Our Undergraduate Modules 2020-21

Course Convener: TBC

This module will encourage you to look at the role of English literature in moments of social and historical crisis. You will encounter literature across different historical periods and geographies, challenging you to reflect on the complex relationship between literature, history and politics.

Course Convener: Dr Judith Hawley

In this module you will develop an understanding of the origins, developments and innovations of the novel form. You will look at a range of contemporary, eighteenth and nineteenth-century novels and learn to use concepts in narrative theory and criticism. You will consider literary history and make formal and thematic connections between texts and their varying socio-cultural contexts. You will examine novels such as 'The Accidental' by Ali Smith, 'Things Fall Apart' by Chinua Achebe and 'North and South' by Elizabeth Gaskell, analysing their cultural and intellectual contexts.

Course Convener: Professor Tim Armstrong

This is the core first-year course for students on the BA English & American Literature.

The aim of the course is to provide an introduction to the main topics of American literature and culture, while studying the writings of the period from the first colonial encounters - before America was - through the establishment of the republic to the mid-century ferment around slavery, and the work which followed the Civil War in which the pressures of industrialization and modernity are apparent. As well as examining how texts respond to and mediate their cultural, historical and political contexts (America’s foundational myths, its geography, gender, race), the course will discuss more formal topics such as genre (the rise of the short story in America; the importance of the essay; the formal features of the slave narrative), poetic form, and the uses of emotion in literature.

Course Convener: Professor Ben Markovits

This is the core first-year course for students on the BA English & Creative Writing or BA American Literature and Creative Writing degree.

In this module you will develop an understanding of a range of literary and cultural writing forms through reading, discussion and practice. You will look at poetry, drama and prose fiction alongside stand-up comedy, adaptation, translation, songwriting, and other forms of creative expression and articulation. You will learn how to offer clear, constructive, sensitive critical appraisals, and how to accept and appropriately value criticism of your own work.

Course Convener: Dr Doug Cowie

This is the core first-year course for students on the BA English & Creative Writing or BA American Literature and Creative Writing degree.

In this module you will develop an understanding of a range historical perspectives on the function, forms, and value of creative writing. You will look at the genesis of particular genres, such as the short story, the novel and the manifesto, and consider relationships between historical genres and the contemporary writer. You will interrogate your own assumptions about creative writing and critically examine the relationship between creative writing and society.

Course Convener: Dr Jenny Neville

This course introduces students to the earliest literary writings in English, covering a span of eight hundred years, from 700-1500.  To put that period of time in perspective, from the time of Shakespeare up to today is only four hundred years.  We cover an extensive range of genres, themes, texts and topics.  By the end of the course you will be well acquainted with the range of medieval literature in English.  You may be surprised at how vital and sophisticated the finest of this material is, and how much it has inspired more recent authors such as Seamus Heaney (see his translation of Beowulf), Derek Walcott (who cites Langland as his greatest inspiration), and Ian McEwan (who voted Chaucer as his ‘Man of the Millennium’).

Course Convener: Dr Harry Newman

In this module you will develop an understanding of Shakespeare’s dramatic and literary craft. You will look at the historical context of the plays and the relevance of the plays today. You will examine a range of Shakespeare’s work from the Elizabethan Comedies and Histories, including 'Twelfth Night', 'Henry V', 'Hamlet'. 'King Lear' and 'The Tempest'. You will analyse key critical approaches to Shakespeare and consider the performance history of the plays.

Course Conveners: Professor Robert Eaglestone

In this module you will develop an understanding of how to think, read and write as a critic. You will look at the concepts, ideas and histories that are central to the ‘disciplinary consciousness’ of English Literature, considering periodisation, form, genre, canon, intention, narrative, framing and identity.

Course Convener: Dr John Regan

In this module you will develop an understanding of a variety of major poems in English. You will look at key poems from the Renaissance to the present day. You will engage with historical issues surrounding the poems and make critical judgements, considering stylistic elements such as rhyme, rhythm, metre, diction and imagery. You will examine poems from Shakespeare to Sylvia Plath and analyse topics such as sound, the stanza and the use of poetic language.

Course Convener: Dr Roy Booth

This course is designed as an introduction to the literature of the English Renaissance, beginning in the 1590s with erotic narrative poems by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, and concluding with John Milton's drama, Samson Agonistes, first published in 1671. Marlowe and Thomas Middleton represent the extraordinarily rich drama of the period, while John Donne and Andrew Marvell are the most famous of the so-called metaphysical poets. A feature of the course is the attention given to situating these works in their historical and cultural contexts. The online course book has several seminar texts, some of which are also available in the printed version.

Course Convener: Professor Judith Hawley

Between the English Revolution and the French Revolution, British literature was pulled by opposing cultural forces and experienced an extraordinary degree of experimentation. The eighteenth century is sometime called The Age of Reason, but it is also called The Age of Sensibility. It was dominated by male writers, but also facilitated the rise of the woman novelist and the emergence of coteries of intellectual women. It continued to be an essentially rural nation, but London grew to be the biggest city in the world and industrialisation was beginning to herd workers into towns. This whole unit explores some of the tensions and oppositions which were played out in the literature of this period.

Course Convener: Professor Judith Hawley

This course aims to introduce the student to a broad range of literatures in the period 1780-1830. It aims to problematise and scrutinise the idea of Romanticism as a homogenous literary movement and to raise awareness of the range of competing literary identities present in the period. 

Course Conveners: Dr Will Montgomery

The aim of this course is to provide an introduction to the study of literary modernism, a period of intense experimentation in diverse sets of cultural forms. It will deal with such issues such as modernist aesthetics; genre; gender and sexuality; the fragment; time and narration; stream-of-consciousness; history, politics and colonialism; technology, and the status of language and the real.

Course Convener: Dr James Smith

This module will familiarise you with a range of influential critical and theoretical ideas in literary studies, influential and important for all the areas and periods you will study during your degree.

Course Convener: Professor Tim Armstrong

Compulsory for BA English & American Literature: priority will be given to students on an American Literature degree pathway but the course is open to students on all English degrees, space permitting.

