English Literature with Drama Studies BA (Hons)

This module introduces students to a key skill in literary study, that of precise and informed analysis of text (close reading).

This module will examine the ways in which English literature has represented the concept of place in a variety of genres across time (1350 to the present day). Students who successfully complete the module will have encountered at least ten substantial, representative literary texts which draw significantly on places of different types. These may include: cities; villages and ‘the country’; islands; built environments; wildernesses; oceans; imaginary worlds; and so on. Examples will be drawn from a diverse range of English, British, Irish and American literature and other Anglophone cultures. The types of text will include prose fiction, poetry, and drama. There will be two workshops each week, introducing and discussing a text or texts; and one weekly tutorial, in groups of no more than nine for smaller-scale analysis and tasks relating to the same weekly text(s) or theme(s).

This module serves as an introduction to the major periods of English literature from the Middle Ages onwards. One literary period will be covered each week by means of one lecture on a literary text from the period and one lecture on its context. These periods correspond to the ‘period’ literature modules that are available to students at Level 2, and thereby provide a sample of those modules, enabling students to make informed choices with regard to the modules they choose to take at Level 2. To this end, the texts have been chosen and the lectures are given by teaching staff from the relevant Level 2 modules.

This module will cover a range or dramatic texts from different culture and eras, exploring the processes of reading them whilst thinking about genre and context. Students will develop close-reading skills as well as an awareness of drama as a genre, its history and development. Assessment is coursework based and involves close reading, discursive response, and a short creative-critical exercise.

This module introduces students to a range of theoretical approaches for analysing diverse forms of dramatic text and performance. Students will learn about how historical and contemporary contexts have shaped the development of theatre and performance theory. They will be invited to think critically about what makes analysing theatre and performance different from other types of text, and how theory might inform their interpretive practice. The module will cover a variety of theoretical approaches and contextualise them against specific performances in order to give students the expertise for thorough critical engagement and interpretation.

This module will allow students to develop critical methods of reading and contextual analysis of literary texts. Lectures and tutorials will explore a range of critical methodologies (for example psychoanalysis and postcolonialism) as well as topics focused on the modes, attitudes and concerns that underlie the production of literature in relation to politics, society and culture. In doing so students will be introduced to key debates within literary study, as well as addressing topics important to different periods including issues of race, gender, sexuality, literary form, environment and economy.

This module aims to develop and challenge accepted modes of reading in order to expand and strengthen original critical enquiry while also improving students’ written, oral and digital communication skills.

Learn how to read an image, images from advertising (commercial and public service), company logotypes, Asterix and satirical political cartoons (Charlie Hebdo)

The aims of the British Writing since 1945 are broadly to introduce students to a range of post-war British writing, and to promote the study of literary expression in contemporary British literature in its political and social contexts. The module aims to consider the literature of this period in a broad cultural and political context, and ask how forms of modern and contemporary identity are represented and contested within the literature and culture of the period, as well as exploring the relations between literary genres, particularly fiction and drama.

This module introduces students to a variety of theoretical and practical contexts for thinking about creativity and the writing process. Students are given practical writing exercises and are encouraged to reflect upon their own practice. Students will also be encouraged to find innovative platforms and means of presenting their own creative work, and may choose to engage fully with the potential for creative thinking in the context of digital technologies and the new media.

​This module covers a range of Renaissance drama, the contemporaries to Shakespeare, focussing on the relationship between page and stage and considering how an understanding of original performance conditions can influence our readings of the plays. 

This module introduces you to aspects of life in Britain and Europe between about 1740 and 1815. This period is often seen as the beginning of the modern world, when the ideas about human nature and society that still shape our own lives came into circulation and when the global entanglements generated by trade and colonisation began to have a lasting impact on everyday life in Europe. The module is taught by tutors from French, German and English Studies, and History, as well as staff from the National Museums Liverpool. It gives you an insight into the range of materials and methods that are used in research in eighteenth-century studies. Interactive lectures, seminars and fieldwork encourage a hands-on approach to learning. You start by inventing an 18th-century character and you follow that character through various experiences typical of the period: shopping, reading, travelling, thinking about political issues of the day. Images, artefacts and contemporary texts in English and other languages are made available to support your research. The aim is for you to develop your capacity for asking questions (curiosity) as well as for answering them (research skills).

