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Core Modules:

Core Skills in Postgraduate Study

This module will help support you in making the transition to MA study. It is taught through a series of workshops on topics such as writing essays at MA level, finding and using secondary materials, giving presentations, and employability. Throughout, you'll be encouraged to reflect on your experiences and expectations, as well as receiving guidance from lecturers. Although the module is not formally assessed, and does not carry credits, it's taken by all students on the MA English Literature programme and as well as helping you to understand the skills you'll be using at MA level will include reflection on your learning and development.

Dissertation (English Literature)

The Dissertation is an independent research essay equivalent to around 12,000 words on a topic chosen by you, relating to your programme of study on either the MA in English Literature, MA in Creative Writing or the MA English Studies. It will be supervised by a member of staff with an academic interest in the topic, and you will meet your supervisor approximately three times. The dissertation should present an argument that develops over a series of chapters/sections. It should demonstrate an ability to carry out effective research using appropriate methods of enquiry, as well as expertise in writing and the communication of research discoveries, and in organisation.

60 credits

Optional Modules may include

Romantic Gothic

Romantic Gothic considers the various manifestations of the Gothic mode, from the middle of the eighteenth century towards the end of the Romantic period in 1830. Looking at how the Gothic became such an enduring and powerful mode of expression in literature, the module will look at Gothic poetry, Gothic novels, Gothic bluebooks, and accounts of supernatural occurrences in the popular magazines and newspapers of the age. By the end of the module, you will have a good knowledge of the rise of the Gothic during the eighteenth century and Romantic periods, and will have examined some of the most popular Gothic works of the age alongside less canonical works.

30 credits

Shakespearean Transformations

This module approaches the literature of Shakespeare's era through the theme of transformation. This theme has multiple dimensions: first, you'll look at how Shakespeare and other Renaissance writers transformed existing literary traditions such as the classical epic, religious scripture, and medieval romance within their own writing. Then, you'll look at examples of transformation in Renaissance writing, such as changing sex, changing religion, and changes between the human and the animal. The module also reflects self-consciously on Shakespeare/Renaissance studies as a discipline and how it has been transformed - and might be transformed in future - in light of changing critical, ethical and social priorities. The module is diverse in its content, covering drama, poetry and prose, reflecting the different specialisms and expertise of staff members. The form of assessment, critical essay, helps you to hone your writing skills at graduate level and to carry out independent research into your chosen topic.

30 credits

Exchanging Letters: Art and Correspondence in Twentieth-Century American Culture

This module looks at the art and practice of letter writing in twentieth-century American literature. In particular, it considers the relationship between letter writing and other literary genres, investigating the use writers make of their own and other people's correspondence in published novels, poems and stories. Students will read letters by some of the twentieth-century's most controversial and innovative epistolary writers, including Elizabeth Bishop, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, Flannery O'Connor and Sylvia Plath. One of the main aims of the module will be to consider the aesthetics of letter writing and the extent to which it might be seen as a literary genre in its own right. In addition to this, you will be expected to show awareness of the different historical and social contexts in which these artists worked and to contextualise their readings of letters through reference to other biographical and literary sources

30 credits

Contemporary Cinemas

This module encourages you to engage with recent developments in world cinema, and to research and interpret films, filmmakers and movements in contemporary film. You will study examples of contemporary international cinema which are currently being researched by academic staff, and be introduced to key critical and theoretical concepts which can be applied to the analysis of film. The films included for study will be actively chosen to reframe national, aesthetic and cultural debates and to foreground the empowerment and relevance of cultural production. As well as being able to view, appraise and discuss diverse and relevant examples of twenty-first century filmmaking, you will be encouraged to select, analyse and critically evaluate films of your choice, using the module's texts, ideas, approaches and debates as points of departure for your own cinematic research. You will gain and develop skills in close analysis, the application of theory, contextual reading, and researching and writing on important, influential and challenging film texts.

