English Literature BA (Hons) (with Foundation Year)

The Foundation Year is a great opportunity if you have the ability and enthusiasm to study for a degree, but do not yet have the qualifications required to enter directly onto our degree programmes. A significant part of the Foundation Year focuses upon core skills such as academic writing at HE level, becoming an independent learner, structuring academic work, critical thinking, time management and note taking.

Successful completion of the Foundation Year will enable you to progress into the first year (Level C) of your chosen honours degree. Further details can be found here.

The first year looks at a very wide range of skills, approaches, texts and contexts, and in doing so it prepares you for the three years of your degree.

Analysing Prose, Poetry and Drama

You are introduced to a broad range of texts from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century and will investigate the historical, cultural and intellectual contexts of literary texts, looking at how these contexts can be used to enrich the reading of a given text.

Close Reading and Context

This topic provides an overview of the development of prose, poetry, and drama. The prose examined includes the short story and the novel, and the poetry selected for close reading introduces students to a range of poetic modes and forms.  You have the opportunity to discuss your own interpretations of literature through detailed close readings of texts.

Writing Workshop

Through working with different types of writing, such as the academic essay, the glossary entry, and the critical synopsis, the Writing Workshop helps you to develop sophisticated thinking and understand the nuances and fine distinctions necessary for effective academic writing.

If you study English Literature as a Single Honours degree, you will also study:

Great Books and their Legacies

An introduction to a range of literature from as early as ancient Greece to the twenty-first century. Lectures will investigate how authors rework previous literary texts and traditions. You will consider, for example, how Tolkien was influenced by Old and Middle English literature, and how Shakespeare was influenced by Ovid.

Texts and Textual Legacies

These seminars investigate the development of particular ideas and themes in literature, such as the journey and the quest, visions of heaven and hell, conceptions of power and utopia, the idea of originality and authorship, thoughts on self and society.

Reading Matters: Literature and Personal Development

These tutorials ensure that you are made aware of the disciplinary and transferable skills that you are developing and help you develop a secure foundation in the research and creative problem-solving skills necessary for Single Honours study. The classes also consider the history and role of English Literature as a university subject and consider the role of reading for the individual and for wider society.

The second year focuses on some key authors and contexts, while also giving you a strong understanding of literature from the Middle Ages to the end of the nineteenth century.

English Literature from the Glorious Revolution to the Fin de Siècle

You study a range of literary texts from the seventeenth century to the early twentieth century, examining how literature engages with intellectual, social and political developments over the course of the era.

Restoration to Early Romantic Literature

A detailed discussion and close reading of significant aspects of the long eighteenth century, for example concerning the nature of reality and truth, the poetic imagination, the rise of the novel, and the diversity and complexity of poetic forms being used in the early years of Romanticism. The literary and philosophical ideas in evidence within the primary texts will be considered against the backdrop of changing social and political attitudes towards, for example, individual and national identity, and the nature of liberty.

Textual Analysis of Nineteenth-Century Literature

This theme will examine the development of English literature through the Romantic period, the Victorian era, and the writing of the fin de siècle. Emphasis will be placed on the influence of the French Revolution on English Literature, the development of feminist thinking in the Victorian era, the impact of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and cultural anxieties reflected in gothic literature and detective fiction of the fin de siècle.

Major Authors of Pre-Twentieth-Century Literature

You will focus on the work of two or more writers within the context of the literature, ideas, and cultural history of their time. The authors examined will vary from year to year, but will include writers such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, Dickens, and Hardy.

If you study English Literature as a Single Honours degree, you will also study:

Medieval to Early Modern Literature

You examine the poetry, prose and drama of the late medieval and early modern periods. Close examination of authors such as Chaucer, the Gawain-poet, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson and Donne in their cultural and historical contexts will underpin an interrogation of the traditional critical divide between 'the medieval' and what comes after.

American Literature

This strand traces the impact of Romantic writers and theorists on the writers and literary productions of the American Renaissance. American literature began self-consciously to differentiate itself from English literature, while being heavily influenced by it.  Topics examined include the historical novel, the sentimental novel, and the gothic tradition.

Archival Research and Publishing History: Problem-Based Learning

You are provided with training on the use of archival resources using both our own Special Collections of rare books and manuscripts and digital archives, and exposure to issues related to the production, publication, and reception of a particular text. You may examine book design, serialisation, illustrations, the production of different editions, the marketing of the text, contemporary reviews and subsequent re-evaluations, reader responses, and literary responses to selected literary texts.

The third year focuses on modern and contemporary literature, and recent theoretical approaches, while also including the dissertation or research project.

Modernism: Literature and Culture 1910-1940

You examine and analyse a range of texts from England, Ireland, and the United States written during the Modernist period such as work by writers such as William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot and Franz Kafka. These texts will be examined through close readings that will enable you to develop your own understanding of the textual strategies, stylistic innovations, and thematic concerns of the literature of this period.

Honours Seminar

You choose one of two seminars, which change each year, and are based on the lecturers’ research interests. Previous years’ courses have included Literature and Place and Fiction after Modernism.

If you study English Literature as a Single Honours degree, you will also study:

Writing Home: World War and Class Conflict, 1900-1945

‘Writing Home’ looks at English poetry and prose during the age of modernism, focusing on how ‘home’ is portrayed – we look at places and travel, but also national identity, war, power, gender, education, political parties, and social inequality, noting how closely related these topics could be during this period.  Indeed, it is an opportunity to consider popularity, accessibility, the book market, and the role of tradition.  We will also look at, among other things, film, music, architecture and painting, as aspects of the context. 

Contemporary Issues and Critical Practice

This theme examines recent theoretical approaches such as trauma theory, the maturing of postcolonial perspectives and the examination of intersectionality in relation to the construction of identity, the contribution of disability studies to the understanding of literature, and the now common awareness of the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of literature.

The Book: History, Theory, Future

These tutorials advance students' knowledge of the field of study known as 'the history of the book' to consider theoretical and historical approaches to analysing the book in its physical and digital forms, and the role that editing and publication play in our responses to a text.

Dissertation

A one-year project completed under the supervision of a researcher in your topic area. You present a research paper drawn from your project at an internal academic conference.