Second Year Modules

An introduction to the literature of the English Renaissance, beginning in the 1590s with erotic narrative poems by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, and concluding with John Milton's drama, Samson Agonistes, first published in 1671. Marlowe and Thomas Middleton represent the extraordinarily rich drama of the period, while John Donne and Andrew Marvell are the most famous of the so-called metaphysical poets. A feature of the module is the attention given to situating these works in their historical and cultural contexts.

Between the English Revolution and the French Revolution, British literature was pulled by opposing cultural forces and experienced an extraordinary degree of experimentation. The eighteenth century is sometime called The Age of Reason, but it is also called The Age of Sensibility. It was dominated by male writers, but also facilitated the rise of the woman novelist and the emergence of coteries of intellectual women. It continued to be an essentially rural nation, but London grew to be the biggest city in the world and industrialisation was beginning to herd workers into towns. This module explores some of the tensions and oppositions which were played out in the literature of this period.

This module will introduce you to a broad range of literatures from the period 1780 to 1830. The module aims to problematise and scrutinise the idea of Romanticism as a homogenous literary movement and to raise awareness of the range of competing literary identities present in the period.

This module is framed by the personal: it begins with Queen Victoria’s private diaries of her happiest days in Scotland, and ends just beyond the Victorian period, with one troubled man’s intensely-felt account of his Victorian childhood. You will look at examples of the novelistic form, including sensation, Romantic, domestic realist and sentimental novels. Some of the works you will study are well-known and truly canonical, while others will be excitingly unfamiliar; all, however, will contribute to a sense of the variety and contradictions inherent in being Victorian.

Providing an introduction to the study of literary modernism, a period of intense experimentation in diverse sets of cultural forms. This module deals with issues such as modernist aesthetics; genre; gender and sexuality; the fragment; time and narration; stream-of-consciousness; history, politics and colonialism; technology, and the status of language and the real.

This module will familiarise you with a range of influential critical and theoretical ideas in literary studies, influential and important for all the areas and periods you will study during your degree.

Develop your skills in the close reading and critical analysis of Middle English poetry, focusing on set passages from three important fourteenth century texts: Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Langland’s Piers Plowman, and the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The module invites you to think about how poets understood the status of Middle English as a literary language, in comparison with Latin and French.

The Lord of the Rings regularly shows up in lists of 'The Best Books of All Time', and Tolkien continues to inspire interest and imitation for all kinds of reasons. You will examine Tolkien’s work from the perspective of his engagement with Old English poetry, a subject which constituted an important part of his scholarly activity. You will look at his three main Old English poems (in the original and in translation) and Tolkien’s two most popular works of fiction, The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.

In this module you will explore a major literary genre which attracted all the great poets of late medieval England: the dream vision. It considers the use of the genre in the works of Chaucer, Langland and the Gawain-poet, as well as examining the visions in mystical writing. These authors’ treatments of the genre repeatedly ask us to reflect on the relationship of literature to experience, poetic authority and identity, and the development of English as a literary language.

This module explores in-depth three supreme examples of Shakespearean comedy, tragedy and historical drama: Richard III (1592-3), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595-6), and Macbeth (1606).

The texts covered in this module span virtually the whole period in which early modern English drama flourished: from Marlowe in c.1593 to 1634. The texts range from famous plays like Macbeth and The Tempest to little-known comedies like The Wise-woman of Hogsden. Two central texts will be The Witch of Edmonton and The Late Lancashire Witches, plays which deal with historically documented witchcraft accusations and scares. Non-dramatic texts about witchcraft are also included for study, including news pamphlets, works by learned contemporaries expressing their opinions about witchcraft, and popular ballads.

Charting a progression from Galenic humoral theory to Cartesian dualism, you will consider the representation and significance of corporeality in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts. Reading Renaissance plays and poetry alongside anatomical textbooks, manuals of health, erotica, and philosophical essays, the module seeks to contextualise the period's literary treatment of the body.

This module offers the opportunity to study one very important and characteristic aspect of Milton’s Paradise Lost: his depiction of Eden, the paradise that was lost at the fall. Throughout his account of Paradise, Milton works to make the loss of Paradise poignant by lavishing on it all his evocative powers as a poet. You will spend at least three sessions looking at Milton's epic, covering aspects such as Edenic sex and marriage, Eden’s fauna and flora, and work in Eden. Throughout the module images of Paradise will be given attention, starting with Hieronymus Bosch's 'The Garden of Earthly Delight'. Alongside artworks, you will look at some of the Bible scholarship which tried to locate the site of Paradise, and deduce its fate.

An introduction to English literature from the Norman Conquest to the birth of Chaucer. This period has been described both as a period of political crisis and also as a period of cultural renaissance. It saw the conquest and colonization of England, the rise of new forms of scholarship and spirituality, and, according to some accounts, the development of new ways of thinking about national and individual identity.

This module will give you the opportunity to work through some issues associated with short-story and/or novel writing. Classes will alternate seminar discussions of aspects of the craft of writing with workshops in which you will interact critically and creatively with others' work.

Examine a range of novels by gay and lesbian writers in Britain and Ireland which have emerged in the wake of the AIDS catastrophe and queer theory. You will focus on interesting though rather peculiar trends in the post-queer novel: queer historical and biographical fictions, and explore the reasons behind the dominance of these approaches in recent gay and lesbian literature.

With the appointment of Carol Ann Duffy as the first woman Poet Laureate for the United Kingdom in 2009, poetry by women became publicly validated as never before. Setting fresh horizons for women’s poetry, Duffy joined Gillian Clarke who has served as National Poet of Wales since 2008; Liz Lochhead was appointed Scots Makar in 2011, and Paula Meehan was appointed in 2013 to the Ireland Chair of Poetry. By careful reading of two collections by each poet, you will assess how each poet has moved from a position of rebellion, liminality or minority into the very heart of the cultural institution.

