Modules

Year 1
Core modules:
Introduction to Drama introduces the work of, and critical debate about, a wide historical range of drama and dramatists writing in English, typically covering work from all or most of the following areas: the medieval, early modern, Restoration and Augustan, Romantic, Victorian, and twentieth and twenty-first century: post-medieval dramatists to be covered might include, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Behn, Gay, Shelley, Wilde, Shaw, Beckett, Kushner and Butterworth.

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

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

Examples of optional modules:
Romance and the Literature of Chivalry; Epic and Literature of Legend; Ancient Worlds and English Literature.

Year 2
Core modules:
Shakespeare introduces a broad range of Shakespeare’s work, and enables you to analyse in detail a selection of works from different periods of Shakespeare’s oeuvre and in different genres. The module seeks to foster an awareness of the kinds of scholarly, critical and theatrical issues which Shakespeare’s work has generated from the seventeenth century to the present.

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

Examples of optional modules:
Chaucer; Old English; Old Norse; Old French; Renaissance Literature; Literature of the Modern Period; American Poetry; Postcolonial and World Literatures; Modern Poetry; Contemporary US Fiction and the Question of Genre; Writing Women: Gendering Literature, c.800-1600; Shakespeare’s History Plays; The Brontës.

Year 3 (Year 4 if undertaking a placement year or year abroad)
Core module:
The final year includes a Dissertation involving guided research on a self-formulated topic, author or genre. The dissertation is based upon the gathering and processing of relevant information and materials, and results in work of sustained argumentative and analytic power.

Examples of optional modules:
Restoration and 18th Century Literature; Old English; Old French; American Fiction; Post-War Fiction and Poetry; Literature, Cinema and Neuroscience; US Cold War Literature and Culture; Shakespeare on Film; WB Yeats; Creative Writing Poetry; Seamus Heaney.

Assessment methods

Most modules will be assessed by essays and end-of-year examinations. In the third year you will write a 12,000-word dissertation on a subject of your choice related to English Literature.

Tuition fees

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