English Literature BA (Hons)

Contemporary Drama

This course surveys the current state of drama in the theatre both in London and the wider world. Regular seminars are supplemented by theatre trips and talks by contemporary practitioners.

Contemporary Fiction

Classes revolve around five or six novels written in the past three decades, expands on the ‘Critical Theory’ module to pose questions about the politics and pleasures of reading. Recent texts considered have been: The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes; Atonement by Ian McEwan; White Teeth by Zadie Smith; and All the Birds Singing, by Evie Wyld. We also often ask our resident authors Christie Watson and Jonathan Gibbs to come in and talk about their books.

Critical Theory

This module requires students to engage with questions about: what ‘literature’ is (and, who says so?); what happens when we read; and the relationship of reading to such political issues as gender, sexuality and class.

Foundations in Literature: Tragedy

Module convenor: Dr Peter Howell

Students are asked to survey the West’s most important literary tradition, from ancient Greece to the present day taking in works by Sophocles, Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy and Ibsen along the way.

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.

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

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 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'

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.

Dissertation/Independent Study

Working closely with a supervisor, students are given the opportunity to specialise in a subject of particular academic or career interest to them. Students often describe submission of this piece of work as their proudest moment, because it represents the fulfilment of three years of study and a symbol of the expertise gained during this time.

Literature and the Unconscious

Taking texts like Bram Stoker’s Dracula and R L Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde as examples, this module proposes a psychoanalytic approach to reading literature, and asks students to examine the literary text as an expression of those repressed anxieties and desires we call ‘the unconscious’.

Modernism

This core module concerns the great flowering of European culture from the late nineteenth century until the Second World War. Authors examined include Thomas Hardy, T S Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.

The Lyricism of Protest: Bob Dylan

Following the award of the Novel Prize for Literature in 2015, this module examines the work Bob Dylan, in particular within the context of the counterculture and social protest of the 1960s and 1970s.

Writing Conflict: The First World War

The war of 1914-8 saw killing on an industrial unseen hitherto; the module examines how it is possible to respond to the horror and pity of war in literature and in art. As well as the well-known British war poets such as Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, and Wilfred Owen, the course also looks at writing by authors of other nationalities, and some more recent representations of the war.