Format: 4-6 pages 12pt font, Times New Roman, Double Spaced, and one inch margins with a proper MLA 8 Works Cited page. Utilization of first person can reduce your paper by up to 10%.
Assignment for Historical Paper: Choose an author and select a story of your choice. Nothing outside what we have read in class can be used. Think of this story as a way of having a conversation with the person who composed it. Stephen Greenblatt once said, “I began with the desire to speak with the dead” and so it began that he engaged in conversation with William Shakespeare. We can have conversations with the author by analyzing their work in the historical context in which it was produced. We can engage in research that will allow us to understand what was happening at the historical moment and furthermore, this allows us to analyze the mobility and contemporary significance of the work.
Your task is to:
- Select a story,
- Research the historical time in which the story was written and be able to relay in your writing who and/or what the author was writing to,
- 3. Incorporate historical sources AND the story equally, and
- Discuss the contemporary significance. Has the significance of this story changed over time?
Source information: You must use credible sources. You may NOT use Wikipedia, Shmoop, Spark notes, enotes, or Cliff notes. You may use once source that I have presented in class. You must utilize four (no more than six) outside sources. Your story does NOT count in your source count. Thus, an MLA 8 Works Cited page is required. Make sure you properly cite in-text and correctly format the WC page. Failure to do so will result in a 20% deduction in overall grade for the paper.