This is a level 2 module, designed to introduce students to a range of medieval literature in the original Middle English language. No previous experience of Middle English is required. Authors considered include Geoffrey Chaucer, Sir Thomas Malory, Marie de France, and the Gawain-Poet.

In the period 1900–45 writers challenged all assumptions about what narrative does, about how we read, and how we represent and interpret the world. This module entails detailed study of some of the most radical modernist writers, such as T.S. Eliot, Mina Loy and Virginia Woolf. It also explores the contexts that shaped them and their innovations, from the city and visual art to empire and psychoanalysis. Together we’ll think about new understandings of time and the mind, new ideas about human relationships, and new dynamics between the silent and the stated, private and public, men and women, local and global, art and life.

This module will look at the history, context and content of some of the late 19th and early 20th century’s most important ‘little magazines’. Using the library Special Collections and Brown University’s Modernist Journals Project this module seeks to understand the role that literary magazines play within a culture and the historical background to their production. It will examine their material and print cultures, history and content in order to gain understanding of the role magazines played in their exploration of, or engagement with, various literary and historical movements. Topics covered will include sexuality, censorship, Modernism, the manifesto, State interference, and literary content, amongst others. Some of the magazines examined may include: The Savoy, To-Day, Blast, The Criterion, Ireland To-Day and Weird Tales. This module will suit students interested in journalism, magazine material and print cultures, censorship, and historical contexts. The module aims to engage students with primary historical research through classes in special collections and through digital resources.

The module addresses both the intrinsic and explicitly theorised moral frameworks of Greco-Roman antiquity, by looking at select sources ranging from the Homeric epic to Hellenistic and Roman philosophy. The issues examined during the module include: reciprocity as ethical model (revenge, justice, solidarity), the goods of the self vs the "external" goods, happiness and morality, valuing other people as part of one’s own moral well-being.

This module explores the works of the Roman poet Ovid which span a wide range of genres and themes. We will focus on a core set text (or set texts) within its sociocultural contexts, wider literary traditions, and the rest of the Ovidian corpus.

The module aims to prepare students for a smooth transition into a work placement year and, more broadly, to develop lifelong skills, attitudes and behaviours and support students in their continuing professional development. This will help students lead flexible, fulfilling careers working as a professional in their field, and enable them to contribute meaningfully to society.

The Trojan War is one of the ‘great stories’ of Western culture. The Iliad most famously replays a crucial episode: the anger of Achilles following insult from the Achaean (Greek) leader Agamemnon and its deadly consequences. But alongside other contemporary epic poems, events from the ten-year struggle between the Achaeans and Trojans have been rewritten, restaged, and represented in literature and art across antiquity and down the centuries into modern times. This module examines some of these various attempts to ‘rebuild Troy’, tracing the myth through a range of source material, including epic poetry, Greek sculpture and painted pottery, Athenian tragedy, Hellenistic inscriptions, Roman poetry, nineteenth-century European art and film. By putting each ‘reception’ of the myth into its social, political and historical contexts, the module traces the fluidity and malleability of Troy in the cultural imagination, and asks what Trojan stories reveal about the societies that tell them, ancient and modern.

The module looks at literature from the late seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries. This is the period when the novel-form emerged; when poetry was sometimes epic (or mock-epic) and also began to cultivate a focus on the self and subjectivity; when drama turned theatrical conventions inside-out; when fantasies in the satiric mode sought to vex the world and when female authors entered the marketplace. Students taking this module will gain in-depth knowledge of some of the ‘classics’ of world literature (such as Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, and Paradise Lost). They will also study the ways in which the literature of the period reflects and imagines such issues as: freedom and slavery; authorship and the culture of print; politics; religion and reason; realism and romance; urban expansion; the body, mind and spirit; sexual, racial and cultural identity; science, technology and new forms of knowledge.

This module covers American fiction written in the twentieth and early 21st century and considers how American writers relate to literary and social aspects of American life and culture. The module also considers how writers interrogate and overturn canonical ideas of ‘America’ as cultural identity by studying a mixture of canonical and lesser-known American fiction writers alongside each other. Topics covered will include: America’s global relations; American citizenship and race/legacies of slavery; American modernism; the Great Depression; postwar anxieties and the Cold War; American approaches to gender and sexuality; paranoia and conspiracy; regional writing; the 1990s and the ‘end of history’.

