BA (Hons) English

This module will introduce you to a wide range of works from the literary canon, from ancient Greek texts in translation to the contemporary, covering the major genres, and embodying significant interventions or influences in literary history.

You'll focus on reading primary texts voraciously and discovering - or rediscovering - diverse writers and cultures so that you can make informed choices from more specialized modules later in your degree. Not being limited to a period, genre or single approach, this module cultivates difference and chronological sweep; it aims to challenge and surprise, as rewarding ‘exploration’ should.

Lectures and seminars sustain the thematic continuity of the module by encouraging you to consider contrasts and dialogues between texts. Cohesion is also supplied by the fact that many of the texts articulate literal and metaphorical ‘explorations’, quests and searches.

This module will introduce you to essential concepts in modern literary study, enabling you to become a more observant, perceptive and analytical reader and critic in your own right.  You'll explore the history and nature of literary studies, and contemporary critical debates.

You'll learn a vocabulary in which to discuss literary language, ideas of literary convention and genre, poetic rhythm and form, and the nature of narrative voice and narrative structures.  You'll be introduced to debates about the relation of texts on the page to texts in performance, and to wider questions about the interpretation of texts. A series of lectures and activity-based seminars, Practical Academic Skills and Strategies (PASS), will ask you to reflect on, and to put into practice a range of academic strategies to enable you to acquire a set of reading, writing and research skills that will support you throughout your studies.

This module will introduce you to the pleasures of poetry written in English and demystifies the language and concepts used in studying it. You'll consider the major poetic components and forms employed in a variety of periods and clarify and illustrate the terminology critics employ in discussing poetry.

The aim is not to provide a chronological survey nor to cover the work of most of the major poets between Chaucer and the present. You'll focus on the vocabulary and technical aspects of verse: diction, metre, rhythm, rhyme, imagery, stanza form, and other such features. Major forms will also be examined: the sonnet, ballad, free verse, dramatic monologue, etc. Lectures will usually address a small number of poems from more than one period, works that illustrate one of the primary poetic characteristics.

This module introduces short stories and tales from various literatures and historical periods. You will explore classical sub-genres such as the fairy tale, the tale of terror, and the detective short story, examine single-author studies of masters of the short story such as Edgar Allan Poe, and consider the uses of the short story in diverse areas of twentieth-century literature.

This module will introduce you to key themes in U.S. literature and culture by focusing on the ways that the identities of Americans and the identities of America have been imagined, negotiated and reimagined, from colonialism to the present day. We'll look at visions of the New World and concepts of the frontier; war, genocide, slavery, and their legacies; democracy and its exclusions; and American’s modernization and modern America’s casualties. Across visual culture and literature and a variety of genres, from the slave narrative to the horror film, these themes will be examined for the way they shape a sense of American-ness.    

This module will introduce you to the kinds of U.S. literature and culture they could study at Level 5 and 6 and to the Department’s approach to that material.

This module introduces you to some of the ideas, approaches and methodologies of comparative literature. This interdisciplinary module introduces you to how comparative literature links engages with other disciplines. You'll encounter literary themes, genres and movements from across national literatures and explore the relationship between literature and other arts.

The module is divided into three parts:

1. The relationship between literature and the other arts, in this case Shakespeare and film
2. The study of the evolution of a literary theme/figure (Salome) re-interpreted across different media—prose, poetry, visual art, dramatic and musical performance
3. The study of an international movement (European modernism) and examination of the dynamic cultural exchanges about art, self and society in Britain, France and Germany in the first decades of the twentieth century. 

This module will introduce you to the study of language in its different contexts of use. We'll cover some of the main areas of linguistic knowledge, for example meaning, varieties of language and multilingualism, language change, history of English, and the characteristics of language across different genres and text types. We'll explore how spoken language is used to communicate in a number of different situations: everyday conversational contexts with your family and friends, or more formal interactions in various institutional contexts like schools or doctor’s surgeries. Our discussions will cover also how language is deployed in written texts, including literary and media texts.

