English Literature

In this module, you will be introduced to the skills required for life in contemporary society. The module covers skills such as the following: argumentation, critical thinking, and clarity in written expression. Critical skills are practiced through the filter of “big ideas,” ranging from artificial intelligence to ecocriticism.

Writing and storytelling are as vital now as they have been since history began to be recorded by writers and storytellers. In this module, you will explore and learn about the importance of these fundamentals of literature from different approaches, different forms, and different periods in their use in various media across time.

Ranging from nineteenth-century novelists such as Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy to postmodern writers such as Graham Swift and Jeanette Winterson, this module examines the history of narrative by tracing the development of narrative strategies and cultural themes, including gender and class.

You will be introduced to key concepts fundamental to the study of popular fiction, including those critical attitudes which mediate attitudes towards it. The module develops knowledge of the publishing industry and literary genres and provides a focus on crime literature spanning from Conan Doyle’s Adventures of Sherlock Holmes to The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.

The Romantic Period was a time of revolution when radical writers began to argue for the natural rights of mankind. On this module, you will study the literature that emerged in a time of revolution while exploring how a range of writers experimented with new literary forms and styles, including the Gothic mode: a form of writing that captured contemporaneous anxieties in monstrous, terrifying, and horrific forms. By exploring ideas relating to nature, childhood, empire, and the self, you will study the ways in which the “spirit of the age” was expressed through the revolutionary compositions of Romantic writers. 

On this module, you will analyse novels, poetry, plays, and autobiography from the beginning of the Victorian era to the late nineteenth-century fin de siècle. The module covers a range of issues, including class, crime, sexuality, empire, urban experience, women’s writing, and identity. It encourages an appreciation of the diversity of nineteenth-century literary, social, intellectual, and political activities and invites a reassessment of received ideas about the Victorians.

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 largely eliminated and where science and a moral approach to economic resources is the norm. Authors have also been interested in what happens when a society follows opposite aims to produce social order: when, that is, a dystopian nightmare dominates social life. On this module, you will learn to understand utopian and dystopian texts by studying authors such as Thomas More, William Morris, H. G. Wells, E. M. Forster, Katherine Burdekin, Philip K. Dick , George Orwell, and Ray Bradbury.

On this module, you will study a range of literary texts and their screen counterparts, including Sherlock, Psycho, and Gone Girl. By encouraging you to consider and explore the relationships between literature and screen adaptations, the module will explore the distinctiveness of both cultural forms while investigating the problems of generating visual and dialogic substitutes for psychological and narrative complexity. You will learn about theories of adaptation and the integral role of technical arts such as scenography, music, and sound production; further, you will also learn about techniques associated with writing film and TV synopses, treatments, and step outlines.

This module explores a range of contemporary texts written by women and includes novels and other forms of writing such as manifestos, graphic novels, feminist history writing, and TV shows and music. As a consequence, you will learn about the socio-political and cultural climate of today’s society as it affects and is shaped by women.

You will look at the development of literature for children since 1744 and examine how child development determines the content within texts written for children. You will scrutinise the texts from many angles and you may even produce texts for children.

In this module, you will explore what constitutes a media text in the 21st century. You will learn how to deconstruct media texts using tools from linguistics in order to explore ideology and manipulation in texts. You will analyse a variety of media texts ranging from news reports and advertisements to political speeches and social media by using qualitative and quantitative methods from discourse analysis.

On this module, you will look at dramatic texts other than Shakespeare’s from the late Medieval to the Jacobean period, investigating how issues of sexuality, politics, religion, and identity are treated during this period. The module also asks you to consider a range of different theatrical traditions of staging and stagecraft from the period in order to encourage an appreciation of how those traditions were kept alive on the stage.  

This module explores a selection of Gothic novels, novellas, short stories, and films, working to trace the development of the Female Gothic in fiction from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. By exploring the significance and the effects of various recurrent tropes—including the uncanny, Gothic spaces, the absent/dead mother, abjection, and the monstrous feminine—you will be introduced to the themes of Gothic writing and to the specialised vocabulary of and theoretical approaches to the Female Gothic.

On this module, you will learn how to approach dramatic texts in translation in addition to interrogating the relationships between actor, director, and dramaturg as the central means of moving a theatre text from page to stage. In your studies, you will examine naturalistic performance systems and key aspects of the director’s function through the practical exploration of selected texts in translation.

