English Literature BA (Hons)

Approaches to Literary Studies

offers a theoretically reflective, historically informed overview of ‘literature’ as a concept and literary studies as a discipline, introducing students to key skills, methods, and resources.

Introduction to Drama

introduces the work of, and critical debate about, a wide historical range of drama and dramatists writing in English, typically covering work from all or most of the following areas: the medieval, early modern, Restoration and Augustan, Romantic, Victorian, and 20th and 21st century: post-medieval dramatists to be covered might include, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Behn, Gay, Shelley, Wilde, Shaw, Beckett, Kushner and Butterworth.

Introduction to Poetry

introduces a wide range of poems by poets writing in English from the early modern to the contemporary periods including some American poetry. You will develop your understanding of traditional major verse forms, modes of organisation and genres (e.g. blank verse, the couplet, the stanza, lyric, elegy, sonnet, epic, pastoral, ode, open form).

Introduction to the Novel

introduces ways of reading English novels and various contexts for studying them. You will be familiarised with strategies for engaging with fictional texts formally as well as historically, by situating the novels studied in their distinctive cultural environments while also being taught the ways in which novelistic form and technique have changed over time.

Epic and the Literature of Legend

introduces students with no previous knowledge of medieval literature to the varieties of epic and related genres, and to forms of religious or mythological expression, in the literature of North-West Europe, especially Britain, during the earlier medieval period.

Romance and the Literature of Chivalry

treats the concepts of knighthood, courtliness and chivalry in a range of later medieval texts (12th to 15th century), examines the development of the romance genre in both literary and cultural terms, and explores its influence on later literature and culture.

Shakespeare

introduces a broad range of Shakespeare’s work, and enables you to analyse in detail a selection of works from different periods of Shakespeare’s oeuvre and in different genres. The module seeks to foster an awareness of the kinds of scholarly, critical and theatrical issues which Shakespeare’s work has generated from the 17th century to the present.

Theory and Practice of Literary Criticism

introduces the presuppositions and principles of literary criticism and issues of knowledge, value and ideology arising from the practice of reading. You will develop an independent critical sense in your own practice of reading, contextualised against the history of theory and criticism.

In recent years optional modules have included: ChaucerOld EnglishOld NorseOld FrenchRenaissance LiteratureLiterature of the Modern PeriodAmerican PoetryPostcolonial and World LiteraturesModern PoetryWriting Women: Gendering Literature, c.800-1600Hotel StoriesWriting HorrorsLiterature and the InternetPoetry by the Book Reading Paradise LostFin-de-Siècle Fiction A selection of our optional modules are available as elective modules taught within a single term.

Dissertation

The final year includes a involving guided research on a self-formulated topic, author or genre. The dissertation is based upon the gathering and processing of relevant information and materials, and results in work of sustained argumentative and analytic power. It is double-weighted (i.e. with credits to the value of two modules).

In recent years optional modules have included: Restoration and 18th Century LiteratureOld EnglishOld FrenchAmerican FictionPost-War Fiction and PoetryKeats and ShelleyThe Rise of Popular Music Post-1945 Black British WritingLife Write Now: Reading Contemporary Autofiction Creative Writing Poetry / Prose FictionSexology and the NovelMind and Narrative