Romanticism is a cultural movement dominant in Europe from the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. The poetic focus of this course is the Romantic lyric. As a genre, it is autobiographical, emotional, confessional; it says: to know your self, narrate your self. It is often painful: that self may have been tried in the fires of political revolution, domestic violence, warfare, disinheritance, alienation, slavery, poverty, and incarceration of the ‘mad’: these are the stories of the writers on the module, the poetry of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Felicia Hemans, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and John Clare; and also the autobiographical and fictional narratives of Olaudah Equiano, Jane Austen, and Mary Prince. Yet the self here is never the sum of its suffering: these writers reach for truths that exceed any human legislation, not least in the awe-inspiring mystery, power, and delicacy of the natural world. They testify to a human psyche that is cosmic in its comprehension, and which can not only reach to the infinite, but can bring that insight to fellow humans through the experience of literature itself.

This module examines Shakespeare’s plays in relation to the early modern socio-cultural contexts in which they were written and first performed. It will introduce you to a range of comedies, histories and tragedies and encourage you to analyse and discuss how they engage with key issues of sixteenth and seventeenth century English life. By the end of the module you should be able to demonstrate in-depth knowledge of a number of Shakespeare’s works and an informed sense of the plays’ relationship to their historical contexts. Topics covered will typically include, Sex & Gender; Power & Performance; Belief & Superstition; Race & Culture; Travel & Trade. Workshops will give critical context provide models of interpretation and encourage reading the plays alongside other early modern texts, while the tutorials provide space for more detailed student-led discussion of the plays.

The aim of the Victorian Literature module is to expose students to a wide variety of texts written and published between 1837 and 1901, an extremely diverse period of literary history. The module will also provide opportunities for close analysis, application of literary theory and consideration of contextual issues in relation to the texts studied as a means of helping students to develop skills that will be useful in other literature modules.

Situated between the end of World War One and the Nazi takeover of power, the Weimar Republic witnessed a ‘crisis of classical modernity’; the period retains a reputation for modernity and decadence. Against a background of political and economic experimentation and uncertainty, it saw a growth in advertising, shopping, urban life and transport, fashion and film. Taught in a mixture of lectures and seminars, this module focuses on cultural representations of the period, through the study of two films: Berlin: Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin: Symphony of the Metropolis, 1927) and Marlene Dietrich’s first major feature, Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1931); and two literary texts: Erich Kästner, Emil und die Detektive (Emil and the Detectives, 1928), and Irmgard Keun, Das kunstseidene Mädchen (The Artificial Silk Girl, 1932). Through close reading and thematic analysis, we will consider how they depict and define the modern metropolis; changing ideas about class and gender; and new forms of working life, entertainment and leisure.

This module will introduce students to a range of literary and cultural forms which give prominence to women’s roles in cultural and social change. Students will engage with a number of key texts and gender related concepts and will consider the ways in which representations of women, whether produced by women or, indeed, by men, have both influenced and been influenced by important social and cultural movements in Spain, Portugal and Latin America from the early modern to the modern eras.

The module intends to familiarise students with central themes of aesthetics and art theory, especially questions about aesthetic judgement, aesthetic experience and aesthetic value. They will be able to strengthen their understanding of the history of philosophy, as well as the connection between theory and artistic practice. The module is taught by lecture (1 hour per week) and seminar (1 hour per week). Assessment is via a 3,000 word essay (85% of the module mark) and one 10-15 minute presentation (delivered during seminars, or recorded if on-line only teaching) that provides the remaining 15% of the module mark.

This module examines twentieth-century ‘offshoots’ that re-think and reinvent some of Shakespeare’s most famous plays, as well as his life and ‘character’ as an author. We’ll consider ‘offshoots’ across a variety of media, from drama and film, to short stories, novels, and graphic literature: texts that re-work and ‘answer’ plays such as Hamlet, The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The relationship between an offshoot and the original, and how that relationship illuminates our understanding of both, is what this module seeks to explore, by addressing questions of originality and intertextuality, adaptation and appropriation, gender and sexuality, power and authority.

This module surveys American poetry from the height of modernism (including poets like Wallace Stevens) to the present (including poets like Jorie Graham). The module adopts a many-angled approach to the subject, examining such social and cultural factors as the influence of feminism, Afro-American politics, and the Cold War. Assessment is delivered by a take-home exam, a 3500 word essay, and a 1000-word book-review. Teaching is conducted through a mixture of whole-cohort and small-group sessions.