On this module, you will examine how global literature engages with environmental concerns, including climate change, species endangerment and extinction, food and water security, and waste and pollution. We will consider a variety of forms and perspectives used by writers from Africa, India, the Americas, the Pacific Islands, and elsewhere in order to uncover how global literatures represent and respond to various environments and crises and how they express resistance, develop strategies of mitigation, and envision solutions.

On the work placement module, you will have the opportunity to fulfil a module of study by finding and completing an internship or work placement related to your degree. While on your placement, you will be assigned an academic tutor from the English discipline. The tutor will meet with you to discuss the progress of your placement, help you think about what you are learning, and establish goals.

This module provides the opportunity to learn or develop a language with the University-wide language programme.

This module explores the formal, conceptual, and ideological complexities of the Modernist Period, analysing different and often contrasting traditions within the period. You will examine a number of the most significant formal features and thematic issues within modernist theory and practice: fragmentation, interior monologue, the decentred self, the experience of the metropolis, the relation between gender and writing, technological transformation, and modernist cinema. Movements such as Futurism and Cubism and stylistic innovations in a range of cultural forms will also be discussed and linked to the above issues.

This module explores a range of post-war and 21st-century texts and links them with debates around the nature of postmodernism. These texts will be used to reflect on central literary critical issues such as authorship, narrative structure, linear progression, and identity which are problematised by postmodern theories. The selected texts include films, novels, novellas, short stories, and are not confined to British sources.

The Dissertation module provides you with an opportunity to undertake an independent and challenging research project under the guidance of a member of academic staff. The dissertation expands and hones your research skills, strengthening your ability to engage with complex materials in a productive way and preparing you for further study or a career in the workplace.

This module introduces you to the rich, innovative, and subversive traditions of biography as well as ground-breaking contemporary practice. The module will explore the following issues: biography as autobiography; biography as fiction; biography as poetry; biography as visual text; biography as political critique; and biography as a way of understanding our world. Postmodern concerns about what we understand by “reality,” “life,” representation, subjectivity, and “truth” will underpin our explorations, and you will be guided through a range of key research and writing techniques as you embark upon your own biographical project.

The term “visual text” usefully reminds us that text is visually-recorded language, designed to be perceived through sight. All text is therefore visual but readers and critics often have difficulty sustaining their awareness of its dual nature. This module is devoted to engaging with the visual delivery of text, its possibilities, and its potential to alter and influence meaning, storytelling, and criticism. You will engage in close textual analysis, and you will be encouraged to question the creative decisions behind the presentation of a wide variety of texts, including graffiti, site-specific writing, illustrated and illustrative writing, graphic novels, concrete and shaped text, and text-based animations.

The subject of this module is ‘disobedience’: how it was defined, represented, condemned, and (on occasions) celebrated in sixteenth and seventeenth-century English literature. In particular, you will study the many ways in which authors structure specific discourses around socially marginal characters and outcasts (villains, malcontents, and prostitutes) whose distinctive qualities can include a disruptive and sarcastic verbal idiom as key figures in the contemporary cultural and historical discourse.

This module explores how postcolonial theory can be used to analyse a range of nineteenth- to twenty-first century African literatures, including novels, short stories, and graphic narratives. You will develop the theoretical grounding to aid your analysis of African literature in relation to ideas of race, empire, national identity, language, conflict, and the environment. Collectively, we will consider literature from diverse locations, including South Africa, Rwanda, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe, in ways attuned to cultural, historical, linguistic, and local contexts.

This module contextualises post-war British theatre in terms of naturalism, the avant-garde, political contexts, and the epic mode. Examining a varied range of play texts, you will consider the ways in which British theatre since the Second World War has engaged with issues of class, sexuality, gender, and national identity and how form, narrative, action, and character have evolved in different contexts.

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.

This module will discuss literature written during the period known as the Northern Irish ‘troubles’, the Peace Process and after. It will consider poetry, prose, drama, and film produced in this period, as well as other visual sources (mural, video, and performance art) to consider a variety of ways of representing the conflict. While a historical narrative will be presented in the first lectures and seminars, the focus will be on considering how form and content intersect in these fictive representations.

This module provides the opportunity to learn or develop a language with the University-wide language programme.