Established upon the 75th anniversary of W. W. Norton & Company, the Norton Scholar’s Prize was awarded annually during the years 1998 to 2008 for an outstanding undergraduate essay on a literary topic.
The Norton Scholar's Prize competition has now been retired, but a new writing competition is forthcoming.
The eleven winners of The Norton Scholar's Prize are listed below. You can click on their titles to read the winning essays.
“Nation-making and Movie-making”: Cinema in Midnight’s Children
Helen Cespedes
Barnard College
Kathryn C. Fore
University of California, Irvine
"Directitude? what's that?": A Verbal Blunder and Unstable Identity in Coriolanus
Garth Kimbrell
University of Kansas
The Communal Space Between: Reconciliation in Emerson’s "Experience"
Rachel Banner
Oakland University
The Opacity of Evil: The Turn from Theodicy in The Winter’s Tale
Matthew Valdiviez
University of New Mexico
Reading Alcibiades as an Appropriative Self
Boris Rodin Maslov
University of California, Berkeley
Rachel and the Household Gods: An Interpretation of Genesis 31
Susannah Rutherglen
Yale University
In Others’ Words: Michelle Cliff’s Epigraphical Black Atlantic Structure
Erin McMullen
Ball State University
"Rapine Sweet": The Rape of Proserpina and Eve’s Fall
Jessica Bulman
Yale University
The Fantasy of Orality in Absalom, Absalom!
Caleb Smith
University of California, Berkeley
"I will live content elsewhere": The Importance of Exile in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney
Andrzej Niekrasz
St. Louis University
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