English Literature MA

Research Skills and Practice introduces students to the practices, contexts and real-world applications of academic research. Through regular seminars and a variety of assessment methods, it provides students with the opportunity to develop skills in advanced literary study, independent research and para-academic activities. The knowledge and skills practised through this module provide a foundation for the world after Master’s study.

How (and why) do we point at a story and say, “This is science fiction”, and what does such a gesture reveal about the genre and our own attitudes to its concerns? In this module, we will explore the territories that Science Fiction ranges over, historically and conceptually. From “A Planet Called Science Fiction” (weeks 1-4), which examines the space that science fiction marks out for itself, we will move into the complicated relationship that Science Fiction has with fantasy, and analyse the ways in which it has been sub-divided into various effects and sub-genres in “Travels in Genre Space” (week 5-8). The final section of the module, “Re-drawing the Genre Map” (weeks 9-12), explores the burgeoning field of sf production, its relevance to society, and the ways in which its tropes and techniques relate to other “fantastic” modes of literary production, alongside recent controversies in the field.

This module encourages students to read widely across the late 19th, 20th and 21st centuries with the specific angle of ‘crisis’. Topics may include literary responses to political, social, psychological, theological or climate crisis, aesthetic responses to moral or societal panic, war and migration/trauma, as well as any links between identity and crisis in literature and the visual (photography, film, fine art). Authors may include: Bessie Head; Jean-Paul Sartre; Virginia Woolf; Sarah Kane; Danez Smith; Solmaz Sharif among others. We will consider how the framing of crisis as a moment or event shapes how we think about chronologies of literary response and its social uses. The module will be delivered via six fortnightly seminars.

At the end of the sixteenth century, England was making its first attempts to build a tradition as a nation of travellers and unsuccessfully attempting to establish colonies in north America. By the end of the Eighteenth century the European Grand Tour was a standard part of a British aristocratic education, and the British Empire was a global force actively participating in the international slave trade. This module looks at both literary and non-literary records of and responses to: the relationship between the ‘old world’ or the Mediterranean and the ‘new world’ of the Americas; the encounter with unfamiliar people and lands; the rise of and debate about the international slave trade, from the perspective of both the enslaver and the enslaved; the literary and cultural importance of these developments for the city of Liverpool.

Reading was woven into the fabric of the Victorian world. Thanks to urban living, cheaper printing, and vastly increased rates of literacy, Victorian society was one of the first societies where you might not have known your neighbours very well, but in which you were surrounded by vast swathes of paper and print – a forest of words. This module not only aims to investigate how the Victorians thought about reading – what they read, how they read it, and how reading itself was thought about and portrayed in literature; but also how we read the Victorians today – who reads them, how and where they are read, how that reading is perceived and constructed, and what insights and benefits our reading of the Victorians in the contemporary moment might gift to us.

Science Fiction texts are, for all their presentations of alternative worlds, deeply embedded in the cultures that produce them. Using examples from the Science Fiction Foundation Collection and science fiction archives in the University Library, this module introduces students to skills of archival research alongside providing the knowledge required to understand how modern Science Fiction developed as a unique interaction of authors, editors, and readers. Alongside this, students will read selected sf texts that consider or reflect upon the notion of the archive and/or which reveal themselves to be “archival” texts through their relationship to their contemporary period. Although texts may vary year-by-year, indicative authors include Margaret Atwood, Alastair Reynolds, Olaf Stapledon, and John Wyndham.

The aim of this module is to read Shakespeare’s plays and poetry in company with others’ works and writings, and thereby to consider a ‘comparative’ approach to reading and interpreting Shakespeare both within and beyond his own time, and against eighteenth-century ideas of him as the great English poet of ‘Nature’, ‘Nation’, and ‘Genius’. Particular attention will be paid to Shakespeare’s contemporaries – for example Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson – as well as to his Restoration and eighteenth-century adapters and ‘improvers’, critics and performers, such as Colley Cibber and David Garrick. Material studied may include Shakespeare’s critics: Jonson to Johnson; Shakespeare and Marlowe; Shakespeare, and Milton; Hamlet and its ‘ghosts’; Richard III – sources and adaptation; and collaborative dramas in which Shakespeare is a co-author, such as All is True and Sir Thomas More.

