Glutton for punishment

So, I'm toying with the idea of doing another Masters. This time in Arts or whatever they offer that's similar.

I really enjoyed (perversely) doing the last one, and I learnt a heck of a lot from it, but I want to do one in Literature.

The trouble is, if I do a Masters by Research (which is probably what I'm going to do), then I have to write something like 40,000 words on my chosen subject, unless I can work out some kind of fancy-pants project with whatever institution I do my Masters with.

At the moment, the four areas I'd like to look at as a Masters project are:

"Tarzan and the Lost City" - Looking at the role of lost civilisations in popular literature in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries and, in particular Edgar Rice Burrough's strange tendency to use that particular plot device over and over again.

"A Garden in the Antipodes" - Using Ursula Bethell's From a Garden in the Antipodes as a starting point, looking at the depiction of Australia and New Zealand domestic life in verse (particularly as depicted by women poets)*.

"Liiv vs Yeats" - juxtaposing the life and writings of Juhan Liiv and William Yeats.

"Language Learner Literature" - examining whether graded readers and adapted texts can be considered a distinct form of literature, exploring "texts in adaptation" as opposed to "texts in translation" and looking at what considerations go into creating a new field of literary study.

Could I milk 40,000 words out of any of these? I have grave doubts.

So would I be better off doing a Masters by Coursework and adapting one of these as a project or dissertation, rather than a full blown Masters thesis? And, if I were particularly clever, would I be able to combine it with one of the things I'm already studying? I've noticed a couple of the subjects I want to do for my Diploma of Languages also pop up in the list of potential subjects for a Masters by Coursework if I go through UNE...


*Actually, what I'd really love to do is "edit" a new publication of this - with an introduction at the front and essays at the back, but lots of pictures of English flowers in New Zealand gardens and illustrations around the poems and all sorts of prettiness. Maybe with a CD of recordings of the poems as well. I wonder if I could convince someone to let me do that as a Masters project?