English Literature: English Literature

Postgraduate Open Event

Join us online for our Postgraduate Open Event - Wednesday 26 October to find out more about our taught programmes and discover why you should study your Masters with us.

ESH7000 Dissertation offers students an opportunity to develop and demonstrate their research and writing skills while engaging with a topic suggested by their work on the core and option modules. The research topic must be feasible, academically sound, and related to the concerns of the programme. The dissertation project must develop an appropriate research methodology and demonstrate an advanced understanding of historical and/or theoretical issues. It must also demonstrate an ability to analyse and present complex evidence and to shape and sustain a coherent, persuasive critical argument at masters level. It must observe appropriate stylistic and bibliographic conventions. To support the independent study that is the mainstay of this module, students attend a number of skills-based structured workshops in addition to one-to-one supervision from their allocated supervisors.

"This is the compulsory core module for students taking the MA in English Literature. By focusing on the production of texts in a range of historical periods, and by considering different genres of writing, the module is designed to prepare you for the three special options you will choose from across the spectrum of the Department's postgraduate taught programmes. The Production of Texts in Context investigates selected historical case studies in order both to provide you with an advanced understanding of the material and social conditions in which texts are produced, disseminated, and read, and to prompt you to reflect critically upon the significance of literary-historical enquiry for the present-day interpretation of texts. The module will thereby equip you with a sound historical and conceptual preparation for the further study of literary writing at Masters level and beyond, whether or not your interests are specific to a particular period."

"The module is intended to address core issues in interpreting what might constitute the modern age and a writing appropriate to it. Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno are two of the most important cultural theorists of the 20th century. They explain their ideas in the process of defining the modernism in writing and thinking of which they approve, in contrast to modern trends they condemn. In understanding these two thinkers, students are introduced to the ways in which a heritage of philosophical and political theory is transmitted to the 20th century and applied to that era's sense of its own period. Their opposition is also central to the methodological justifications by literary and cultural studies right now of what they think they can achieve."

"This module will enable students to explore a turbulent period of innovation, reformation, and artistic self-consciousness across which writers reconsidered the cultural status, aesthetic potential and political mission of the novel. Deliberately chronological in organization, the syllabus will move from the late-1960s to the present, in order to chart the evolution of key phases in the way we retrospectively frame late-twentieth-century writing, from postwar social realism, postmodernism and beyond. Students will thus have the opportunity to engage not only stylistically but also historically with discrete moments of and transitions in novelistic experiment. They will be reading important essays from writers themselves (Iris Murdoch, David Lodge, Jeanette Winterson, J. M. Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, Caryl Phillips) and allowing the questions they raise to inform close readings of form. The selected novelists will be framed by topics ranging from early debates about the future of experimentalism in the 1970s, the relation between style and social critique in the 80s, the renaissance of historical fiction in the 90s, and finally the new directions in formal innovation that have emerged since 2000."

"This module explores the diverse uses that contemporary authors (from the past fifty years) make of science and technology in their works, and the distinct ways in which critics and scholars engage with science and technology in the cultural field. We take a broad definition of 'science', 'technology' and 'literature'. Besides reading fiction, poetry and drama we may also look at selected works of electronic literature, non-fiction, performance, graphic novels, film, and museum exhibits."

"This module introduces students to developments in the literature of the late Victorian period with an eye to its possible influences on modernist writing. Students are encouraged to explore such issues as the construction of the self and personality, representation of the body, the role of the artist with reference to gender and sexuality, Decadence, and the 'New Woman', as well as making a more general survey of aesthetics, style, and the visual and literary imagination in the writings of the period. Students study a variety of different kinds of writing including poetry, drama, art and literary criticism, and the novel. Writers included are Swinburne, Pater, Wilde, and Hardy, and lesser known figures such as Vernon Lee and Charlotte Mew."

"This module considers the mythology of the East End of London as articulated and interrogated by literary texts. It focuses on the period from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day and examines the East End as a continuing site of public fascination and creative production. By exploring a selected body of novels and other texts, considered with reference to different aspects of the mobile environment of the East End and contemporary debate, the module develops an understanding of how texts organise and articulate urban space and urban change. In particular, it explores the ways that fiction and prose writing have represented the East End as a site of immigration, cross-class encounter, crime, political activism and memory."

"This module focuses on the representation of the city in the literature of the Restoration and eighteenth century. The general research question this module investigates is the interaction between literature and history: in particular how is urbanism - the formation of a new and distinct affectual structure associated with the structural transformation of urban life in the early eighteenth century - manifested in and by the literary. The module will examine how this cultural and historical transformation can be read in and through experiments in literary genre and style in the period (including forms of popular satire, verse, periodical essays, prose fictions and the novel, as well as painting and cartography). The module will focus on four key debates, which may include topics such as the city and its mock poetic forms, the coffee-house, the Spectator essays, and women writers, and will engage in key critical debates in twentieth-century city theory."