This module focuses on British poetry from c.1930s – the present. Attention will be given to individual poems as well as their social, historical and political contexts and modes of production. Students will develop skills in close reading, buttressed by an increased understanding of the literary, theoretical, aesthetic and historical contexts for poetry writing. The module pursues an enquiry informed by (and critical of) ideas of nation, theory and poetics into the developments of poetry in this period with a view to questions of race, class, language and gender.

This module explores Children’s Literature from its ‘Golden Age’ in the late C19th through to the present day, considering its development and innovations through this period, alongside the traditional and sustained features of the genre. Time is also spent at the beginning of the course giving the module texts an historical and literary context by looking at early educational texts and chapbooks, for example. Topics covered include: children’s literature and the pastoral; the moral tale; fairy tales; the role of illustrations; coming-of-age literature; metafiction in children’s lit; fantasy; adult authors, narrators and readers, and talking bears. Critical approaches to children’s literature are introduced and discussed during the course, and specific use is made of the Special Collections and Archives collection of children’s books.

The module engages with comics and graphic novels as increasingly relevant media in contemporary transcultural processes, notably in the emerging of memories and rewriting of History. Students will develop critical skills to read stories in words and images, an understanding of the different genres and forms of graphic narratives in the 21st century, and practical (i.e. writing) skills to engage with the expanding relevance of comics in the cultural industries. Moving across a series of linguistic and cultural contexts in which comics have been developed and translated since the 20th century, the module considers comics and graphic novels as tool of communication and self-narration across languages and cultures.

This is a 15-credit Level 6 module. The module is designed to encourage students to write original poetry, using class workshops, the study of high-quality examples, and weekly assignments with written feedback. Assessment is delivered by means of a portfolio, which is composed of original work (50%) and a self-assessment (40%). There will also be a performance of the students’ own work (10%).

This module will give students an opportunity to write a short story, and reflect critically on the writing and editing process in a workshop situation. Students should be prepared to write and read independently, to share their work in progress with their peers and to critically evaluate their own work and that of their peers.

This module develops research and critical skills when examining digital cultures with a particular focus on the Americas. It takes examples that encompass North, Central, and South America as well as the Caribbean. Building confidence in handling theoretical tools in the analysis of digital cultures it examines a range of professional and amateur content creators from social, institutional and personal perspectives and considers issues of curatorship, archival approaches, the ethics of (re)appropriation and remediation, and the relationship between the self and the public and private spheres.

This module gives you the option to write a 10,000-word dissertation. You will be expected to formulate a dissertation proposal in advance, and if this is accepted, you will be allocated an academic supervisor. This module gives you a chance to focus on a specific topic or area that interests you within the study of either English language or literature, and allows you to demonstrate your capacity in undertaking a piece of serious, independent research.

This module gives you the option to write a 10,000-word dissertation. You will be expected to formulate a dissertation proposal in advance, and if this is accepted, you will be allocated an academic supervisor. This module gives you a chance to focus on a specific topic or area that interests you within the study of either English language or literature, and allows you to demonstrate your capacity in undertaking a piece of serious, independent research.

This module gives you the option to write a 10,000-word dissertation. You will be expected to formulate a dissertation proposal in advance, and if this is accepted, you will be allocated an academic supervisor. This module gives you a chance to focus on a specific topic or area that interests you within the study of either English language or literature, and allows you to demonstrate your capacity in undertaking a piece of serious, independent research.

Fiction is a place where unreal things can happen…

This module looks at the genre of the fantastic, the cross-over between real and unreal, and marvellous in some of the best known works of German-language literature: the Grimms’ fairytales; ‘Blond Eckbert’, a ‘fairytale’ invented by Ludwig Tieck; and ETA Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (The Sandman), a text dealing with madness and magic. We will also look at some modern versions of classic fairytales.

Close reading of the set texts will be paired with a range of critical analysis including contemporary approaches including disability studies and queer readings, as well as established frameworks by theorists such as Propp, Bettelheim, Bottigheimer and feminist critics (Warner, Tatar). The module will also introduce key theories with a particular emphasis on Todorov’s theory of the fantastic and Freud’s theory of Das Unheimliche (‘the Uncanny’).

This module examines different periods of Asian cinema from the early 20th century to the latest trends in Asian blockbusters. The course looks at directors, genres and trends as well as different stages of innovation in filmmaking in Asia. We will pay close attention to how the production and consumption of filmic texts in Asia has developed across differing time periods. We will look at a variety of genres, ranging from Chinese martial arts films to popular Japanese anime and the Korean new wave. By conducting close readings of these films from East Asia in conjunction with English-language scholarly articles, students will gain competency in methodological approaches for the study of Asian cinema as well as an understanding of topics such as auteurism, gender and sexuality, nationalism, transnationalism postcolonialism and censorship.

