BA (Hons) Creative Writing and English with Integrated Foundation Year

Skills and Scholarship in Humanities

This module provides you with an introduction to and practice of the key skills associated with the success in Humanities. Foregrounded areas will include: defining research questions; accessing research (using libraries, archives, galleries, and online sources); engaged reading of different materials (including a substantial range of sources); constructing arguments and developing structure in communication; communication in written and oral formats, including concise and longer formats.

This module is a toolkit for the skills and scholarship needed to thrive and to enjoy the humanities.

Understanding Ideas, Images and Creativity: Reading Humanities through concepts, objects and pictures

Humanities used to be primarily engaged with written materials and the production of analytical new research in written forms. This is no longer the case (in fact since about circa 1975).

Humanities engage with multiple non-text based sources including: paintings, objects, advertising, film and television, music and sound, posters, photography, graphic narratives, landscapes, and digital materials (including AI generated sources).

This module aims to introduce you to this space and support you to use it as part of your development as a scholar. It also consciously asks you to contextualize and explore non-text sources in their frequently changing multiple and global contexts.

Global Skills for the twenty-first century

Humanities scholarship today is no longer bound by national frameworks. Ideas of frontiers and borders no longer limit the questions we ask. However, what are the skills for understanding this ‘world’ and how are they practised in inclusive and reflective approaches that are democratic and thoughtful?

This module therefore explores: questions of translation, cultural influence and power; cultural intersections and cultural differences, framing the global north and the global south after empire, unpacking where experiences are globalizing and hybrid or that are valued for their specificity and localized meaning and value.

It will ask how did views of the world get things wrong (e.g. early anthropology) and how do scholars think of ‘the world’ today.

Engaging with the ‘Cultural Life’

This module prepares you for exploring and working with ‘culture’ – meaning all forms of public expression associated with the humanities.

It asks what it means to be interested in culture? How we learn to access and explore culture and what barriers may limit access?

It will offer you a chance to define and pursue your own form of cultural activity – ranging from engaging with a form (e.g. writing or blogging criticism) or making new culture (creative writing; curation).

Research Project or Making Humanities Work for You

This module allows you to engage in either an independent research project in any area of the Humanities (subject to staff approval) or to engage in an equivalent 10 days of work experience.

It offers you the chance to pursue your own interest in your preferred humanities area or explore work experience targeted to a future career.

Literature Now: Reading and Writing the Present Moment

This module introduces you to the contemporary cultural landscape by exploring recent literary texts and transformations of the literary (film, graphic novels, digital texts, gamification, etc.). Tracing multiple forms of ‘writing’ and ‘reading’, you will gain the capacity to engage creatively with the present and to develop your own critical responses.

Creating Characters

This module introduces you to the basics of creating credible characters.

The module will prompt you to make artistic decisions about the history of your characters, the setting and time of your characters’ lives, character motivation and perspective.

The Writer’s Notebook: Source and Reflection

This module introduces you to the fundamental skills of creative writing through engagement with the writer’s notebook and a variety of sources, from both personal experience and in the locality.

The module will focus on the training of the eye and ear in keen observation, the collection of detail and the recording of the full experience through the employment of the senses. You will learn the value of the ‘concrete’ as opposed to the ‘abstract’ and generalised, and discover how the ordinary can be rendered extraordinary.

By examining a selection of case studies of notebook entries, drafts and published creative writing, you will learn about the journey from rough idea to finished piece.

Subverting the Subject: Ideas in Literature from Barthes to Gaming

This module explores the idea of the subversion of the subject, our idea of the individual, across a range of ways of thinking about literature.

If fiction is already an exploration of the subject, and one that is potentially destabilising, then we need to consider how our selves might be considered as a kind of fiction and what results from this.

Ranging from the 1970s to the present, we will examine how ideas of the unconscious, of the body, of the libido, of power, of simulation, of performance, and of the machine and the animal undermine our sense of the boundaries of the human and even the human itself.

Decadence and Desire: Late Nineteenth-Century Literature

This module will familiarise you with a series of key texts from the late Victorian period, covering the 1880s through to the turn of the century.

It will focus on some of the major conflicts and controversies associated with this time of significant change and will consider the different ways in which a range of writers responded to these concerns.

The module will develop your skills in the application of contextual and historical knowledge to the structure and content of a range of texts, including novels, poetry, and short stories. The module will also help you to continue to develop the skills of close textual analysis, which you will rely on throughout your degree.

Introduction to Writing Short Fiction

You will build on skills and techniques acquired in the first semester: concrete imagery; writerly research; notebook gatherings; reflections on developing creative work.

