Leadership in Literature: A Research Proposal Review
This research proposal outlines a plan to examine how leadership is represented in five significant literary works published within the past two decades. Drawing on fiction, drama, and historical nonfiction, the proposal argues that meaningful literary representations of leadership extend well beyond portraits of powerful figures to include followers, subordinates, and morally compromised individuals. The five selected works—Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, Peter Morris's Guardians, George Saunders's "Winky," Adam Thirlwell's Politics, and Jonathan Franzen's Freedom—are analyzed through interpretive methodology supported by secondary critical literature, with the goal of illuminating leadership from new and unexpected angles.
- Introduction: Leadership vs. Leaders in Literature: Distinguishing literary leadership from powerful characters
- Research Questions and Objectives: Five works examined across multiple leadership perspectives
- Literature Review: Secondary scholarship on Guardians and Abu Ghraib
- Research Methodology: Interpretive approach to fiction and nonfiction sources
- Conclusion: Recent literature illuminates contemporary leadership anew
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What makes this paper effective
- The proposal opens with a sharp and memorable distinction between "leadership" and "leaders," using King Lear as an illustrative example to immediately anchor the argument in literary analysis.
- The selection of five contrasting works is clearly justified: each represents a distinct perspective on leadership (high-ranking, low-ranking, ironic, explicit, implicit), giving the proposal methodological coherence.
- The methodology section honestly addresses the interpretive challenge of analyzing creative fiction versus peer-reviewed scholarship, showing intellectual self-awareness about the research design.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The proposal effectively uses secondary literature as a bridge between creative works and scholarly argument. By citing Greenberg and Beilin as examples of how critics have engaged with Guardians, the writer demonstrates how interpretive claims about fiction can be grounded in documented scholarly debate—a technique central to literary research proposals.
Structure breakdown
The paper follows a standard research proposal format: an introduction establishing the conceptual framework, a section defining research questions and objectives with brief annotations of each primary text, a literature review (illustrated through one work), a methodology section addressing the interpretive approach to creative works, and a conclusion restating the study's purpose and rationale. Approximately 1,100 words total; graduate-level vocabulary and citation density.
Introduction: Leadership vs. Leaders in Literature
The representation of leadership in literary works is not identical to the representation of leaders. To take one of the most famous examples in English literature, King Lear may be the highest-ranking leader in the Shakespeare tragedy that bears his name, but his actions are neither wise nor principled. Lear's Fool, the court jester, arguably displays more leadership over the course of the drama. Examining literary representations of leadership in the past two decades, therefore, will not always entail examining stories about powerful or influential people.
In outlining a research proposal to examine how leadership issues are illuminated by recently published works, it is crucial to understand that a proper survey will include a mix of works. Some of these works will examine directly the highest leadership roles, such as that of a commander-in-chief, while other works will illuminate leadership from the perspective of the ordinary soldiers who follow that lead. This proposal will follow that principle, although in some sense it may seem contradictory to observe that sometimes the best approach to evaluating good leadership entails looking at followers or at bad leaders.
Research Questions and Objectives
The five works under examination have been selected to provide a broad spectrum with points of contrast, so as to approach the question of leadership from different angles. The primary objective in selecting these works is to view leadership from multiple perspectives, and to do so with recent works that have occasioned significant comment in secondary literature, so that a variety of critical perspectives on the five authors can be incorporated.
The contradictions potentially inherent in the study of leadership are summed up in what we might fairly describe as the most influential book about leadership published in the early twenty-first century: Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Although this story of a powerful and influential leader—Abraham Lincoln—was famously embraced as a template for leadership by Barack Obama, the central figure in Goodwin's book is one who had never held any significant leadership post before finding himself in command of an entire nation during a time of civil war.
Other recent works explore issues of leadership by focusing on the conscience of the individual who is led by another and struggles to exhibit leadership in his or her own conduct. Therefore, a study of recent literary works about leadership might focus on depictions of lower-ranking characters. The 2006 stage drama Guardians by Peter Morris depicts a female American soldier during the Iraq War—clearly modeled on Private Lynndie England of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal—who finds herself pressured to commit immoral and criminal acts in the course of duty. George Saunders's short story "Winky," originally published in The New Yorker in 1997, has already become a staple of college syllabi; it too examines leadership from the perspective of a follower: in this case, an ordinary person who seeks "life coaching" with heartbreaking results. Adam Thirlwell's 2003 novel Politics presents a novel twist on the relationship between leadership at the highest level and ordinary personal drama. The story of a love relationship between two young Londoners, the novel rather daringly offers examples from the lives of high-ranking political leaders like Stalin and Mao to illuminate the choices made on an intimate personal level by a couple whose relationship is falling apart. Finally, Jonathan Franzen's 2010 novel Freedom similarly represents a character trying to exhibit leadership while remaining true to his conscience, as he takes a public relations job working for a coal industry billionaire but still hopes to advance environmentalist causes.
This selection of five works carries a distinguished literary pedigree: all were nominated for or received significant awards. To some extent, they all involve relevant political issues from the last two decades—some directly, like Franzen and Morris, who both engage with the Iraq War, and some more indirectly, like Goodwin, whose examination of Lincoln's leadership in the Civil War serves as an implicit contrast to the domineering, cocksure style employed during the Iraq War by the Bush administration with disastrous results. But the way in which each work approaches the question of leadership differs significantly. Leadership is seen ironically in Saunders and Thirlwell: Saunders looks at what happens when a strong leader gives strong instructions to someone in no position to follow them, and Thirlwell examines aspects of the most famous leaders—good and bad—of the twentieth century to explore what happens to a couple who are dating, a situation that should be a model of leaderless collaboration but which always involves individuals making individual decisions.
As a result, examining who the "leader" is in each of these works will require different approaches. Abraham Lincoln is presented in full portrait by Goodwin, while the leadership guru in Saunders's short story appears in the first half but the action of the story focuses on the follower who takes the guru's advice. In the first, comments on leadership are explicit; in the second, they are implicit, as the reader is asked to understand and judge leadership by its results and by how it affects the people being led.
Conclusion
The five works proposed for focus may seem to represent a broad range of subjects: a short story about a poor man who takes advice from a business-class life coach, a novel about a failing relationship that compares the couple to Stalin and Mao, a play about a soldier convicted of crimes after following orders, a novel about an executive whose ethical qualms prompt his firing, and a historical study of Abraham Lincoln. What is crucial to understand, however, is that all of these works are less than twenty years old and illuminate not only the question of leadership but, more particularly, what leadership looks like in the present moment. Creative works reflect the way we live now in a way that great historical works on leadership from the past—such as Plato's Republic—cannot. It is the goal of this study, therefore, to approach the question of leadership in the most current and creative way possible by looking at recent creative works, illuminating leadership from new and surprising angles.
References
Beilin, K. (2012). "The split-screen syndrome": Structuring (non)-seeing in two plays on Abu Ghraib. Comparative Drama, 46, 427–450.
Franzen, J. (2010). Freedom. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Goodwin, D. K. (2005). Team of rivals: The political genius of Abraham Lincoln. Simon and Schuster.
Greenberg, K. J. (2007). Split screens. In T. McKelvey (Ed.), One of the guys: Women as aggressors and torturers (pp. 37–44). Seal Press.
Morris, P. (2006). Guardians. Dramatists Play Service.
Saunders, G. (1997, July 28). Winky. The New Yorker.
Thirlwell, A. (2003). Politics. Jonathan Cape.
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