BA (Hons) English Literature

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.

Investigating Interpretation: Ideas in Literature From Marx to Barthes

This module explores literature as a strange and uncanny phenomenon. To do so, we explore how interpretation does not merely take a pre-existing work and try to find the correct reading, but actively transforms the text and the world.

We explore a series of ideas that challenge what we mean by interpretation and the notion that we have a stable self who does the interpreting.

The result is a strange new world that we will explore, while you work with these ideas to transform your understanding of literature and other cultural texts.

Conflicts and Controversies in Victorian Literature: Charlotte Bronte 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.  

Subverting the Subject: Ideas in Literature 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 we 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.

Make It New: Modernist Experimentation

This module considers the Modernist period, from the first appearance of Modernist texts in the late 19th century, through the period of High Modernism in the early 20th century, and then examining texts through the 1930s and 1940s which engage with Modernist ideas and techniques.

During this module, you will consider literary texts in relation to key contextual and historical information, looking at new forms developed by Modernist writers in order to write about a new period of rapid change, conflict and controversy.

You will also continue to hone your skills of close textual analysis, as well as developing comparative skills in writing on more than one text.

Experiments in Fiction: Magic, Detection, Sci Fi and Beyond

This module allows you to explore the way writers exploit genre to entertain, persuade or amaze. You will discover some of the principal genres and sub-genres in prose fiction from the rise of the novel to the present day.

You will then trace the rise of genres in literary history and gain knowledge of defining or characteristic features of kinds of prose text, which you will be able apply to your own writing and analytic work on other modules.

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 on these elements, and to examine the historical conditions that give rise to particular genres and make them salient at particular moments. 

Renaissance to Restoration

Covering the Tudor and Stuart eras and the period after, this module will provide you with detailed knowledge of literature from the early sixteenth to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

The module starts with the literature of the Renaissance, taking in the sixteenth-century sonneteers, Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney and Spenser, moving on to the drama of Marlowe and Shakespeare, and ending with seventeenth-century poetry from Donne to Rochester. The Restoration era exploration includes Marvell, Milton and Rochester and some later texts.

Lectures will address the set texts in line with a specific issue in current critical debate, focusing on desire, power, feminist interpretation, sexual politics, history, subversion, subjectivity and carnival. The emphasis will be partly on seeing the texts in their historical context but also on finding ways of appreciating them today.

Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries

The Romantic period 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.

After examining the earlier part of the eighteenth century, this module moves to cover an extended Romantic period, from the 1760s to around 1832.

The module will examine the impact of the American and French Revolutions on the vibrant literature and ground-breaking thoughts 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 in Romantic-period scholarship relatively recently.

Agents of Change: British Women’s Writing in the Twentieth Century

This module aims to contribute to your critical understanding of the complex relationship between ‘centres’ and ‘margins’, by engaging with a wide variety of work by women writers who challenge various orthodoxies in their work.

The module aims to generate an awareness of the range of critical approaches useful in the study of women’s writing and ‘gender’. In the teaching and in the module reading list, attention is drawn to the desirability of close textual analysis as a means of illuminating the literary text. The focus on writers who have confronted areas of exclusion, both in terms of representation and identity, introduces issues which will be examined in later modules.

American Visions: Modern and Contemporary American Writing

This module introduces you to the depth and range of modern and contemporary American literature, defined as American writing during the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

The module will engage with key texts and writers, as well as being diverse and inclusive of a range of voices. It will also engage with a range of forms, including the novel, short stories, poetry, and creative non-fiction. 

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 aim of this module is for you to undertake a work placement to apply your academic learning in a related employment setting and for you to gain experience that will be useful in pursuing your career or profession.

Emphasis will be placed on the development of vocational and employability skills, knowledge of self-reflexive work, the ability to use subject knowledge beyond the classroom, and the development of skills for lifelong learning.

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.

Journalistic and digital communication skills will start to be developed underpinned by the history of creative non-fiction. The concept of the ‘personal essay thesis’ will be explored.

You will be encouraged to connect your creative non-fiction to relevant debates in contemporary culture, and to engage with the issues arising from these debates.

English and Creative Writing Dissertation

The English Literature Dissertation enables you to build on the research and writing skills developed during the first two years of your 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.

Unconscious Desires: Psychoanalysis and Culture from Freud to Žižek

This module explores the notion of unconscious desire and the expression of these desires in literature and culture. It traces the emergence of the ideas of unconscious desire in the work of Freud and how Freud links this idea to the literary and the cultural.

Then the module explores the ways in which various psychoanalytic thinkers have transformed the notion of unconscious desire and used it to grasp literary and cultural forms. At the heart of our experience is, psychoanalysis argued, a fundamental fantasy that engages and shapes our experience of the world and our ‘selves’. These fundamental fantasies are shaped by literature and culture.

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, while often underrated, 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 contributes to our understanding of the extended Romantic period and nineteenth-century literature.

During this module, you will explore the relationship between such writing and the political debates of the period. 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, and 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.

Digital Writing: Writing for the Community of Strangers

On this module, you will harness the skills developed in non-fiction modules at Levels 4 and 5 to engage with new possibilities in digital writing.

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 required to submit a critical essay, exploring specific cultural and political issues that confront digital writers and be encouraged to explore experimental possibilities, and to extend the range of their 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.  

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

This module closely examines the literature of the First World War and analyses the development of a specific way of writing about the conflict, one dependent upon repeated uses of common tropes, images and ideas.

The module also considers how the war impacted existing language and literature, critically examining the conflict’s effect upon literary culture.

You will examine the wider political, social, historical, cultural and military context of the conflict, demonstrating the extent to which the literature of the First World War is a product of a particular moment, employing a shared language and shared images which developed during the epoch-shaping four-year period of the War.

Fantasy Writing: Origins and Development

This module explores the landscape of fantasy writing from its origins to the contemporary. While examining a range of core generic writing, you will discover the diversity of this fiction and the shifting forms and styles of fantasy writing.

Fantasy writing combines the power of imagination, the creative appropriation of the cultural past, and the ability to engage with a diverse range of cultural experiences. This module will guide you through this rich and living tradition, and by the end of the module, you will be equipped to respond critically or creatively to fantasy writing as a genre.

European Literary Legacies: Writing the City

This module deals 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 module 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.

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, creating a firm vision of the cityscape that has both transformed writers and has been transformed by literary and visual art over time.