The aim of this course is to explore American Literature in the twentieth century, looking at a selection of key topics and movements as American literature moves from realism to modernism and postmodernism. Because the field is too large to survey easily, the course is divided into four 5 weeks blocks (which vary from year to year) which enable students to explore issues in more depth, guided by the specialism of the staff involved. Topics covered may include race, gender, genre and the impact of specific historical events like the Great depression and the Cold War.

Course Convener: TBC

English and Drama students only, core course

‘Shakespeare from Page to Stage’ actively encourages students to reflect on the processes of creative tension and crossfertilisation between Drama, Film and English studies. The course is studied in the English Department in the autumn term and is taught in the Drama Department in the Spring term. The focus of the first term is on Shakespeare the playwright; therefore the emphasis of the textual analysis will be on the rhetorical strategies employed as well as the plays’ dramatic structure. The class will consider Shakespeare, as performed, in contemporary productions on stage and film.

Course Convener: Dr Nick Pierpan

This course is only open to English and Creative Writing/Drama and Creative Writing students.

The first term will focus on a series of dramaturgical elements, looking at the way that these elements are exemplified in 39 various set texts and trying to develop them through writing exercises. For example, students may be asked to read Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard thinking specifically about how each character changes in the course of the play (however minutely). In total, a useful ‘toolbox’ should be gained on how to write a play. A summative portfolio of short scenes is produced at the end of the first term. For much of the second term, students will be engaged in developing a series of ideas for plays that they will then write in small groups. During this period, the content of the classes will be driven by the demands of the developing scripts. As appropriate, specific topics (dialogue, character, subtext, etc.) will be introduced to contribute to the development of the class. For the last few weeks of the second term, students will be concentrating on their own short, single-authored plays, and we will revisit issues of structure, style, language and inspiration. 

Course Convener: Dr Doug Cowie

This course is only open to English and Creative Writing/Drama and Creative Writing students.

This is a course option available to all second-year Creative Writing students. It is designed to provide students with the opportunity to develop their fiction-writing skills within a structured workshop-based environment. The course seeks to pick up on the grounding in the theory and practice of creative writing students acquired in their first year. 

Course Convener: Dr Prue Bussey-Chamberlain

This course is only open to English and Creative Writing/Drama and Creative Writing students.

On this course you will work through some of the fundamental elements of poetry: subject, duration, image, language, sound, rhythm, visual poetics, performance, etc. We shall do so through encountering and discussing different approaches to and examples of these fundamental elements as they arise in poetry as well as in background readings across an historical range and between disciplinary boundaries. The course aims to develop your familiarity with a variety of techniques available to the contemporary poet, thereby informing and enhancing your own creative practice. It likewise aims to further your understanding and appreciation of poetry as an artistic medium of thought and communication. The course will concentrate on lyric rather than dramatic or narrative poetry; however, throughout the course you will be encouraged to expand your creative practice alongside your thinking; to write and consider longer sequences of poems as well as alternative styles of poetic practice.

Course Convener: Dr Alastair Bennett

This course will develop your skills in the close reading and critical analysis of Middle English poetry, focusing on set passages from three important fourteenth century texts: Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Langland’s Piers Plowman, and the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The course explores these passages in detail, examining their metre and verse form, their use of literary and rhetorical devices, and their wide ranging intertextual allusions. It also relates the passages to their contexts, both in the poems they come from, and also in the wider literary culture of late medieval England. The course invites you to think about how poets understood the status of Middle English as a literary language, in comparison with Latin and French. It also asks whether these Middle English texts can be said to articulate their own kinds of literary theory. The course will introduce you to some of the best and most exciting current criticism on Troilus, Piers, and Sir Gawain and on medieval poetic practice more generally. Your work on this course will make you a more confident reader of Middle English, and will inform and enhance your close analysis of poetry from all historical periods. 

Course Convener: Dr Jenny Neville

With the release of the movies based on The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien seems to be as popular as ever. This course examines Tolkien’s work from the perspective of his engagement with Old English poetry, a subject which constituted an important part of his scholarly activity. We will focus on three main Old English poems (in the original and in translation) and Tolkien’s two most popular works of fiction, The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.

Course Convener: Dr Catherine Nall

This half-unit explores a major literary genre which attracted all the great poets of late medieval England: the dream vision. It considers the use of the genre in the works of Chaucer, Langland and the Gawain-poet, as well as examining the visions in mystical writing. These authors’ treatments of the genre repeatedly ask us to reflect on the relationship of literature to experience, poetic authority and identity, and the development of English as a literary language. Lectures will explore the cultural, religious and social background to these works, as well as focusing on individual authors and texts.

Course Convener: Dr Catherine Nall

Romance was one of the most popular genres of secular literature in late medieval England. We begin by looking at the Arthurian romances of Chretien de Troyes, before going on to consider works by Chaucer, the Gawain-poet and Sir Thomas Malory. We will encounter romances set in the mythical British past, in the classical cities of Troy, Thebes and Athens, and in the more recognisable landscapes of medieval England and France. Attention will be paid throughout to the often inventive and unpredictable ways in which medieval romance works to articulate specific historical and cultural anxieties.

Course Convener: Dr Deana Rankin

This half-unit explores in depth three supreme examples of Shakespearean comedy, tragedy and historical drama that are not covered by the first-year Shakespeare course EN1106: Richard III (1592- 3), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595-6), and Macbeth (1606). It allows for a closer, more concentrated study of the range of Shakespeare's drama than was possible in EN1106, and is designed to pave the way for the advanced third-year Shakespeare option EN3011. However, it is not a pre-requisite for EN3011.

Course Convener: Dr Roy Booth

The texts covered span virtually the whole period in which early modern English drama flourished: from Marlowe in c.1593 to 1634. The texts range from famous plays like Macbeth and The Tempest to little-known comedies like The Wise-woman of Hogsden. Two central texts will be The Witch of Edmonton and The Late Lancashire Witches, plays which deal with historically documented witchcraft accusations and scares. The phenomenon of witchcraft, and the persecution of witches during outbreaks of witchcraft hysteria has fascinated historians: the historical component of this course will be large. Accordingly, nondramatic texts about witchcraft are also included for study in the course. These will include news pamphlets, works by learned contemporaries expressing their opinions about witchcraft, popular ballads and other archival texts. 

