The First Year – An Essay
Turning up to Oxford after a
gap year and about 14 months without writing an essay was pretty
nerve-wracking. We were asked to write an essay on ‘Wuthering Heights’
before arriving, and with the imagined level of intellectual
competition stratospherically high, I went slightly overboard.
The
result was the longest essay I ever wrote in my time there (!) at over
7500 words.
In spite of a positive review by the tutor, essay lengths
for the rest of my career were swiftly cut to a more manageable level.
The first term was on the
Victorians, with one essay set per week including two weeks on Dickens
and George Eliot each. On top of this we had Old English classes, which
were designed for getting to know the language through translation. In
the second term, we moved on to the Moderns, with two weeks on two of
Joyce, Woolf or TS Eliot. In addition, we were now set Old English
essays every two weeks as well. By the end of the second term I was
knackered and much in need of the break from essays that Easter and a
term of revision would provide.
First year essays are all about
finding your feet and learning to deal with the pressure of working at
Oxford. In these essays you’ll find plenty of ideas that I found new
and exciting and consequently got a bit wrong (post-structuralism in
‘Bleak House’ for instance, or a significant part of my ‘Ulysses’
essay). Also, you can tell the work load had got to me by the time of
Beowulf at the end of the second term. However, the rest aren’t bad and
my favourites are probably the essays on ‘Wuthering Heights’, ‘Great
Expectations’ and ‘Oliver Twist’, ‘The Wanderer’, and ‘Dubliners’.
Essay Titles: First Year Essays On...
Moderns
Edward Thomas
The poetry of Edward Thomas and Transience
James Joyce
Fidelity in the 'penelope' chapter of ulysses
The trapped society and Dubliners
Joseph Conrad
Conrad and 'material interest' in Nostromo
Conrad's narration and civilisation in Heart of Darkness and The Secret Agent
TS Eliot
The Waste Land disorder and unity
Time and variation in The Four Quartets
Old English
Beowulf
Narrative direction in Beowulf
The Battle Of Maldon
The Battle of Maldon has been described with great variety. Consider the descriptions
The Dream Of The Rood
Discuss the role of the cross in 'The Dream of the Rood'
The Wanderer
'a broken man speaking' Pound. Is this an adequate description of The Wanderer?
The Victorians
A.C. Swinburne
The influence of sexuality in the poetry of Algernon Swinburne
Charles Dickens
Dickens and the Divided Self in reference to Great Expectations and Oliver Twist
Narrative Structure in Bleak House
Christina Rosetti
Denial in the poetry of Christina Rossetti
Emily Brontë
What is interesting about the way Emily Bronte explores relationships in Wuthering Heights?
George Eliot
Humanist Realism in Middlemarch
What's interesting about the way in which George Eliot explores 'the past' in The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner?
Gerard Manley Hopkins
The influence of Catholicism in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins
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