English Literature and History BA (Hons)

The US is a paradox when it comes to nature: it is both the country that invented the national park concept and the biggest carbon dioxide emitter historically; it was the first country to celebrate Earth Day in 1970, but it is also where the hyper consumerist lifestyle first emerged; it is the birthplace of some of the oldest and most important environmental NGOs and of climate denial. How can we make sense of the US and its relationship to nature? Are Americans doomed to destroy the natural wonders of their nation? Can we envision a red, white and green nation that would put science and technology at the service of sustainability and environmental justice?

The module will answer these questions by examining the US’ complicated relationship to nature chronologically. In doing so, we will re-examine and challenge conventional narratives of US history by integrating the role of nature as a historical actor in its own right. Examples of themes covered include: nature and conquest; Native American environments; nature and technology; the wilderness myth; animals in US history; environmental disasters; urban nature; the rise of environmentalism; environmental justice and environmental racism; waste and pollution; toxicities, etc.

The module will approach these themes using the tools of the environmental humanities. Combining historical, visual and literary analysis with insights from ecology and other ‘hard’ sciences, we will achieve a thorough understanding of environmental phenomena in their full complexity.

From Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Christabel (1816) to Alan Ball’s True Blood (2008-), this module invites you to explore the dark, shadowy world of the Gothic in relation to a diverse range of literary texts and modern media. Combining the study of familiar canonical fictions with new and challenging material, we will train our focus on the enigmatic figure of the vampire, examining its various transitions and developments through the lens of critical and cultural theory.

Through an analysis of the Gothic, the module aims to develop your critical thinking, as well as your existing knowledge of literature, film, and television dating from 1816 to the present day. In doing so, it will encourage you to reflect on and interrogate the complex ways in which Gothic texts engage with, and intervene in, broader cultural debates about gender and sexuality.

This module will enhance your awareness and appreciation of one of the most controversial and stimulating authors of the early modern period (and beyond!), Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593). Marlowe wrote plays and poems that expose our darkest hearts, showing characters lusting for power, and each other. Building on your brief contact with Marlowe at Level 5, this module will offer a chronological survey of his short but staggering career, situating each of his works in relation to the tumultuous contexts of their production and reception, including later appropriations. This will involve looking at Marlowe in relation to discussions of early modern politics, religious conflict, sexuality, urbanisation, imperialism, science and magic, ethnicity, geography, and historiography. The module therefore offers a unique opportunity to see how one writer’s remarkable career developed.

You will explore a selection of key prose texts (novels and short stories) about the First World War that were written between 1914 and the present day. You will relate these novels and short stories to a range of influential critical ideas across literary studies and history. The module will help you to understand the close links between literary writing about the war and the way the war has been remembered in Britain at different points in time and will develop your research skills beyond your own discipline by allowing you to engage with scholarly concepts and sources in history, psychology and sociology. By reading a range of autobiographical and fictional prose texts, you will think about the value of literary texts as sources of cultural history, and you will investigate the changing historical contexts in which these texts have been produced, published and read. Themes and topics you will cover include the representation of soldiers, enemies and allies, class and gender in war writing, formal and publishing aspects and memory and remembrance.

The Romantic period (1789-1832) was a time of revolutionary change in literature, yet the literature of the period is typically represented by a narrow list of elite poets. On this module you will learn about a much more diverse range of writing: by men and women, by the poor and the rich, and taking in styles from satirical poetry, to advertising, to magazine fiction, to essays about opium addiction. Is there a distinction between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture, and who gets to decide the answer? This was a question the Romantics asked, and it is one you will learn to answer. You will also learn to investigate the diverse range of literature produced in the period yourself by using e-resources to find texts from the period that you think are valuable. You will develop an enhanced knowledge of the literature and culture of the period and as a result you will learn to question the way that literary critics tell stories about who and what should count in literary history.

This module develops your awareness and understanding of post-Renaissance adaptations and appropriations of Shakespeare’s work, from the seventeenth century to the present day. It engages with Shakespearean adaptations belonging to different literary genres (in particular, drama and prose fiction) and different media (written texts, films). It examines the ways in which selected Shakespearean texts are transformed in subsequent adaptations, and the issues underpinning these transformations, especially those concerning race, gender, and class. It also engages with theoretical debates surrounding authorship, literary value, canonicity, and popular/high culture.

From Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and its popular television adaptation (2017) to Yorgos Lanthimos’ film The Lobster (2015), this module invites you to explore a wide and diverse range of novels, short stories and other media in order to promote and analyse the study of contemporary theoretical debates on gender, love, the body and sexuality.

Through the theoretical lens of feminism, psychoanalysis, queer theory and postmodernism, the module aims to develop your critical thinking and your existing knowledge of literature, film and television, from 1985 to the present day. It will encourage you to explore the complex issues raised by diverse critical theory and close analysis of a range of late twentieth and twenty-first century literature, film and television adaptation. By doing so, you will reflect on the ways that twenty-first literature and other media engages with, interrogates and often offers alternative narratives on present debates about gender, love, the body and sexuality.

You will study a selection of texts, written from the eighteenth century to the present day, that engage with the natural environment in various ways. These include natural histories and popular science, pastoral and environmental poems, environmental protest literature, apocalyptic novels, and the ‘new nature writing’. You will learn how literary writers describe the world around them and how they use the natural world to articulate their own personal needs, feelings, and desires. You will study texts that draw attention both to natural beauty and to environmental catastrophe. You will learn how writers as diverse as Gilbert White, William Wordsworth, Charles Darwin, Rachel Carson, and Robert Macfarlane have changed the ways in which readers engage with the world around them. As part of your studies, you will learn to produce your own literary engagement with the natural world in a ‘creative field journal’, inspired by the writings of Charles Darwin, Robert Macfarlane, Amy Liptrott, and others. By the end of the module, you will have gained a sophisticated understanding not only of the ways that writers can change the world, but also how they can save it.

This module will survey the ‘Sensation Mania’ of the 1860s as a historically significant literary phenomenon that seemed to threaten the growing respectability of the novel form. We will examine how a variety of sensation narratives, including novels, plays and short fiction, participated in contemporary debates over sexuality, morality, race and class. You will learn about the radical spaces these sensational texts provided for Victorian readers to question and to ‘queer’ societal ‘norms’. We will investigate the historical context in which sensation literature emerged, considering its debt to the Gothic; its strong ties to penny dreadfuls and tabloid journalism; the art of serial publication; the power of circulating libraries; the influence of notorious criminal trials, and important legislative changes such as divorce law reform.

Early modern/Shakespearean theatre was fascinated by questions of gender and its representation onstage. Early modern drama offers us important insights into its culture because, as a popular form which has become enshrined in the canon as ‘high art’, it gives us access to both popular and elite culture. This module explores the drama of the early modern period through the lens of stage gender and its intersections with race and race-making, faith, sexuality, and women’s writing and performance.

You will read plays by early modern men and women to explore topics such as: early modern femininities and masculinities; women’s performance and the early modern boy-actor; trans, queer, non-binary and gender nonconforming identities. We will structure our reading around the intersections of gender with questions of (1) faith (how, for example, does the English stage depict the gendered Muslim or Jewish subject in travel plays?); (2) race-making (how does the English stage depict racialised blackness and whiteness on an actor’s body? How does the stage forge concepts of race that we have inherited today?); and (3) sexuality (how does the Shakespearean stage represent queer desire? Is the Shakespearean boy-actor an inherently queer figure?). Because we are students of literature, for all of these categories, we’ll examine how these forces shape the language of the stage and the plays performed there.

In this seminar-based module you will study the roots, trajectory, and legacies of the African American Freedom Struggle since 1945. Although the primary focus will be on the movement for racial justice in the US South between roughly 1954 and 1968, that history will be placed in longer chronological and broader national and international contexts. More specifically you will study the grass-roots activities of African Americans engaged in various forms of resistance and protest alongside the histories of the major civil rights groups – the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). You will interrogate their tactics, examine their often fraught relationships with each other, and assess their achievements and failures in the face of widespread resistance to racial change. You will examine the contributions of the extraordinary ordinary people at the heart of the struggle, as well as those of nationally prominent leaders such as Martin Luther King. In this module you will also analyse the relationship between the civil rights movement and the federal government, address the role of the media and popular culture in shaping both the history and popular understandings of the post-war Freedom Struggle, and examine the international coordinates and impact of the struggles.

