English Literature Dissertation

Hey! I'm doing an MA in English Lit and have the dissertation to start and complete. The guidance I've had is to pick a topic and go with it. For my undergrad, I did a dissertation in Education which is very different. Can anyone please explain to me what an English lit one entails?

I assumed it was to find a gap? However, there are two other people in my group who are a bit further on that me and have had feedback. Their dissertations are just "rethinking" topics but from what i've read-they aren't addressing a gap? So it is just, research a topic and give your opinion and try and say something different?

I'm very confused and probably overthinking but would appreciate the help!

Reply 1

Anonymous #1

OP

Original post

by Anonymous

Hey! I'm doing an MA in English Lit and have the dissertation to start and complete. The guidance I've had is to pick a topic and go with it. For my undergrad, I did a dissertation in Education which is very different. Can anyone please explain to me what an English lit one entails?

I assumed it was to find a gap? However, there are two other people in my group who are a bit further on that me and have had feedback. Their dissertations are just "rethinking" topics but from what i've read-they aren't addressing a gap? So it is just, research a topic and give your opinion and try and say something different?

I'm very confused and probably overthinking but would appreciate the help!

Also, I did explain this to my tutor but she told me to just read example dissertations.

Reply 2

Keele University

13

Original post

by Anonymous

Hey! I'm doing an MA in English Lit and have the dissertation to start and complete. The guidance I've had is to pick a topic and go with it. For my undergrad, I did a dissertation in Education which is very different. Can anyone please explain to me what an English lit one entails?

I assumed it was to find a gap? However, there are two other people in my group who are a bit further on that me and have had feedback. Their dissertations are just "rethinking" topics but from what I've read-they aren't addressing a gap? So it is just, research a topic and give your opinion and try and say something different?

I'm very confused and probably overthinking but would appreciate the help!

You don't usually have to make identifying and finding a 'gap' in the current literature a focus of your research project until PhD level. At MA level, re-thinking or building upon existing research is usually fine so don't worry about having to be entirely original.

In terms of picking a topic, you're going to want to choose something you're interested in as you'll be researching and writing about it for quite a while! I would advise you to start big - a text, an author, a literary period or genre, a theme - and then narrow down your topic as you research. Start reading a chosen text, or a secondary text about the period/genre and think about what interests you - what do you want to know more about? Then have a look to see if anyone else has asked that question and what they have to say about it, and think about how you can add to that conversation.

So for my MA dissertation, for example, I knew I wanted to write about Arthurian literature and that I was interested in gender studies. I did my BA dissertation on Tennyson's 'Idylls of the King' so I had a vague idea about writing more on that. Reading around the topic, I came across a book about Arthurianism in the Romantic period, which got me thinking about what was happening in terms of Arthurianism before Tennyson wrote the 'Idylls'. There was considerably less literature about this earlier period so I started looking at source materials, reading what was out there etc. Eventually I wrote a dissertation that looked at the formation of chivalric masculinity in the Arthurian narrative from 1760 - 1850. Tennyson ended up becoming my final chapter and my dissertation examined how ideas of masculinity and chivalry had developed into the form seen in Tennyson's poetry. My PhD has since come out of my MA and I'm now examining the development of Arthurianism in the long eighteenth century - research leads to research!

As your tutor suggested, looking at other MA thesis' is not a bad idea for getting a sense of what sort of scope your topic needs to cover and the methodology you might want to use - a lot of students try to cover far too much in their MA dissertations but you soon realise that 15,000 words isn't really that much once you start conducting deep analysis of your chosen texts! You don't need to read the whole thesis - maybe just find a few that are broadly in your area of interest and give the abstract a read, or take a look at how the thesis is structured. There are a few available at https://library.leeds.ac.uk/dissertation-examples, or maybe ask some of the current PhD students at your university if they would be prepared to share their thesis' with you? You can also find examples of PhD thesis at https://ethos.bl.uk - it might be helpful to look at some of these to get a sense of the difference in scope between an MA and a PhD thesis (plus some of them may also provide useful secondary reading for your topic!).

You might also find it helpful to see if your university has any MA writing/study skills guides. These often have sections on choosing a topic - most guides aren't subject specific, but the tips and tricks that they include are often relevant to all disciplines.

Hope that helps!

Amy :smile:

English Literature Dissertation

Related discussions

Articles for you

How The Student Room is moderated