Course Convener: Dr Deana Rankin

Charting a progression from Galenic humoral theory to Cartesian dualism, Early-Modern Bodies considers the representation and significance of corporeality in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts. Reading Renaissance plays and poetry alongside anatomical textbooks, manuals of health, erotica, and philosophical essays, the module seeks to contextualise the period’s literary treatment of the body; authors and works studied will range from familiar names such as Marlowe, Donne, and Sidney, to the comparatively less canonical (for example, the plague tracts of Thomas Lodge; Jacques Ferrand’s cure for love-sickness, Erotomania; or Helkiah Crooke’s anatomical treatise, Microcosmographia). Renaissance depictions of the body variously condemn the ‘filthy fleshy pleasures’ of ‘bodily matter, superfluous and unsavery’ while celebrating ‘the Wisdom of the Eternal Mind’ exhibited in a well-ordered cadaver. This module shows how Renaissance writers exhibit period unease about the workings and mysteries of the body, returning compulsively to what is both a site of meaning and a site of corruption. During the course of this module we will explore issues of metamorphosis, humoral theory, gender and race, healthy moderation and grotesque over-indulgence, examining bodies heroic and maternal, bodies articulate and disarticulated, infected by physical desire and plagued by contagious disease. Although Donne’s ‘pulse... urine [and] sweat, all have sworn to say nothing’, nevertheless we will attempt to read the early-modern body and anatomise its meanings.

Course Convener: Dr Roy Booth

This module offers the opportunity to study one very important and characteristic aspect of Milton’s epic: his depiction of Eden, the paradise that was lost at the fall. Throughout his account of Paradise, Milton works to make the loss of paradise poignant by lavishing on it all his evocative powers as a poet. We will spend at least three sessions looking at Milton’s epic, covering aspects such as Edenic sex and marriage, Eden’s fauna and flora, and work in Eden. Throughout the course images of Paradise will be given attention, starting with Hieronymus Bosch’s ‘The Garden of Earthly Delight’. Alongside art works, we will touch briefly on some of the Bible scholarship which tried to locate the site of paradise, and deduce its fate. 

Course Convener: Dr Alastair Bennett

This course provides an introduction to English literature from the Norman conquest to the birth of Chaucer. This period has been described both as a period of political crisis and also as a period of cultural renaissance. It saw the conquest and colonization of England, the rise of new forms of scholarship and spirituality, and, according to some accounts, the development of new ways of thinking about national and individual identity. The course will offer a survey of English writing from this period, considering established genres like lyric, epic and satire alongside new literary forms like romance, fabliau and beast fable. Core texts include King Horn, an early romance of exile, love and revenge, Laȝamon’s Brut, a magisterial verse history of the British, saints’ lives from the ‘Katherine-group’ with their powerful accounts of physical endurance and religious desire, and The Owl and the Nightingale, perhaps the first example of comic writing in English. Not all English literature from this period was written in English, and you will have an opportunity to read these early Middle English texts alongside contemporary writing in Latin and French (using modern English translations), and to think about the implications of a tri-lingual literary culture. Once a largely-forgotten period in English literary history, 1066-1340 has seen a revival of critical interest in recent years. The course will introduce you to some of the best recent criticism on this literature, and give you a stake in the ongoing project of recovering and reinterpreting it.

Course Convener: Dr Azelina Flint

This is a core course for English and Film Studies students, but open to students from all English programmes, space permitting (priority to English and Film Studies students)

This course aims to introduce students to a range of adaptations of North American Literature from the 20th and 21st century. The analysis of the texts of these adaptations will be combined with an exploration of their social, political and cultural contexts to articulate the connection between creative work and social environment raising the questions of why adapt literature to film and what constitutes adaptation. 

Course Convener: Professor Ruth Livesey

In this course we immerse ourselves in novels that transformed ideas of what stories could do in the world. This in-depth study of a selection of works by three extraordinary nineteenth-century writers takes us from village life in Cranford, out into the industrial city and the new global networks of the ‘age of Empire’. Along the way we explore how Gaskell, Eliot, and Dickens played with new possibilities of the literary marketplace in the industrial era, struggled to give a voice to subjects rarely before represented in fiction, and scandalised many by their treatment of sexuality. We will reflect on readership as well as writing in the nineteenth century and explore the challenges that we now face, letting go and committing to immersing ourselves in these long-form stories. Texts studied will include Gaskell’s Cranford, and Mary Barton, Dickens’s David Copperfield and Great Expectations, stories from George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life, and Daniel Deronda.

Course Convener: Professor Ben Markovits

This course is only available to English Single Honours and Joint Honours students (not to students registered for the Creative Writing Pathway).

This module is designed to give Single Honour and Joint Honour students who are interested in doing some creative writing (but not those enrolled in the Creative Writing programme) the opportunity to work through some issues associated with short-story and/or novel writing. Classes will alternate seminar discussions of aspects of the craft of writing with workshops in which students interact critically and creatively with one another’s work.

Course Convener: Dr Rob Gallagher

This course will examine a range of novels by gay and lesbian writers in Britain and Ireland which have emerged in the wake of the AIDS catastrophe and queer theory. We will focus on interesting though rather peculiar trends in the post-queer novel: queer historical and biographical fictions, and explore the reasons behind the dominance of these approaches in recent gay and lesbian literature. We will also explore the various literary and political strategies employed by these writers such as historical and literary reclamation, the queer destabilisation of fixed categories of identity, the figuring of desire’s ambiguous textures, a studied engagement with form etc. By focusing on prominent contemporary writers, we will explore the evolution of gay and lesbian British fiction beyond the dictates of queer theory. 