30 credits

Humans, Animals, Monsters and Machines: From Gulliver's Travels to King Kong

This module examines imaginings of the 'human' in relation to machines and animals (and those monsters that are neither one thing nor the other) from the eighteenth century to the twentieth. We will focus mainly on fiction, its cultural contexts and on readings from the period's key thinkers of human being, alongside more recent theories of humans, posthumans and animals. The aim is to encourage critical engagement with this key issue and to facilitate a deeper appreciation of the period's literature, culture and politics, including the relationship of discourses of technology and species to discourses of class, gender and race.

30 credits

Memory and Trauma in Contemporary Literature

This module examines a variety of representations of memory and trauma in contemporary narrative. The texts range widely both generically (from memoir to fiction and the graphic novel) and thematically (to include both personal and collective histories, memories and traumas). Texts by Julian Barnes, Annie Ernaux, Kazuo Ishiguro, Herta Muller or Yoko Ogawa will be studied in relation to classic, contemporary and decolonial theories of memory and trauma, such as those of Sigmund Freud, Cathy Caruth, Stef Craps and Michael Rothberg. We will discuss how narrative form is affected by such factors as historical events, memory loss, delayed recovery and childhood recall. You will gain and develop skills in close analysis, the application of theory, contextual reading, and researching and writing on important, influential and challenging texts.

30 credits

Mid-Century Modernism

The module will engage with current research and scholarship relating to literature of the 'long modern' period (1930 to 1975), introducing you to the history and contemporary state of criticism and theory in relation to mid twentieth-century cultural production. You will receive a thorough grounding in research methods specific to the period. This is a period of unprecedented violence and transformation, from the momentous impact of totalitarian systems, the rise and impact of the Second World War on global culture, host to the worst events the world has ever experienced with the Holocaust and Bomb, the age of rapid and shifting groups and movements, existentialism through abstract expressionism to confessional, innovative and pop art styles. It is also an era of very deep reflection on the idea of the relations between systems of thought across disciplines. The module will chart that reflection as well as a forum for thinking about art's power in a world under new techno-political compulsions, be they nuclear-apocalyptic, Cold War-propagandized, or transnational, neo-imperial, superpowered or postcolonial.

30 credits

Literature and Language in the Workplace

This module will give you the opportunity to work with an external organisation, applying your research and communication skills to a specific project. You will undertake 100 hours of work with an external partner on an agreed project. At the end of the project you complete a log and record of your activities, and write a reflective essay.

The module will help you develop research skills such as working with archives, museums, and oral histories, and using social media. It will also give you experience of engaging members of the public with academic research. It will enable you to undertake valuable work experience and develop your CV.

15 credits

Murderers and Degenerates: Contextualising the fin de siècle Gothic

The module explores three related case histories which help to establish how the literary Gothic shaped particular fin de siècle anxieties. To that end the module examines accounts of Joseph Merrick (aka The Elephant Man), newspaper reports of the Whitechapel murders of 1888, and the trials of Oscar Wilde. It is by exploring how the Gothic infiltrated medical, criminological, and legal discourses that we can see how a narrative which centred on the pathologisation of masculinity was elaborated at the time. These case histories will be read alongside Jekyll and Hyde (1886), The Great God Pan (1894) and Dracula (1897) as three of the key literary texts which also examine medicine, the law, and crucially the urban and gender contexts which in turn shape the three case histories.

30 credits

Style in Literature and Discourse - Tools and Techniques

This module explores various approaches to the investigation of style, making reference both to literary texts and to other kinds of discourse. It introduces a range of tools that we can use to analyse style in a detailed and systematic way. These include techniques for the investigation of grammar, linguistic patterning, point of view, speech and thought representation, modality, and metaphor. In this sense, the module provides a foundational account of stylistic analysis suitable for those who have not experienced it before. However, the module extends its exploration of stylistics further than is usual in undergraduate modules, engaging with the theory that lies behind the practical tools that we are covering as well as extending, problematizing, and complicating our view of what the term 'style' actually means. In this sense, the module will also be suitable for you if you have some experience of studying stylistics at undergraduate level and now wish to develop your knowledge of the field. By the end of the module, you should be able to produce sophisticated stylistic analyses of particular pieces of text and discourse while also showing a critical awareness of the intellectual context of your work and the theoretical ideas underpinning it.

