Full-length essay question: Your paper must be at least two pages in length and must contain a thesis, an analysis of the elements in the thesis, supporting evidence (examples from course readings), and a conclusion. Your essay must reflect a sense of order and avoid major grammatical errors.

Prompt: This course has surveyed some 750 years’ worth of British literature–a time that witnessed countless scientific, religious, philosophical, and cultural developments. As a result the literature we’ve read addresses numerous challenges in areas such as class, gender, religion, and politics. Discuss how storytelling in many of the forms we’ve covered this semester reflects those challenges, using ONE of the following quotes to *frame* your response, and be sure to note which quote you’re using in your answer:

1. By god, if women had written stories

As clerks had written their oratories

They would have written of men more wickedness

Than all the mark of Adam may redress. (Chaucer)

2. “He that desires to print a book, should much more desire to be a book.” (Donne)

3. “For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.” (Milton)

4. “Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.” (Francis Bacon).

Building on the ideas from your chosen quotation, develop an argumentative essay about how storytelling connects with history and culture. In your response, please provide a brief timeline of the works we’ve covered this semester, and be sure to discuss at least THREE of the works you mention in depth. Your thesis should express a position on the relationship between narrative and its cultural context.