There are several options available for your term paper/project.  Note that many will require you to read an additional book from the list of further reading attached to the syllabus. Format instructions will be found at the end of this document.

• Select one of the books from the list of further reading.  Write a persuasive essay about why it should be considered for a future version of this course.  In your essay, you should consider questions of the work’s quality (define what you mean by quality), important themes that may be present in the book, and what it might offer that the current books do not.  You do not need to argue for which, if any, of the existing books should be dropped.

    Explain what makes the book you have selected representative of the children's writing of this period, as you understand it, including a discussion of the particular genre under which it falls; in other words, what the book has in common with other children's books.  You should also offer an explanation of why this book should be of particular interest to a 21st-century student of the history of children's literature, which means that you should focus on the aspects of the book that make it unique or different.
 
• Many children’s books have been made into films for theatrical release or television.  Several of these films are available in local video stores or at the NSU or public libraries.  Compare one of the novels from the course reading list or the list of further reading to a film adaptation (be sure and specify which adaptation by giving the director, producer, or other significant information), and write an essay exploring the ways in which the filmmakers altered the material to make it work as a movie, explaining why you think those changes were (or were not) necessary.  Among specific questions you might address are:
• Which if any characters are left out? Added? How do alterations of the characters affect the apparent meaning of the story?
• Which if any plot elements or episodes are left out?  Added? Again, how do these alterations affect the apparent meaning?
• Are any of the characters that occur in both the film and the story altered – i.e., are their personality traits or social situations changed in any way?
• To what extent do the technical aspects of film (the ability to present the story visually, the choice of animation over live action, etc.) either require or make possible new ways of telling the story?  (What can a film do that a written or oral story can’t?)
• What is the setting of the film and the story?  If it is different, to what do you attribute the difference?
• How do the casting and physical imagery of the film reinforce or contradict the images you created in your own head as you read the book?  Does this contribute to the success or failure of the film adaptation?

• Read two (2) pieces of criticism about ONE of the books we are reading.  One of the critical pieces may be a chapter from a book (I will put several on reserve at the library), but the other must be a journal article from one of the following journals: Children's Literature (an annual – the NSU library has several issues), Lion and Unicorn (available online at the library through Project Muse), The Horn Book (available at the library), Children's Literature in Education, or the Children's Literature Association Quarterly.  These are the primary critical journals in the field of children's literature; for issues or journals that the library does not have, you may use interlibrary loan or see me (I have several).  To find these critical sources, use the MLA Bibliography which is available online at the NSU library.  NOTE: Be sure to use topic headings as well as names and titles.  You may find useful information about Winnie-the-Pooh in topical books such as Lois Kuznets's When Toys Come Alive or Margaret Blount's Animal Land, but these sources won't turn up on a search using either "A.A. Milne" or the book title as your search term.

    Another reference to help you find critical articles is Linnea Hendrickson's Children's Literature: A Guide to the Criticism, which is available in the reference section of the NSU Library and on-line at http://www.unm.edu/~lhendr/    Be forewarned, however, that Hendrickson's book does not include the large amount of children's literature scholarship that has been produced over the past 10-15 years.
    Once you have found these two critical pieces, analyze and compare their contributions to your understanding of the children's book with which they deal.  Briefly summarize their major points, discuss whether (and why) you find those points convincing, and conclude by a discussion of which of the two critical sources would be most useful:
• to someone preparing to use the book in a K-12 classroom;
• to someone teaching a class such as this one for adult readers; or
• to a student writing an independent critical analysis of the children's book.
Be sure to explain why the articles would be useful for this particular context.
    You may choose to write on any of the books in the course syllabus, whether or not we will have completed our class discussion of the book before the paper is due; however, be sure you have read the book you are writing on as well as the criticism.  That is, if you wish to analyze two critical sources on Winnie the Pooh, you may do so, but you must have read Milne's book first - even though we won't get to it until late April.

