Essay 3: Drama or Novel In our first unit, we learned about the elements of fict

Essay 3: Drama or Novel
In our first unit, we learned about the elements of fiction; for this paper, you will choose a text
and analyze one specific element: setting. You can choose to write about either Glaspell’s play
Trifles or Doyle’s novel The Hound of the Baskervilles. Once you have chosen a text, focus
closely on how the author creates his or her setting, remembering everything we learned about
different types (temporal, physical/geographical, etc.) and functions of setting.
This is also a research essay, which means that you need to include secondary sources
(contextual, historical, critical). Your most important evidence in this essay will come from the
primary text (quotes, paraphrases, references), but the secondary source material will also be
vital to proving your point. For help on how to choose quality secondary sources, check out this
week’s presentation.
Your thesis in this essay should make an argumentative claim about how your chosen author
establishes his or her setting, or about how your author uses setting to accomplish something in
the text. A sample thesis for this paper might look like this:
Sample Thesis 1: In Trifles, Susan Glaspell uses the appearance and arrangement of various
household articles to create a disturbed setting that mirrors the mind of the accused woman.
Sample Thesis 2: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles uses Stone Age ruins
to both support the plot of the story and reinforce the theme of the hold that the past can have on
the present.
Sources
For this paper, you must include at least three scholarly secondary sources. Scholarly sources
include printed books and literary journals, reputable fully-online literary journals, and reputable
websites (sites that end in .org or .edu). See this week’s presentation for help on how to choose
good sources and use HBU library databases. All secondary sources and your primary text of
choice must be cited in the essay and included on the Works Cited Page.
Requirements
The paper should be at least 1,000 words long and formatted according to MLA style rules. Use
Times New Roman font, 12-point size. Margins should be one-inch. All papers must be double-spaced