We'll look at how language varies in these different contexts, but also in different locations, and at different points in time. We'll consider whether and how speech varies between people of different gender, age, or ethnicity. We'll think about how languages are learnt, both by children and adults, and how they are taught. We will explore how multilingual speakers use language, and how multilingualism is reflected in city landscapes or literary works. This module will equip you with the tools you need to discuss how language is structured and how it encodes meaning, at the level of individual sounds, words, sentences and in interaction. You'll think about how people experience languages as users, but also as learners, and will acquire skills in hands-on analysis of linguistic data. This module aims to provide you with new perspectives on language in any context of use, as well as new vocabulary to discuss it. 

This module represents the full chronological sweep of the Victorian period as well as a range of its genres, including poetry, novels, short stories, essays and drama. The module engages with authors such as Tennyson, Dickens, Browning, the Brontës, Eliot, Stevenson, Gaskell, Kipling and Wilde. We will consider a variety of critical approaches to the literature of the period and examine how writers use form, content and language to represent and question power relations. We will study the ways in which texts set in Britain and overseas contribute to debates about class, gender, sexuality, politics, morals, religion, industrialisation, nationhood, race and empire.

This module explores a range of approaches to conflicts between divine or political authority and human claims to self-assertion and freedom; submission to orthodoxy; co-existence of orthodoxy and humanism; reconciliation of autonomy and theonomy; and the demise of divine law. The module introduces you to epoch-specific types of overlaps and tensions between religious and positive law, divine and human reason, feeling and understanding. The module also aims to increase your awareness of issues of gender and power, and investigates the nature of female revolt and violence in the light of the Aristotelian theories and traditional male academic and religious discourses. 

This examines a cluster of major American writers from the 1830s to the 1880s, all of which are engaged in shaping, describing, criticising and contesting the emerging American nation. We will examine literature’s role in the definition of national identity by exploring individual writers. We will also address the key ways in which the American literary tradition differs from its English counterpart. The writers of the so-called ‘American Renaissance’ – Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville and Whitman – will be central to the module, as their writings are at the heart of the project of national self invention. However, the module will look at this project from alternative perspectives, including those of region, race and gender. It includes the study of film as well as texts. 

During the 19th century, London easily outstripped all other contenders as the largest and most vibrant metropolis in the world. Inevitably, the city, with its extraordinary contradictions, was intimately involved with some of the century’s most major literary developments.

This module focuses on representations of the metropolis by a range of writers living and working in London across the period, and in so doing covers a range of genres (poetry, biography, essay, novel, crime writing) and subjects (everyday life, government, poverty, religion, law, empire).

This module constitutes a ‘pre-1800’ choice. You study English writing in the 14th and 15th centuries, especially social satire, the comic tale, varieties of romance, and autobiography. You study texts in relation to genre; society and morality; gender; dissent and individual consciousness. Texts might typically include Chaucer, 'The Canterbury Tales' (selection); romances such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and 'The Book of Margery Kempe'; the ‘Lais of Marie de France'.

In this module, you will study modernist writing in Britain, Ireland and internationally from the 1920s, including such works as Eliot, 'The Waste Land'; Woolf, 'Mrs Dalloway'; Joyce, 'Ulysses'; Brecht, 'Mother Courage'; poems of Yeats, Auden, Stevens and others.

This module constitutes a ‘pre-1800’ choice. An introduction to the language and literature of the Anglo-Saxons, with consideration of a variety of themes and genres, including history, lyric, mythology, poetic elegy and romance. Some texts are read in translation. Major texts might typically include selections such as the 'Anglo-Saxon Chronicle', 'Beowulf', works by King Alfred, Ælfric, and Bede.  

This module examines selected literary works across several genres in the period 1901-36, concentrating upon English-based writings in the non-modernist tradition. Topics for consideration include responses to social change and warfare, and new conceptions of Englishness and modern sexuality. Authors typically include Hardy, Shaw, Forster, Strachey, Brooke, Owen, Graves, Mansfield, Lawrence, Waugh, Holtby, and Orwell.

