BA (Hons) English and Creative Writing

International students can apply
Overseas study available
Work placement opportunity

You will learn creative writing skills in scriptwriting, fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Working with innovative and enthusiastic lecturers who are also practising writers, you will be inspired to break new ground as a writer, whether it be writing for theatre or working with creative graffiti. You will also study a range of works from modern literature which will feed and inspire your creative writing making it strong, rigorous and exciting.

The creative writing portion of your course will teach you how to present creative work to a professional standard, as well as editing techniques, how to research a story and how to turn life experiences into gripping reading with the opportunity to specialise in genres including writing for young adults, visual text, innovative poetry, and writing for theatre or TV.

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 as you study a range of literary works.

Course Structure

Year 1

This year serves as an introduction to the study of English literature and creative writing at university level. You will be taught to analyse texts from a variety of genres and to use a range of literary and theoretical concepts, and to discuss and reflect critically upon your creative products and processes.

Year 2

In this year you will develop your writing skills through more focused engagement in particular specialisms supported by a wide range of reading in contemporary and earlier literature. You also have the opportunity to participate in European exchanges. All modules are optional, meaning that there are no compulsory choices, but in semester 1 you will choose one creative writing module plus two English modules. In semester 2 you will take two creative writing modules plus one English module.

Year 3

Year 3 modules encourage you to develop independence of mind in critically assessing secondary and theoretical sources. You will further develop your study and presentational skills, researching topics independently and presenting work professionally. Creative writing modules encourage a higher degree of independence and specialisation in one or two chosen areas. You will be able to write confidently in these areas with a developed ability to discuss your own work and that of others, and to develop and express a critical understanding of the intentions and achievements of your writerly projects.

Year 1

This year serves as an introduction to the study of English Literature and Creative Writing at university level. You will be taught to analyse texts from a variety of genres and to use a range of literary and theoretical concepts, and to discuss and reflect critically upon your creative products and processes.

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.

Narrative, Fiction and the Novel

This module examines the history of narrative, from early texts such as Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe, to postmodern writers such as Jeanette Winterson. We trace the development of narrative strategies, and cultural themes such as gender and class.

Introduction to Drama

You will be introduced to the specificities of drama/performance as a genre and to some of the different forms it has taken historically. This module will outline some of the key formal elements of drama such as plot, narration and characterisation and the key formal features of major dramatic genres (e.g., epic, realism, comedy, farce, tragedy, melodrama).

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.

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.

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.

Year 2

In this year you will develop your writing skills through more focused engagement in particular specialisms supported by a wide range of reading in contemporary and earlier literature. You also have the opportunity to participate in European exchanges. All modules are optional, meaning that there are no compulsory choices, but in Semester 1 you will choose ONE Creative Writing module plus TWO English modules. In Semester 2 you will take TWO Creative Writing modules plus ONE English module. This is a representative list:

Creative writing modules:
Choose three from the following:

Writing Fiction: Contemporary Practice

This module aims to equip you with an overview of the state of contemporary fiction, exploring the opportunities and choices available to emerging writers. We will survey a broad range of contemporary practice, from literary fiction to experimental fiction and genre fiction, including ‘chick lit’, historical fiction, crime/thrillers, science fiction, and supernatural/fantasy fiction.

Biography: Tradition and Innovation

You will be introduced to biographical writing strategies and explore a range of contemporary sub-genres, themes and devices in biography. You will develop an awareness of the professional presentation of biographical work and your ability to discuss it collaboratively and constructively.

Playwriting

This is a unique opportunity to work with one of the UK's leading theatres, the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, via their new playwriting programme Repwrites. You will have a chance to work with a professional playwright as your tutor and explore how to write a full length play, working with your peers, the theatre industry and your tutor on this project, which will potentially lead to a professional production.

Writing the Novel for Young People

You will be introduced to novel-writing, in particular Young Adult and Young Fluent Reader novels. You will develop an awareness of the demands and expectations of the publishing industries, and your skills in reflecting on creative products and processes.

Writing for Performance: Writing for the BBC

You will explore writing for the BBC, particularly in terms of radio writing this year. You will work with your professional scriptwriting tutor and your peers to produce a radio play, ready to be submitted for potential professional production by the BBC. Radio is a form that is very open to new writers - around 50% of all radio plays produced by the BBC are by new writers.

Introduction to Children’s literature

You will become acquainted with the history of children’s literature and twenty-first and twentieth century texts produced for children from pre-reading infants up to early teens. You will be given the opportunity to invent and / or analyse such texts. This module can be taken either as a literature or a creative writing choice.

Creating Visual Text

This module will help shift and broaden your approach to creative writing in all genres. You will learn to ‘see’ the text you work with in a completely different way. You will explore graffiti, site-specific writing; illustrated and illustrative writing; concrete and shaped text; animated and moving creative pieces.

Creative Non-Fiction

This module explores different forms and sub-genres of creative non-fiction, a genre which Lee Gutkind describes as ‘the most important and popular genre in the literary world today.’ We will cover a wide range of forms, including memoir, biography, literary journalism, autobiographical poetry, travel writing, music writing and nature writing.

