However, the time has come for my exam!! Egads! I will be writing my answers this Friday. My professor asked me to put together some potential exam questions. I narrowed it down to six. While they are by no means perfect, they are all issues I am interested in and would love to explore more in future projects.
Let me know what you think - I will post revised ones after I get feedback from my professor, too.
Potential Questions for Early Modern British Romance Exam:
1) Mary Baine
Campbell, in her book Wonder and Science
describes the early modern period as rife with world-making texts. She states “these texts make up, in part, a
history of imaginative literature, a history of science, a history of their
mutually determining emergence, a history of cognitive transformation and the
means it expresses and is expressed by.
The entanglements of these texts with one another and with the history
of early colonial empires make up a fabric knotty with significance for all
these histories, and for the characters of the forms and genres on which they
are woven” (2). For this exam question,
follow some of the significant knots that weave early modern British romances,
travel narratives, and science together.
How did their interweaving change the characters of these forms and
genres? What did these inter-generic
ties allow authors to do? Also trace
where these forms and genres begin to diverge.
2) Roger
Ascham, in The Scholemaster (1570)
famously lambasts the Morte Arthure,
saying “the whole pleasure of which booke standeth in two special poyntes, in
open mans slaughter and bold bawdrye.” Critique
of medieval romances had a significant influence on early modern romance
writers, particularly in the latter two decades of the sixteenth century. How did early modern romance authors attempt
to avoid such criticism of their own work and how did this change the tenor,
goals, methods, and contexts of the romances of the period?
3) Tracing the
readership of early modern romances is exceptionally difficult. The readership of romances is often
obfuscated by the stratagems of early modern romance authors attempting to hail
certain types of readers, sell their literary product (either through the
marketplace or through patronage), and create their reputations. The writers of romances in the period are
widely varied—and equally so are their readers (either hoped for or actual);
they range from Edmund Spenser yearning for the attention of Elizabeth I to
authors like Lyly, Rich, and Greene who were more focused on the potential
buyer in St. Paul’s Churchyard. Romance
as a genre also includes a diverse spectrum of sub-categories from picaresques
and cony-catching narratives to aristocratic pastorals. In part because of these wide-ranging
aspects, deciphering the class and gender of most romance readers is especially
problematic. For this exam question,
outline how current critics attempt to locate the readership of early modern
romances in Britain. What are their
methods? What are their findings? How might the problem of early modern romance
readership parallel issues of genre fiction readership today?
4) Early modern
romance provided the proponents of early modern British colonialism a glamorous
narrative with which to recast the projects of empire building. Romance also gave early modern explorers a
framework for perceiving their role in new cultural and geographic
encounters. For this exam question,
describe how romance narratives shaped the experiences and expectations of
early modern explorers and how simultaneously romance was deployed to shape the
perception of the New World and the actants within in it for readers back in
England.
5) Authors such
as Kim Hall (Things of Darkness
(1996)) and Elizabeth Spiller (Reading
and the History of Race in the Renaissance (2011)) contend that the early
modern experience of racial difference was most commonly encountered through
reading—specifically through reading travel narratives and romances. For this exam question, discuss how critics
have described these textual encounters and how early modern reading practices
may have contributed to phenotype racialism or to a more nuanced understanding
of ethnicity. In addition, discuss what
the inclusion of racial difference adds for early modern romance—what is it a
proxy for? What is the effect of racial
exoticism? How are racialized characters
different in early modern romances and what makes them so?
6) The authors
of early modern travel narratives are intensely invested in the presentation of
their tales as true. Yet the
successfulness of their narratives relied on a careful balance between veracity
and excitement. Too much ‘plainness’ of
speech or action might make their story uninteresting, yet too much art in
their language or too much of the incredible made their narratives more akin to
romances and other ‘fanciful stories’.
For this exam question discuss how authors of travel narratives borrowed
structures, tropes, and other characteristics from romance and how they
simultaneously attempted to distance their works from being perceived as romance. Also, discuss how romance authors adopted the
increasingly familiar tropes of the travel narrative into their genre. What did this cross-pollination do for the
romance and for the travel narrative?
What are the tensions between them and how are they negotiated?
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