BA (Hons) Creative Writing and English

Introduction to Creative Writing

Introduction to Creative Writing focuses on imagination, creative and critical thinking, and the transformative power of language.

This module introduces you to the fundamental skills of creative writing through two core lines of investigation: the Writer’s Notebook and the creation of characters.

You will develop their writer’s notebook through active engagement with a wide range of sources, including personal experience and the local environment, and recording lived experience through attentive use of the senses.  

By examining a selection of case studies, you will learn about the journey from rough idea to finished piece. The aim is to transition from private writer to thinking about a potential future reader.

You will be provided with an introduction to the habits of writing, to support the development of an emerging awareness of their own practice and craft techniques. You experiment with style, form, medium and genre, generating creative work through processes of critical reading, editing and revision. 

This module also introduces you to the fundamentals of creating convincing fictional characters who are individuals, not ‘types’. 

You will make artistic decisions about the history of their characters, the setting, and time periods, about character motivations and points of view. You will experiment with playful methods of pressurising their characters so that their characters speak or act or are shown on the cusp of change.

The work will be assessed via a portfolio of pieces.

Creative Non-Fiction: Starting From The Self

This module introduces you to the versatile genre of creative non-fiction, in which writers employ skills transported from fiction to lend dramatic complexity to factual narratives.

Using autobiographical material as a base, you will generate dramatic scenes on a variety of topics and themes.

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.

Literature Now: Reading and Writing Modern and Contemporary Literature

How do we write and read our own moment? Exploring modern and recent literary texts and transformations of the literary (film, graphic novels, digital texts, gamification, etc.), this module introduces you to the contemporary cultural landscape.

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.

Flexible and expansive, this module allows you to test cultural forms, create your own written responses, and grasp your own experience of the present.

Conflicts and Controversies in Victorian Literature: Charlotte Brontë to Charles Dickens

This module will familiarise you with a series of key texts from the early and mid-Victorian period, covering the 1830s through to the 1860s.

You 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 one scientific text.

The module will also help you develop the skills of close textual analysis, which you will rely on throughout your degree.  

Writing Back: Poetry, Image Voice

This module aims to provide you with knowledge of how poetic genres have arisen and developed through time and the ability to engage with that poetry, imaginatively and critically.

The module shows that even in an age when emphasis on pastiche and irony can seem to undermine categories of poetry, genres are still very much at the heart of poetry today.

You will encounter a variety of forms and voices in contemporary, experimental and traditional poetry. The focus will be on finding and recognising source material and imaginative territories, and on writing back, experimenting with voices, tones, imagery and sound.  

Fairy Tales: From Early Modern to Postmodern

This module aims to develop an informed historical, critical and imaginative perspective on the fairy tale. Tracing this powerful literary and cultural tradition from its written roots in early modern Italy, through the Salon culture of 18th-century France, the 19th-century folklore and fairy tale collections of Germany, Norway, Russia and Ireland produced against the backdrop of great social and political change and emerging nationhood, and the collections of Lang and Jacobs, this module will examine the development of the fairy tale over the course of three centuries.

You will explore the changes and developments within the genre through analysis of a wide range of stories, and through a specific focus on six major narratives (Puss in Boots, Bluebeard, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Red Riding Hood).

The later weeks of the module consider the work of a range of major 20th-century authors in order to consider and question the continuing influence of the traditional fairy tale.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Fiction: Stories in Motion

This module explores the dynamics of change in contemporary fiction, with particular emphasis on how research initiates and propels narrative movement.

You will examine a range of texts across different modes of fiction – such as the fantastic, experimental writing, and folktales – to explore and evaluate how stories are set in motion through moments of disruption, discovery, or transformation.

Through close reading and discussion, you will analyse narrative form and the techniques writers use to shape stories, create tension, and generate conflict. These include structural choices as well as stylistic devices that control pacing, focus, and momentum.

You will develop your skills of effective storytelling through research and a range of writing devices, including exposition, dialogue, patterns of imagery, metaphor, and suggestion. Attention will be given to how these elements work together to animate a story’s central concerns and themes.

The module aims to deepen your understanding of short fictional narrative forms and to inspire the production of original creative work that demonstrates control over both the technical and imaginative aspects of these genres.

Alongside creative writing, you will write a critical essay on one of the model short stories studied. This essay will focus on a specific writing device explored during the module, analysing its function and effectiveness in relation to the story’s central theme or themes.

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 in non-fiction modules in year one and year two to engage with new possibilities in digital writing, including:

• blogs
• games
• websites
• online journalism
• Twitter/Tumblr/Facebook
• texts
• podcasts
• comments forums
• campaigns
• hypertext

and the non-linear; e-books; apps; fan fiction; reviews, etc.

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 connections between the reader, author and cityscape.

Using Venice as an example, as well as key psychogeographic works by Benjamin, de Certeau, Debord, Sinclair and others, you will examine key works created and inspired by Venice over the past 400 years.

By doing so, you will consider how cityscapes are created and affect conceptualisations of settings outside the boundaries of their original texts.

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, Romanticism and Women’s Writing: From Mary Wollstonecraft to Jane Austen

The aim of this module is to introduce you to the exciting range of women’s prose writing in the late 18th century, as you consider the relationship between such writing and the political debates of the period.

You will discover how this writing, while often underrated, was of importance to Romantic aesthetics, often primarily understood and defined in terms of poetry written by men.

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

On this module, you will write the first chapter of a contemporary novel, deepening skills gained on short fiction modules in Years 1 and 2. Having acquired skills in narrative, imagery, characterisation and theme, you will now be encouraged to develop these skills in greater depth while engaging with the demands and challenges of a longer form.

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.