BA (Hons) English and Drama

International students can apply
Overseas study available

You will learn to analyse and criticise various forms of literary text, most particularly plays and novels. In addition, you will work on drama projects designed to deepen your understanding of different kinds of play texts and theatre practitioners. You will also explore contemporary approaches to 'making' performance.

Further, the course has a unique emphasis upon the adaptation of novels, short stories, poetry and 'popular' forms (such as folk and rock music, cartoons) for performance both on stage and screen.

The Drama portion of your course will teach you how to communicate ideas creatively, and to make links between literature and screen and stage performance. The optional structure of the course means that you can choose whether to emphasise drama 'in theory' or drama 'in practice' or a combination of the two.

The English portion will equip you with the key skills and analytical tools needed for literary study and will also encourage you to explore social and cultural issues raised by literary texts.

Course Structure

Year 1

In year 1 modules provide a thorough grounding in key ideas and approaches to literary and drama study at University level.

Year 2

In year 2 you will study two core and four option modules. The core modules focus on adaptation and your option modules are split equally between English and drama. You will have the opportunity to work more independently and develop your understanding of the relationship between theory, text and practice.

Year 3

In year 3 you will have one core module and a choice of options. You will develop your knowledge of texts, practitioners and approaches to practice with a stronger emphasis on the 20th and 21st Centuries. Modules in year 3 encourage you to develop independence of mind, critically assessing secondary and theoretical sources, and expect a high level of analytic skill.

YEAR 1

In year 1 modules provide a thorough grounding in key ideas and approaches to literary and drama/performance study at University level.

Narrative, Fiction and the Novel

You will read a variety of novels spanning the history, genre and forms of British fiction, from Pre-Realist to Postmodernist, and study how the subjects of fiction have changed and developed over time.

Introduction to Drama

You will be introduced to different genres and forms of drama, analyzing key features of dramatic texts from Shakespeare to 21st century theatre.

Creative Practice: Observation, Imagination, Representation

You will be provided with a range of imaginative tools which facilitate an exploration of how life experience informs creative practice. You will be introduced to techniques for developing a coherent character or voice in your creative work, and to creative exercises, reflective practice and reading for creative processes and understanding.

Introduction to Poetry

A broad survey of historical periods and genres, which prepares you for the study of poetry at degree level, from Shakespearean sonnets to linguistically innovative twenty-first century poetry and many points in-between.

Theory and Practice

You will be introduced to a range of theoretical approaches to literary and cultural practice. You will gain an understanding of how both literary and cultural texts can be read and analysed, and how different theories can be productively applied to them.

Working the Text

You will develop an understanding of creative process, specifically: reworking creative material in the light of self-appraisal, peer and tutor feedback. Alongside the reflective process, you will be supported in developing your knowledge and understanding of a range of creative themes and techniques and exploring a range of contemporary approaches to forms, sub-genres and creative movements.

YEAR 2

In year 2 you will study four core and two option modules. The core modules focus on adaptation and your option modules will be English modules English and drama. You will have the opportunity to work more independently and develop your understanding of the relationship between theory, text and practice.

Core module: Literature, Adaptation and the Screen

You will examine interdisciplinary relationships between literary fiction and its adaptation to the screen, considering the challenges involved in transposing literary works to film and/or television. You will become equipped with the skills to produce a working treatment and step outline for a screen adaptation (TV or film).

Core module: Theatre Adaptation: Writers and Devisers

You will engage with a range of performance material that draws upon both European and American performance traditions and develop a knowledge of a range of theatre practices associated with performed adaptations including cultural and temporal transposition, appropriation and deconstruction. You will develop the ability to generate and present your own ideas as prospective writers, directors or performers.

Core module: Contemporary Approaches to Writing and Performance

The module begins with the question 'What is the place of the writer/creative practitioner in society?' We then addresses a series of topics including the pleasure of spectatorship, voice and identity, and engaging the personal and political

Core module: Page to Stage: Drama Texts in Translation

You will develop a practical and theoretical understanding of a range of 20th/21st Century theatre texts in translation and the ability to interpret dramatic texts, whilst fostering an understanding of the particular ideological and cultural implications of staging plays in translation.

Optional modules may include:

British Writers And Popular Culture From The 1930s To 1980s

We will analyse the histories and meanings of terms such as ‘culture’, ‘popular culture’, ‘mass culture’, ‘highbrow’ and ‘literary’. These terms will be used to investigate a wide range of novels, essays, poems, television programmes, films and plays; questions around class, gender, sexuality and national identity will be at the forefront of our enquiries.

Utopias and Dystopias

Learn to understand the complex relationship between utopian projections and the material world, and study a variety of utopian and dystopian texts by authors such as Anthony Burgess, Philip Dick, George Orwell and HG Wells.

Cinema and Psychoanalysis

This module introduces you to psychoanalysis by way of cinema and to cinema by way of psychoanalysis. It will ask whether key Freudian methods (such as dream interpretation), concepts (phantasy, fetishism, wish-fulfilment) and narratives (the Oedipus and castration complexes) can illuminate a series of Hollywood and non-Hollywood films.