Course Convener: Dr Betty Jay

The aim of this course is to provide an introduction into the study of eco-criticism and environmental literatures. The crises of climate change generate new perspectives on contemporary and historical literatures. In this course students will examine a range of literary and theoretical texts towards an understanding of the development and current issues in this growing interdisciplinary area of study. The course will take a thematic rather than an historical approach to the investigation of its materials with a focus on water as a defining feature of a number of texts drawn from different genres. Topics for discussion will include community, labour, flood, movement, belonging, purification and borders.

Course Convener: Dr Betty Jay

As a nineteenth-century novel that occupies a unique place within the cultural imagination, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) raises vital questions about literature and science, narrative and epistemology, creation and theology, gender and power. In addition to exploring these questions through detailed readings of the text, this course also considers the novel as it relates to genre and, in particular to the epistolary form, science-fiction and the female Gothic. An emphasis on the formal attributes of the text will be supplemented by a consideration of the historical and cultural context of this novel. Debates about Shelley’s relation to Romanticism, anxieties about the body and the role of myth-making in Frankenstein will lead into an exploration of the ways in which the text has influenced subsequent literary and cinematic renditions of monstrosity.

Course Convener: Professor Ruth Livesey

The aim of this course is to examine the 'dark' topics of late-Victorian and Edwardian literature. Perhaps the most important cultural influence on these texts is the negative possibility inherent in Darwinism: that of 'degeneration', of racial or cultural reversal, explored in texts like Wells's The Time Machine, and often related to the Decadent literature of Wilde and others. Dorian Gray, used by Nordau and others as evidence of degeneration, also provides a location for such pathologies: in the 'borderland' of the demi-monde and in the East End of London, with its fantasized criminal zones, opium dens, and white slavers.

Course Convener: Professor Anne Varty

Explore British drama staged during the first half of the twentieth century against a backdrop of two world wars. The plays studied place the values of their age under scrutiny, to raise questions about social justice, spiritual choices, class and gender inequalities. Theatrical genres were under just as much pressure as the cultural values they sought to convey; the ten plays studies during the course reflect a range of evolving genres, from the well-made play, the play of ideas, social comedy, to poetic drama.

Course Convener: Dr Rob Gallagher

This course will explore how the digital has shaped and reshaped the humanities, and particularly literary studies, over the past fifty years. After offering this historical grounding it will familiarise students with key words, concepts and methods used in the field today, unpack the implications of various different digital addresses to literature that are available to them, and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of all of these. It is a central objective of this course that students will leave it having become familiar not only with the history and theory of the intersections between literature and the digital, but that they feel emboldened to use some of the technologies that are currently available. 

Course Convener: Professor Tim Armstrong

This course aims to provide an introduction to American literature via the tradition which David Reynolds labels 'dark reform'; a satirical and often populist mode which seek out the abuses which lie beneath the optimistic surface of American life, often through grotesque, scatological, sexualized and carnivalesque imagery. It explores the contention that because of America's history, with its notions of national consensus and fear of class conflict, political critique in America has often had to find indirect expression. As well as studying a range of literature (mainly prose, with some poetry and drama), and some visual material and film, students will be expected to gain a basic grounding in elements of American history, and read some political and cultural theory. Topics include: race and class in America; the critique of 'big business'; conspiracy theories and the Jeremiad; the carnivalesque; issues of genre and audience. 

Course Convener: Dr James Smith

This course interrogates the importance that has been placed on the ambiguous idea of ‘culture’ in literature, critical thought,and social theory, from the early twentieth-century to the present day. It looks at examples of literary criticism (F.R. Leavis), feminism (Virginia Woolf), psychoanalysis (Freud), ‘New Left’ thought (Perry Anderson, Raymond Williams), and the ‘Two Cultures’ debate between literature and science in the 1960s, all the way through to current ‘culture wars’ over the alt right, trans identity and other political and activist subcultures today. Students will be asked to interrogate their own ideas about cultural value and the relationship between art and politics. The module is assessed by coursework essay.

Course Convener: Dr Rob Gallagher

The study of contemporary fiction has seen two exciting and important developments in recent years. Firstly, postcolonial studies, which is largely concerned with colonialism and its afterlife, has been expanded upon and to some extent, problematised. Critics argue that a new critical methodology is necessary to deal with a variety of more contemporary concerns e.g. the post 9/11 cultural clashes, the Arab Spring, the financial crash of 2008 etc. The genre of ‘world literature’ thus emerges as a means of engaging with this new globalised and globalising geo-political landscape. Secondly, there has been a convergence between a re-thinking of these texts from around the world with the concerns of queer people. As Hawley has pointed out, this convergence has not been an easy one. World-literature critics worry that queer theorists foist a Western, elitist approach to LGBTQ+ identities on to the rest of the world, that is, a Western homonormativity performs a similar role as the unequal distribution of power in a globalised world. Queer theorists, on the other hand, are anxious that queer perspectives get lost in world-literature 33 theory and texts, which tend to, they argue, either privilege a masculine nationalist agenda or not pay enough attention to the effects of globalisation on local articulations of race, gender and sexuality. The principal aim of this course is to explore this productive tension by paying close attention to variety of texts from around the world. The course is geographically ambitious: we will look at texts from/about the Middle East, the Caribbean, and from a number of Africa countries; generically eclectic: short stories, novels, and memoirs will be engaged with; and we will address some of the some of the most pressing debated in the convergence between world literature and queer studies. 

Course Convener: TBC

This is a core course for English and Film Studies students but open to students from all English programmes, space permitting (priority to English and Film Studies students.

This course aims to promote the interdisciplinary study of Shakespeare. It provides students with the opportunity for dedicated, second-level study of a limited number of plays both from the perspective of film studies and literary criticism. It will also explicitly encourage joint-honours students to reflect on the creative tensions and cross-fertilisation between the two halves of their degree.

Course Convener: Professor Ruth Livesey

This course explores aspects of nineteenth-century literature, science and culture in some depth and brings well-known works like Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, Eliot’s Middlemarch and Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend into conversation with the evolutionary thought of Charles Darwin, the social investigations of Henry Mayhew and nineteenth-century writings on psychology. It will range across a number of genres including novels, poetry, journalism, science writing, autobiography, history, art criticism and introduce elements of contemporary visual culture. The course is arranged into linked sessions, the first session of each pair introducing an aspect of nineteenth-century social thought and cultural practice (generally through non-fictional prose) and the second exploring a major nineteenth-century text in the light of these ideas. The course concentrates on the period from the late 1830s to the early 1870s.

