Other examples of literary contextual information being used in a more effective way

Example 1

Essay question: How do Fielding’s comparisons between characters in Tom Jones contribute to the overall meaning of his novel?

This is an extract from a student essay on the question quoted above:

'It is interesting to compare the novel with its predecessors, such as Bunyan's A Pilgrim’s Progress. Within this text can be seen the roots of Tom Jones, mainly a novel detailing departure, journey and arrival (Ermath, 1997), illustrating knowledge acquired through meeting with various stereotyped characters, and leaving a much wiser hero at its close. This topos shows how to find 'the straightest road to heaven' (Ermath, 1997, p.16), or the easiest route to achieving a goal, which in the case of Jones is to wed the virtuous Sophia Western (a symbol of the gaining of knowledge). It is a journey in which the reader will discover the commendable traits present within humanity. To discover these virtues, the characters must be compared, in order to display that which is deemed morally good, and that which should be labelled a vice.


Q. Why is this effective?

TUTOR'S REPLY

A useful point of comparison with another text from the same period is provided, showing how Fielding is using the same kind of underlying narrative structure as employed by Bunyan to pattern the events of his novel. The making of this comparison suggests an understanding on the student’s part of where Fielding’s text is placed in the evolution of the English novel.

Example 2

Essay question: 'Pastoral poetry offers no more than an escape from serious concerns.' Does the pastoral poetry you have studied on this unit lead you to agree with this statement?

The following extract comes from a student essay, answering the above question:

'In Christopher Marlowe's 'The Passionate Shepherd to His Love' we see a poem that follows the traditional form, where the poet speaks as the shepherd, an innocent figure conventionally associated with the genre, and the appeal of the countryside is used to seduce his love. However, the attitude of the central figure is also typical to poems of this type, and through the simple voice of the shepherd we also hear the voice of a wordly character. The first hint of this occurs in the second line of the first stanza where the shepherd invites his love to 'prove' the pleasures of the 'valleys, groves, hills and fields.' The attitude here is that the countryside is something to be sampled, a view of consumption more typical of the pampered urban classes than to a rural labourer.'


Q. Why is this effective?

TUTOR'S REPLY

The essay looks at Marlowe’s poem as an example of the pastoral genre, and comments on how certain of its features conform to generic conventions. It also considers the pastoral genre more broadly, in a critical rather than purely descriptive way (e.g. pastoral poetry often appears to regard the countryside from the point of view of the cultured and leisured town dweller, not the rural working class).

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