This module constitutes a ‘pre-1800’ choice. You'll study English verse and prose satire 1660–1760, the Restoration comic stage, the rise of the novel, and landscape and poetry.

The principal texts might typically include selections from:

• Paul Hammond (ed), Restoration Literature: An Anthology
• Aphra Behn, Oroonoko
• Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
• Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
• Samuel Richardson, Pamela
• Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
• Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
• and works by Burney and Johnson. 

This module constitutes a ‘pre-1800’ choice. The module covers aspects of mid to late 18th century and early 19th century literature including ‘sensibility’, ‘pre-romanticism’, the Gothic novel and the emergence of the Romantic movement. Principal texts might typically include Sterne, 'A Sentimental Journey'; Goldsmith, 'The Vicar of Wakefield'; Austen, 'Sense and Sensibility' and 'Mansfield Park'; Lewis, 'The Monk'; Scott, 'Waverley'; Brontë, 'Wuthering Heights'; selected poems of Blake, Byron, Coleridge, Keats and Wordsworth.

A study of the majority of Shakespeare’s plays, undertaken roughly in the order in which they were written or performed, is augmented by close analysis of the poetic means and theatrical conditions through which the playwright emerges.

Looking at the plays alongside the theatres of Elizabethan London and the social politics of the period, we will examine how language and drama evolve in Shakespeare’s craft, and the enduringness of his art. The module will take in a range of early modern concerns, political, social, domestic, geographical and aesthetic to explore the evolution of media – the written text and the theatrical production.

Specified passages from ‘set plays’ (annually varied) are set for close reading exercises in the module. Shakespeare’s other texts are placed within Shakespeare’s whole work and the culture of the age.

This module constitutes a ‘pre-1800’ choice. 

This module explores how and why language is used differently in a range of contexts. We will examine the variation of spoken language in relation to region, gender, ethnicity, age and social class; we will see that individuals are able to shift their style of speaking from one situation to the next and we will explore the attitudes that people have towards different varieties of English. We will also examine a range of tools and frameworks used by sociolinguistics to examine these topics.

The questions that will be addressed may include the following:

• Do women and men speak differently?
• What is slang?
• How and why do adolescents speak differently from adults?
• What are the public stereotypes about speakers with “non-standard” accents?
• How are varieties of English represented in literature?
• What is Standard English?
• How do language choices influence the representation of social groups (e.g. women, asylum seekers)?

You’ll examine the transcultural and transnational spaces imaginatively created in the works of Arab writers who are originally from North Africa and the Middle East and migrated to European and North American countries.

The core module texts are novels, memoirs, as well as short stories that cross boundaries spatially but also socio-culturally and linguistically. These works confront the waves of political repression, socio-economic crises, conflicts and geopolitical upheavals in the Arab world, as well as unprecedented rates of illegal migration, especially to Europe. The module texts are mostly Anglophone Arab literature and translations from Arabic and French, since 1999.

We will approach the texts as both specific to particular political and cultural geographies and also reflective of people’s physical and intellectual itineraries in a world where borders are alternately opened and closed. We will mainly look at place, memory, identity, home, diaspora, exile, refugee status, clandestine migration, surveillance, human rights, conflict, resistance, postcolonialism, nationalism, transnationalism, multiculturalism, assimilation dynamics and integration policies, gender, religious diversity and extremism, life-writing, as well as language, translation and the transcultural imagination.

You'll explore key developments and trends in the novel form the early eighteenth century to the present day. Beginning with Defoe’s Moll Flanders, the module goes on to look at representative landmarks of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ‘realism’ and of later modernist and postmodernist fiction.

As well as attending to the distinctive features of the individual novels, we will investigate critical and theoretical accounts of the genre, paying particular attention to debates about mimesis, character, narrative voice and plot.

• The central objective is to enable you to take up a workplace learning experience which will benefit your studies, your skillset and your CV.
• The work placement will take place on one day per week over 10 weeks.
• Assistance will be given in sourcing a suitable placement.
• You will gain an understanding of key issues within the organisation and have access to data which will be invaluable in developing your research report.
• You will be supported in preparing the assignments through workshops and individual discussions.
• You will have the opportunity to relate your degree subject to real-life situations, develop a range of transferable skills and gain sector-specific experience, thereby enhancing your employment prospects.