Games are ubiquitous today; even if you don’t think you play them, you do, via schemes like loyalty cards. This module examines the role of games in contemporary society, and the ways in which this has been reflected within contemporary literature. Throughout this module, we will consider the relationship between games and literature in relation to three key areas—“Ludic Literature”, “Gaming Cultures”, and “Games of the Future”—with each area involving the analysis of particular literary texts to consider what they reveal about contemporary society and its interests in games and gaming. Illustrative authors include: Raymond Queneau and members of the OuLiPo, Orson Scott Card, William Gibson, Daniel Suarez, and Ernest Cline.

This module examines the history of Gothic fiction from the 18th century to the present day and explores relationships between literature and film in the evolution of the genre. It considers both the influence of cinematic and pre-cinematic visual technologies on Gothic literature and aesthetics and the reciprocal influence of Gothic literature upon the emergence and development of cinema and television.

This module aims to introduce students to the history and background to Italian crime and Mafia written texts, films and other visual / media manifestations, and to the main relevant theoretical and critical approaches in the field.

This module examines the life and work of Ireland’s greatest and most influential fiction writer, James Joyce, from his 1914 collection of short stories, Dubliners, through his first novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and onward to his later masterpieces, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.
Historical and biographical context will form a key part of our studies.

This module explores the dialogue between the sciences and works of the imagination. The (sometimes-blurred) boundaries between ‘literature’ and ‘science’ have long been a source of conflict and creativity, and this module aims to set the long history of this relationship in wider cultural context, paying particular attention to questions surrounding ecology, biology and environment. We will not only consider the ways in which different ‘literary’ forms, modes and genres   ̶   including poetry, prose, film, visual art and, of course, science fiction   ̶   have engaged with ‘scientific’ ideas across different periods, but will also discuss the extent to which we can read (or indeed, re-write) scientific texts as works of creative endeavour and theoretical intent. Over the course of the module we will explore the relationship between fact, fiction and speculation; the past, future (and potentially the end) of humanity; questions of energy, ecology and sustainability; and the political and ethical dilemmas that emerge alongside new scientific discoveries and technologies that shape humans’(and other animals’) lives on micro and macro scales.

​This module invites students to read a variety of medieval (and some pre-medieval) texts and consider how they reflect various types of encounter between human and other worlds, such as animal, monster, ghostly, spiritual, dream and other such non-human worlds. The module requires close reading of texts in original Middle English and includes a translation exercise.

The module covers a series of strategies adopted by millennial writers to engage with the literary, cultural and international discourses of the late 20th and early 21st century. Topics covered will include the following: Generations X and Y and “Millennials”; irony and the cultural relationship between the 1960s/70s and the 1990s; digital/internet culture and the tech corporation (Apple/Google); developments in life-writing and journalism; the novel after theory; neoliberalism, austerity and debt; the globalised postcolonial city; discourses of waste, climate change and ecocriticism; terminologies of contemporary race relations; writing after/against postmodernism; 9/11, the war on terror and apocalyptic writing; the role of genre in contemporary writing.

This module examines the range of writing, film and art within the genre of Noir. In particular, it engages with the relationships between literary and non-literary, particularly visual, media as well as examining Noir’s social, political, intellectual and historical contexts.

This is an interdisciplinary module which aims to get students to think critically about imaginative literature and philosophical approaches to literature. It familiarises students with some of the main issues, theories and arguments relating to the ontology, value and structure of literature, as well as concept critical theory.
The module discusses key themes at the intersection of philosophy and literature; there is usually a focus on the genre of tragedy. The module is taught by lecture 1 hour per week and seminar 1 hour per week. Assessment is via class presentation (10%) and two 3,000 word coursework essays (40%, 50%).

The module explores how popular culture can be political by examining a range of popular cultural commodities discursively. The module surveys a range of views on how to examine popular culture in order to contextualise discourse analysis. This is examined and then used to critically consider the political potential of popular culture. Successful students will be able to critically analyse a range of popular cultural commodities such as film, television programmes, digital popular culture, popular music and the tabloid press. The module is delivered in the forms of lectures and more hands-on analysis during seminars. Students are assessed by an essay, which is an analysis of a popular culture commodity.

