English Literature

Core Module

Core Skills in Postgraduate Study

This module will help support you in making the transition to MA study. It is taught through a series of workshops on topics such as writing essays at MA level, finding and using secondary materials, giving presentations, and employability. Throughout, you'll be encouraged to reflect on your experiences and expectations, as well as receiving guidance from lecturers. Although the module is not formally assessed, and does not carry credits, it's taken by all students on the MA English Literature programme and as well as helping you to understand the skills you'll be using at MA level will include reflection on your learning and development.

Optional modules may include:

Memory and Trauma in Contemporary Literature

The fictional narratives of Greco-Roman antiquity play a foundational role in the Western literary tradition. In this module students will encounter the extant masterworks of Chariton, Xenophon of Ephesus, Achilles Tatius, Longus, Heliodorus, and Apuleius - authors once widely read in the ancient world - as well as two Jewish and Christian examples: Joseph and Aseneth and the Acts of Paul and Thecla. The ancient novels, the earliest examples of the genre, are a ripe literary field to explore the construction of gender, human sexualities, the relation of lovers to family and society, and the intersection of eroticism with ancient religious sensibilities.

30 credits

Contemporary Cinemas

This module encourages you to engage with recent developments in world cinema, and to research and interpret films, filmmakers and movements in contemporary film. You will study examples of contemporary international cinema which are currently being researched by academic staff, and be introduced to key critical and theoretical concepts which can be applied to the analysis of film. The films included for study will be actively chosen to reframe national, aesthetic and cultural debates and to foreground the empowerment and relevance of cultural production. As well as being able to view, appraise and discuss diverse and relevant examples of twenty-first century filmmaking, you will be encouraged to select, analyse and critically evaluate films of your choice, using the module's texts, ideas, approaches and debates as points of departure for your own cinematic research. You will gain and develop skills in close analysis, the application of theory, contextual reading, and researching and writing on important, influential and challenging film texts.

30 credits

American Nightmares: Socio-political Discourses in American Gothic Literature

Have you been struck by how often American socio-political discourse sound like Gothic fictions? The Gothic is a pervasive mode in America, one which expresses and negotiates a variety of social anxieties such as racial identity, patriarchy and the rise of feminism, and class antagonism. This course will examine a variety of Gothic texts from the 1800s onward to explore how they express and negotiate various socio-political anxieties and shifts. We will also contextualize the narratives by reviewing the relevant socio-political ideologies and debates contemporary to the texts. In doing so, the course will clarify the numerous chasms between the American ideal and the brutal American reality.

30 credits

Core modules:

Core Skills in Postgraduate Study

This module will help support you in making the transition to MA study. It is taught through a series of workshops on topics such as writing essays at MA level, finding and using secondary materials, giving presentations, and employability. Throughout, you'll be encouraged to reflect on your experiences and expectations, as well as receiving guidance from lecturers. Although the module is not formally assessed, and does not carry credits, it's taken by all students on the MA English Literature programme and as well as helping you to understand the skills you'll be using at MA level will include reflection on your learning and development.

Optional modules may include:

Directed Reading (Early Modern Literature)

Students will interrogate a wide variety of texts written in English in the early modern period in order to develop their understanding of the major literary genres of the period, and to broaden their knowledge of the field. The module will draw on both 'canonical' and 'non-canonical material' and will examine issues such as:
* the interaction between literature and the social, political, religious and intellectual cultures which produced it;
* how texts circulated, and the audiences they address;
* how texts engage with their literary tradition;
* how these texts have been treated, and constructed, within the literary history and historiography.

15 credits

Renaissance Transformations

This module approaches Renaissance literature through the theme of transformation. This theme has multiple dimensions: first, you'll look at how Renaissance writers transformed existing literary traditions such as the classical epic, religious scripture, and medieval romance within their own writing. Then, you'll look at examples of transformation in Renaissance writing, such as changing sex, changing religion, and changes between the human and the animal. The module also reflects self-consciously on Renaissance studies as a discipline and how it has been transformed - and might be transformed in future - in light of changing critical, ethical and social priorities. The module is diverse in its content, covering drama, poetry and prose, reflecting the different specialisms and expertise of staff members. The form of assessment, critical essay, helps you to hone your writing skills at graduate level and to carry out independent research into your chosen topic.