Creative Writing

You will learn writing techniques for a variety of genres including poetry and the short story. You will also be introduced to key skills such as presenting your work professionally, discussing it and reflecting critically on your creative products and processes.

Monstrous Bodies

Using a range of texts and genres from the 1790s to the 1890s, this module will consider the importance of the physical human body, in health and sickness. Examining the historical context in which these texts were written, we will look at such topics as medical treatments, drug use, pregnancy, disability, physical strength, race, and gender.

Female Gothic

We will explore the significance of various features such as: the uncanny, the absent/dead mother, convents, excess, the heroine, etc. Particular attention will be given to the historical and cultural context of the texts and you will be encouraged to consider how and why the Female Gothic evolved in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Women’s Writing Between the Wars

You will analyse the aesthetic and cultural impact of novels written by women between the First and Second World Wars, including Agatha Christie, Daphne Du Maurier and Stella Gibbons.

Dickens

You will develop your ability to analyse literary texts and gain an awareness of the issues that inform the critical reception of literary texts. Through detailed study of a representative selection of Dickens’s novels, you will become familiar with the development of a major writer and his contribution to nineteenth-century literature and culture. At the same time, you will explore a number of key issues within Dickens's writing such as: class, gender, the family, criminality and childhood.

Reptiles of Genius: Satire and Satirists in the Eighteenth Century

The design and scope of this module allows you to gain an appreciation of the complexities of satire as a mode of writing; we will learn to recognise what it is and what it tries to do and consider who writes satire and why. A key concern of the module is the relationship between the author and reader.

YEAR 3

In year 3 you will have two core and four option modules. You will develop your knowledge of texts, practitioners and approaches to practice with a stronger emphasis on the 20th and 21st Centuries. Modules in year 3 encourage you to develop independence of mind, critically assessing secondary and theoretical sources, and expect a high level of analytic skill.

Core module: Performance and the Postdramatic

You examine contemporary experimental performance theory and practice and have the chance to create a short original solo piece drawing on the techniques and ideas learnt in the module.

Core module: Drama Research Project

This is an opportunity to explore in depth an area that interests you, combining research with practice in an extended creative project. You can create original work or submit a research portfolio.

Optional modules may include:

Dissertation

A chance to explore in detail a topic of your choice in an extended piece of critical writing. You can choose to write a dissertation on drama or literature.

Green Writing

This module explores literary representations of nature from Romanticism to the present-day, looking at images and tropes within different forms of green writing, such as the relationship between place and space, the country and the city, landscape, memory and subjectivity, animals, environment and gender.

Reading the Page

You will explore the significance of the form of the book including text and illustration and consider how the page may be most effectively used to carry both narrative and argument in different literary forms including poetry, novels and graphic novels.

Shakespeare and the Play of Thought

This module explores the various ways in which cultural intertextuality informs and shapes Shakespeare's approach to character and action. To gain a broader understanding of how Shakespearean drama can be seen as “the play of thought,” we will analyse Shakespeare’s work in terms of literary theories including New Historicism, Cognitive Linguistics, and Gender Studies.

Twenty-First Century Women’s Fiction

Some of the key themes to be explored will include the impact of virtual realities on questions of body politics, representations of violence and death in contemporary women’s fiction, futurist landscapes and how new feminist utopias and dystopias feed into established traditions of the form.

The Twentieth-Century British Working-Class Novel

We will begin by discussing the complexities of the terms ‘working-class’ and ‘working-class fiction’; we will conclude with the fragmented forms and apocalyptic visions of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993), and debate what, if anything, it means to talk of the ‘working-class novel’ in the context of contemporary British society.

Writing Ireland

This module explores constructions of Ireland and Irishness in literary and cultural texts across the last century, tracing how ideas of nationhood, gender and ethnicity, tradition and modernity have been negotiated in often turbulent historical conditions, dealing with issues such as the the Celtic Tiger myth, and Northern culture during the Troubles.

British Theatre post-1950

This module contextualises post-war British theatre in terms of naturalism, the avant-garde and the epic mode. A range of play texts will be explored in relation to form, narrative, action and character while exploring the ways in which they engage with issues of class, sexuality, gender and national identity.

Writing For Performance (Theatre)

Classes are focused on helping you to develop your work via discussion with the tutor and classmates, exploration of craft and techniques used by professional writers, and optional sharing of work. You will meet leading theatre professionals during the module, and at its conclusion you will have a play ready to send out to theatres.

Playwriting

You will create a full length play over the course of the semester, explore playwriting craft, concept, structure, characterisation, dialogue, theatricality and rewriting and revising techniques in depth, and you will also learn more about the playwriting industry, both in the UK and abroad, and have the opportunity to make connections with industry professionals.

Writing/Performing the City

You will investigate a range of texts and performances which respond to the city as an environment and cultural concept, and explore perceptions of the cityscape through creative praxis. You will have the opportunity work creatively and analytically and develop your style as a writer or performance practitioner.