​This module aims to introduce students to the field of postcolonial literature and theory through the close study of a range of fiction written by writers from British ex-colonies in South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. The focus of analysis will be an exploration of this literature through the lenses of British colonisation, the process of decolonisation and independence as well as the complexities of the postcolonial condition. As part of this module, students will be required to read theoretical texts and engage with a range of theoretical concepts within the field of postcolonial studies. They will also be encouraged to apply these theories to the literature they read. Film and music may be used to enhance the learning experience. 

Up until this point of your degree your engagement with the Renaissance period will have been almost entirely through its drama. But the Renaissance was also a golden age of English poetry: writers like Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Amelia Lanier, John Donne, Katherine Phillips, John Milton, Mary Wroth and … yes … Marlowe and Shakespeare, experimented with exciting new poetic forms and explored in their verse questions of originality and authenticity, desire and sexuality, ambition and politics, spirituality and human frailty, and what it is that makes us who we are.

The module will introduce you to a range of important poets who wrote during the profoundly formative period of English literary history between the reign of Henry VIII and the restoration of the monarchy. It is taught in interactive tutorials and workshops, in which we approach the poetry in a number of ways, from highly focused close reading to theoretical approaches that take into account issues such as gender, sexuality and social status, to placing the works in their historical and political context. The assessment incorporates both traditional and creative-critical elements, encouraging you to think not just about what the poetry might ‘mean’, but also how it ‘works’.

This module is an opportunity for you to undertake a placement in a setting which matches your academic and possible career/industry interests, develop materials and/or undertake tasks within a practical or vocational context, apply academic knowledge from your degree, and develop your personal and employability skills within a working environment. SOTA300 is not open to students who have taken SOTA600.

A large proportion of films are based on written texts and this module will introduce you to a range of cinematic adaptations of literary works from across Modern Languages. Using adaptation theory to inform your analysis, you will have the opportunity to study excerpts from texts and consider the issues that arise from their adaptation as films. How does cinema convey a sense of the past or modify literary works from a different time period? How does it represent the gender roles which can be a central preoccupation of literature? How does film transcend language boundaries to bring modern-language texts to new audiences? On this module you will have the opportunity to explore these areas whilst also developing skills in film analysis, journalistic writing and academic writing.

This module is about how Shakespeare is made, and re-made: on the page, stage, and screen. Focusing on six of Shakespeare’s plays, it examines how they’ve been transformed, through theatrical production and cinematic adaptation, by actors and directors who bring them to life in performance but also change and challenge, sometimes quite radically, their meaning and interpretation as encountered on the page. Debating where ‘Shakespeare’ really ‘lives’ – on the page, stage, or screen – you’ll be reading and interpreting his plays in relation to specific editorial and production issues, assessing how the texts appeared in Shakespeare’s own time (in Quarto and Folio), and reviewing how modern editors and directors treat them today, dealing with the problems and possibilities they continue to present. Encountering original printed texts, the sources that Shakespeare himself adapted to create his plays, and subsequent adaptations of them for stage and screen, this module offers a more advanced, dynamic, and complex understanding of Shakespearean drama as it is put to work: on the page, stage, and screen.

The Single Author/Special Topic module allows students to undertake detailed study of an author or theme connected closely to the research specialism of an academic staff member. Students will take part in a series of research seminars throughout the semester. Seminars in the early part of the module will introduce key ideas, contexts and critical debates in relation to the relevant author or theme. In the later weeks of the module, seminars will become increasingly student-led, giving students the opportunity to present their own research into the topic. At the end of the module, students will use their research to develop a public engagement project designed to explain the significance of their topic to an audience beyond the university. The module is intended both for students who want to undertake research in a collaborative, seminar-based environment and for students who want to develop skills of engagement with wider public audiences.

In the 1920s a canny advertising executive coined the phrase, ‘One Look is Worth a Thousand Words’. But the idea that pictures can be read (and that writing creates pictures in the mind’s eye) has a long pedigree. According to Plutarch, it was Simonides of Keos – the Greek lyric poet of the 5th century BC – who first formulated the equation: ‘poems are talking pictures, pictures are silent poems’. This module examines the ways in which pictures have been used to tell stories from the beginnings of widespread print culture in the seventeenth century to contemporary digital comics.

