One very speedy
way to survey Austen scholarship is to review issues of
Persuasions On-line
the electronic journal of JASNA.
For over a decade there has been an annual review of Austen scholarship
at the end of most issues.
For example:
Jane Austen
Works and Studies 2002, compiled by Barry Roth.
You can just glance over the citations to discover the kinds of issues
being discussed. Before 1996,
there�s a series of print volumes edited by Barry Roth that catch up with Austen
scholarship to their year of publication.
Recent online
annual summaries are compiled by Deborah Barnum, for example:
Jane
Austen Bibliography, 2007 or
Jane Austen
Bibliography, 2012.
I could abstract topics from these bibliographies, but that�s part of the fun for you. You should be able to make better use of your time studying these focused bibliographies.
Once you have a topic and some seed articles or chapters, use online databases to develop the "cluster" of related articles into which you wish to insert your own argument. At UW there are three such excellent databases:
MLA International Bibliography
JSTOR (Journal Storage Archive)
Arts & Humanities Citation Index
We'll have a short demo of these by librarian Kaijsa Calkins at 3 pm on Wednesday, April 15.
The final research paper should be 7-10 pages, double spaced with a table of Works Cited.