30 credits

Core module

Core Skills in Postgraduate Study

This module will help support you in making the transition to MA study. It is taught through a series of workshops on topics such as writing essays at MA level, finding and using secondary materials, giving presentations, and employability. Throughout, you'll be encouraged to reflect on your experiences and expectations, as well as receiving guidance from lecturers. Although the module is not formally assessed, and does not carry credits, it's taken by all students on the MA English Literature programme and as well as helping you to understand the skills you'll be using at MA level will include reflection on your learning and development.

Optional modules may include:

Mid-Century Modernism

The module will introduce students to current research and scholarship relating to literature of the 'long modern' period (1930 to 1975), introducing them to the history and contemporary state of criticism and theory in relation to mid twentieth-century cultural production. Students will receive a thorough grounding in research methods specific to the period. This is a period of unprecedented violence and transformation, from the momentous impact of totalitarian systems, the rise and impact of the Second World War on global culture, host to the worst events the world has ever experienced with the Holocaust and Bomb, the age of rapid and shifting groups and movements, existentialism through abstract expressionism to confessional, innovative and pop art styles. It is also an era of very deep reflection on the idea of the relations between systems of thought across disciplines. The module will chart that reflection as well as a forum for thinking about art's power in a world under new techno-political compulsions, be they nuclear-apocalyptic, Cold War-propagandized, or transnational, neo-imperial, superpowered or postcolonial.

30 credits

American Nightmares: Socio-political Discourses in American Gothic Literature

Have you been struck by how often American socio-political discourse sound like Gothic fictions? The Gothic is a pervasive mode in America, one which expresses and negotiates a variety of social anxieties such as racial identity, patriarchy and the rise of feminism, and class antagonism. This course will examine a variety of Gothic texts from the 1800s onward to explore how they express and negotiate various socio-political anxieties and shifts. We will also contextualize the narratives by reviewing the relevant socio-political ideologies and debates contemporary to the texts. In doing so, the course will clarify the numerous chasms between the American ideal and the brutal American reality.

30 credits

Memory and Trauma in Contemporary Literature

The fictional narratives of Greco-Roman antiquity play a foundational role in the Western literary tradition. In this module students will encounter the extant masterworks of Chariton, Xenophon of Ephesus, Achilles Tatius, Longus, Heliodorus, and Apuleius - authors once widely read in the ancient world - as well as two Jewish and Christian examples: Joseph and Aseneth and the Acts of Paul and Thecla. The ancient novels, the earliest examples of the genre, are a ripe literary field to explore the construction of gender, human sexualities, the relation of lovers to family and society, and the intersection of eroticism with ancient religious sensibilities.

30 credits

Core Module:

Core Skills in Postgraduate Study

This module will help support you in making the transition to MA study. It is taught through a series of workshops on topics such as writing essays at MA level, finding and using secondary materials, giving presentations, and employability. Throughout, you'll be encouraged to reflect on your experiences and expectations, as well as receiving guidance from lecturers. Although the module is not formally assessed, and does not carry credits, it's taken by all students on the MA English Literature programme and as well as helping you to understand the skills you'll be using at MA level will include reflection on your learning and development.

Optional modules may include:

Contemporary Cinemas

This module encourages you to engage with recent developments in world cinema, and to research and interpret films, filmmakers and movements in contemporary film. You will study examples of contemporary international cinema which are currently being researched by academic staff, and be introduced to key critical and theoretical concepts which can be applied to the analysis of film. The films included for study will be actively chosen to reframe national, aesthetic and cultural debates and to foreground the empowerment and relevance of cultural production. As well as being able to view, appraise and discuss diverse and relevant examples of twenty-first century filmmaking, you will be encouraged to select, analyse and critically evaluate films of your choice, using the module's texts, ideas, approaches and debates as points of departure for your own cinematic research. You will gain and develop skills in close analysis, the application of theory, contextual reading, and researching and writing on important, influential and challenging film texts.

30 credits

Post-1945 British Drama, Film and Television

This module provides the opportunity for parallel study of the British drama, cinema and television of the post-war period. This era saw the emergence of influential styles, prominent figures and landmark texts in all three artistic forms: e.g. the plays of John Osbourne (Look Back in Anger), television drama (Cathy Come Home) and key British films, such as Ealing comedies (The Man in the White Suit), retrospective war films (The Cruel Sea) and social problem films (Sapphire). The module will explore the evolving post-war cultural landscape to contextualise and critically appraise examples from these interrelated literary, performative and representational media.

