An Essay On English
Home First Year Essays Second Year Essays Third Year Essays Authors Reading List Sitemap search AnEssayOnEnglish.com only	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 © 2009 copyright www.anessayonenglish.com - An Essay On English - Free English Essays Online

An Essay On English

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’.