You will encounter a variety of forms and voices in a range of examples from traditional and contemporary sources in both British and international short fiction.

The focus, however, will be on writing itself, finding and recognising source material and imaginative territories, and experimenting with voices, characters, dramatic structures, imagery, and genre.

This module forms the basis of a fiction ‘strand’ which can be developed throughout the course and intersects with a range of genre-specific modules. Themes covered include the digital world of a writer; writing across borders; finding a writer’s voice.

Agents of Change: Women’s Writing in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

This module explores the challenges made by women’s writing, both critical and creative, to established authority over the past two centuries.

Creative Non-Fiction: Writing Lives

Focusing on life narratives and creative non-fiction, including biography and autobiography, this module develops your skills in the genre of creative non-fiction.

Developing narrative and research skills, you will write an account of a transformative event in a person’s life.

Journalistic and digital communication skills will begin to develop, underpinned by the history of creative non-fiction. The concept of the ‘personal essay thesis’ will be explored, and you will be encouraged to articulate ‘the big idea’ or ‘the question at stake’ in your work.

In doing so, students will be encouraged to connect their creative non-fiction to relevant debates in contemporary culture and engage with the issues arising from them.

Understanding the creative potential of different forms will equip you with the ability to recognise, experiment with and transform a wide range of crafts, practices and modes of expression.

The ethics of life writing will remain a primary focus. Potential personal and professional consequences of publishing life writing will be explored, and workshops will provide you with the opportunity to provide sensitive responses to the life experiences of your peers.

Creative Writing: Poetry, Form and Freedom

This module will enable you to develop a variety of sophisticated traditional poetic forms and to develop experimental free verse poems within a reflective contemporary poetic practice.

Experiments in Fiction: Detection, Sci Fi, Magical Realism and Beyond

From historical fiction to science fiction, realism to romance, gothic to detective fiction, this essay-assessed module explores the way writers exploit genre to entertain, persuade or amaze.

You will discover some of the principal genres in prose fiction from the rise of the novel to the present day. You will trace the rise of genres in literary history, defining characteristic features of different kinds of prose text, which you will then be able to apply to your own writing and analytic work.

Genres are often passed over or ignored in certain kinds of modern literary criticism: this module explores why, and argues for the importance of often underrated generic forms.

You will learn to recognise key aspects of specific genres, and variations upon these elements, as well as to examine the historical conditions that give rise to particular genres and make them salient at particular moments.

Fairy Tales: Early Modern to Postmodern

Gain an informed historical and critical perspective on a powerful literary and cultural tradition beginning with the fairy tales written in early modern Italy, continuing through Perrault, D’Aulnoy, Grimm, Andersen to the work of more contemporary authors such as Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood. It also asks where we can turn to for modern fairy tales, through a focus on the use of fairy tale tropes in the work of J.K Rowling and Philip Pullman.

Fiction for Children

This module introduces you to writing fiction for children.

The module will extend and deepen your key writing skills as you learn to pay particular attention to such things as suitable and age-specific subject matter, appropriate language, a more active narration, faster pacing and the demands of greater immediacy.

Poetry: 1300 to the Present

The module aims to develop your understanding of rhythm, rhyme, free verse, diction, particular verbal effects, timbre, tone and voice. It will encourage awareness of the centrality of genre to a wide range of poetic practice from the Renaissance to the present day.

Prose Fiction: The Dynamic of Change

This module will explore the dynamics of change in the contemporary short story.

You will examine model short stories and how they invariably dramatise a significant change in character, and/or situation.

In doing so, you will understand how to analyse the devices writers use to shape narrative, and to create tension and conflict.

Renaissance to Restoration

This module explores the evolution of poetry and prose throughout the Renaissance era and into the Restoration period of the 17th century, as result of major political and religious turbulence.

You will consider the works of Spencer, Marlowe and Shakespeare, who begin to explore gender and history in their work, before moving on to the satirical poetry of Donne, Marvell, Milton, and Rochester.

Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries

After gaining knowledge of the earlier eighteenth century, you will study the Romantic period. This was a time of revolution: when the idea of ‘rights’ first emerged; when the ‘noble savage’ was imagined; when childhood was invented; and when an actress made love to a prince and wrote about women’s rights.

This module follows a chronological pattern but will teach the debates stimulated by the American and French Revolutions. It will examine their impact on the vibrant literature and ground-breaking thought of the time.

As well as covering the great works of the major Romantic poets, this module will examine the exciting genres and writers that have risen to prominence within the Romantic period relatively recently.