30 credits

Core Modules:

Core Skills in Postgraduate Study

This module will help support you in making the transition to MA study. It is taught through a series of workshops on topics such as writing essays at MA level, finding and using secondary materials, giving presentations, and employability. Throughout, you'll be encouraged to reflect on your experiences and expectations, as well as receiving guidance from lecturers. Although the module is not formally assessed, and does not carry credits, it's taken by all students on the MA English Literature programme and as well as helping you to understand the skills you'll be using at MA level will include reflection on your learning and development.

Optional modules may include:

Romantic Gothic

Romantic Gothic considers the various manifestations of the Gothic mode, from the middle of the eighteenth century towards the end of the Romantic period in 1830. Looking at how the Gothic became such an enduring and powerful mode of expression in literature, the module will look at Gothic poetry, Gothic novels, Gothic bluebooks, and accounts of supernatural occurrences in the popular magazines and newspapers of the age. By the end of the module, you will have a good knowledge of the rise of the Gothic during the eighteenth century and Romantic periods, and will have examined some of the most popular Gothic works of the age alongside less canonical works.

30 credits

Contemporary Cinemas

This module encourages you to engage with recent developments in world cinema, and to research and interpret films, filmmakers and movements in contemporary film. You will study examples of contemporary international cinema which are currently being researched by academic staff, and be introduced to key critical and theoretical concepts which can be applied to the analysis of film. The films included for study will be actively chosen to reframe national, aesthetic and cultural debates and to foreground the empowerment and relevance of cultural production. As well as being able to view, appraise and discuss diverse and relevant examples of twenty-first century filmmaking, you will be encouraged to select, analyse and critically evaluate films of your choice, using the module's texts, ideas, approaches and debates as points of departure for your own cinematic research. You will gain and develop skills in close analysis, the application of theory, contextual reading, and researching and writing on important, influential and challenging film texts.

30 credits

Literature and Language in the Workplace

This, the core module for the MA in English Studies, will combine an introduction to electronic, microfilm, and paper tools with an in-depth exposure to the way in which close reading can be aided by consideration of reception history, literary theory, historical backgrounds, and stage history. You will learn by way of and demonstrate skills in online discussions. Those who complete this module will have developed skills that are transferable to various employment situations, especially publishing. The module will be very useful for and interesting to secondary and post-16 English teachers, particularly those whose degrees are not recent.

15 credits

Work Placement with Research Project

This module provides you with the experience of working with an external organisation (for example, a library, gallery, theatre, school) and undertaking a short research project related to that organisation. You will choose a placement from those offered at the start of the academic year and will work on a defined project agreed between the academic co-ordinator and the partner institution. Alongside this project, you will undertake a programme of related reading and research directed by the academic co-ordinator. The module has three aims: (1) to enable you to develop your discipline-specific vocational skills (2) to enable you to gain practical research skills through undertaking research related to your project (3) to promote reflection on the relationship between academic research and external organisations.

30 credits

Core module

Core Skills in Postgraduate Study

This module will help support you in making the transition to MA study. It is taught through a series of workshops on topics such as writing essays at MA level, finding and using secondary materials, giving presentations, and employability. Throughout, you'll be encouraged to reflect on your experiences and expectations, as well as receiving guidance from lecturers. Although the module is not formally assessed, and does not carry credits, it's taken by all students on the MA English Literature programme and as well as helping you to understand the skills you'll be using at MA level will include reflection on your learning and development.

With a focus on literature from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, optional modules may include:

Romantic Gothic

Romantic Gothic considers the various manifestations of the Gothic mode, from the middle of the eighteenth century towards the end of the Romantic period in 1830. Looking at how the Gothic became such an enduring and powerful mode of expression in literature, the module will look at Gothic poetry, Gothic novels, Gothic bluebooks, and accounts of supernatural occurrences in the popular magazines and newspapers of the age. By the end of the module, you will have a good knowledge of the rise of the Gothic during the eighteenth century and Romantic periods, and will have examined some of the most popular Gothic works of the age alongside less canonical works.