Course Convener: Dr John Regan

The objective of this course is to prepare literature students for work in the creative industries by developing their use of digital technologies in responding to literature. In using digital technology to respond to literature both critically and aesthetically, literature students can become adept at various practices that are of immediate, valuable use in the creative industry workplace. This course will cultivate these practices, show how they grow organically out of a love for reading and writing, and demonstrate how they are skills that are in great demand in a wide range of creative workplaces. 

Course Convener: Professor Adam Roberts

This course aims to provide students with the chance to study a broad range of writing for children from the nineteenth through to the twenty-first centuries.

Course Convener: Professor Tim Armstrong

This two-term course provides a survey of African-American literature in relation to the troubled history of race in America. It begins with the first writings of black Americans in early nineteenth century – mainly slave narratives – and charts the emergence of more literary forms of writing, culminating in the explosion of activity in Harlem in the 1920s, an important moment in Modernism. In the period which follows we examine the political novel in the wake of Richard Wright’s Native Son; modernist and contemporary writings; writings on black history and historiography; and the prominence of black women writers. 

Course Convener: Dr Will Montgomery

This interdisciplinary course focuses on a key moment in mid-20th century art and culture: the period when the New York Schools of poetry, painting and composition emerged in parallel. In the postwar period, the city took over from Paris as the centre of contemporary art. Abstract Expressionism quickly achieved global popularity, establishing MoMA as the world’s leading contemporary art museum. However, other cultural currents also made a great impact on their respective disciplines. The witty, fast-moving work of the New York School Poets (Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest and James Schuyler) challenged the authority of High Modernism in the field of poetry. The radical music of John Cage and Morton Feldman posed a similar challenge to established European composers. The leading proponents of these tendencies did not work in isolation from other discplines. The poets, for example, wrote about art and Cage and Feldman were both inspired, in different ways, by painters such as Rauschenberg and Guston. Members of all three groupings met socially and exchanged ideas at an informal forum known as The Club'. This course examines all three fields and the relations between them. The principal focus is on literature, but considerable time will also be devoted to both art and composition. We will study key works by O'Hara, Ashbery, Schuyler, Koch and Guest. We will examine the work of such influential painters as Rothko, Pollock, Guston, Hartigan, Rauschenberg and Johns. We will tackle John Cage's theories of chance and Feldman's use of indeterminacy in his 1950s scores. Students will emerge from this interdisciplinary course with a thorough grounding in these overlapping fields of artistic experimentation.

Course Convener: Professor Adam Roberts

The course aims to provide students with the opportunity to  study the complete career of Charles Dickens (1812-1870), with detailed discussion of eight novels in their historical and cultural contexts. We will look at Dickens’s life and times, and the cultural discourses that shaped his fiction; the serialisation and illustration of his work, and the themes, forms and structures of his art; but above all the course will encourage students to pay close attention to the richness and specificity of Dickens’ actual work, with detailed readings of the text and contexts of a range of his work, from early novels like Oliver Twist, Dombey and Son and A Christmas Carol, through his mid-period masterpieces David Copperfield and Bleak House to his late career masterpieces of theme and symbol, as well as exploring his short stories and journalism. A number of critical approaches are explored, and the course will examine questions of adaptation, looking at a gamut of versions of Dickens from contemporary theatre to modern-day film and TV. Dickens is our most famous novelist: does he deserve the title? This course will give you the detailed knowledge of primary texts and critical perspectives to answer that question. (Spoiler: the answer is yes).

Course Convener: Professor Anne Varty

An opportunity to read in detail and in chronological order the full range of works by Oscar Wilde, from his early poetry to his last letters. Wilde’s work has captured the widest possible public attention since his death in 1900, and his readers and audiences are spread across the globe. His work is intensely literary and profoundly political yet it is popular and fleet-of-foot. And just as his output is exceptionally varied, so too the questions which arise from its study will take students in many directions. Aesthetic poetry, the role of the critic, the construction and betrayal of national and sexual identities, symbolist drama, platonic dialogue, fairy tale, farce, satire, wit: these are some of the topics we will discuss.

Course Convener: Professor Robert Eaglestone

Winner of the Nobel Prize in 2017, Kazuo Ishiguro is one of the most highly regarded but most hard-to-pin down of contemporary world writers. His novels, short stories and film work engage with our shared past, present and futures and explore issues at the heart of contemporary life (some: gender, politics, ethics, guilt, grief, national identity, violence). The whole Ishiguro’s creative work amounts to seven novels, eleven short stories and two films of his (plus two film adaptations of his most celebrated novels) and we plan to cover all this on our course. There is also a manageable amount of good criticism on his work, too, and we will be reading and engaging with some of that, too. Overall, this course gives you the chance to grasp the work of this writer, explore his development and understand the critical debates his work has ignited.

Course Convener: Professor Finn Fordham

The dissertation is an opportunity for you to undertake a substantial piece of independent work in an area of your choice, and so to deepen your understanding of literature, culture and critical theory.

Course Convener: Dr Nicholas Pierpan

This course is taken by all third-year Creative Writing students who are specialising in Playwriting for their final project.

It is an opportunity to write a full-length play independently – to develop one’s playwriting skills in a self-led, rigorous way; in this sense, CW3010 enables students to develop through practice many of the skills and processes essential to a professional playwright.

Course Convener: Dr Doug Cowie

10,000 words fiction project. This project may be the start of a novel; a self-contained piece of fiction; or a collection of short stories.  One 2000-word essay which engages with the development of the project with reference to contemporary practice and relevant cultural contexts. 

Course Convener: Dr Prue Bussey-Chamberlain

This course aims to provide Creative Writing students with a supervised environment in which they can work upon a substantial piece of creative writing in poetic form.

