English Paper Topics

English Paper Topics

Whether you want us to choose your English paper topic and write your paper, or whether you are looking for inspiration to start or continue your own work, we can help! If you aren’t an English major, you might think about the ways that the book you are writing about intersects with your major.

To give you an idea of how you can use any type of book to talk about any kind of subject, I’ll use an example from the self help genre. If you are writing about Marie Kondo’s The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, you can write about self-help books from the perspective of psychology, sociology, or even anthropology. You can do this by comparing self-help book trends in different countries, or at different times in the same country.

You can also explore the self-help genre from a scientific standpoint, by examining the almost universal failure rates of diets and comparing them with the economic success of the self-help publishing industry. Perhaps you are an economics major, in that case, you can explore the economic trends of the self-help industry versus that of novels.

If you want to write about it in a strictly “English department” way, you can even write about self-help texts in novels. For example, the women in Jane Austen’s novels are often reading self-help texts, usually of a religious nature, because the genre was considered appropriate for women while novels were considered a luxury that would encourage women to be lazy. Some of these perceptions persist today, where women’s choices in reading are derided. So, self-helps texts can be explored as a historical phenomena, a religious imperative, and a feminist reality, in terms of novels alone.

60 Research Paper Topics

We can write about literature, but we can also write literature! That is, if you need short stories, plays, poetry, or other prose fiction, we can write those, as well. Here are another 60 research paper topics for papers about English language texts:

1. /Satire: It’s more than just repeating the opposition’s language: Satirical signifiers
2. A critical essay: It’s not about complaints or praise
3. Adult fantasies of childhood in English language literature of the early twentieth century
4. Alice Walker: Books on film
5. American protest literature of the 21^st century
6. Argumentative essay: All writing classes from K-12 should include units on code switching
7. Argumentative essay: Why you should recycle and carpool as much as possible
8. Audience matters: How thinking about who you are talking to can improve your writing
9. Best bites: The Canterbury Tales and how teaching choice parts of ‘great works’ fails students
10. Catch-22 book review
11. Cause and effect essay: How stereotypes make day to day life harder
12. Cause and effect essay: Lies that help and lies that hurt
13. Change of scene: Walking, dancing, and sitting in Jane Austen’s novels
14. Combat in English literature: King Arthur and others
15. Comics and graphic novels: How to write about images
16. Comics on screen: iZombie
17. Coming of age stories in Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
18. Conflict with self in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
19. Critical essays include expository, descriptive, definition, and persuasive elements
20. Definition essay: You didn’t know and now you do
21. Descriptive essay: What I’m talking about in five paragraphs
22. Editing as composition: How to improve your writing
23. Expository essay: Almost no one enjoyed their K-12 experience, how can we improve the system
24. Expository essay: Why “compare and contrast” is both repetitive and unclear
25. Fiction into film: Gone Girl and The Leftovers
26. Five paragraph essay: The Hunger Games
27. From movie, the musical, to movie: Hairspray
28. Gendered humor in George Eliot’s Middlemarch
29. Harry Potter and the dream of a life without parents
30. Hermione Granger and Girl Friday
31. Hester Prynne and Monica Lewinski: Puritan narratives of women in America
32. Humor in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice
33. Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility  and Christopher Marlowe’s and Dr. Faustus: I read them in high school and no one knew they were funny
34. Literature off the page: Playwriting and screenwriting: The theater background of Tina Fey and other television stars
35. Media and identity in contemporary literature
36. Misfits and underdogs in literature
37. Musical theater rises again: Its influence on contemporary comedy
38. My heroes have always been fictional
39. Newspaper writing and opinion-editorials: How op-eds evolved in American newspapers
40. No drama: Placidity as a mode of cultural control in contemporary novels
41. Persuasive essay: Shakespeare should be left behind in the majority of American schools
42. Persuasive essay: Why computer literacy should be a part of all education
43. Presentation of the self: J.K. Rowling in the Harry Potter books
44. Rare birds: Women antiheroes in literature
45. Rhetorical devices and responsibility: You, them, we, and me
46. Shakespeare, race, and the 21^st century
47. The Bronte sisters and their terrible men: Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
48. The delicacy of the human spirit: George Orwell’s 1984: The responsibility of government toward its citizens
49. The emptiness of theme in understanding literature
50. The Pacific Northwest in fiction: Lee Maracle’s Ravensong
51. The poem I would want read at my funeral and why
52. Theater for whom? Race, class, and gender in contemporary drama audiences
53. Theater: What plays and vaudeville taught me about television
54. Very rich or very poor: The absence of working class life in American novels
55. What I learned when I learned how to read poetry
56. Where are the real lives? Why don’t contemporary novels have anything about life in them
57. Who cares? Why schools should stop teaching William Gold’s The Lord of the Flies
58. Words have moods: How to write feelings
59. Writing about nature in the 21^st century: The return of conquest stories
60. Youth is no longer for the young: How teenagers and 20somethings exchanged rhetorics

See more great research paper topics by discipline.