This module encourages students to engage with literary modernism in a range of contexts, from the cities in which it was made to the periodicals in which it was published and the theories that contributed to its development. As well as analysing the formal innovations of modernist literature, students will explore connections between writers, texts, works of visual art, geographic locations and mass culture, to understand modernism as a global network of people, objects, places and ideas. Conceptions of modernity will be studied, including approaches to the past and tradition, and ideas around novelty and fashion. Authors may include: T.S. Eliot, Hope Mirrlees, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, Jean Toomer and Nancy Cunard.

This module examines the literary representation of murder and other serious crimes in the Victorian period. Students will examine the interrelation of different genres in the period (such as court and newspaper reports, essays and the novel). The module considers these topics in relation to wider cultural and intellectual developments such as evolving ideas about psychology and forensic evidence, and in particular how such matters may be reproduced in literature so as to allow the reader a window into the world of crime. Students will be encouraged to consider the significance of genre when thinking about Victorian representations of murder and to engage with a wider range of primary sources. They will develop appropriate research methods and understanding of theoretical perspectives, and combine these with detailed textual analysis in the development their critical reading and writing skills.

In ENGL701 Dissertation Project, students lay the groundwork for the dissertation they will complete in the following term. This module does not require students to write or produce a finished dissertation. Rather, it requires them to conceive, carefully and self-reflectively, an original topic for their dissertation before going on to develop a plan and outline of the piece informed by secondary research. They will then deliver an oral presentation on their plans to their peers and to staff, including their supervisor (who will be assigned in the course of the module), reflect on the feedback they receive and, finally, create an audio-visual recording, such as a narrated slideshow, based on their presentation. Not only does this module provide structure and guidance in the crucial early stages of developing an extended work of literary analysis, it also offers an opportunity to practise vital skills, such as public speaking, responding to feedback and developing digital resources.

The final dissertation, comprising a 14,000-15,000-word thesis on a subject devised by the student and agreed with their supervisor, is written over the summer. Some students take this opportunity to explore in more depth a theme, idea, or author studied in one of the taught strands; others strike out in a wholly new direction. This module is a culmination of previous modules studied on the MA, in which students, under the supervision of a tutor, bring to bear the skills, knowledge and confidence they have developed over the course of the Master’s programme.

The philosopher Rosi Braidotti tells us that science fiction unfolds social imaginaries that reveal to us our potential to metamorphose, to mutate to become posthuman, while Donna Haraway urges us to embrace our cyborg identities. Such new materialist thinking shapes this module. To borrow from Karen Barad, what we’re interested in here is how ‘matter itself is diffracted’; how are different kinds of bodies – human and non-human, gendered, raced, classed, aged, prosthetic, engineered, planetary – materialized and sedimented according to the various spaces in which they find themselves. These spaces can be bewilderingly diverse in science fiction: from the hyper-urban to the rural, from the aquatic to the aerial, from high to zero gravity, from confined spacecraft quarters to the hostile expanses of desert planets. We’ll explore representations of gender, race and religion, with particular attention to the ways in which bodies become vulnerable or empowered, protected or miscegenated. And we’ll also address the ethical and practical concerns of exploration, immigration, colonization and cultural imperialism, all the while with an eye to theories of embodiment that take us far beyond binary thought into new forms of becoming.

How do the tidy editions of literary works that you read come into being? What textual complexities and difficulties might these editions obscure? And how far can or should an editor go in resolving these complexities or difficulties? This module addresses these questions, while at the same time giving you practical experience of scholarly editing. Working with a team of tutors with recent and current experience in scholarly editing, you will introduced to key debates in textual theory, will examine the specific editorial challenges raised by the work of a range of writers from the period, and will produce your own edition of a passage of literary text.

This module examines texts from a variety of historical periods, interrogating the role that technology plays within them. After setting up some of the initial concerns of the module regarding technology, and the relationship between literature and technology, we will situate our reading within three broad topic areas: Technologies Across Time, Humanity & Technology, and The Uneven Distribution of the Future.

