This paper should examine a question, image, argument, contradiction, or connection that catches your attention. These papers are not only literature essays but also exercises in critical thinking, which should examine and analyze an issue on a level more meaningful than mere liking/disliking. Two research sources per essay will be required, correctly cited in MLA style.
The assignment and question:

In Biographia Literaria XIV, Coleridge writes:

The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural, and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life…In this idea originated the plan of the ′Lyrical Ballads′; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least Romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith” .
Considering Coleridge’s assertion, write an essay analyzing the text we have read with supernatural elements: Elizabeth Gaskell ″ The Old Nurses Tale″ How well does this text work in terms of inducing “the willing suspension of disbelief”?

Category: Essays