Which is the best (focussed, appropriate, achievable) thesis statement?

A colorful and creative image depicting iconic literary elements, including books, quills, and symbols of famous works like Pride and Prejudice and Twelfth Night in a whimsical, artistic style.

Literary Thesis Statement Quiz

Test your understanding of thesis statements in classic literature! This quiz covers four iconic works, challenging you to identify the most focused and effective thesis statements.

Each question presents multiple choices related to:

Pride and Prejudice
Maus
Twelfth Night
Various poems

4 Questions1 MinutesCreated by WritingWave87

Pride and Prejudice

Through reference to Roland Barthes essay on “The Death of the Author,” this essay will argue that Pride and Prejudice was, in a very real way, written by a 70-year-old Danish man in the year 2019.

The marriage plots in Pride and Prejudice allow Austen to satirize the inequalities of male-female relations in her society. The novel’s message to its audience is that women need to be treated as more than wives and companions.

Irony is important in Pride and Prejudice as it allows the author to explore the difference between appearance and real character.

While the technique of free indirect discourse provides access to some characters’ interior thoughts in Pride and Prejudice, development of character depends just as much on Austen demonstrating characters’ failure to think at key moments in the novel.

The continued success of Pride and Prejudice has to do with evolutionary factors that condition us to prioritize the selection of the best partner for the survival of the species.

Maus

The novel’s attention to the complexities of storytelling, and its use of multiple narrative frames, makes it clear that graphic novels can be just as sophisticated and literary as canonical novels.

My principal claim is that the indirect and unreliable narration of Vladek is achieved in ways available only to graphic novels, which I will demonstrate in the sections of this essay.

Maus is a complicated piece of narative fiction, with three overlapping narrative modes, as McGlothlin argues.

This essay will argue that the animal allergories of Maus: A Survivor’s Tale allow Spiegelman to praise and criticize different nations’ behaviour in World War Two without reverting to national stereotypes.

Twelfth Night

By setting Twelfth Night in Illyria, Shakespeare encouraged his audience to think of the Mediterranean south as a place of sexual freedom.

The Elizabethan requirement that male actors play female parts allows Twelfth Night to explore gender identity.

Disguised identity (and disguised gender) in Twelfth Night is important because it allows characters to reflect on who and what they truly desire, and encourages the audience to do the same.

In our present, non-binary historical moment, we intepret the play very differently from Shakespeare’s original audience.

Poems

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“Ladies First” inherits a poetic form, and reconfigures the gender relationship of its address; this argument will be illustrated through comparison with Aretha Franklin’s recording of Otis Redding’s song “Respect.”

In “Ladies First” and “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” Queen Latifah and Emily Dickinson interrogate the ethics of turn-taking and the right to go first.

The speaker of Langston Hughes’s poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” has a distinctive and realist voice, even though it has no historically identifiable persona.

Reading “My Last Duchess” carefully enables an interpretation that the poem is not a dramatic monologue but an address to the parents of his next Duchess.

Which is the best (focussed, appropriate, achievable) thesis statement?

Literary Thesis Statement Quiz

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