• Select one of the books from the list of further reading.  Write a paper that interprets the book as a work of literature.   This does not mean a book report in which you simply re-tell the story’s plot; rather you should undertake one of the following:
• CHARACTER ANALYSIS: Explain what a particular character (the main character (”protagonist”) or another major character) is like, and how that character might relate to an ordinary child.  Support your analysis of the character by referring to specific passages and events in the work you are reading that demonstrate particular character traits.  A reasonable thesis for a character analysis would be: “The heroine of ‘Bluebeard’ exhibits behaviors that were socially unacceptable at her time and faces danger because of them.”
• THEMATIC ANALYSIS: With this option, you are to examine a particular topic (theme) from your novel (e.g., the theme of the ideal Christian life as expressed in Pilgrim’s Progress), explaining what the work has to say about this topic, and supporting your analysis by referring to specific passages, events, and characters from the work.  A reasonable thesis for a thematic analysis would be: “The first half of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress shows the ideal Christian life to be lonely and difficult, while the second half offers a more communal model of Christian life.”
• COMPARISON AND CONTRAST: Compare one of the books from the list of further reading to one of the course texts.  You can look at how two different works explore the same theme (e.g., the quest in Pilgrim’s Progress and Alice in Wonderland), examine two characters in similar situations (Cinderella and Jo March as marriageable young women), or describe how two different works exemplify a particular literary genre (e.g., Winnie the Pooh and Black Beauty as animal stories).

• Select one of the books from the list of further reading.  By examining the kinds of characters and situations found in the book, its mood, and the kind of language that it uses, determine who the likely readers would have been.  What age, what type of child, how does the original projected audience differ from that of today?  Was the work intended to be read mainly by children, by children and adults, or by adults initially (and then subsequently adopted by younger readers)? How do the child readers of a historical text differ from the average child reader today?  Use as a model the class discussion of Pilgrim’s Progress, where I pointed out specific addresses to children, etc.  Include in your paper the specific references that lead you to your conclusions.

• Take an important section of a work from the list of further reading (the opening, the conclusion, a climactic chapter or episode) and rewrite it from a different perspective or point of view.  For example, how would the story of Faithful’s trial in Pilgrim’s Progress be different if it were told in the first person by Faithful? by Christian? by the judge? How would the story of “Cinderella” differ if it were told from the perspective of someone living in the 21st century?

• Find a book on the list of further reading or among the course texts that seems to you to present messages or attitudes that would no longer be accepted by our culture (e.g., a more subservient role for women is depicted in Pilgrim’s Progress; a higher level of violence than we might accept for child readers is found in Perrault’s fairy tales).  Explain what the attitude or message that you find is, why it is no longer acceptable in our (21st-century American) culture, and why it might have been more acceptable in the time the work was written.  Do you think the historic text you are discussing is still suitable for today’s children, or should it be relegated to adult readers with a historical interest only?

• Create a web page discussing one of the books from the list of further reading.  Your page should include at a minimum the following items:
• A brief biographical sketch of the writer (this will require some research using library references; do NOT simply download something you found elsewhere on the web);
• A synopsis of the story or a description of the contents of the work (for volumes of poetry such as Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses or Rossetti’s Sing Song);
• A list, with descriptions, of major characters;
• Explanatory notes (minimum one paragraph each) to at least three important considerations for modern readers of these historic works (e.g., for Pilgrim’s Progress you might include a paragraph about the Puritans’ belief system, another about the English Civil War (in which Bunyan was involved), and one about the literary genre of allegory);
• A list of print references that would be useful to the reader (critical articles, etc.); and
• At least four links to other sites that would be useful or interesting to the reader.
By all means, include illustrations and other design elements to make your web page attractive.  But BE CAREFUL, both with text and images, that you do not violate copyright law – you can’t just download something and post it to a web page.

• A title that describes the content (e.g., “Abnormal Mothering in Pam Conrad’s Stonewords” – not just “English Term Paper”);
• Your name;
• The number and title of this course; and
• The date the paper is turned in.

Papers should be 4-6 pages in length, when using the format described above.  (The cover page does not count in determining length.)  Papers that use unusually large fonts or exceptionally wide margins will be reset into the prescribed format to determine that length requirements have been met.  The four-page minimum is an absolute requirement; students may exceed six pages if they have that much to say.  Papers may be submitted in hard copy or electronically via e-mail.

WEB PAGES: Web pages should be submitted to me on a floppy disk, with all necessary files included.  Please see me if your web page requires more memory than a floppy can hold.

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