Advanced Higher English dissertation ideas!

Thank you both for your suggestions! I actually had a complete change of mind and decided to go down the social issues route. I thinking about doing To Kill a Mockingbird and how the issues in the novel impact on children. To compare it, I thought of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne but I'm not sure as it is a kids book even though it fits the topic well.

Would you guys have any thoughts on other texts?

To Kill a Mockingbird is taught at Nat 5 so I'd maybe avoid that...
A good novel that deals with racism (though not a child narrator) is Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man - works by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Zora Neale Hurston are also worth exploring.

Non-Fiction wise:
Maya Angelou's autobiography series may be another interesting avenue. Huey P. Newton (leader and co-founder of Black Panthers) also wrote an autobiography called Revolutionary Suicide.

Boy in Striped Pyjamas really wouldn't be appropriate. A boy in my class the year just gone by wrote a dissertation on the death of a parent in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathon Safran Foer (narrated by 9 year old) and Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch . - may be worth looking in to?

Emma Donoghue's Room is another novel worth looking into if you want to tackle child narrators specifically.

I'm thinking about doing Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Apart from love what other themes do you think are common between both books?

Ahhhhh the Bronte sisters are some of my favourite writers - Jane Eyre is the book that inspired my love for English 😍

The main concern with doing these would be they aren't exactly uncommon texts, so if you're going to do them they need to be done very well as the marker will have most likely read many dissertations on them in previous years/ perhaps even in the year they mark yours and therefore comparisons will be inevitable. It may be worth looking into The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte, or Villette by Charlotte for a more unique twist. There is also Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys which is a novel from the perspective of Bertha Mason set while Rochester is in the colonies - although I believe that this and Jane Eyre is a fairly common pairing as well.

Themes that come to mind are:
- Romanticism (basically, love - as you said)
- deconstructing the Romanticism (everyone in Wuthering Heights is a pretty awful person, and the argument can certainly be made that Rochester is only so charming because Jane herself is narrating the story)
- A look at gender would also be possible, particularly how female characters are presented
- Love in the form of Obsession
- The Gothic
- The presence and importance of Nature
- Character development (Jane Eyre is a Bildungsroman after all )
- Social Class

(these aren't mutually exclusive options btw, you could easily pick and match some together, or some could take smaller parts under the other - e.g an example title may be something like:
"A Literary Study of The Transformative Impact of Love on the Character Development of Cathy Earnshaw and Jane Eyre in Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte"
And within it, it could also touch on the Gothic elements, Nature imagery and Obsession etc.)

Hope that I helped 😅

I'm planning to use Despair by Wladimir Nabokov and Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky but I'm yet to decide a title

i was contemplating looking at how the use of second person perspective affects the theme/way we perceive the characters, with "if on a winters night a traveler" by italo calvino, the fall by albert camus & a man asleep georges perec, but im not sure how well that would work/if the books would be suitable as they're all quite short. Any help and book suggestions would be appreciated.

I'm thinking of doing The American Dream in New York in the start of the 20th century and using Gatsby and A Tree Grows In Brooklyn to compare the difference around the same time/area. Do you think this is a good idea, or too basic?

can anyone give me ideas on what books I could link with clockwork orange.

I'm not really familiar with either text however I suppose the obvious choice would be an analysis of guilt? ( Something on the significance of narration would be good too )




The length of the books doesn't matter too much, it's the complexity that is important - writing a whole dissertation on 2nd person narration and how it affects the way we perceive characters may prove a tad repetitive however, perhaps take a theme as your jumping off point. Then under the theme you can discuss the 2nd person narration, and the reader's perception of characters. (I'm only saying this cause my friend did her dissertation based around colour symbolism and the analysis became quite repetitive because it was focused more on analysing a technique than a theme)



I'd substitute Gatsby for another book (it's taught a lot at Higher) - Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck perhaps? - or, The Color Purple by Alice Walker could be really interesting (since that and Tree Grows in Brooklyn deal with kids: the comparison of Northern White Childhood vs Southern Black Childhood could also be touched upon, as well as child narration.) I would also warn you not to turn it into a historical study, the theme of the American Dream would be important - however, you'd have to be careful it didn't turn into a "this happened in book X, because it is set in place Y, whereas in book Z, that happened as it is set in place Q - this shows the differing experiences of the American Dream." Focus on the analysis of the literary techniques in representing the differing American experiences, however, and you're on to a winner

Hello!! I'm maybe a tad late to this, but thought I'd share my thoughts nonetheless.

I'm planning on writing about female sexuality and views/portrayals of female sexuality in literature, focusing on The Bell Jar and another novel. My teacher suggested books like Wuthering Heights, The Scarlet Letter and Beloved among others. It seemed that certain themes i.e. mental illness are highly overdone when it comes to The Bell Jar so I wanted to stray from that. If anyone has any other ideas for books/authors that I could look at alongside Plath it would be much appreciated !!

Erica Jong's Fear of Flying would be my gut reaction recommendation for something focusing on female sexuality. (And it was written in the early 70s so it's roughly of the same time as the Bell Jar which may prove better than the anachronism a comparison with any of the more classic novels dealing with the theme, like Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina etc would result in)