Course Convener: Dr Jenny Neville

The Lord of the Rings regularly shows up in lists of ‘The Best Books of All Time’, and Tolkien continues to inspire interest and imitation for all kinds of reasons. This course examines Tolkien’s work from the perspective of his engagement with Old English poetry, a subject which constituted an important part of his scholarly activity. We will focus on three main Old English poems (in the original and in translation) and Tolkien’s two most popular works of fiction, The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.

Course Convener: Dr Harry Newman

This module is a comprehensive study of three of Shakespeare’s most difficult and most disturbing plays, collectively known as the ‘problem plays’: Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure. Students will develop a detailed knowledge and understanding of the plays, both as individual works of dramatic art and as a group of texts sharing distinctive concerns and techniques. The nature of the problems posed and the issues raised by the plays will be established through a close analysis of their language, structure and form. The course will explore and evaluate a wide range of critical perspectives on the plays, including feminist, new-historicist, culturalmaterialist and psychoanalytic approaches. In so doing, it will also provide a forum for focused discussion of crucial questions in current literary theory.

Course Convener: Dr Roy Booth

The texts covered span virtually the whole period in which early modern English drama flourished: from Marlowe in c.1593 to 1634. The texts range from famous plays like Macbeth and The Tempest to little-known comedies like The Wise-woman of Hogsden. Two central texts will be The Witch of Edmonton and The Late Lancashire Witches, plays which deal with historically documented witchcraft accusations and scares. The phenomenon of witchcraft, and the persecution of witches during outbreaks of witchcraft hysteria has fascinated historians: the historical component of this course will be large. Accordingly, non-dramatic texts about witchcraft are also included for study in the course. These will include news pamphlets, works by learned contemporaries expressing their opinions about witchcraft, popular ballads and other archival texts.

Course Convener: Dr Deana Rankin

Charting a progression from Galenic humoral theory to Cartesian dualism, Early-Modern Bodies considers the representation and significance of corporeality in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts. Reading Renaissance plays and poetry alongside anatomical textbooks, manuals of health, erotica, and philosophical essays, the module seeks to contextualise the period’s literary treatment of the body; authors and works studied will range from familiar names such as Marlowe, Donne, and Sidney, to the comparatively less canonical (for example, the plague tracts of Thomas Lodge; Jacques Ferrand’s cure for love-sickness, Erotomania; or Helkiah Crooke’s anatomical treatise, Microcosmographia). Renaissance depictions of the body variously condemn the ‘filthy fleshy pleasures’ of ‘bodily matter, superfluous and unsavery’ while celebrating ‘the Wisdom of the Eternal Mind’ exhibited in a well-ordered cadaver. This module shows how Renaissance writers exhibit period unease about the workings and mysteries of the body, returning compulsively to what is both a site of meaning and a site of corruption. During the course of this module we will explore issues of metamorphosis, humoral theory, gender and race, healthy moderation and grotesque over-indulgence, examining bodies heroic and maternal, bodies articulate and disarticulated, infected by physical desire and plagued by contagious disease. Although Donne’s ‘pulse... urine [and] sweat, all have sworn to say nothing’, nevertheless we will attempt to read the early-modern body and anatomise its meanings.

Course Convener: Dr Roy Booth

This half unit offers the opportunity to study one very important and characteristic aspect of Milton’s epic Paradise Lost: his depiction of Eden, the paradise that was lost at the fall. Throughout his account of Paradise, Milton works to make the loss of paradise poignant by lavishing on it all his evocative powers as a poet. We will spend at least three sessions looking at Milton’s epic, covering aspects such as Edenic sex and marriage, Eden’s fauna and flora, and work in Eden. Throughout the course images of Paradise will be given attention, starting with Hieronymus Bosch’s ‘The Garden of Earthly Delight’. Alongside art works, we will touch briefly on some of the Bible scholarship which tried to locate the site of paradise, and deduce its fate. 

Course Convener: Dr Alan Bennett

This course provides an introduction to English literature from the Norman conquest to the birth of Chaucer. This period has been described both as a period of political crisis and also as a period of cultural renaissance. It saw the conquest and colonization of England, the rise of new forms of scholarship and spirituality, and, according to some accounts, the development of new ways of thinking about national and individual identity. The course will offer a survey of English writing from this period, considering established genres like lyric, epic and satire alongside new literary forms like romance, fabliau and beast fable. Core texts include King Horn, an early romance of exile, love and revenge, Laȝamon’s Brut, a magisterial verse history of the British, saints’ lives from the ‘Katherine-group’ with their powerful accounts of physical endurance and religious desire, and The Owl and the Nightingale, perhaps the first example of comic writing in English. Not all English literature from this period was written in English, and you will have an opportunity to read these early Middle English texts alongside contemporary writing in Latin and French (using modern English translations), and to think about the implications of a tri-lingual literary culture. Once a largely-forgotten period in English literary history, 1066-1340 has seen a revival of critical interest in recent years. The course will introduce you to some of the best recent criticism on this literature, and give you a stake in the ongoing project of recovering and reinterpreting it.

Course Convener: Dr Alan Bennett

This course will develop your skills in the close reading and critical analysis of Middle English poetry, focusing on set passages from three important fourteenth century texts: Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Langland’s Piers Plowman, and the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The course explores these passages in detail, examining their metre and verse form, their use of literary and rhetorical devices, and their wide ranging intertextual allusions. It also relates the passages to their contexts, both in the poems they come from, and also in the wider 28 literary culture of late medieval England. The course invites you to think about how poets understood the status of Middle English as a literary language, in comparison with Latin and French. It also asks whether these Middle English texts can be said to articulate their own kinds of literary theory. The course will introduce you to some of the best and most exciting current criticism on Troilus, Piers, and Sir Gawain and on medieval poetic practice more generally. Your work on this course will make you a more confident reader of Middle English, and will inform and enhance your close analysis of poetry from all historical periods. 

Course Convener: Dr Catherine Nall

This half-unit explores a major literary genre which attracted all the great poets of late medieval England: the dream vision. It considers the use of the genre in the works of Chaucer, Langland and the Gawain-poet, as well as examining the visions in mystical writing. These authors’ treatments of the genre repeatedly ask us to reflect on the relationship of literature to experience, poetic authority and identity, and the development of English as a literary language. Lectures will explore the cultural, religious and social background to these works, as well as focusing on individual authors and texts. Middle English texts will be read in the original, Latin and French texts will be read in translation. 

