Exploring Genre Through the Pastoral Elegy: The “Lycidas” Project Assignments | Get Paper Help

We’ll spend a fair amount of time this semester exploring John Milton’s “Lycidas” from a variety of perspectives, primarily to gain an understanding of the many ways in which texts can be “contextualized” to better understand what and how they mean. This first project uses “Lycidas” to explore both the challenges inherent in genre as a concept and the role that literary precedents play in shaping a text’s meaning. It’s also meant to get you to begin familiarizing yourself with some useful research tools and strategies for filling gaps in your existing knowledge, using a variety of resources at your disposal through the HSU library and online. Our overall goal here is to learn what we can about the peculiar genre to which “Lycidas” belongs—the pastoral elegy—and how our ability to make sense of the poem depends on us “getting” the contexts and conventions of that genre.