LITERATURE MODULES: CHOOSE THREE FROM THE FOLLOWING:

Attitudes to English

You will explore contemporary and historical attitudes to the English language, and examine aspects of language (e.g. grammar, pronunciation, spelling) and the ways in which these have been affected by notions of ‘correctness’ at different stages in the history of English. You will engage with conceptions of language and identity and build on existing knowledge of the social, cultural and political dimensions of language and language use.

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.

High Romance of the Late Middle Ages

You will be introduced to the concept and context of medieval romance and gain an understanding of medieval culture and society in its literary context. You will study key texts of the late Middle Ages and gain a basic understanding of the language of Middle English as well as the major narratives, themes, and techniques of the key texts.

Introduction to Children’s literature

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).

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.

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.

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.

Chaucer And Society In The Late Fourteenth Century

You will develop an awareness of the nature and complexity of fourteenth-century English society through The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. We will investigate the principal genres of medieval English literature as exemplified in The Canterbury Tales and study the relationship between society and literature in the second half of the fourteenth century.

Utopias And Dystopias

We will explore how idealised human societies, utopias, have played an important role in the development of literature, sociology and politics. These Brave New Worlds have envisaged societies where economic and gender divisions are eliminated, and/or where science and rationalism rule. But we will also investigate what happens when these societies go wrong, when dystopian nightmares dominate.

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.

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

Third Year modules encourage you to develop independence of mind in critically assessing secondary and theoretical sources. You will further develop your study and presentational skills, researching topics independently and presenting work professionally. You will take ONE core Creative Writing module through the two Semesters, which will encourage a higher degree of independence and specialisation. You will be able to write confidently with a developed ability to discuss your own work and that of others, and to develop and express a critical understanding of the intentions and achievements of your writerly projects. Modules studied during this year:

Final Portfolio (Core)

This double module (40 credits) runs throughout your final year. You will undertake a self-directed project in the genre(s) of your choosing while giving and receiving feedback in a supportive workshop environment. By the end of the module you should have 6000 words (or equivalent) of highly polished creative work.

PLUS FOUR OPTIONS FROM THE FOLLOWING:

Playwriting

Writing for Performance: Writing for the BBC

Biography: Tradition and Innovation

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 Fiction: Contemporary Practice

New Departures: Reading And Writing Innovative Poetry

This module combines critical and creative study of some of the most exciting poetry written in the last fifty years. The main areas for consideration include: Beat poetry, the New York School and the Language Poets in the USA and Linguistically Innovative Poetry in the UK. Each workshop offers practical exercises to aid understanding of the aesthetic and political decisions being made.

Change in Contemporary English

In the last 10-15 years, new technologies have led to the emergence of new forms of text, such as email, instant online messaging, blogs and text messages. In this module we will look at developments across both traditional and the new forms of text, and explore how social factors are shaping the way the English language is evolving today.

Dissertation

You will undertake sustained academic exploration of a literary topic and/or text(s) or other media, of your choice relevant to the the course. You will research your chosen literary topic and write an extended piece of academic work (8000-10,000 words) with a clearly defined thesis and a carefully constructed argument.

The Language of Names

You will examine the origins, development and cultural significance of the names of places and people in Scotland and England (and the wider world) and consider the special properties of names as lexical items. You will analyse the evidential value of names in historical and linguistic research, and assess the use of names in literature from different periods.

Representing the Holocaust

You will gain an interdisciplinary understanding of the relationship between representation and the Holocaust, and the key concepts and debates informing the development of Holocaust Studies. You will gain a substantive insight into a number of literary and non-literary case studies.

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.

Women Behaving Badly

You will further your understanding of the position and construction of women in nineteenth-century literature and society, though exploration of questions concerning representation, constructions of femininity, class and contemporary medical and legal discourses. You will gain a sophisticated knowledge of a group of fictional texts, and of the context in which they were written.

Writing/Performing The City

In this module we investigate a range of artistic material which responds to the city as an environment, community and cultural concept and explore our experiences and perceptions of the cityscape through creative praxis. You will have the opportunity to try new approaches and further develop your style as a writer or performance practitioner.

Reading The Page

By exploring the significance of the form of the book and examining a range of different genres the aim is to extend the number of ways in which literary texts can be studied. You will be encouraged to consider how the page may be most effectively used to carry both narrative and argument.

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.

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 Celtic Tiger myth, and Northern culture during the Troubles.

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.

Green Writing

This module explores the link between literature and environmentalism, examining globalization, consumerism, eco-criticism, apocalypse, landscape, vegetarianism, what it means to be human, urbanization, and the representation of nature. Beginning with Romantic-period literature and visual art, we discuss a range of cultural forms, such as Constable’s paintings, travel writing and guidebooks, poetry, novels and recent films.

BA (Hons) English and Creative Writing

Course Structure

Year 1

Year 2

Year 3

Year 1

Year 2

YEAR 3

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