You will learn about the causes, events, and results of the U.S. Civil War, a war which took over 620,000 lives; the bloodiest in American history. The Civil War and its aftermath are considered the dividing line between early and modern US history. The War ended the South’s dominance of American politics. It also led to three major constitutional amendments which ended slavery, defined American citizenship, and provided for African American votes respectively which still have implications in American life in the 21st century. The course begins in 1850 by looking at American sectionalism and how and why that caused the founding of the Republican party and the eventual secession of eleven southern states. It then examines the military aspects of the war and explores its social, political, economic, and diplomatic effects. The end of the term will be spent on the political and social aspects of the post-War period known as ‘Reconstruction.’ It will explain how American national identity became redefined during this tumultuous time, especially in popular memory around public commemorations, art, literature and film. You will also analyse the controversial historiography of this period throughout the semester.

In this module you will learn how different scholars have conceptualised and written about women, crime and subversion from 1400 to 1800. You will assess and analyse why and how tensions in the early modern period meant that authorities across Europe directed their attention upon women in specific ways. The influence of the Protestant reformation is examined in terms of its impact upon female behaviour. Female criminality and subversive behaviour will be examined through a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, including feminist and gender theories. Key concepts at the fore of this module include witchcraft, petty treason, infanticide, female piracy, prostitution, adultery and fornication, lesbianism, the crime of cross-dressing, and women’s strategies in European court systems. You will move beyond areas classified as criminal to behaviour considered as subversive and deviant, such as domestic disorder. You will utilize a wide range of primary sources including court records, the Old Bailey legal records, assize court records and female testimonies from across Europe which will equip you to think critically about academic literature, primary sources and historical interpretation.

In this module you will learn about the emergence, development and nature of fascism in Italy. It examines the history of Italy and the nature of Italian politics and considers the ways in which problems of Italian nationhood may have contributed to the rise of Fascism in that country. It looks at the origins and development of Fascism in Italy, the 'intervention crisis' of 1914-1915, and the various strands that made up Italian Fascism. It considers the manner in which fascist parties came to power, the myth of the 'March on Rome,' and the consolidation of Fascist Power, which took place after the Matteotti Crisis. The module covers key issues in the development of the Fascist regime in Italy including: Fascist mass organisations, the 'Fascist Style, and consensus coercion and resistance under the regime. It will enable you to engage with the various debates and questions of interpretation raised by the course.

The dissertation gives you the opportunity to work on a sustained piece of research of your own (guided) choice and to present that research in an organised and coherent form in a major piece of writing. The module will teach you how to function as an independent researcher, learner and writer. The dissertation represents the culmination of your studies as a Joint Honours student. You will apply the skills developed in your earlier studies to a discrete body of primary sources, working upon a clearly defined topic. In designing and implementing your research project, you will draw on insights and approaches from both of the disciplines that from part of your degree. The dissertation will develop your research skills and allow you to work independently, drawing on the advice and guidance of a designated supervisor.

In this module you will learn about the ‘Urban Renaissance’ in Britain during the long eighteenth century, the period 1660-1830, focusing on Edinburgh, York and London, as well as several smaller urban centres. You will learn why urban populations expanded in this period, and you will be invited to consider the social, economic, cultural, environmental and intellectual consequences of urbanisation. You will learn about how and why town planning, sanitation and urban governance changed in this period, as many cities underwent dramatic physical improvements and alterations to their infrastructure, layout and environment. You will learn how all of these changes reshaped urban inhabitants’ daily lives, their social interactions, the gendering of urban life, and their sensory experiences (i.e. taste, smell, touch and sound as well as sight). You will be invited to consider key changes over time, such as the rise of the middle class, the treatment of social ‘problems’ such as crime and poverty, changes to the meaning and experience of neighbourliness, and improvements to water supply, waste disposal and street cleaning. The module will place a strong emphasis on the environmental governance of the townscape, exploring the complex negotiations between the top-down methods used by urban councils (bylaws, street inspections and court fines) and the bottom-up self-governance of neighbours (such as petitions). Using an environmental history approach, the module will explore in depth how townspeople interacted with the bio-physical flows of water, blood, manure, urine, livestock, beer, foodstuffs and each other.

Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman have claimed that the twentieth century was an ‘era of testimony’. This module addresses the ways survivors have attempted to bear witness to the Holocaust, the catastrophe at that century’s centre, and the cultural responses to that witness. We will consider how the tools and concepts of cultural analysis both speak to and are challenged by testimony, and how culture continues to work on the problem of representing the Holocaust. The course aims to enable students to consider the continuing impact of the Holocaust on the lives of its surviving witnesses and their children and how literature and films bear witness to it. To this end, the module draws on a variety of sources: video testimony, courtroom testimony, memoirs, diaries, different literary genres (novels, short stories, poems and graphic novels) and films.

Sometimes it can seem that concern about climate change and the broader environmental crisis is a recent phenomenon whose effects are largely felt in other parts of the world. This module challenges these assumptions. You will learn about the origins of these concerns in their British context through five environmental disasters that shaped Britain after the Second World War. They are the devastating east coast floods of 1953, the collapse of the spoil heap onto a school at Aberfan in Wales in 1966, the wrecking of the Torrey Canyon, an oil tanker, off the Cornish coast in 1967, the near-extinction of birds of prey as a consequence chemical pesticides in the 1950s and 60s, and the hurricane that caused widespread destruction to woods and forests in 1987. You will spend two weeks on each of these case studies. The first week will focus on the event itself and its human and non-human causes and costs. The second week will focus on the event’s long-term political, social, and cultural consequences. Among the questions you’ll consider are: How did public opinion and the media respond to these disasters? What short and long-term effects did they have on government policy? In what ways did these disasters catalyse the development of the modern environmental movement? How has our understanding of what constitutes a natural disaster changed over time? You will learn about the historical development of theories of climate change and you will be able to contextualise historically the environmental crisis that is shaping political culture today and develop a greater understanding of why it is so difficult to agree on possible solutions.

In July 1979 a broad-based opposition movement led by a small group of young guerrillas - the ‘Sandinistas’ - overthrew the Somoza dictatorship which had ruled Nicaragua for 43 years. The euphoria of triumph quickly soured, as the new Sandinista government faced division at home and aggression from overseas, in the form of a US-funded proxy conflict, known as the ‘Contra War’. In this module, you will learn how ordinary Nicaraguans experienced the revolutionary decade by working with a wide range of sources, including memoirs, poetry, and murals. You will draw on testimonios and oral histories to critically evaluate the impact of the revolution’s programmes in education, agrarian reform, and women’s rights; and you will explore the Contra War in the context of the wider Cold War struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States. Finally, you will use your detailed knowledge of the period to assess the relative importance of a number of factors, including US aggression and Sandinista failings, which together caused the eventual defeat of the revolution.

This module explores a tumultuous period in Russian history when the pendulum swung from dictatorship towards increasing democracy and back again. Relatively freer politics and loosening of controls over the media were accompanied by economic dislocation and social instability under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, while conversely, the Putin era saw improved economic performance, stability and some restoration of order alongside the return of a creeping authoritarianism in politics and tighter censorship. Students will investigate why the Soviet regime, which ten years previously had seemed destined to last indefinitely, was so rapidly undermined. We will examine the political struggle that accompanied perestroika, as well as how official Soviet ideology unravelled under the impact of glasnost’ and the opening of public debate. The module considers Gorbachev’s government’s attempt to find economic solutions to stagnation and the disastrous effects of the collapse of faith in the command economy. Also, particular attention is paid to the role that nationalist movements in the Baltic, Ukraine, Transcaucasia and Central Asia played in tearing the Soviet system apart. The module then turns to Russia’s turbulent post-Soviet transition, the ‘Wild Years’, a dangerous and exciting period where, after the USSR legally ceased to exist on 31 December 1991, the new state, the Russian Federation, set off on the road to democracy and a market economy without any clear conception of how to complete such a transformation in the world’s largest country. As well as looking at Russia’s new political system, we will examine the economic reforms introduced as the country underwent ‘shock therapy’ to create a market economy, involving mass privatization, financial crisis, the rise of oligarchs. We will consider the devastating social impact of these policies, as life expectancy plummeted, birth rates collapsed and crime exploded. Students will assess how in these conditions Vladimir Putin, assumed power and explore how his presidency saw economic upswing and improvement in living standards but also a creeping authoritarianism in politics and media controls. Finally, we will investigate Putin’s cultivation of an aggressive, socially conservative Russian nationalism which grew from the shame and international humiliation derived from the catastrophic transition of the former superpower.