Students who pursue this module are required to undertake 10 days of unpaid work at a host institution. The work is normally carried out over 1 day per week, although there is the possibility of working more than 1 day per week, depending on the student's and the host institution's availability. The type of work students would be expected to do should have some relevance to their academic studies. There is no expectation that the student should expect any sort of extensive or designated training such as that which might be offered to a professional working on a long-term basis at the institution. The student will be given guidance, however. The type of work which students might undertake on their placement may include (but not be limited to), for example, cataloguing, archive work, helping organise publicity for events or educational programmes, or shadowing a specialist in his/her work in a mostly observatory way.

In this module, we will study and analyse language in use. We will learn about how people interact and the different elements of language that persuade, (dis)empower and contribute to the discourses that construct our social realities. Students will be introduced to a variety of different theoretical perspectives and approaches (e.g., Critical Discourse Analysis, Interactional Sociolinguistics, Stylistics) and a range of tools and methodological frameworks to enable them to effectively analyse both spontaneous spoken interaction and written media, advertisements and literary texts.

The questions that will be addressed may include the following:

• How is spoken language organised and how can it be transcribed and analysed?
• How do language choices influence the representation of social groups in the media?
• What are the language strategies employed by politicians?
• How is language used by advertisers to make us buy things?
• What language techniques make us admire our favourite fictional works?

This module will introduce you to major texts, themes and movements of nineteenth-century American literature and then explore the ways that literary concerns of the nineteenth century have evolved or been adapted or interrogated in and by twentieth- and twenty-first century American authors. The module will engage with the ways that nineteenth-century literature narrated national identity, the ways America was experienced, and so the tensions between the idea of nation and its realities. Studying twentieth- and twenty-first century counterparts to this literature, the module will examine how the nation has been rewritten. Of particular interest to this module will be the literary representation of migration, frontiers and indigeneity; the experience of modernity (of the city, technology, industrialisation, and economic transition); notions of independence, revolution and democracy; slavery and its legacies; the transatlantic and global dialogues of this nation’s literature; the social and cultural position of women; the relationship between religion and power; and environmentalist sensibilities and ecological catastrophes. The module will examine these topics and their evolution through a variety of genres and forms particular to American literature.

You explore representative African-Caribbean and Indian-Caribbean women’s writing – prose and poetry – since the 1960s, with comparative study of black women’s writing in non-Caribbean contexts. Principal texts might typically include Gilroy, 'Boy Sandwich'; Collins, 'Angel'; Hodge, 'Crick Crack Monkey'; Riley, 'Waiting in the Twilight'; Senior, 'The Arrival of the Snake Woman'.

You explore practical problems of literary convention and technique, including dramatic dialogue, poetic forms, fictional prose and reviewing.

This module explores the literature of the decadence in France and England in the 19th century. Beginning with definitions of the term ‘decadence’ and its antecedents in antiquity, the module considers the emergence of decadence as a literary tradition in France as a challenge to the orthodoxies of Romanticism and its subsequent treatment by English decadents and European Symbolists at the Fin de Siècle. The principal themes of decadence – degeneration, disease, sex, death – are traced in the work of writers in the 19th century and understood against the backdrop of contemporary cultural anxieties and controversies. 

This module covers the period from the closing of the frontier in America to the eve of the Second World War; a period that saw both mass immigration and the growth of urban centres, the crash of 1929 and the onslaught of the Great Depression. Through a selection of poetry and fiction, the module traces some of the major themes of the period, such as: the literary and cultural move from Naturalism to Modernism; the Harlem Renaissance; Cubism and Avant Garde Aesthetics; Expatriate Writers and the cult of the Lost Generation; Regionalism; Documentarism and Photography; and the emergence of an American poetic vernacular. The module takes some account of the relation of the visual arts, photography and cinema to literature of the period.   

