From 23/24 the assessment pattern will be as follows:

Intermediate year:
1 x 800 word formative close reading essay deadline Term 1, Week 8 (required; submit hard copy to your seminar tutor, not through Tabula)
1 x 3000 word essay (50% of the final mark; submit through Tabula) deadline tba
1 x 2 hour closed examination taken in the summer term

Finalists:
1 x 800-1000 word formative close reading essay deadline Term 1, Week 8 (required; submit hard copy to your seminar tutor, not through Tabula)
1 x 3000 word essay (50% of the final mark; submit through Tabula) deadline tba
1 x 2 hour closed examination taken in the summer term

I: 1 x 800 word close reading essay

The close reading exercises should be submitted in hard copy directly to your seminar tutor. You should not submit them through Tabula. The first close reading exercise is due in term 1, week 8. Set texts for this exercise will be a poem or section of a poem from the module set text list and will be identified 3 weeks before the submission deadline.

II: 1 x 3,000 word essays

Second year students will select 1 question from a list supplied on which they will write a 3000 word . Final year students will come up with their own questions, which must be approved by the module tutor, and will write 1 3,000 word essay. This essay must be submitted through Tabula.

From the 2023-24 session the assessment pattern changes. For both finalists and intermediates the second 3,000 word essay is replaced by a 2 hour closed examination paper taken in the summer term.

2023/2024 Assessed Essay Questions

Discuss the French Revolution as it appears in Romantic poetry.

Discuss the boundary between life and death in Romantic AND/OR Victorian poetry.

Write an essay on travelling AND/OR wandering in Romantic AND/OR Victorian poetry.

Discuss the impact on Romantic AND/OR Victorian poetry of contemporaneous developments within the fields of EITHER geology OR evolutionary theory OR cosmology, OR a combination of them.

Write an essay exploring Romantic depictions of nation and nationalism.

How and why do Romantic AND/OR Victorian poets negotiate the influence and shadow of their literary predecessors? Write an essay exploring this.

Discuss the boundary between internal and external worlds in Romantic AND/OR Victorian poetry.

Write an essay exploring the theme of memory in Romantic poetry.

Discuss contrasting accounts of nature in Romantic AND/OR Victorian poetry.

Compare and contrast the engagement with the sublime in the work of male and female Romantic poets. Are there distinct male and female versions of the sublime?

What is invested in the figure of the child in Romantic AND/OR Victorian poetry?

Write an essay on depictions of the human AND/OR nonhuman body in Romantic AND/OR Victorian poetry.