English Literature and Creative Writing (Extended Degree) 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.

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.

This module provides an opportunity to undertake a sustained, large-scale writing project as the culmination of your degree. It allows you to demonstrate both creative skill and the ability to reflect critically on your creative writing practice.

You will undertake a Creative Writing Project of 8,000 words of prose fiction or 300 lines of poetry. Your creative writing project may take any form that is agreed by the project supervisor, but in most cases will be:
• A collection of poetry;
• A collection of short stories;
• A novella;
• Part of a novel
As well as the creative work, you will submit a critical commentary reflecting on the project. The commentary must be 1,000-4,000 words. The creative work will be 4,000-7,000 words, so that together they make a total of not more than 8,000 words.
As well as the final project, you will give a formatively assessed presentation, and submit summatively assessed draft work, in semester 1.

This module is designed for students with some experience in creative writing to further develop their skills in prose and/or poetry, with an emphasis of producing longer pieces of writing. The module will examine the nature of genre, and will explore structure in the novel, novella, short story cycle, long poem and poetic sequence.
Although the focus of the module is on your own writing, we will read and discuss a number of texts in order to improve technique and help you in planning and carrying out your project.
Seminars will run as creative writing workshops in which students respond to writing exercises and learn to offer and receive feedback on their own and others’ work.

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.

The module will focus not only on the craft of writing for performance, but also on how a script plays out in real space and time, and in front of an audience. It will be grounded in the possibilities and practical limitations of writing for theatre. This module is designed to engender a critical understanding of the principal theories and concepts of dramaturgy and performance, and will also focus on the practical mechanics of how plays work and how they are structured. Students will examine a number of work-in-progress texts, and will employ research and literary analysis very specifically to illuminate the issues raised in the practical realization of plays.

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.

On this module you will explore the unique possibilities for storytelling available in the audio medium. You will study a range of sample episodes from podcasts, exploring how audio creators can make use of the narrative techniques of both fiction and creative non-fiction. These might include more conventionally-structured audio essays (in the vein of This American Life), shows like Reply All and 99% Invisible which blend investigative journalism and cultural history, and more recent work – for instance, Moya Lothian-McLean's Human Resources which foregrounds the producer's personal response to her material. Sessions analysing the narrative structure and techniques of the set texts will be interspersed with lecture-style presentations which cover the landscape of the podcasting industry, and with hands-on practical sessions, in the studio and in the field, where you will learn to use recording equipment and editing software. You will deconstruct a podcast episode for your first assessment, and for your final assessment you will produce your own short scripted episode, alongside with a short commentary which situates your work within the broader context of the medium.

On this module you will explore the possibilities of language to create experiences of strangeness, enchantment, and the unexplained across a range of texts which might include poetry, prose, and creative non-fiction. You will study how authors, historical and contemporary, have made language behave in unusual ways to create strange and fantastical reading experiences. Forms to be considered might include: spells, ballads, myths, creepypastas, contemporary fabulist fiction, and uncanny memoirs. You will experiment with ways to push the boundaries of your own linguistic and conceptual approaches, and submit a portfolio for assessment in which you explore how language can create ‘strange,’ enchanting or fantastical reading experiences. The module will introduce you both to esoteric literary traditions and to publications which seek out the 'weird' in the work of contemporary writers.

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.