English Literature BA (Hons)

In your third year you will be ready to become an independent thinker and researcher. The dissertation is your opportunity to research and write a substantial investigation of a topic that you are really passionate about. Your tutors will support you as you learn how to work independently and to manage a large project. You will also learn project-management, research, presentation and writing skills. You will learn to be self-motivated and independent. By the end of the module you will have produced a major piece of work that you can be proud of, and you will be ready to continue as an independent thinker in further study or in the graduate job you go on to at the end of your third year.

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.

On this module, you will learn about how the Victorian period is presented in an interdisciplinary range of texts, from film, graphic novels, theatre and contemporary fiction. You will examine the notion of ‘Neo-Victorianism’ in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. from the 1960s to the present, and you will learn why the Victorian period still holds such a fascination in literature and popular culture. We will also study several key theoretical areas: feminism, lesbianism and women’s writing; postcolonialism and Empire; postmodernist rewrites, reinterpretations and intertextuality; nostalgia and its effects in literature and the wider society; technology and travel; the interaction of the visual and the written text.

This module will introduce you to a range of texts which have been created out of, or about, the experience of African peoples in the diaspora from the seventeenth century to the present. It will encourage you to relate your understanding of the texts to the cultural and historical background from which they developed. Following on from level four core modules this module will develop your understanding of the concept of the ‘Atlantic World’ and theories of local, national and global cultures as well as theories of race and postcolonial theory. You will be encouraged to recognise the activity of the slave trade as the beginning point of the Atlantic World as an imagined space that challenges national and chronological boundaries and speaks of the powerful and enduring legacies of slavery.

This module will enhance your understanding of postwar American literary culture in its broader social, political, and
economic contexts. Mid-century America was a time of profound contradictions: while US citizens lived under the shadow the bomb, many experienced unprecedented economic prosperity and access to new material comforts. We will explore how national paranoia
about the spread of communism and the nuclear arms race sat alongside – and fed into – the postwar image of the American ‘good life’, an image of suburban conformity underpinned by the growth of advertising and consumer culture. We will consider how postwar fiction and poetry challenges this demand for conformity in both content and form: through its complex representations of the American cold war experience and its innovative narrative and poetic strategies. The texts on this module offer insights into postwar attitudes towards a diverse range of topics, including national and international politics, work, leisure, and domesticity, gender and sexuality, and race and ethnicity.

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.

This module explores the writings of the first professional woman writer in England, Aphra Behn (d. 1689). Biographically, Behn remains something of an enigma. We know little about her personal life, and some of our earliest records of her relate to her work as a Continental spy for Charles II. Yet Behn is one of the most important writers of the late seventeenth century. She contributed to many genres of literature (poetry, drama, translation and prose), she was the second most prolific dramatist of her age, and she authored the first English novel. Behn was a transformative and innovative author, deeply engaged with questions of gender and self-aware, in her writings, of her status as a female author in a male profession.
On this module we will read a selection of Behn’s writings, exploring their relationship to her contemporary writers, Behn’s historical moment and the broader development of literature. We will also explore the complex reception history of Behn’s work, thinking about why she disappeared from the literary canon within decades of her death, only to be rediscovered by feminist and postcolonial scholars from the 1970s and 80s. In studying Behn’s changing status as a literary author, and by reading her work, students will learn about a key moment (the 1670s-80s) in the development of the literary marketplace, whilst developing an appreciation of the ways in which gender concerns have affected access to Behn’s literature, as well as shaped (and, at times, limited) our understanding of its wider importance.
Today, Behn is much-studied and there are numerous scholarly editions of her writings. Yet there is still much we have yet to properly understand about her writings, and Behn studies are as vibrant and diverse as ever. Recent years have seen a renewed energy in Behn scholarship that seeks to understand her writings beyond their significance to gender studies, with scholars showing how Behn’s writings engage with the burning issues of the day: marital law; monarchy; philosophy; politics; science; sexuality; slavery.

The eighteenth century is often considered the ‘age of politeness’, a new enlightened age of material wealth, refinement, global trade and luxury, urban order and civility, and polished manners. However, the major changes that brought such refinement and wealth to British society also brought with them disruption, poverty, violence, and crime and a period of adjustment to modern commercial realities and pressures. This module will introduce students to eighteenth-century Britain’s underbelly of crime, through the lives of criminals who, reviled and celebrated in news, popular culture, and literature, were always the focus of public fasincation.

On this module, we will use a variety of media, including criminal biographies, novels, plays, poems, newspaper reports, pamphlets, legal records, art and visual culture, and film/TV adaptations, in order to explore the social, political, and cultural meanings encoded in the lives of criminals in eighteenth-century Britain and the countries to which its global trade reached. We will consider the ways in which criminal figures were represented and continue to be represented today, as well as the implications of these representations in terms of ideas about crime, social class, gender, regional and national identity, race, and culture.

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.

Academic skills when studying away from your home country can differ due to cultural and language differences in teaching and assessment practices. This module is designed to support your transition in the use and practice of technical language and subject specific skills around assessments and teaching provision in your chosen subject. The overall aim of this module is to develop your abilities to read and study effectively for academic purposes; to develop your skills in analysing and using source material in seminars and academic writing and to develop your use and application of language and communications skills to a higher level.

The topics you will cover on the module include:

• Understanding assignment briefs and exam questions.
• Developing academic writing skills, including citation, paraphrasing, and summarising.
• Practising ‘critical reading’ and ‘critical writing’
• Planning and structuring academic assignments (e.g. essays, reports and presentations).
• Avoiding academic misconduct and gaining credit by using academic sources and referencing effectively.
• Listening skills for lectures.
• Speaking in seminar presentations.
• Presenting your ideas
• Giving discipline-related academic presentations, experiencing peer observation, and receiving formative feedback.
• Speed reading techniques.
• Developing self-reflection skills.