Writing Homework Help

For your last major assignment, you will write a 7-10 page research paper on a text of your choosing (12 pt. Times New Roman, double spaced, once inch margins, MLA citations). Your paper should provide a critical analysis of an American novel.

Your job is to help create a deeper understanding of something most people engage uncritically. Your reader should understand what cultural work is being performed by the subject matter. You should look to advance the reader’s understanding of the novel and of its surrounding cultural contexts. Think about how the novel creates meaning, but also consider how literature can advance one’s understanding of a broader issue. Your research should be supported with a minimum of 4 scholarly sources. Please utilize the university’s library resources (library.illinois.edu).

A successful research paper should begin with a catchy and interesting title. You should then establish an exigent topic/question, a clear and original argument/thesis, and the general stakes of the topic and thesis within the first two paragraphs. The remainder of the paper should provide evidence, analysis, and additional details that support the established thesis. Research should be integrated throughout, but any source, whether quoted, summarized, or paraphrased, should be couched within your own interpretation. The paper should conclude with a sense of finality, in that all the body paragraphs should cumulate into a full understanding of the subject matter at hand. Strive to teach your reader and to convince them of your position. All your claims should be grounded in the text.

Choose novel from

James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (1826)

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850)

Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851)

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1869)

Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881)

William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885)

Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889)

Robert W. Chambers, The King in Yellow (1895)

Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)

Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)

Frank Norris, McTeague (1899)

Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900)

Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (1901)

Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (1919)

Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920)

Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922)

Jean Toomer, Cain (1923)

Anita Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925)

William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain (1925)

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926)

Nella Larsen, Passing (1929)

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930)

Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (1930)

Erskine Caldwell, Tobacco Road (1932)

Tom Kromer, Waiting for Nothing (1935)

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (1936)

D’Arcy McNickle, The Surrounded (1936)

H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness (1936)

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust (1939)

Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)

John Steinbeck, Cannery Row (1945)

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (1952)

Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha (1952)

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (1956)

John Okada, No-No Boy (1957)

William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1959)

Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (1959)

Walter M. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)

Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)

Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle (1962)

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1965)

Frank Herbert, Dune (1965)

Truman Capote, In Cold Blood (1966)

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971)

Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (1972)

Joanna Russ, The Female Man (1975)

Ann Beattie, Chilly Scenes of Winter (1976)

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (1980)

Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine (1984)

Samuel Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984)

Andrea Lee, Sarah Phillips (1984)

Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street (1984)

Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985)

Bobbie Ann Mason, In Country (1985)

Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

Paul Auster, In the Country of Last Things (1987)

Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club (1989)

Philip Roth, American Pastoral (1997)

Nora Okja Keller, Comfort Woman (1997)

Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist (1999)

Percival Everett, Erasure (2001)

Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake (2003)

Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge (2008)

E.L. Doctorow, Homer & Langley (2009)