Imagined World Explores The Relationship Between Literary Works: English Essay, UCD, Ireland

Imagined World explores the relationship between literary works and the historical events that are picked up, reflected on, and, in turn. shaped by the works we are examining. That ‘bleed’ between fact and fiction, literature and the world, is a matter both of content (the text reflects on and talks about events current at the moment of trailing) and of the form (genres/style).

In Utopia, for example, Sir Thomas More invented a new form to reflect (safely) on Henry VIII’s England, and, in doing so, he gave Sure thinkers a format for reflecting on political alternatives to the status quo. Spenser’s allegorical epic-romance is all at once a non-stop series of chivalric adventures, exemplary fables about the moral virtues, and the highly political work of a colonist in Ireland. The comedy of Midsummer Nights Dream and the tragicomedy of The Tempest study both the power of the imagination – and the power itself.

So, for the mid-semester assessment, we want you to focus on the jowl of wig work covered during the first half of term and to imitate it creatively in a way that reveals something about both its form and its politics. So. pick your work and then. a) writing In the style of the work you have selected, produce a stanza or paragraph or short speech now Logue or dialogue that addresses an issue raised by the work itself.

That ‘issue’ can be either internal to the work itself or can be a contemporary issue viewed through the filter of the early modern text. E.g. you might want to challenge some of the political assumptions internal to The Faerie Queer& itself or the gender politics of Midsummer Night: Dream, say; or you may instead prefer to focus on some issue of 2021 but use the filter – stylistic/linguistic – of an early modern text to do so (e.g. ‘updating’ Utopia to satirize a contemporary ‘abuse’).