15 credits
Level 1
First Term
15 credits
Level 1
Second Term
30 credits
Level 2
First Term
30 credits
Level 2
Second Term
30 credits
Level 3
First Term
30 credits
Level 3
First Term
30 credits
Level 3
First Term
30 credits
Level 3
First Term
The Romantic movement of the late 18th and early 19th century transformed received modes of writing, redefined the role of literature, and gave new prominence to ideas of originality, creativity and self-expression. This course traces the development of the Romantic aesthetic in the context of the social and political upheavals of the Age of Revolution. Analysing the work of major poets – Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron and Keats – as well as political writers, novelists and essayists such as Burke, Paine, Wollstonecraft, Austen, and De Quincey, the course examines the literature and thought of Romanticism across a range of genres.
30 credits
Level 3
Second Term
30 credits
Level 3
Second Term
The period from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century was a time of rapid social and political transformation and high cultural achievement in Scotland. The 1707 Union of Parliaments had made the country part of the new polity of Great Britain and the century and a half that followed witnessed a steady growth in Britain's global power. Scotland played a leading role in these developments and Scottish writers responded in diverse ways to the challenges of modernity. The course examines how these challenges are imagined in key poetic, fictional and philosophical texts.
30 credits
Level 3
Second Term
30 credits
Level 3
Second Term
This course offers students the opportunity, through lectures and interractive workshops, to develop their understanding of, and practical skills in, the writing of prose fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction. Taught by widely published, award-winning writers, it provides a thorough, practice-based understanding of creative process and of the technical challenges involved in developing an original idea into a completed literary artefact, presented to a professional standard. It also contributes to students' future career potential, whether as ‘creative’ or other kinds of professional writers/communicators.
30 credits
Level 4
First Term
Drama was the entertainment phenomenon of the early modern period: a popular art form that developed swiftly and attracted mass audiences. London was both the city that played host to this new cultural form, and the subject of much of its output. The course will examine the relation between life in the early modern city and the great flowering of drama by celebrated authors of the period. Using works by well-known writers such as Middleton, Jonson and Shakespeare, as well as lesser known authors, we will explore how the plays of the period engage with key concerns of urban living.
30 credits
Level 4
First Term
30 credits
Level 4
First Term
30 credits
Level 4
First Term
30 credits
Level 4
First Term
30 credits
Level 4
First Term
30 credits
Level 4
First Term
30 credits
Level 4
First Term
30 credits
Level 4
First Term
30 credits
Level 4
Second Term
The 1790s was a turbulent decade in which literature, politics and science interacted in unprecedented ways, producing far-reaching changes in all areas of intellectual life. The rise of Romantic poetry coincided with a cult of Gothic horror, new forms of fiction and drama, and an explosive pamphlet war unleashed by the French Revolution. This course explores the distinctive culture of the revolutionary decade, studying poems, novels and plays by Coleridge, Blake, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, 'Monk' Lewis and other writers, alongside Jacobin and anti-Jacobin polemics, courtroom speeches, political cartoons, and experiments with 'laughing gas' in the laboratories of the poet-chemist Humphry Davy.
30 credits
Level 4
First Term
From Gawain and the Green Knight to Skyfall, Spenser’s Faerie Queene to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, romance is a genre which embraces some of the greatest works of literature as well as being a vehicle for some of its most seductive fictions. The course explores this rich cultural tradition, analysing works in verse and prose (and film) from six centuries while also investigating the efforts of literary theorists to explain the remarkable persistence and reinvention of the genre. Among the authors studied are Marie de France, Spenser, Milton, Austen, Keats, Browning, T.S. Eliot and David Lodge.
30 credits
Level 4
First Term
30 credits
Level 4
First Term
30 credits
Level 4
Second Term
30 credits
Level 4
Second Term
30 credits
Level 4
Second Term
30 credits
Level 4
Second Term
30 credits
Level 4
Second Term
30 credits
Level 4
Second Term
30 credits
Level 4
Second Term
30 credits
Level 4
Second Term
The course will be taught in two parts, focusing on personal experience as material for fiction and poetry, and exploring historical and contemporary varieties of short written forms as catalysts for your own work. Initially, the course will enable you to use your own experience to create fictional worlds, stressing the importance of close observation, character, dialogue and attention to detail. The second part will encourage you to explore less familiar short forms from other historical periods, as well as to look afresh at virtual forms from our own time such as Facebook profiles, texts, tweets and blogs.
30 credits
Level 4
Second Term
30 credits
Level 4
Second Term
Whether composing works for the stage or the page, for radio, television or film, Beckett took perverse pleasure in revealing the failures of the artistic media he was working in: actors on the stage reduced to talking heads or voiceless bodies, first-person novels narrated by voices unable to say ‘I’, radio dramas filled with silence, television plays where the main action is listening, and film featuring characters terrified of being seen. This course explores and interrogates the fascinating process of reading, listening, and watching the art of failure exemplified byBeckett’s later works of short prose, theatre, radio, film and television.
We have detected that you are have compatibility mode enabled or are using an old version of Internet Explorer. You either need to switch off compatibility mode for this site or upgrade your browser.
