Postgraduate English 2017-2018

The course engages students in a variety of activities designed to develop their creativity and originality, as well as in specific tasks to test and extend their skill in the writing of poetry. Students will attempt imitations of a variety of different poetic styles, will be provided with a number of specific 'stimulus' exercises and will develop and revise their poems both independently and in regular workshop sessions.

Novel Ideas: Reading Prose Fiction explores the many different voices of the novel from the eighteenth century to the present day, and considers how these voices are assimilated by readers and reading communities. It looks at how this literary form, sometimes regarded as trivial entertainment, has developed into a powerful and highly theorised literary genre, capable of handling complex cultural and psychological material, and of effecting profound social impact. 

This course examines some critical approaches and theories that have shaped modern literary inquiry. An organising theme of the course is different notions of ‘text’, ranging from historicist definitions of the ‘material text’ to poststructuralist theories of intertextuality and the practice of modern textual editing. The relevance to literature of different types of context is also explored, as are the interpretative possibilities of various forms of ideological critique, including feminism and post-colonialism. Throughout the course students are exposed to a wide variety of primary and secondary texts.

This course is devoted to the development of non-fiction creative prose. Among the themes and genres engaged with will be: travel writing, psychogeography, non-academic critical writing, prose poetry, diary, memoir, and the fragment. Students will study examples across the genre and build up a portfolio of work, discussion of which will form the basis of weekly workshops.  

Art and culture are integral to our daily lives, and the ways in which these are experienced are continually changing. Whether it is in a street performance, a public gallery, an academic festival, a webcast, a documentary or in social media, the relationship between the creative artist and those who consume it, is complex and can itself be a creative process. This course explores the many ways in which creative materials can be brought to public view, and how different forms of communication, aural, verbal and visual, can enhance public engagement with aesthetic experiences and the discourses around these.

This course will focus on the part Middle Scots poets such as Robert Henryson, Gavin Douglas, William Dunbar and Walter Kennedy play in constructing ideas of a national literary tradition. The course will consider the ways in which these texts articulate changing conceptions of vernaculars and vernacular writing, and their reception in the work of the seventeenth-century poet and collector Allan Ramsay. It will also explore the role of the publishing society founded by Sir Walter Scott, the Bannatyne Club (1823-61).

Taught by experienced, award-winning writers, this course will engage students in a variety of activities designed to develop their creativity and originality, as well as in specific tasks to test and extend their technical skill in the writing of prose fiction. Students will be encouraged to develop an awareness of the centrality of narrative voice, to experiment with a variety of different narrative styles and to develop and revise their work in the context of workshop discussion and individually targeted feedback from course tutors.

The Romantic period was one of the most exciting in the history of literature. It brought about a new aesthetic sensibility and has helped to shape much of our thinking about art, creativity, and the role of the artist. However, while it is sometimes figured in terms of six great English males it was a phenomenon that emerged across Britain and Ireland. This course will consider the particular form that the Romantic movement took in Scotland and Ireland by considering writers such as Burns, Scott, Edgeworth, Maturin, and James Hogg.

This course examines the social, political and cultural construction of place in literary texts. The imaginative co-ordinates of places such as ‘Scotland’, or ‘England’ exist in a constant state of flux, refusing to yield an essential, authentic image. Using core texts from the early modern period paired with more recent literary responses we explore the idea of place in its various forms. Key themes and issues to be discussed will include the rural and urban divide; literature and nationhood; the nature of community; the significance of emigration, and displacement; walking texts, metropolitan literature, and ideas of the “new world” 

​The course examines the rich poetic literatures of Ireland and Scotland from earliest times to the present. It includes works from the medieval Gaelic culture shared by both countries and from their very different literatures in modern Irish and Scottish Gaelic and in Teutonic languages (English and Scots in Scotland, English and Ulster Scots in Ireland). The course reveals the fascinating back story to the achievement of world famous writers such as Robert Burns and W. B. Yeats and explores how two small neighbouring countries sustained diverse, inter-involved and still evolving poetic traditions over a period of fifteen hundred years.

Writing and publishing practices changed dramatically around the turn of the twentieth century in response to new developments in printing, technology and the emergence of a new mass readership for novels, often across international boundaries. This course looks at the rise of the modern novel through the work of three major authors. It will explore the impact of typewriters, telegraphs, colour printing and new styles of book illustration, lithography and photography.  It will also examine how these themes of technology, readership and material culture were treated in the writings of Henry James, Joseph Conrad and Edith Wharton.

This course will look at a wide range of  science fiction writing, beginning from the ‘fantasy science’ of Tait and Balfour’s The Unseen Universe, through early science fiction in the works of Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle to the science fiction of major modern Scottish writers such as Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Naomi Mitchison. On the Irish side, the course will explore how the fantasy science of the Celtic Twilight (W.B.Yeats’s ‘experiments’ in occultism) lead on the modernist science fantasies of Flann O’Brien and Francis Stuart.

Candidates will be required to research and write a 15,000 dissertation on a subject and in an area approved by the supervisor and the Head of School.

This course will provide students with the opportunity to write an extended folio of creative work in either poetry or prose. It will provide students with the opportunity to explore and extend their creative ambitions in writing and, through the reflective commentary element, enable them to contextualise their own creative achievements in relation to works by established writers. Throughout the evolution of the folio, the student will develop a thorough practical awareness of some of the key stylistic, formal and expressive possibilities available to the skilled creative writer.

Under individual supervision, students will write a 15,000-word dissertation on a novel-related topic to be approved by the Programme Co-ordinator.