English Literature BA Honours

This is a module where the bulk of teaching and learning takes place in small groups, combined with regular meetings with your academic tutor. The module will introduce and develop academic skills for literary studies, to reflect upon feedback in order to improve future assessment, and to further academic and personal competencies. The small group sessions also provide a space to build on, and respond to, regular lectures. These lectures encourage you to think about two related things: what you mean by literature or the literary; and why, for any literary work, a particular form has been chosen in which to address the reader. The texts are chosen from various periods in order to focus the questions above and to promote informed, critical attempts to answer them. Recent and contemporary works are particularly strongly represented in the module’s coverage.

So, while addressing directly some of the most important changes in literary innovation and valuation over the centuries, the module particularly stresses the recent debates over the canon’s diversity and inclusivity (or lack of these), and over decolonizing the dominant literary tradition. The texts and issues therefore equip you with a critical knowledge of a variety of forms of writing and the histories that shape them, reinforcing this knowledge through development of your writing practice and expansion of your critical and theoretical tools.

This module introduces a series of ‘keywords’ that have been historically central to the study of literature, and explores these in relation to specific critical approaches to, and theoretical understandings of, literary works.

This module introduces some of the most exciting developments in poetry over the last 200 years. It examines how poetry intervenes in the modern world, exploring the role poetic form plays in the poet’s critique of key social and political issues. Spanning work from William Wordsworth to Frank O’Hara, Emily Dickinson to Nat Raha, the module considers issues such as the role of poetry and the poet, the politics of form, poetry’s engagement with political resistance, social reform, gender, the body, sexuality, class and cultural identity.

This module samples a generic mix of Shakespeare’s plays and provides a broad introduction to contemporary Shakespeare study. The specific forms of Shakespearean drama are explored not only in their early modern contexts, including the performance practices of the time, but also in terms of other key approaches and topics in current Shakespeare performance, criticism and theory.

In this module you will look at children’s literature from the early eighteenth century to the present day, examining the various cultural contexts which have given rise to this rich and varied field. Over the course of the module, you will be thinking about children’s literature in relation to children, parents and guardians, publishers, teachers and librarians, asking what children’s literature is, who it’s written for, who buys it, who judges it, and why it is written. Genres you will consider include the time-slip narrative, the adventure story, the school story, the picture book, children’s poetry, fantasy and dystopian fiction.

This module insists on the pleasure of reading. But it also explores the idea of finding pleasure in our reading activities. Over the course of the module, students carry out their own reading, but with a different guiding direction each week. Students direct their own reading, and record passages that are pleasurable. We also encounter some theoretical approaches to literature that try to account for the pleasure of reading.

The Level 5 tutorials follow on from the Level 4 tutorials, providing you with weekly tutorials working in small groups with an Academic Tutor. The tutorials are divided between time spent developing practical academic skills, and structured ‘employability’ sessions designed specifically to support and guide you in your preparation for employment.

This module examines the literary, social and political concerns of Romanticism and its legacies across the period c.1790-1865. Centring on the idea of ‘revolution’, the module considers how a range of texts (poetry, the novel, non-fictional prose, and paintings) engage with issues as diverse as the natural world, political upheaval, liberty and the rise of the individual, ‘Englishness’ and the nation, gender and sexuality, the role of the artist, and the idea of modernity.

This module examines the literature, society and politics of the Victorian period, an age of considerable change and upheaval. Through close consideration of a range of texts – including poems, novels and visual material – you'll consider responses to pressing social and political issues such as industrialisation and the ‘Condition of England’, scientific developments, faith and doubt, psychology and the mind, gender, sexuality, imperialism and the empire, and decadence and the fin de siècle.

This module introduces you to the key debates and concepts that have been central to the formation of current understandings of memory, and its relationship to culture, history, and representation. Sample topics include slavery and its contemporary legacies; the Holocaust; and 9/11.

This module offers a critical investigation of the figure of the monster and the metaphors of monstrosity across a wide historical range of fictional, film, and non-fictional texts. The various ways in which textual and visual representations of monsters have been used in political, economic and social contexts will be considered, as will continuities and discontinuities in the conventions of these representations.