Work Placement

The work placement module allows you to develop your skills in a work environment and gain vital experience to put you ahead in your future career.

During your placement, you could gain experience in, for example, a workplace such as a local newspaper or as a writer-in-residence.

You will then use the skills you have learnt on your course in order to reflect critically on the world.

World Literature: Roots and Routes From Conrad to Afrofuturism

This module explores the role of literature in making the modern world. Using texts from around the world, you will consider a new sense of the globe, colonial relations and the new post-colonial world.

You will consider our sense of having roots in the world, especially national roots.

Charting a path through texts from the late 19th to the 21st century, the module does not aim to ‘represent’ the totality of world literature. Instead, you will study a selection of texts that engage with crucial issues. Within these, you encounter a variety of themes: from the violent imposition of imperial power, to the ecological challenge of global climate change.

Writing for the Screen

This module introduces you to the craft of writing a short cinematic screenplay.

The module focuses on the building blocks of screenwriting, with a focus on:

• visual storytelling
• plot (using treatments and step outlines)
• scene-building
• research skills
• characterisation
• setting
• sound
• struggle
• movement
• layout.

You will experience the collaborative nature of screenwriting, and explore the role of the screenwriter within the broader institutional framework of the industry.

Reenchanting ‘the West’: Learning from Myth and Sacred Texts

In this module, you will examine the genesis, evolution and global context of Western literature through an internationalist and beyond realist lens.

European and world myths, folklore, legends, wonder tales and sacred texts will be read and discussed in relation to global, historical and contemporary beyond realist and social realist oral literature and texts. 

You will be asked to consider questions concerning hidden social histories; political power; psychology; mythography; poetics; narrative structure; cultural appropriation; and translation.

Ultimately, the module will empower you to confidently participate in creative and critical conversations and writing modes.

You will be introduced to ‘the Cauldron of Story’: core texts and oral literature in the fields of world myth, legend, folklore and wonder tale.

Seminars will invite you to read these stories in relation to contemporary texts in English and English translation: work ‘speaking back’ to traditional narratives, including poetry and fiction.

Uniting these disparate fields of study will be a critical concern with themes of gender, power, disability, war, the supernatural, faith and the beyond human world. Jung’s theory of the archetype and Campbell’s ‘The Hero’s Journey’ will be introduced as conceptual frameworks subject to feminist, queer, post-structural and decolonial critique.

You will critically evaluate mythic archetypes and stereotypes. Questions of universality will be contextualised in relation to specific historical contexts, including our own diverse backgrounds and shared cultural experiences.

British Culture Wars

This module explores conflict within British culture from the start of the 19th century to the turn of the new millennium.

You will consider the reaction to obscene publications and other literary controversies and moral panics of Victorian Britain, through to the liberal reforms in the 1960s and the self-censorship and the baleful influence of Hollywood on British cinema.

Contemporary Short Fiction: Writing the Here and Now

This module will enable you to explore, as active writers and readers, the strategies, innovations and preoccupations of contemporary writers of the short story. You will read and analyse the craft, technique and rigour of three to four highly regarded short story collections from the last 15 years.

Digital Writing: Writing for the Community of Strangers

On this module, you will harness the skills developed during your course to engage with new possibilities in digital writing, including: blogs; gaming reviews, online journalism; social media campaigns; experimental digital writing; podcasts, fan fiction; etc.

You will develop your creative skills and augment them with the technical skills that are necessary to deliver a written project in a specific interest area.

You will be asked to submit a critical essay, exploring specific cultural and political issues that confront digital writers. You will be encouraged to explore experimental possibilities and to extend the range of your work by engaging with groups both within and beyond the university.

The module will cover a trinity of skills: academic, technological, and professional, with an emphasis on employability and transferring storytelling and narrative-building ideas into the job market.

Throughout, you will be encouraged to examine your chosen field critically and to engage with examples of the best professional practice.

English Literature Dissertation

The Dissertation enables you to build on your research and writing skills developed during the first two years of the degree. It gives you the opportunity to work independently on a research project of your own choosing (with supervision), to pursue specialist interests and to strengthen and enhance your knowledge of a chosen subject.

Creative Writing Dissertation

The Dissertation in Creative Writing gives students the opportunity to work independently on an imaginative writing project of their own choosing. This may take the form of a fiction project, a poetry project, a play or screenwriting project or a creative non-fiction project. It will include a related essay in which the student-writer investigates a particular artistic, aesthetic or cultural issue of relevance to you as a contemporary writer OR the work of a particular writer who will be influential as you develop your own body of work for the Dissertation project.