30 credits

Murderers and Degenerates: Contextualising the fin de siècle Gothic

The module explores three related case histories which help to establish how the literary Gothic shaped particular fin de siècle anxieties. To that end the module examines accounts of Joseph Merrick (aka The Elephant Man), newspaper reports of the Whitechapel murders of 1888, and the trials of Oscar Wilde. It is by exploring how the Gothic infiltrated medical, criminological, and legal discourses that we can see how a narrative which centred on the pathologisation of masculinity was elaborated at the time. These case histories will be read alongside Jekyll and Hyde (1886), The Great God Pan (1894) and Dracula (1897) as three of the key literary texts which also examine medicine, the law, and crucially the urban and gender contexts which in turn shape the three case histories.

30 credits

Humans, Animals, Monsters and Machines: From Gulliver's Travels to King Kong

This module examines imaginings of the 'human' in relation to machines and animals (and those monsters that are neither one thing nor the other) from the eighteenth century to the twentieth. We will focus mainly on fiction, its cultural contexts and on readings from the period's key thinkers of human being, alongside more recent theories of humans, posthumans and animals. The aim is to encourage critical engagement with this key issue and to facilitate a deeper appreciation of the period's literature, culture and politics, including the relationship of discourses of technology and species to discourses of class, gender and race.

30 credits

American Nightmares: Socio-political Discourses in American Gothic Literature

Have you been struck by how often American socio-political discourse sound like Gothic fictions? The Gothic is a pervasive mode in America, one which expresses and negotiates a variety of social anxieties such as racial identity, patriarchy and the rise of feminism, and class antagonism. This course will examine a variety of Gothic texts from the 1800s onward to explore how they express and negotiate various socio-political anxieties and shifts. We will also contextualize the narratives by reviewing the relevant socio-political ideologies and debates contemporary to the texts. In doing so, the course will clarify the numerous chasms between the American ideal and the brutal American reality.

30 credits

Core Module:

Core Skills in Postgraduate Study

This module will help support you in making the transition to MA study. It is taught through a series of workshops on topics such as writing essays at MA level, finding and using secondary materials, giving presentations, and employability. Throughout, you'll be encouraged to reflect on your experiences and expectations, as well as receiving guidance from lecturers. Although the module is not formally assessed, and does not carry credits, it's taken by all students on the MA English Literature programme and as well as helping you to understand the skills you'll be using at MA level will include reflection on your learning and development.

Modules may include:

Romantic Gothic

Romantic Gothic considers the various manifestations of the Gothic mode, from the middle of the eighteenth century towards the end of the Romantic period in 1830. Looking at how the Gothic became such an enduring and powerful mode of expression in literature, the module will look at Gothic poetry, Gothic novels, Gothic bluebooks, and accounts of supernatural occurrences in the popular magazines and newspapers of the age. By the end of the module, you will have a good knowledge of the rise of the Gothic during the eighteenth century and Romantic periods, and will have examined some of the most popular Gothic works of the age alongside less canonical works.

30 credits

Confession

Western man has become a confessing animal, or so Michel Foucault contended. This module interrogates confessional acts in literature and culture, beginning with St Augustine's Confessions (often considered the first autobiography in the Western tradition) and focusing in particular upon eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forms. Students will explore confession across a range of contexts: sacred and secular law, medicine, self-improvement, scandal and sensation. A variety of genres will be considered, from autobiography to fiction, prison writing to medical case studies, periodical print to the confession 'album'. Authors will include Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas De Quincey, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Oscar Wilde.

30 credits

Murderers and Degenerates: Contextualising the fin de siècle Gothic

The module explores three related case histories which help to establish how the literary Gothic shaped particular fin de siècle anxieties. To that end the module examines accounts of Joseph Merrick (aka The Elephant Man), newspaper reports of the Whitechapel murders of 1888, and the trials of Oscar Wilde. It is by exploring how the Gothic infiltrated medical, criminological, and legal discourses that we can see how a narrative which centred on the pathologisation of masculinity was elaborated at the time. These case histories will be read alongside Jekyll and Hyde (1886), The Great God Pan (1894) and Dracula (1897) as three of the key literary texts which also examine medicine, the law, and crucially the urban and gender contexts which in turn shape the three case histories.

30 credits