BA (Hons) English Literatures

This module offers a critical and creative engagement with literature written for children, designed for Creative Writing and English students. In studying the historical trajectory of children’s literature, students will be encouraged to analyse texts in relation to their cultural, social and gendered contexts, and mindful of the changing politics of childhood as an identity category. What did ‘childhood’ mean in different eras, and what was the literature intended for them meant to do?

This module introduces you to the principles of drama in performance. Aided by theatre professionals the module takes you through the practicalities and theory of putting on a play: interpretation, staging, directing, producing and acting. Using the Arena Theatre's stage and resources, you'll take key scenes from the page to the stage.

This module will explore a broad and inclusive selection of poetry from different periods of literary history and representing diverse voices, including Black, Asian, and minority ethnic poets from global backgrounds. Using these examples, our emphasis will be on learning techniques for formal analysis (close reading), creative expression (writing poetry), and performance. We will consider aspects of reading, writing, and performing poetry, including form, rhythm and meter, diction, figurative language and sound. We will also consider the development of particular genres (e.g. the ballad, the sonnet) and forms (e.g. blank verse, free verse) over time and across cultures, from the medieval period to the present, with an emphasis on the reader expectations that accrue around poetic forms and genres.

This module explores the social, political and philosophical contexts of the English and global Renaissance through its literary culture.

This module will focus on the key themes, ideas and characteristics of the Gothic genre, situate them in their historical and philosophical context, and attend to the ways in which the representation of the Gothic has developed over the centuries since it first emerged out of the shadows of the Enlightenment. We will begin with John Aikin's 'Sir Bertrand: A Fragment' and end with Helen Oyeyemi's 'White is for Witching' and in between examine a range of literary texts. Close attention will be paid to the ways in which the genre has featured in a range of media and cultural environments, including, visual art, film, music, television and youth subcultures. Topics such as cultural anxieties, the ideology of the sublime, sexual politics, and strategies of subversion will be foregrounded, as will the array of critical perspectives and readings that the Gothic has generated. We also examine the ways in which themes such as gender, class and race intersect with the concern of the gothic tropes that we examine.

This module aims to provide both a thorough introduction to the main areas of contemporary literary criticism and theory, with a particular emphasis on textual/cultural constructions of identity. Students will be equipped with a set of theoretical terms and concepts that will enable them to understand what is at stake in current debates in critical and cultural theory, and the way in which such debates inform the politics of literary and cultural representation. Topics covered include Structuralism/Post-Structuralism; Psychoanalysis; Marxism; Feminisms; Postcolonialism; Disability Studies; Animal Studies. Students will be provided with copies of theoretical essays via the VLE, with particular emphasis on thinkers from beyond the white, European-American 'canon' of theory.

This module will explore the representation of disability in Victorian literature and culture, using a definition of the 'Victorian era' which expands beyond the colonial centre and considering texts as part of a long nineteenth century as well. With a particular emphasis on the way in which the 'extraordinary' body and mind are constructed in Victorian popular culture, students will study a selection of nineteenth-century texts via the lens of contemporary disability theory. The ideologies of empire are explored alongside issues of gender, class and religion (Christianity and Islam). Students will encounter nineteenth-century novels, drama, poetry, short stories, pamphlets, religious tracts, newspaper articles and advertising.

How do we think about the outside world, the relationship between our environment, humanity and its living inhabitants? What cultural and philosophical, religious, political and racial attitudes shape the literature of space, and place and do they affect our daily lives? This module examines historical and contemporary cultural attitudes to nature and the environment by examining a range of texts across multiple genres, places, cultures and periods which engage with notions and representations of 'nature', place, the pastoral, cities, development, agriculture, animals, gardening, outdoor leisure, environmentalism, industry, climate change, social justice and the ways in which humans have conceptualised our relationships with the natural world. You will engage with poems, plays, novels, non-fiction, religious texts from multiple traditions, film, television and other media from across the world and throughout history, plus appropriate critical and theoretical work including eco-fiction theory.

The module examines literary and cultural responses to political debates and to key moments in social history. Particular reference will be made to the impacts of socio-cultural change and political movements on popular literature and culture, and how such productions have been used to advance or resist various ideological interests. Issues addressed will include the relationships between various types of representation and their claims to truth and authenticity, the impact of social, commercial, political and moral issues on cultural production; the significance of the audience; the role(s) of culture within particular social formations such as ethnic and sexual identities, with particular reference to practices of collaboration, recuperation, and resistance. Students will draw on theoretical perspectives acquired through 5EN001 and in the course of this module including but not limited to queer theory, decolonisation, Marxism and feminism Texts may include: Black Panther (2018); James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time; Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale; The Fresh Prince of Bel Air; Doctor Who; Drag Race UK; The Crown, South Park, South Park, Jilly Cooper's Riders; Watchmen; American Psycho; The Book of Mormon (the musical, not the religious text), Lessing's The Good Terrorist.

