5: Critique of a Selected Source, due 4/29, worth 10% of final grade
Choose one recent critical article from a reputable source. If you are not sure what
sources are reputable, consult me or a reference librarian. The critique must contain: (1) in the
first paragraph the name and full bibliographical date of the literary work and the critical article,
the thesis of the critical article, and YOUR thesis or CRITICAL ASSESSMENT of the argument
of the critical article; 2) a brief summary of the article (no more than 500 words, must cover all
sections of the article); 3) an objective analysis of the structure and validity of the argument (a
minimum of 500 words); 4) a more subjective and personal response to the critical article
addressing your belief in the critical article's argument, the underlying principle and assumptions
of the critical article's argument, and comments on the rhetorical choices the author made in

presenting the critical argument (tone, diction, style, etc.); 4) a work cited page; and 5) a clear
photocopy of the entire article.
The critique should be five to seven pages long. If your critique is shorter than five
pages, add more proof to your objective section and more commentary to your subjective
section. Any missing section will result in a low grade. Excessive summary will result in a low
grade. Use a spell checker and a grammar checker on your paper (do not believe everything the
grammar checker says; consult a grammar book to edit the paper). Read the paper aloud. Check
the rules on the syllabus about automatic grade deductions.

Part 6: Sentence Outline
The research paper must make an original argument about the quality of the work of
literature selected. The paper should focus on explaining the meaning of the literary work or
works and evaluating the said work(s). You must decide what you believe the purpose of the
work was and evaluate if that purpose was achieved. You should look at the work and consider
what part of the work you wish particularly to focus on: character, diction, theme, plot, style, etc.
You should classify all the critical articles on your work and decide which set of articles you
believe is the most accurate. Try to relate the text to the author's life (biographical,
psychoanalytical criticism), to the reader's experiences (reader response criticism), to the written
word (formalism, stylistics, new criticism), and to real life (feminist, Marxist, new historical,
cultural criticism). Decide which of these four methods interests you the most and offers the
most enlightenment about the work. Each of these methods is aligned with different critical
schools, and you may wish to consult a reference work on these schools of criticism to assist you
in your analysis.
Your thesis CANNOT be A FACT, A PURE OPINION, or THE SAME IDEA AS
THAT OF ANOTHER WRITER. It must be a STATEMENT THAT CAN BE PROVEN BY
REASONING, LOGIC, EXAMPLES, AND EXPERT TESTIMONY. The paper MUST BE
STRUCTURED LIKE AN ARGUMENT.

Here is a sample of the preliminary stages of a sentence outline. (There is no Jane Swigla or
poem "Blue Dancing"; this is a made-up example.)

Thesis: Jane Swigla's "Blue Dancing" is a poem that asserts women today are forced by the
"way of the world" to either be intelligent or sensual and thus can never be fully themselves.
Swigla argues for a change in the current social attitudes that see intelligence and sexuality as
incompatible. Although Swigla's poem is not pragmatic, it is a powerful fantasy written in
lyrical verse with strong, effective images and deserves a place in the canon of women's
literature.

Part I: Proof "Blue Dancing" sees intelligence and sensuality/sexuality as in conflict in the world
for women
Part II: Proof "Blue Dancing" sees a choice between intelligence and sensuality/sexuality as
denying an essential part of a woman's nature
Part III: Swigla's assumptions about "women's nature" in "Blue Dancing"--good aspects
Part IV: Swigla's assumptions about "women's nature" in "Blue Dancing"--bad aspects
Part V: Proof Swigla's "Blue Dancing" calls for cultural change
Part VI: Assessment of the practicality of the call for change in "Blue Dancing"
Part VII: Value of the poem's lyrical verse
Part VIII: Value of the poem's images
Part IX: Overall value of the poem in the canon

To develop this into a full sentence outline, each section from I through IX would need to be
expanded into complete sentences that would sum up the argument of each section and at least
two subpoints would need to be added to prove the point of each section. Proof should involve
expert opinion, textual evidence, logical argument, etc.

Part 7: Research Paper, Due 5/22 (5%, 20% when revised)
Using the comments on your outline, write your research paper. Be sure to consult an
expert on your paper (such as your teacher at her office hours, a tutor from the Learning Center
or Writing Center, etc.). Your paper must be in the MLA form; it must cite at least ten sources;
it must be a well written and thought out argument. It should be at least eight pages in length.
The paper should include a brief plot summary of the work or works studied--NO MORE THAN
500 WORDS in length.

Part 8: Revised Research Paper, Due June 5th
Using the comments on your paper, revise as directed. Return to syllabus