This module explores the role literary texts play in imagining South Asia and its diasporic cultures and communities. We will examine a range of South Asian novels, as well as poetry and short stories, to ask how they shed light on and complicate our understanding of some of the defining themes of the 20th and 21st centuries, including nationhood, partition, inter-ethnic conflict, disaster, migration, cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, globalisation and terror. Moving across Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Britain and the US, and from the mid-20th century to the present day, we will explore how race, class, religion and gender shape South Asian cultures and identities, and interrogate the paratextual material surrounding contemporary South Asian literary production (festivals, prizes, reviews) to consider how this shapes our understanding of the texts.

This module will offer an opportunity to study key thinkers and debates in the field of queer theory, while also exploring how sexuality is narrated in contemporary culture. The module will be grounded in a mix theoretical texts and literary and visual cultural texts. Throughout, we will consider the relationship between cultural texts, politics, and theory, asking: What kind of object is sex and sexuality? What is 'queer' about queer theory? How is queerness narrated in contemporary literature and cultural texts? How do LGBTQ writers experiment with form in relation to sexuality? This module offers an opportunity to engage in debates central to queer theory, while also develop skills in literary and cultural analysis of contemporary narratives of sexuality.

This module aims to provide students with a common grounding in the study of Shakespeare within a global context through sustained analysis of three areas: an understanding of Shakespeare in terms of genre, historical context and the close reading of his texts; the transformation of the Shakespearean text by the critical turn of theory; and the afterlife of Shakespeare in his appropriation, translation or adaptation in a global context. The module will be divided into sections. Each section will be devoted to a play of a different genre: comedy, history, tragedy, and romance. The first week of each section will deal with close reading, genre theory, and the play in its historical context. The second will examine a major critical turn by which a new theoretical perspective transformed perceptions of the play--in the classroom, the theatre, or in film. The third will study a particular, global appropriation of the Shakespeare text beyond Britain and North America, through popular cultural or political appropriations and in TV, theatre performance and film. The module will be cumulative: each section will build on the understanding and skills developed in the respective earlier one, and each week devoted to Shakespeare's afterlives will involve an intense critical conversation about the meaning and significance of the 'global'. The texts will be selected in accordance with available teaching expertise and performances of the plays in any year.

The artistic energies and intellectual currents of the Romantic movement crossed national boundaries and reflected the political and social upheavals of an increasingly globalised world in an age of revolution. This module examines key works of British and European Romanticism and investigates the cultural mechanisms through which Romantic ideas and literary practices were transmitted from one country to another. Diverse strands in British 'Four Nations' Romanticism, including work by Coleridge, Byron, Edgeworth and Carlyle, are analysed alongside Continental texts in translation including Rousseau's Confessions, Goetheآ؟s Faust, Staأ«lآ؟s Corinne, and Leopardiآ؟s Zibaldone. Themes to be explored include the pan-European Ossian phenomenon, the reception of Kantآ؟s Critical philosophy, the role of literary periodicals, and the `natural supernaturalismآ؟ of the American Transcendentalists.

This MA module will introduce you to key texts (in translation), and key debates, from or about the Middle East (defined broadly to include Iran, Turkey and North Africa). The module aims to ask questions about the role of race, religion, regional geo-politics, sectarian and other violence, gender and sexuality. It will allow you to explore these and other topics though some of the most interesting, iconic, or controversial writing to come from, or engage with, the region in the 20th and 21st centuries. The question of translation (literal, cultural, metaphorical) is at the centre of the module's approach to these texts. At a time when it feels as though the Middle East and its people have never been so demonised, nor so victimised, this module seeks to interrogate the work that such texts do in the university and beyond to represent, challenge representations, or 'translate' their cultures of origin, and to shed light on the many prisms through which we analyse, understand, and perceive the Middle East, its people, languages and cultures today.

How might the idea of Utopia helps us galvanise political literary readings amid an increasingly dystopian sense of global crisis? What constitutes hope for the future in a context of ecocatastrophe? How does fiction offer alternative ways of imagining subjectivity, community and belonging? This module turns to a range of short stories and novels from across the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will examine the relationship between Utopia and a range of political ideologies and ideas, including feminism, anti-colonialism, Marxism, neoliberalism, anarchism and anti-capitalism. We will also explore historical and contemporary attempts to live out Utopian ideals in intentional communities and other social movements.