This module will introduce students to approaches to memory and to a body of textual, visual, material representation of terror that has become a key focus for critical analysis in recent cultural studies. It will provide a context in which students can engage in systematic comparisons between European, Latin American and East Asian experiences and representations of social and political trauma. It will also encourage students to reflect systematically on the political and ethical implications of literary, material, digital and cinematic representations of traumatic histories. You will have the opportunity to study in depth and compare examples of representation through different media and across different national and linguistic boundaries. Lectures provide background both to the main theoretical approaches, and to specific representations. In weekly seminars, you will work on the case studies covered in class, and on related materials. Assessment is on the basis of a poster and an essay.

This module investigates literature, culture and art at the turn of the Victorian century: you will be required to read texts touching on such diverse topics as decadence, Empire, psychoanalysis, occultism, and suffragettism.

This is a course for anyone interested in the early novel, and focusses on prose fictions from the period 1740-1830, which is to say the development of the novel from its early appearances through into the Romantic period. If you have taken Victorian Literature, this is the story of how the novel developed prior to the appearance of writers such as Dickens and the Brontës. We look at the kinds of literature that fed into the early novel (such as journalism and travel writing), and the material conditions that were necessary to its development (print technologies and so on). We consider a wide range of related topics such as sensibility, the physiology of emotion, realism, and editing, and—in the context of the ongoing history of misogyny—we pay particular attention to the astonishingly courageous, radical, inventive, psychologically insightful, and funny writing of the women authors of the period. Writers on the course typically include Mary Davys, Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, Horace Walpole, Henry Mackenzie, Mary Hays, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and James Hogg.

War Writing addresses the ways that wartime and peacetime are imagined by writers in the 20th and 21st centuries. We consider the topic by looking at a diverse range of texts that address war directly or indirectly. We ask our students to ask exactly what it is that war means and the ways in which writers have attempted to answer that question. We actively look to expand our definition of war writing and to include a wide spectrum of writers and writing.

This module engages with twentieth-century and contemporary feminisms and their relation to literature of the period. We consider key debates and concepts in feminist thought, and explore how they have been represented and reimagined in writing across a range of forms, including poetry, prose (fiction and non-fiction) and theatre. Students will examine feminist literary criticism, critical understandings of gender, and how feminisms relate to other questions of identity and justice, from sexuality and socialism to the postcolonial and the ecological. They will understand feminisms on their own terms, but also think closely about how literature takes up, questions – and perhaps even attempts to transform – the problem of sexism and intersecting inequalities.

This is an opportunity to spend the third year of your studies working as part of your degree programme. The placement year is not just about gaining work experience, it is also about deepening your academic understanding in your subject. Whatever modules you have taken previously, your prior studies in Years 1 and 2 will have given you some appreciation of general issues and theoretical concerns in your subject area. Your placement will give you some real-world experience against which to compare that academic knowledge. The experience will in turn inform your studies in your final year, providing you with material to discuss in such modules as the Independent Project or the Dissertation. You will have the opportunities to learn and practise a range of intellectual, interpersonal and technical skills relevant to your chosen industry. You will be encouraged to think creatively and to develop skills in adapting and responding positively to changing circumstances. Ultimately, your academic learning will be enhanced in the final year of study through this opportunity to contextualise your studies in the workplace. Students who have taken SOTA600 are not allowed to take SOTA300.

This module will explore the art of writing for radio. At the same time, it will introduce students to the history of literature on the radio in Britain and Ireland. With a focus on the early and mid-twentieth century, we will survey essays, documentaries, lectures, radio plays, adaptations, poems and sound experiments. We will contextualise these works by discussing major events in the development of radio as a medium across the period: from the founding of national broadcast networks such as the BBC and RTÉ to the launch of the World Service; from the establishment and decline of the hugely influential BBC Third Programme to the histories of radio guides and magazines such as The Listener. The course will be underpinned by significant studies of media history produced by scholars including Chris Morash, Emily Bloom, Jürg R. Schwyter and Kate Murphy. Certain questions will preoccupy us throughout: is there something special, in an aesthetic sense, about writing for the radio? Do familiar writers have a ‘radio voice’? How have political and social changes shaped the programming of literature on the radio? And what role has literature on the radio played in forging national cultural identities in Britain, Ireland, and across the world? Writers and broadcasters to feature on the course might include: Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Louis MacNeice, Elizabeth Bowen, Dorothy Sayers, E.M. Forster, Dylan Thomas, Laura Riding, J.B. Priestley, Philip Larkin and Ewan MacColl.