EN 396 Austen Final Project Assignment
Fall 2016
Due Wed, December 21 by 1pm (earlier is welcome!). Send by email only, no hardcopies:
We will use ECCO for this project: ECCO only extends into the middle of the Romantic Period, just short of the Regency, so you won’t be able to search for “Austen,” but you can search for topics she writes about and authors she mentions or might have known about (using your best guess from the subject matter). ECCO contains Burke’s Peerage, for example, and Fordyce’s Sermons. But there were also many publications dealing with medicine, mercantile matters, the role of women, the slave trade, abolition, the military and navy, maritime travel, etc. Most of the documents in this archive are non-literary since the archive is representative of the documents and texts available in the long 18th century, and as with the circulating library, most people read non-fiction whether for business, information, or pleasure.
This project will be a combination of things:
1)a log of your findings, so keep careful track of what you find
2)entries for the document and variations on it that you finally select to use
3)a 2-4 paragraph analysis of the document (1 – 1½ pages)
4)a 2-3 page argumentative essay using the document either contextually or comparatively in a discussion of one of the Austen novels in which the topic of the Romantic-period document serves as an important theme
To start searching for the first part of your project, the log:
1) go to the Healey Library website:
2) Healey Library eResources List
3) Select a Database by Title
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPRSTUVWZTrial Databases
4) Eighteenth Century Collections Online
Every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in Great Britain during the eighteenth century, along with thousands of important works from the Americas.
5) Gale Publishing
Eighteenth Century Collections Online
Advanced Search
Enter search term(s) and select index type. Indicate choice of Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT)
Fuzzy Search
in
Search Tip:Use n# to search for words within x number of words each other, i.e. slave n3 trade
in
in
Add a Row
To begin, do a couple of searches for documents dated 1780s – 1810s using different combinations of keywords (literary titles/authors won’t work—you need cultural and historical terms or combinations of literary and cultural/historical terms). Keep a log of your hits, I want to see a listing of titles + dates for documents you found.
You should play around with this: do a new topic search, and see what people in Britain were writing related to this topic in the late 18thand early 19thcentury. See what key terms provide you with really interesting documents; then settle on what topic you think you want to focus on. Select one document (you can choose 2 if the documents are too brief for this project), and list all or several of the variations of it in your log.
Then begin work on the analysis and argumentative parts of the project. Have fun!!