This module provides opportunities for community-based learning through voluntary community engagement. This activity will enable you to understand the relevance of your studies within a community context, combining practical experience with academic studies. In addition, it is an opportunity to develop a critical understanding of the Third Sector, and the notion of citizenship. Both subject specific and transferable skills will be developed and utilised throughout this module, thus developing graduate employment attributes.

This module provides an opportunity to apply academic skills and knowledge to a project negotiated with an external organisation. Students are required to identify, negotiate and research an issue which is relevant to both their academic study and the external organisation. This enables the student to demonstrate an awareness of academic research within an organisational context, together with an understanding of the parameters of research methodologies within an academic framework.

This module provides the opportunity for students to conduct their own research into a negotiated subject of their choice within the areas of English Language Studies or English Literary Studies. It requires students to demonstrate the analytical skills acquired over length of their English degree, including the abilities to construct and sustain an argument, and to support it using evidence.

This module provides the opportunity for students to conduct their own research into a negotiated subject of their choice within the areas of English Language Studies or English Literary Studies.  It requires students to demonstrate the analytical, research, interpretive and study skills acquired over the length of their English degree, including the abilities to construct and sustain an argument, and to support it using credible researched evidence.

This module maps, historicises and analyses our rapidly changing experience in the digital age, which confronts us with new and diverging forms of social relationships, identities and changing human behaviour. The module explores how narrative form is changing by paying attention to new modes, media, formats, platforms and reading devices with new temporalities and possibilities, such as literature published via Twitter, gaming narratives, cell phone novels, and new genres such as 'tech thrillers'. We also analyse game narratives. Particular attention is paid to gender representation in the digital age, digital inequality in relation to class and ethnicity, and how technology responds to post-secular contexts. Relevant theoretical contexts include post-humanism, digital humanities, AI and computational literary studies.

This module aims to provide students with an understanding of the Modernist period and the terms ‘modernism’ and 'avant-garde' in some of their classifying and critical uses, and to develop and deploy reading skills appropriate to modernist and avant-garde texts across a selection of works, including some from continental Europe and the USA and Latin American. We will begin with a screening of Salvador Dali's film 'Un Chien Andalou' and end with a short story by the first openly gay black writer in the USA, Richard Bruce Nugent, in between we will examine the work of James Joyce, Latin American Frida Kahlo, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, T.S Eliot, David Garnett, and Leonora Carrington amongst others. In addition, some sessions will be dedicated to the analysis of Modernist theory and the texts and to an examination of relevant contextual tropes such as gender theory, psychoanalysis and the concept of the fragmented subject (Freud, Jung and Spielrein) and theories of time (Bergson) and race (Walker).

This module approaches medieval literature through the lens of feminist and queer studies. It covers texts from the tenth to sixteenth centuries which either trouble or resist categories such as male/female; heterosexuality/homosexuality and Christian/Muslim/Jewish, or which disrupt heteronormative narratives and time. The module reads and workshops medieval poetry, drama, prose and art from a wide variety of genres in relation to key queer and feminist theorists. It covers early examples of what we would now term gay, lesbian, bisexual and asexual narratives; cross-dressing and trans narratives; female masculinity; the relationship between gender, race and oppression in the medieval imagination and early evidence of the emergence of what we now consider ‘queer’ art forms, such as camp and drag performance.

This module explores the ways postcolonial texts challenge dominant discourses of 'race', gender, sexuality, class, disability, and religion. Students will study a range of texts by authors of colour from Britain, the U.S. and other parts of the world and consider the intersections between different constructions of identities in literature and culture. Postcolonial cultural theory and critical race theory will be central to this module, alongside feminism and disability studies. Guest speakers will contribute towards the module at various points. Alongside the set texts on the module, students will be encouraged to bring literary and cultural texts from their own experiences to the classes, and to feed into the assessment. Students will have the opportunity to work together to produce a digital artefact which communicates their expert knowledge of this topic to audiences beyond academia.

This module draws on a range of texts and cultural practices to address the extremes of representation. We will examine some examples of the ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural texts that are hidden from mainstream society, and those which are rejected by both/either the populace and the academy. Our objects of enquiry will be representational strategies, and their real effects on individuals and on society. Topics may include debates around representations of racism, genocide, disablism, sexual 'deviance', blasphemy, obscenity, political extremism, cancel culture, screen violence, animal rights and wrongs. Students are asked to contribute their own examples of problematic texts and to engage with current and ongoing culture wars. A wide range of theoretical approaches will be applied, including postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, cultural materialism, animal studies, disability studies.

This module examines Romanticism as a concept encompassing literature and global culture between 1780 and 1840. With reference to poetry, fiction, and non-fictional prose, the module explores in particular how the Romantic imagination intersects with, is modified by, and contests developments in material culture, science and technology, politics, religion, and the arts. Sites of cultural debate to be considered include: representations of revolution; the abolition of slavery; gender rights and sexuality; landscape, travel, and colonialism; and the writer in society.