Course Convener: Dr Catherine Nall

Romance was one of the most popular genres of secular literature in late medieval England. We begin by looking at the Arthurian romances of Chretien de Troyes, before going on to consider works by Chaucer, the Gawain-poet and Sir Thomas Malory. We will encounter romances set in the mythical British past, in the classical cities of Troy, Thebes and Athens, and in the more recognisable landscapes of medieval England and France. Attention will be paid throughout to the often inventive and unpredictable ways in which medieval romance works to articulate specific historical and cultural anxieties.

Course Convener: Professor Robert Eaglestone

This course aims to provide an advanced introduction to debates about the philosophy of literature. It is structured around three key questions: the ethics of literature, what literature is presumed to reveal and the relationship between literature and its interpretation. 

Course Convener: Dr Harry Newman

What is a character? This is a question with which Shakespeare and his contemporaries engaged creatively as they enacted and responded to significant changes in theatre, literature and culture in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This module explores the representation of a wide variety of literary personae in drama, poetry and prose during a period often associated with the emergence of modern attitudes to identity and subjectivity. Thinking across genres – including tragedy, the comedy of humours, the character sketch, erotic and religious poetry, prose fiction, and autobiographical writing – we’ll study texts by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Webster, John Donne, William Baldwin and Anne Clifford, and consider different theoretical/critical approaches to character, from Aristotle to A.C. Bradley to more recent ‘new character criticism’. Students will develop a detailed understanding of character in different genres and media (performance, print and manuscript), identify and debate theories of selfhood and mimesis, and investigate the impact of cultural and historical shifts on concepts of identity.

Course Convener: Dr Terri Ochiagha

The elusive and oneiric construction called the Orient has awakened a myriad fantasies in the Western imagination. It is a locus of luxury, languor, unbridled and mysterious sexuality in which the Western self—unshackled and free—may conquer, or be conquered by dangerous potency of its sensuous delights. Abounding with harems, odalisques, secluded courtyards, bejewelled interiors, and lush gardens, the Orient is a place for the senses—bereft of cultural and historical specificity, ethnocultural heterogeneity, and subjectivity, in which all ‘Orientals’ but the Pashas, Sultans, and Sultanas remain silent. While this discursive construction of Otherness finds its maximum expression in the Romantic period its permutations persist to this day. Colonialism is often perceived as military conquest and missionary intervention, and colonial discourse as racist disquisitions against brown/black peoples. This course will demonstrate that colonialist and neo-colonialist thought is deeply intertwined with fantasy and desire, unleashing its destructive power not just in the ‘darkest’ recesses of the earth but in its most opulent corners. 

Course Convener: Dr Rob Gallagher

Since the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Britain in 1967, gay and lesbian writers have had the freedom to explore openly in their work their sexuality without fear of prosecution. The early writings of the post-decriminalisation period were often celebratory (there was an explosion of affirming, and sometimes trite, ‘coming out’ stories) and archival (the excavation of the submerged currents of homosexuality in English literary history was seen as an important project for the reclamation of a specifically gay and lesbian history). And then AIDS cast its dark shadow in the 1980s. Out of the disillusionment that beset the gay and lesbian community, out of the belief that hard-won rights were under threat in Thatcherite Britain, out of a mood of apocalyptic despair, the combative discourse of queer theory emerged. Where previous theories of gay and lesbian liberation had stressed equality, queer theory demanded a radical re-thinking of the categories of gender and sexuality. This course will examine a range of novels by gay and lesbian writers in Britain and Ireland which have emerged in the wake of the AIDS catastrophe and queer theory. We will focus on interesting though rather peculiar trends in the post-queer novel: queer historical and biographical fictions, and explore the reasons behind the dominance of these approaches in recent gay and lesbian literature. We will also explore the various literary and political strategies employed by these writers such as historical and literary reclamation, the queer destabilisation of fixed categories of identity, the figuring of desire’s ambiguous textures, a studied engagement with form etc. By focussing on prominent contemporary writers, we will explore the evolution of gay and lesbian British fiction beyond the dictates of queer theory. 

Course Convener: Dr Terri Ochiagha

The end of the various colonial empires in the middle of the twentieth century saw an explosion of literatures from the newly emergent postcolonial societies. The aim of this module is to introduce students to the postcolonial novel—its generative contexts, the critical debates that have shaped its consolidation as a field of academic inquiry, and the dominant preoccupations that have determined its themes and shaped its development: language, gender, migration, colonialism, nationalism, postcolonial disillusion, social and cultural change and identity and representation. While the cultural, historical, and sociopolitical contexts of these novels will be given considerable attention, the module privileges questions relation to aesthetics and form, as well as questions of literary value and canonicity.

Course Convener: Dr Rob Gallagher

The study of contemporary fiction has seen two exciting and important developments in recent years. Firstly, postcolonial studies, which is largely concerned with colonialism and its afterlife, has been expanded upon and to some extent, problematised. Critics argue that a new critical methodology is necessary to deal with a variety of more contemporary concerns e.g. the post 9/11 cultural clashes, the Arab Spring, the financial crash of 2008 etc. The genre of ‘world literature’ thus emerges as a means of engaging with this new globalised and globalising geo-political landscape. Secondly, there has been a convergence between a re-thinking of these texts from around the world with the concerns of queer people. As Hawley has pointed out, this convergence has not been an easy one. World-literature critics worry that queer theorists foist a Western, elitist approach to LGBTQ+ identities on to the rest of the world, that is, a Western homonormativity performs a similar role as the unequal distribution of power in a globalised world. Queer theorists, on the other hand, are anxious that queer perspectives get lost in world-literature theory and texts, which tend to, they argue, either privilege a masculine nationalist agenda or not pay enough attention to the effects of globalisation on local articulations of race, gender and sexuality. The principal aim of this course is to explore this productive tension by paying close attention to variety of texts from around the world. The course is geographically ambitious: we will look at texts from/about the Middle East, the Caribbean, and from a number of Africa countries; generically eclectic: short stories, novels, and memoirs will be engaged with; and we will address some of the some of the most pressing debated in the convergence between world literature and queer studies. 