As a nineteenth-century novel that occupies a unique place within the cultural imagination, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) raises vital questions about literature and science, narrative and epistemology, creation and theology, gender and power. In addition to exploring these questions through detailed readings of the text, this course also considers the novel as it relates to genre and, in particular to the epistolary form, science-fiction and the female Gothic. An emphasis on the formal attributes of the text will be supplemented by a consideration of the historical and cultural context of this novel. Debates about Shelley’s relation to Romanticism, anxieties about the body and the role of myth-making in Frankenstein will lead into an exploration of the ways in which the text has influenced subsequent literary and cinematic renditions of monstrosity.

This course aims to introduce you to a range of adaptations of North American literature from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The analysis of the texts of these adaptations will be combined with an exploration of their social, political and cultural contexts to articulate the connection between creative work and social environment, raising the questions of why adapt literature to film and what constitutes adaptation. The first half of the term will focus on Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller and Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet, both as plays and films, and will end with Wag the Dog, a film by David Mamet. The second half of the term will consider A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley and the film based on this novel; we will also analyse Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and the subsequent film and television series. The course will end with an analysis of The Hunger Games series of novels and films and an assessment of the failures of capitalism that these texts explore.

This course aims to introduce you to a range of historical adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays in order to illustrate the creative dialogue that these works have inspired over time. The analysis of the texts of these adaptations will be combined with an exploration of their contexts in order to articulate the connection between creative work and social environment raising the questions of why adapt Shakespeare and what constitutes adaptation. By introducing these questions in an historical context in the first few weeks you will develop critical strategies that can be tested on more recent creative adaptations of the plays that have appeared on film, television and online.

An introduction to American literature via the tradition which David Reynolds labels 'dark reform'; a satirical and often populist mode which seek out the abuses which lie beneath the optimistic surface of American life, often through grotesque, scatological, sexualized and carnivalesque imagery. You will explore the contention that because of America's history, with its notions of national consensus and fear of class conflict, political critique in America has often had to find indirect expression.

This course explores more than two centuries of fear and terror in American culture. We will examine how authors and directors have used the gothic genre to consider issues of race, gender, social class, and regional and national identity. You will study texts that include one of the earliest American novels, the first novel by an African-American woman, Southern writing, true crime, and a classic zombie movie. Alongside these texts, you will be introduced to various theorizations of gothic writing. How does it change our reading if we understand the gothic mode as a response to moments of collective crisis, or an exploration or an individual or group psyche, or a return of the repressed? By excavating the ghosts and anxieties that haunt the American consciousness, we will consider what, if anything, makes American Gothic into a distinct, and national tradition.

The principal aim of this course is to examine the ‘dark’ side of late Victorian and Edwardian literature. Perhaps the most important cultural influence on the texts chosen for study is the negative possibility inherent in the discoveries of Charles Darwin: that is, the idea of ‘degeneration’, of racial and cultural reversal, explored in texts such as The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, and often associated with the decadent writings of Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater and others. Wilde’s infamous novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), typically regarded by contemporary critics as symptomatic of a decadent consciousness, also provides a location for such pathologies in what became known as ‘darkest England’: in the borderland of the demi-monde and in the East End of London, with its fantasised criminal zones, opium dens, prostitutes and outcasts.

The study of contemporary fiction has seen two exciting and important developments in recent years. Firstly, postcolonial studies, which is largely concerned with colonialism and its afterlife, has been expanded upon and to some extent, problematised. Critics argue that a new critical methodology is necessary to deal with a variety of more contemporary concerns e.g. the post 9/11 cultural clashes, the Arab Spring, the financial crash of 2008 etc. The genre of ‘world literature’ thus emerges as a means of engaging with this new globalised and globalising geo-political landscape. Secondly, there has been a convergence between a re-thinking of these texts from around the world with the concerns of queer people. As Hawley has pointed out, this convergence has not been an easy one. World-literature critics worry that queer theorists foist a Western, elitist approach to LGBTQ+ identities on to the rest of the world, that is, a Western homonormativity performs a similar role as the unequal distribution of power in a globalised world. Queer theorists, on the other hand, are anxious that queer perspectives get lost in world-literature theory and texts, which tend to, they argue, either privilege a masculine nationalist agenda or not pay enough attention to the effects of globalisation on local articulations of race, gender and sexuality. The principal aim of this course is to explore this productive tension by paying close attention to variety of texts from around the world.

Explore British drama staged during the first half of the twentieth century against a backdrop of two world wars. The plays studied place the values of their age under scrutiny, to raise questions about social justice, spiritual choices, class and gender inequalities. Theatrical genres were under just as much pressure as the cultural values they sought to convey; the ten plays studies during the course reflect a range of evolving genres, from the well-made play, the play of ideas, social comedy, to poetic drama.

‘Shakespeare from Page to Stage’ actively encourages joint-honours students to reflect on the processes, as well as the creative tension and cross-fertilisation between Drama and English studies. The course is studied in the English Department in the autumn term and in the Drama Department in the spring term. The two halves of the course will employ contrasting but complementary approaches. The focus of the first term will be on Shakespeare the playwright; therefore the emphasis of the textual analysis will be on the rhetorical strategies employed as well as the plays’ dramatic structure. The second term will place greater attention on Shakespeare as performed, looking at casting practices and the politics of race and gender in contemporary productions on stage and film.

This course aims to promote the interdisciplinary study of Shakespeare. It provides students with the opportunity for dedicated, second-level study of a limited number of plays both from the perspective of film studies and literary criticism. It will also explicitly encourage joint-honours students to reflect on the creative tensions and cross-fertilisation between the two halves of their degree.