This module explores literature’s claims to ‘represent’ reality. It focuses on the emergence, development and contestation of realist aesthetics in literature from the rise of the English novel in the 18th century to the present. It investigates how these aesthetics have been challenged and consolidated, and on the many forms of realism that now constitute literature as a result.

This module examines the literary innovations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, relating these developments to the period’s central religious, social, and political upheavals. The module examines an array of literary and theatrical experimentation, emphasising works of the late Elizabethan period through to the English Revolution. It is organised in three thematic groups: religion, the social individual, and power and politics. The themes identify the transformations not only inspiring new formal experimentation in verse, prose, and drama, but also influencing changes in literary culture more generally, such as the establishment of the professional playhouse and the development of women’s authorship.

This module offers you the opportunity to undertake an extended piece of independent research and writing on a topic of your choosing, undertaken with individual supervision. The dissertation’s research questions and approach are developed and refined in consultation with your supervisor and you'll receive feedback on a draft chapter. Over the course of the academic year, you'll produce the final dissertation.

This module interrogates cultural constructions of the present by putting the contemporary into conversation with the past. The module will historicise current social concerns and aesthetic forms to question how and why particular cultural flashpoints have become so important. In so doing, this module asks students to question the value of literature today.

This is a work experience placement associated with employment with an appropriate employer that you as a graduate might eventually join, such as a small or large business, an arts organisation or a subject-based placement in a school.

Assessment consists of a portfolio which you'll complete. You'll need to source your own placement. Support is provided via three face-to-face teaching sessions: one introductory session, one session focused on the assessment, and one drop-in session to discuss work towards the assessment. You are also strongly encouraged to make full use of the support offered by discussing your placement and coursework with the module leader during the semester. In cases where you are unable to secure a placement by the end of the first week of the semester, or where a placement has fallen through, the University will support and facilitate a change in module.

In this module, you'll explore the English novel after 1950 through the lens of temporality. You'll examine how the legacy of modernism and the events of the Second World War challenged ideas about the relationship between past, present, and future. The module will guide you through the conceptual debates these challenges provoked and show how they influenced the shape and form of the novel. You'll focus particularly on novels that have most clearly experimented with formal conventions in response to these temporal concerns.

In the first part of this module, you'll explore a range of contemporary socio-cultural issues through readings by key theorists and commentators. Indicative topics include mass culture, privilege and intersectionality, cultural appropriation, public culture, bodies in public space, digital culture and surveillance, national culture, citizenship and immigration, and working culture. You'll examine how these issues manifest in everyday life as well as in contemporary art, film, literature, music, and popular culture. In the final part of the module, you'll be supported in developing an individual project in which you critically analyse a cultural issue and a chosen cultural object. This project is assessed through a linked presentation and essay.

From the mid-1800s to the present, ideas around sexuality and the politics of desire have been central to many literary and cultural artefacts. In this module, you'll examine the construction and deployment of notions of sexuality across that time period. Through close examination of a range of novels, poems, films and television series, you’ll consider how understandings of, and engagements with, sexuality have been represented. As you consider homosexuality, queerness, trans* identities, and heterosexuality, you’ll interrogate ideas of identity, the body, intimacy, desire, history, and representation.

The content of this module changes each year, allowing you to explore in depth a specific contemporary area or issue in literary studies, led by the research expertise of the teaching staff.

In this module, you'll examine early 20th century modernism through the lens of intercultural encounters and their influence on formal innovation.

The first half of the module explores how major European modernists engaged with non-European cultures in their quest to create new forms for a new century. The second half of the module examines non-European modernism through the work of postcolonial and African American modernists.

Modernist remaking of form fundamentally rethinks the relation between all forms of representation and the world, and modernism will be examined in terms of its being both a reaction to and a constituent part of global modernity.

Through close analysis of selected key texts from the history of literary tragedy, you'll trace the development of tragedy as a genre. You'll explore its origins in the Ancient Greek polis through the works of Sophocles and Aeschylus, examine its revival in Renaissance England with Shakespeare, and consider its much-debated ‘crisis’ in modernity.