Topics for Essay # 2 due around the end of the quarter.

1. Discuss the Confessions as a spiritual autobiography or theological statement or statement about love.
2. How is Eliduc a medieval romance or an example of Gothic art or as a Christian statement or elements of the fantastic.
3. Discuss structure and character in Dante.
4. Explain the symbolic imagery in Dante
5. Discuss Dante as a theological statement.
6. How can The Divine Comedy be regarded as epic romance?
7. Discuss the Tale of Genji as a psychological novel or a novel of psychological realism or on the theme of love or quest for perfect love or as a representation of Heian aristocratic society or as Buddhist document on the cause of suffering.
8. Discuss Basho's Narrow Road as an embodiment of romantic ideas or as a development of the metaphor of travel or on the use of Haiku and poetry in general in the text.
9. Discuss Hamlet as a play about Renaissance self-fashioning, both positive and negative aspects.

10. Discuss the theme of illusion versus reality or irony or staging or attempts to manipulate reality in Hamlet.

11. Discuss Tintern Abbey and a poem influenced by the ideas of Romanticism.

12. Discuss the theme of fragmentation in Eliot’s The Waste Land?

13. In what ways is Achebe’s novel post-colonial?

14. Discuss the tension in Okonkow’s character, particularly regarding the feminine.