Please select one of the five essay questions:

1. Set during a volatile, dynamic and factionary moment in eighteenth-century European history, when religion must make way to reason and science, Ingenious Pain historically dramatises the friction between the embedded spiritual thinking of its time and the rise of a new philosophic project: the Enlightenment. How is the opposition of science and religion, thematically played out in Andrew Miller's historical fiction?

2. The Enlightenment, as a philosophic movement, profoundly shifted how the modern world would be shaped, through its influence in the fields of science, economics, politics and art. Please research a single field of the mentioned disciplines that was greatly altered by Enlightenment thinking, and compare your findings with how Andrew Miller fictionally treats this change in Ingenious Pain.

3. The Enlightenment, essentially, was about a great change in collective thinking. Analogously, in Andrew Miller's book, the protagonist, James Dyer, is helpless to change taking place within himself, as well as the world around him. Please write an essay that analyzes this transformation, and explain what Miller believes as the importance of such human mutability.

4. One of the major themes discussed in Alain de Botton's Consolations of Philosophy human suffering through the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. For the German philosopher, a world without pain makes no sense, since through his rational deduction, pain is essential to our psychic growth in the long term. Andrew Miller seems to take a similar stance, as he fictionally constructs a character who enters the world immune to physical and emotional suffering; hence anaesthetized also to pleasure. Please explore how Miller takes a Nietzschean stance on human suffer ing, by analyzing the different stages of metamorphosis that takes place with James Dyer, as he goes from an indifferent
automaton child to a full-bodied-feeling human being.

5. As a creative option to your list of essay questions, I would like for you to imagine that you have been assigned the task of writing a sequel to Andrew Miller's first novel. Ingenious Pain leaves off with not only the burial of the curious James Dyer, but the correspondences relating his early life in which the good Reverend Lestrade received from people associated with James. Moreover, the ever mysterious companion of the good doctor, Mary, is one of several who survives and outlives the supernatural Dyer.

Please continue the story of Miller's world of Ingenious Pain, in the voice and structure that reflects your own prose and style. Again, for those who want to challenge themselves in an inventive project like this, please take some solace in that I will read the submission knowing that this option demands creative prose outside of a traditional argumentative essay.