Course Convener: Dr Will Montgomery

Students will examine the role of sound both as the subject matter and as a formal feature of literary texts. They will learn about the importance of the aural to both the inner ‘sounding’ of the reading process and to public performance. Material studied will include early modernist movements such as Dada and Futurism; major modernist authors such as James Joyce, Wallace Stevens and Joseph Conrad; and a number of contemporary authors. Students will also learn about the influential ideas of John Cage – felt across disciplines – and the relatively new medium of sound. The course will engage with the growing critical literature on the subject of sound, addressing such subjects as the history of technology, soundscapes and theories of listening.

Course Convener: Dr James Smith

This course interrogates the importance that has been placed on the ambiguous idea of ‘culture’ in literature, critical thought, and social theory, from the early twentieth-century to the present day. It looks at examples of literary criticism (F.R. Leavis), feminism (Virginia Woolf), psychoanalysis (Freud), ‘New Left’ thought (Perry Anderson, Raymond Williams), and the ‘Two Cultures’ debate between literature and science in the 1960s, all the way through to current ‘culture wars’ over the alt right, trans identity and other political and activist subcultures today. Students will be asked to interrogate their own ideas about cultural value and the relationship between art and politics. The module is assessed by coursework essay. 

Course Convener: Professor Adam Roberts

This course will read a wide range of examples of pastoral literature, tracing the mode from its classical origins up to the present day. Students taking it will acquire a detailed knowledge of the roots, development and contemporary relevance of pastoral as a mode, across literature but also music and art, from classical eclogues to novels. It is a main purpose of the course to connect the generic conventions of pastoral to contemporary Eco-theory and Green thinking more widely, and to consider the way pastoral has shaped the way we think of Nature as such.

Course Convener: Professor Ben Markovits

The aim of this course is to approach questions about the Great American Novel (what it means, why it matters) by looking intensely at a series of shorter works that all offer themselves for close reading and analysis. The course will consider these works from the point of view of the writer – the sorts of decisions the writers made in fitting their texts within a tradition, and adding something new to it. The Great American novel is a useful starting point for a certain kind of discussion – about quality, as much as anything else. This course will put questions of quality at the forefront of literary analysis, offering in an English class the kind of perspective on literature most commonly confined to creative Writing: questions of what works, why, and what doesn’t will make up a part of each seminar, and students will be encouraged to treat all the primary sources on their own merits without recourse to secondary material. 

Course Convener: Dr Nicholas Pierpan

This course is designed to introduce students to the craft of writing drama for the screen, both at a theoretical level and through the process of writing and re-writing a 12-minute screenplay of their own. Over ten weeks, students will be introduced to a range of themes and skills, including: how to express stories visually; the 3-Act structure; genre; conflict; plot; character; dialogue and use of location. They will learn to brainstorm ideas with other students and critique one another’s material, as well as how to pitch their projects, combined with a broad introduction to standard film industry practice. All of these topics will be taught with reference to a wide range of films, excerpts from which will be shown in class, as well as an in-depth study of the films Thelma & Louise and Whiplash.

Course Convener: Ms Nadifa Mohamed

The term ‘vernacular’ refers to languages and dialects that are related to particular geographical, social, and cultural spaces and communities. Vernacular languages may be categorised as native or indigenous, and may be considered to be natural, naïve, and authentic in contrast with classical and institutional languages. These associations, which are often accompanied by pejorative and discriminatory judgements relating to social status and education, extend to the communities using vernacular languages. Asking what – and who – is signified by ‘English’ language and literature, this course invites students to consider multiple, diverse English languages and literatures, or ‘Englishes’. Taking an intersectional approach to identity and community formation – that is, thinking about race, gender, sexuality, and class in relation to each other – this course provides an overview of vernacular English languages and literatures. The course is structured historically, geographically, and thematically. The focus is on periods and writers identified with Black British and African American literatures (for example, the Caribbean Arts Movement, the Black Arts Movement, Fred Moten), but also includes Scottish, Latin American, and Asian American literatures, and themes such as music, mythology, and decolonisation. The syllabus includes novels, poetry, experimental and cross-genre writing, music, and live performance, as well as theoretical and critical texts. All students are expected to think critically and creatively about their linguistic and cultural contexts, and students are especially encouraged to reflect upon the contexts that are and are not accessible to them, and upon the cultural significance of the languages in which they choose to write.

Course Convener: Dr Doug Cowie

Writing about Music will ask you to think, and read, and talk, and write about the history, culture, and sound of music (the hills are alive with it). Mostly you will study various forms of popular music, from the blues to jazz to rock ‘n’ roll to grime with a variety of stops in between, though we’re also going to talk a little bit about classical music. 

Course Convener: Dr Anna Whitwham

We will consider some of the ways men and masculinity are presented across a range of texts and sub-cultures. We will develop ideas around constructs of masculinity – its needs and delusions and the tactics of an obsolete masculinity in a post-industrial age – and of new and emerging definitions of masculinity. We will begin with 1950s models as a foundation and reach into a variety of sub and counter-cultures, from boxing to art. We will look at the ways authors create male characters and create new definitions, narratives and language around masculinity as both concept and construct. During this course we will devise and develop our own prose, poetry or scripts to create our own protagonists from their own cultures and with their own crisis. 

Course Convener: Dr Prue Bussey-Chamberlain

Extending to both content and form, Writing Queerness will consider the ways in which queerness can feature within the practice of writing. From more experimental Modernist texts to contemporary realist novels; across genres such as non-fiction, poetry and the graphic novel; the course will chart the multiple ways in which queerness can be realised in textual form. Students will not only engage with contemporary literature, but also the history of LGBTQ+ identities, considering how pivotal political and social moments might have an impact on how queerness is realised. The module will address self, sexuality, and community through creative writing, close reading, and critical theory on both sex and gender.