European Literary Legacies: Writing the City

This module will deal with anxieties regarding the relationship between reader, author and cityscape.

Not only will it provide a survey of a variety of canonical and non-canonical works drawn from and inspired by a specific location, it will provide you with a new set of theoretical constructs drawn from psychogeographic writers and texts.

Ranging from classic canonical texts to contemporary genre fiction, this course will provide you with an in-depth literary history of the period studied, clear connections between the texts under discussion and a renewed attempt to place theoretical readings in context.

Using key psychogeographic works by Benjamin, de Certeau, Debord, Sinclair and others, the early part of the module will situate you in the theoretical context for the study of the works developed from the geographic space – in this case, Venice.

The module will then go on to discuss key works created and inspired by Venice over the past four hundred years, and, by doing so, each work will build upon the other, creating a firm vision of the cityscape that has both transformed writers and has been transformed by literary and visual art over time.

Fairy Tales: Early Modern to Postmodern

Gain an informed historical and critical perspective on a powerful literary and cultural tradition beginning with the fairy tales written in early modern Italy, continuing through Perrault, D’Aulnoy, Grimm, Andersen to the work of more contemporary authors such as Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood. It also asks where we can turn to for modern fairy tales, through a focus on the use of fairy tale tropes in the work of J.K Rowling and Philip Pullman.

Gothic Women’s Writing

The aim of this module is to examine a range of women’s Gothic and Romantic- period writing, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Radcliffe and Jane Austen in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

You will explore a range of prose texts across a variety of genres, including the novel, the essay and the drama. You will discover how this writing was of importance to Romanticism.

You will also examine the use of the Gothic and assess how this popular yet often devalued mode of writing adds to our understanding of an extended Romantic period and to nineteenth-century literature.

You will explore the relationship between such writing and the political debates of the period. In particular, the module uses these writings to show the intensity of the debate concerning the nature of the individual and society in the political turmoil following the American and French Revolutions and their long-term aftermath.

By examining women’s writing, you will be encouraged to move away from naïve assumptions about the historical context, particularly in terms of sexual and political oppression. You will consider how ‘feeling’ or sensibility, often connected with femininity, became a key concept.

You will also be encouraged to appreciate the complex interaction of the discourses of taste, gender and politics in the period and consider the role women writers played in this.

Making It Strange: Writing the Science Fiction, Fantasy and Modern Gothic Novel

This module offers you the opportunity to develop your creative skills within genres that focus on worlds that lie beyond the tradition realm of ‘realism’. These forms of ‘Beyond Realist’ texts have a distinguished pedigree stretching back to humanity’s earliest myths, epic narratives, folklore and fairy tales. You will explore how to write within genres such as science fiction, fantasy and contemporary Gothic as you learn their specific complexities and intricacies.

The Cultural History of Death

This module explores how literary representations of the historical and social treatment of the dead presents a vivid insight into the cultural behaviour, ideology and social order of different cultural and historical contexts.

You will explore the beliefs and attitudes towards the dead within literature from the Middles Ages through to more contemporary examples and debates.

Unforgettable Corpses: Literature, Cultural Memory and the First World War

This module will examine literary products of the First World War, the methods by which the authors reproduced, described and fictionalised their experiences.

The second half of the module will also consider the use of First World War tropes in literature produced in the latter half of the 20th century, compare the application of those narrative devices, and critically assess the later use of those devices.

Writing Flash Fiction

‘Flash Fiction’ is an exciting new way of telling stories. By composing their own portfolio of very short fiction, you will be challenged to see the form from the inside, and to focus upon the creative challenges that are unique to ‘flash fiction’. These challenges will be brought into additional focus by workshops that require critical reflection upon the evolving work.

Writing the Novel

In this module, you will develop your skills in narrative, imagery, characterisation, and theme while engaging with the demands and challenges of a longer form.

Using prescribed reading and independent research, you will be asked to develop the first chapter of a novel, as well as a concise synopsis of the remainder.

You will be encouraged to adopt a set of working methods and habits that assist lifelong learning so that the novel may be completed after university. To this end, you will be asked to write a critical paper that demonstrates productive and creative engagement with a novel that has expanded the imaginative range of their creative practice.

You will also be asked to make critical insights that demonstrate understanding of relevant and appropriate literary traditions within your chosen field.

Writing, Environment and Ecocriticism

This module will offer you the opportunity to explore the ways in which contemporary writers and critics engage with images, issues and concepts of the environment in novels, poetry and non-fiction. You will choose whether you wish to engage with the themes of the module as a critic or a creative writer.