In this module, you will be provided with the skills to complete a written dissertation and a public-facing output on a topic that you will agree with your supervisors. The dissertation with public history represents an opportunity to apply the skills you have acquired at earlier levels, as well as a chance to develop new skills, both theoretical and practical, associated with public history. In Semester One you will produce the written piece of work. This written piece, which can take the form of a ‘short dissertation’ or ‘extended essay’, may be an analysis of a discrete body of primary sources, a discussion of historiographical controversy, or an intervention in a current debate about the public understanding of the past. In Semester Two you will work with your supervisors to produce a public output (the ‘knowledge exchange’ component), such as a digital exhibition or public history podcast, based on your research for the short dissertation/extended essay. The knowledge exchange aspect may include work with an external partner. The ‘Dissertation with public history’ is an exercise in research and public engagement and is intended to develop your research and communication skills, as well as your ability to work independently. Topics will be supervised by two appropriate tutors, one with subject-specific knowledge, the second with knowledge exchange experience.

In this module you will discover how the histories of travel and tourism are deeply connected to the making of modern Britain and Ireland. You will explore the history of tourism from its eighteenth-century origins, when seaside towns and spas welcomed their first visitors and British and Irish aristocrats embarked on Grand Tours of Europe. You will learn how British and Irish landscapes were made iconic by Romantic writers, and how the development of steamships, railways, roads, bicycles, and motor travel revolutionised the way in which journeys were experienced and narrated.

You will discover how the royal tourism of Queen Victoria and her descendants helped strengthen the political union of the United Kingdom, and how the tourism industry forged cross-border links, promoted cooperation, and encouraged dialogue between Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State after the Partition of Ireland in 1921. You will also learn how tourism was connected to the expansion of the British Empire, as travellers on Thomas Cook’s tours followed missionaries, traders, and empire builders to the Middle East, Africa, and India. You will consider how Black British travellers have experienced city space and the countryside in different ways to their white counterparts, and the photography of Ingrid Pollard will prompt you to think about the relationship between race and national identity in Britain today.

You will learn about key concepts and debates in the history of tourism, such as mobility, authenticity, landscape and place, gender, post-colonialism, the interaction of ‘hosts’ and ‘guests’, and the growing importance of travel as part of individual and national identity. You will engage with a wide variety of primary source material, from personal travel accounts, guidebooks, and timetables to the rich visual and material culture of postcards, illustrations, paintings, photographs, and poster artwork.

How and why did the British empire end? And how did legacies of empire continue to shape the world, even after it had virtually disappeared from the map? During the 1930s, the British empire was the largest that the world had ever seen. In this module you will analyse how anti-colonial activism, shifting international contexts, and crises in Britain itself combined to make the empire untenable. You will explore both how British authorities sought to manage the end of empire to protect what they saw as their vital interests, and efforts by activists in decolonising and newly independent countries to challenge British visions for the postcolonial world. You will compare and contrast case studies of the end of empire including India, Ghana, Kenya, and Australia, examining how and why the end of empire took on different forms at different locations.

You will also consider how, even after most colonised territories had won independence, the empire never seemed to completely go away. You will assess the reasons for the stubborn intractability of legacies of empire, and study efforts to challenge these legacies, such as the Third Worldist project for a New International Economic Order in the 1970s, and recent campaigns to decolonise British society.

Drawing on a rich collection of primary sources and cutting edge scholarship, this module will introduce you to a vibrant field of interdisciplinary research that is vital for understanding the contemporary world.

You will develop your understanding of academic conventions in UK higher education aligned to your level of study, including expectations around critical analysis, structure, argumentation, evidencing, and referencing. The module focuses on developing communication strategies that will help you express your ideas clearly and coherently in written assignments and spoken activities. You will also reflect on your current academic and language skills and develop strategies for development ahead of your assessments.