English Literature BA (Hons)

Year two

• Curating London 

Curating London

In this module oriented towards the achievement of students’ career aspirations, students first examine the history of, and writing about, the capital city, and are then asked to plan and execute an enterprising project on the subject; for example, students may create an education website on some aspect, design a walking tour of a part of the city, or curate a small exhibition or film season on a particular theme.

• Eighteenth-century London: Writing the Metropolis 1700-1832 

Eighteenth-century London: Writing the Metropolis 1700-1832

You will study the growth of the world’s first ‘mega city’ by looking at the writing produced in and about it during the ‘long’ eighteenth century.

The module aims to enable you to read a number of literary works within the context of the metropolis as it was during the period 1700-1830, and to encourage you to reflect on the synthesis between historical/geographical environments and the texts that arise from them and come to define them.

• Gothic Cultures 

Gothic Cultures

Starting with Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764), which was written at Strawberry Hill, students examine the result genre of Gothic fiction that flourished during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

• Romanticism: English Literature and its Background 1776-1832 

Romanticism: English Literature and its Background 1776-1832

The module asks students to read literature of the so-called ‘Romantic’ period in the context of the revolutions ad profound changes that were happening in society. While the ‘big six’ male poets – Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron and Keats – are considered, the module brings to the fore works by working-class and women writers, such as Shelley’s Frankenstein, Austen’s Persuasion, and John Clare’s poetry.

• Writing Adaptations 

Writing Adaptations

The aim of this module is to offer students an examination of the relationships between texts in different creative media, and specifically to develop students' critical and creative skills in considering the relationship between the printed word and film/television, with particular emphasis upon the techniques and processes of adaptation. Source material included for consideration in the module will include short stories, novels, comics/graphic novels, non-fiction and video/computer games. Adaptations from page-to-screen as well as from screen-to-page (novelisations, tie-ins, spin-offs, etc) will be examined.

• Writing Identity in the Victorian Novel 

Writing Identity in the Victorian Novel

By looking at novels like Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë), Great Expectations (Charles Dickens), Adam Bede (George Eliot) and Lady Audley’s Secrets (Mary Elizabeth Braddon), students are introduced to the variety of ways in which class- and gender-based oppression are both recorded and, to some extent, subverted in Victorian fiction.

• Writing the 'Renaissance' 

Writing the 'Renaissance'

The ‘Renaissance’ (very approximately, 1450-1650) is often thought of as a re-awakening of art and culture, but it was also a time of violence and uncertainty. All this is reflected in the drama and other writing of the period, which this course examines, with a particular focus on Shakespeare.