30 credits

Creative Writing: Prose, Ekphrasis, Experiment, Ritual Writing - Prose Transformations

This module can be taken as a standalone module, though it complements all other Creative Writing Modules. This module allows you to develop your own creative prose by engaging both creatively and critically with texts which push at, break and spill over the boundaries of genre and form. Through studying a wide range of fiction, hybrid texts, poetry, creative-critical writing, and theory, you will develop a practical and theoretical understanding of the ways in which the creative process can transform texts. We will ask: what does it mean to write the self and the other, or the self as the other? We will consider how texts can function as modes of resistance and repair, or resistance to the idea of 'repair', particularly in the context of racism, ableism, sexism, homophobia, and other structural harms. We will look at different ways of generating material from unusual sources, ranging from other art forms to biographical and historical material, to theory. to dreams, myths and folklore. Through experimenting with different processes of writing, you will challenge your expectations around our own approaches to literary style, genre and form. Through alternating discussion-based seminars and peer workshops, you will produce your own writing that engages creatively and critically with the themes and concerns of the module.

30 credits

Creative Writing: Poetry, Prose, Hybrid - Writing, New Writing, Rewriting, Not Writing

This module can be taken as a standalone module, though it complements EGH442, EGH440, and EGH441, a practical and theoretical workshop which is designed to look at current methods of creative writing exploring a wide range of forms experimenting further with genre-fusions, the boundaries of genre conventions exploring forms of writing as re-writing and writing as process and experimentation focussing on through stretching borders and edges of poetic and prose forms contours of self, selves and identity: prose poetry, poetic prose, lyric poetry, hybrid, creative nonfiction, fictional memoir, auto-theoretical prose texts, poetic prose, blog, script and other cross-media. Through a wide range of conventional and cross genres, we will continue to be exploring notions and structures of identity, of perception and consciousness, the construction and re/de/constructions of self and selves in writing, layers of memory, trauma, the correlation between psyche, body, place, movement and environment, politics, historicity, race and gender; we will be focusing on unnameable, the 'difficult' and 'tender tissues' of the writing and writer's material, the abject, the other, the liminal and further hybrid concepts, psychoanalysis, post-modern philosophy, liminalities and boundaries of the contemporary creative text, as made, found, speculated, re-invented, documented, de-constructed words of public and private selves. During the module you will be given the opportunity to develop your writing in various contemporary formations of more established and currently forming conventions/experimentations; your critical thinking through a wide range of creative samples by current published authors of prose, poetry, creative non-fiction, speculative prose, play, radio and performance, cross- and multimedia and the hybrid; and through the weekly workshops to sharpen your editorial skills.

30 credits

Feminist Methods in Historical Practice

In this course, we examine a wide range of feminist approaches to studying the past. We trace the development of women's history, gender history, and queer history, asking how feminist politics have shaped the research questions and methods of historians. But we also consider feminist history in its most expansive forms: through the lens of psychoanalysis, of memoir and oral history, of auto-theory, and intersectional histories of gender, race, and social class. How has feminism reshaped historical methods and our institutions? How has it failed to do so? How can we balance our stories of women's agency and transformations in women's status, with accounts of continuity and long-term injustice? What is the future for feminist history, and what is the place of historical writing in feminist activism? 

Throughout, we encourage students to engage their learning with their own ongoing research and primary sources from contexts with which they are familiar. Our classroom discussions will be enriched by a creative and diverse application of feminist methodologies to a wide range of primary sources and student-led research interests.

30 credits

A History of Emotions, from the Medieval Age to the Modern

Though History of Emotions is a relatively recent subdiscipline, it has seen a huge rise in popularity in a relatively short period - to the extent that it is now easy to find journals devoted exclusively to the field, research centres specialising in it, and monograph series that publish numerous books every year. Nevertheless, it is not easy to define what History of Emotions means, or the conceptual tools that it must encompass or exclude. At its heart, though, is the notion that emotions - like other, more easily visible phenomena - are malleable and quite likely to change over time. Taking this as its starting point, the module will explore historical traces of a range of emotions from the medieval period to the modern (including  anger, loneliness, jealousy, love, amongst others) in a variety of European and non-European settings. It will also discuss concepts that allow us to exercise a firmer grasp over something that is as supposedly flimsy as emotions.

30 credits