In this course, you will learn to analyse a range of media text-types found in advertisements, magazine and newspaper articles, television and photography. Comparative studies with literary texts may also be included. The course will cover a number of approaches to the reading and interpretation of a range of media genres.

You will be asked to reflect upon features of language and consider how they work within texts and across a variety of contexts.

The course will draw on linguistics and discourse analysis. In the analyses undertaken, the ‘linguistic’ features of a text will be understood broadly to include the participants (i.e. the narrators, audience, observers and hearers, etc), audio-visual components, as well the cultural and ideological conditions within which these features occur.

You explore a variety of styles and approaches practised in the American novel and short story since 1945, including African-American and ‘postmodern’ fiction. Principal texts might typically include: R Ford (ed), 'The Granta Book of the American Short Story'; Nabokov, 'Lolita'; Kerouac, 'On the Road'; Ellison, 'Invisible Man'; Plath, 'The Bell Jar'; DeLillo, 'White Noise'.

The module surveys major trends and figures in English-language poetry since 1945, chiefly in the USA, Britain and Ireland, with close attention to linguistic and formal features characteristic of this period, and to patterns of influence. Authors for study typically include Stevens, Auden, Lowell, Larkin, Ginsberg, Ashbery, Gunn, Hughes, Plath, Hill, Harrsion, Heaney, and Mahon.

Whilst modernist drama on the European continent is characterised by a variety of pronouncedly anti-realist tendencies, modern English drama continues the tradition of Realism. The module explores the main contrasts and affinities between these modernist and realist trends, focusing on major innovative approaches to Realism and on precursors and varieties of modernist drama from 1880-1930. Through a close reading of representative texts, you will be introduced to a range of dramatic forms and techniques of the period in question. Examples from expressionist film will acquaint you with questions related to performance, stage set, and lighting.

The module explores the history of the Western novel’s development since Don Quixote by focusing on representative landmarks of ‘realism’ and later modernist and postmodernist novels. We investigate a number of theoretical problems including those of narrative voice and strategy and of mimesis in the novel. Major texts might typically include: Cervantes, 'Don Quixote'; Austen, 'Emma'; Balzac, 'Père Goriot'; Flaubert, 'Madame Bovary'; Kafka, 'The Trial'; Proust, 'Swann’s Way'; Calvino, 'If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller'.

The module considers a number of dramas that feature the related figures of Oedipus and Antigone. The plays to be studied are drawn from disparate periods and cultures, and so the thrust of the module is to enquire into why the myth on which they are based has proved so perennial. As part of the effort to provide answers to this question, the module addresses relevant literary and cultural criticism and psychoanalytic theory.

This module analyses the literature and culture produced in the aftermath of, and in response to, the end of European formal colonialism. It addresses representations of colonialism and decolonisation, of the experience of postcolonial societies and of diasporic peoples. You consider issues of ethnicity, class and gender in postcolonial literatures, the claims of ‘nativist’ ideologies and cosmopolitan theories of ‘hybridity’, through a comparative analysis of different genres, regions and historical experiences of (post)colonialism. Included in text studies will be works by some of the following: R K Narayan, Chinua Achebe, Flora Nwapa, V S Naipaul, Athol Fugard, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Mehdi Charef, Arundhati Roy.

The module explores the close relationship between literature and film in the 20th century. It offers a range of perspectives and methodologies for studying literature and film, both separately and in relation to each other, with an emphasis on cultural and historical criticism. The module also examines the particular characteristics of both literature and film and the cross-connections between them through a detailed study of selected poems, plays, essays, experimental films, and feature films. The texts studied will be drawn from a range of national literatures and cinemas. Foreign literary texts will be studied in English translation.

This module surveys major texts, authors, and ideas in England from about 1500 to about 1660, offering both a broad introduction to the period and the opportunity for more specific study of particular works. Considerable attention will be paid to the social, religious, and political currents of the day, but mostly we will concentrate on the emergence and development of multiple forms of imaginative writing under the Tudors and early Stuarts. In the first term alone we move from the court poetry written under Henry VIII to the sonnet craze that emerged under Elizabeth to the invention and development of blank verse, the appropriation of the epic in the service of the Reformation, and the maturation of the public theatre. In the second term, the range is arguably as great, encompassing Jacobean tragedy and comedy, the erotic and religious lyric, and literary responses to political upheaval.