In both the Renaissance and the eighteenth century authors were acutely aware of working inside and sometimes against given forms and genres that served to capture, condense and communicate the most profound human experiences: those of love, death, grief, sexual desire, war, friendship, religious belief and despair. This module examines the development and history of some key literary genres, modes and forms, across both periods, and assesses later versions of them in their conscious relation to earlier examples. The forms and genres addressed may include: the sonnet (from Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney and Shakespeare to Charlotte Smith and Thomas Gray); the erotic elegy (from Marlowe and Donne to Rochester and Dryden); epic and mock-epic (aspects of Milton, Paradise Lost and Pope, Rape of the Lock); the country house poem (from Ben Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’ to Mary Leapor’s ‘Crumble Hall’); the funeral elegy (from Spenser and Milton to Gray); the ‘Preface’ (from Spenser, Donne, and the King James Bible to Gay, Johnson, and Charlotte Smith); the psalm in translation (from Wyatt and the Sidneys to Christopher Smart); and the verse ‘Epistle’ (from Donne and Jonson to Pope).

This module explores the literary and cultural frameworks within which scientific knowledge and practice was produced, narrated, and communicated during the Renaissance and long eighteenth century. Reading science as performance, and theatre as experiment, the module will locate plays alongside alchemical and natural philosophical ideas and writings, in order to think through the issues both literature and science raise about secrecy and public demonstration, curiosity and observation, audience, and space. The module will also pay attention to how emerging ways of knowing and seeing influenced poetic and prose accounts of body and mind, discovery and imagination, and nature and self, and how writers were inspired by or set themselves against different narratives of nature, from simple conceits to grand visions of the cosmos.

This module focuses on theories of the body in contemporary critical thought and in modern and contemporary literature using relevant theory to support readings of a range of literary texts. We will study politically informed theories such as critical race studies, feminist, queer and disability studies and topics such as the maternal body, the body in pain and the ageing body. In all these cases the body emerges as a concept marked by internal division in terms of sex, gender, age, size, and race. We will study bodies as organisms and bodies as social phenomena, exploring the tension between the body’s material manifestations and its sites of immateriality such as the mind, spirit, psyche and affect.

This module asks students to consider the question ‘What is the Contemporary?’. How can literature help us to understand our sense of ‘the now’ and locate us in the present? And what does it have to tell us about our past and our future? These enquiries take in a series of literary and critical positions on matters of ‘the present’ and ‘contemporariness’ as explored through literature and theory. Over a series of seminars, students will be required to conceptualise and understand the different ways that we can understand the idea of the contemporary, contemporaneousness as a historical term and as a term of theoretical discourse.

How we imagine the end of the world tells us not only what we fear, but what we value – the study of apocalypse is not simply a study of endings, it is a study of revelation. The Victorians had every reason to be pre-occupied with the apocalypse: theirs was a culture facing the advent of new technologies, a changed experience of time, shifts in religious belief, and profound ecological concerns. On this module, we will study a range of Victorian apocalyptic texts across a range of forms and genres (both historical and literary), and we will consider the contexts and controversies from which they emerge. Lively discussions about what the end of the world meant to the Victorians, and what it still means to us, are at the heart of this module.

On this module, we will explore the strange, the uncanny and the supernatural in Victorian literature. We will examine the range and variety of Victorian Gothic writing: its hauntings, supernatural terrors and sensational stories. We will consider the literary, cultural and technological contexts of Victorian Gothic, including its relationship to realist literature, to shifting beliefs about religion, nature and the human, and to new and emerging technologies. We will also explore current critical debates in Gothic studies and introduce key theoretical approaches to the genre. Expect lots of discussion of the fears and thrills that kept Victorian readers awake at night.

Victorian literature and culture revived, reconstructed, and reimagined the Middle Ages. The nineteenth century’s fascination with days of yore saw a new word – “medieval” – invented to reflect the upsurge of interest in, and romanticisation of, the Middle Ages in art, architecture, literature, philosophy, politics, and religion. This module interrogates the ways in which the Victorians made the medieval through their literature and material culture. Students will encounter a variety of texts and objects of the Victorian revivals (medieval, Gothic and classical), through archives, art collections, digital resources, and architecture unique to the city of Liverpool. Attention will be given to the profound implications of the Victorian medieval revival on shaping ideas of England and Englishness locally and globally, past and present, showing students how they are still Victorians today.

The final dissertation, comprising a 14,000-15,000-word thesis on a subject devised by the student and agreed with their supervisor, is written over the summer. Some students take this opportunity to explore in more depth a theme, idea, or author studied in one of the taught strands; others strike out in a wholly new direction. This module is a culmination of previous modules studied on the MA, in which students, under the supervision of a tutor, bring to bear the skills, knowledge and confidence they have developed over the course of the Master’s programme.