You'll gain an understanding of some major perspectives in modern narrative writing on the problematics of the Great War, with appropriate strategies for analysing and interpreting literary techniques for the exploration of representative themes; it concentrates on ways of remembering and/or historicising the war in narratives published between 1923 and 1933.

Particular attention is paid to the significance of gender and to divergent cultural perspectives in Britain, Germany, and France.

• The central objective is to enable you to take up a workplace learning experience which will benefit your studies, your skillset and your CV.
• The work placement will take place on one day per week over 10 weeks.
• Assistance will be given in sourcing a suitable placement.
• You will gain an understanding of key issues within the organisation and have access to data which will be invaluable in developing your research report.
• You will be supported in preparing the assignments through workshops and individual discussions.
• You will have the opportunity to relate your degree subject to real-life situations, develop a range of transferable skills and gain sector-specific experience, thereby enhancing your employment prospects.

Students who pursue this module are required to undertake 10 days of unpaid work at a host institution. The work is normally carried out over 1 day per week, although there is the possibility of working more than 1 day per week, depending on the student's and the host institution's availability. The type of work students would be expected to do should have some relevance to their academic studies. There is no expectation that the student should expect any sort of extensive or designated training such as that which might be offered to a professional working on a long-term basis at the institution. The student will be given guidance, however. The type of work which students might undertake on their placement may include (but not be limited to), for example, cataloguing, archive work, helping organise publicity for events or educational programmes, or shadowing a specialist in his/her work in a mostly observatory way.

This module introduces you to the critical analysis of professional communication in contemporary society. Using a variety of linguistic tools, we will analyse language as social practice in a range of spoken, written and computer mediated contexts.

The module starts with an overview of basic theories in the field of genre analysis and more broadly discourse analysis. You will then explore how language is used in the workplace, issues in intercultural communication, successful communication and misunderstanding in multilingual/transnational organisations, doctor-patient interaction, courtroom discourse, service encounters in face to face and online contexts and political discourse.

In the second term you will explore classroom interaction, scientific and academic communication in a globalising world, drawing on corpus-based as well as ethnographic approaches (and reflecting on methodological choices in research).

The final part of the module looks at discourses of food, sustainability/climate change, tourism and finally discourses of trust. We will conclude by reflecting on the role of power and social responsibility in institutional contexts

There are many kinds of words: words for formal occasions and for informal conversations, words for naming things, words for the actions we take, words helping other words, words with attitude and words we should treat with the utmost care. Some words become our lifelong companions, we wear them as names, and they are part of our identity. Words have the power to woo, or to offend and cause hurt – some are so potent, we treat them as taboo. But even the more innocuous, more ordinary, everyday words, can convey feelings and attitudes. Words are central to our experience of language. In this module we will delve into the richness and variety of the lexicon. We will explore what the study of language can tell us about how words mean, how they function, how they change over time and how language speakers make new ones. We will discuss the history of words and link it to the history of the people who use them. We will explore the link between words and culture. The study of words will give us a window into the working of language more generally, and provide a link between language and the worlds its users inhabit.

This module aims to give a comprehensive introduction to the study of language and gender. We will examine how gender is reflected and constituted in language, that is, how women and men speak, how language is used to accomplish femininity and masculinity.

Students will become familiar with a wide range of studies exploring the language used by women, men and children in a range of different contexts, including informal talk among friends and talk in work or public settings.

The module encourages a critical engagement with past and present approaches to the study of language and gender and draws on a range of different theoretical and methodological frameworks to show how gender and identity can be analysed in language.

Questions which will be addressed on this module include: Do women and mean speak differently? How do men and women speak to their friends and to their colleagues at work? How does gender interact with other social variables such as ethnicity, class, and age? In what way does language constitute a resource for the construction of gender and sexual identity? What is the relationship between (sexist) language and (sexist) ideology?