English, _MA

30 Credit Points

So you think you know Shakespeare? This course invites you to think again. Studying a range of plays we get behind the mythology of Shakespeare, and rediscover the dynamic inventiveness of the Elizabethan theatre. Shakespeare and his contemporaries were the principal players in a period of literary experimentation that reinvented the possibilities of literature. Encounters with Shakespeare is your chance to find out more.

30 Credit Points

This course traces the use of key Western myths from antiquity to the present to examine the way knowledge is often presented as both dangerous and compelling. As well as introducing students to a range of historical, social, and formal variations on the theme of knowledge, the course also highlights the role of storytelling and adaptation in the formation of knowledge and understanding.

30 Credit Points

This optional course in literature allows students at pre-Honours to learn about the impact of global colonialism through the writings of those who experienced it and its repercussions. It includes theorists of our time and texts like Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Buchi Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen. The texts on this course are necessarily concerned with enslavement and freedom, with how one encounters difference, and what it means to possess or claim territory. In examining these issues students will engage with issues of power and equality over centuries of writing about colonialism and empire.

30 Credit Points

This course explores the poetry, drama and prose of a period often referred to as the golden age of English literature. A period which saw Shakespeare and his contemporaries produce innovative new literary works in which the language of desire took centre stage.

30 Credit Points

Knights, Virgins, and Viragos offers an introduction to the variety of medieval literature and culture. Turning a critical eye on the role misconceptions of the Middle Ages play in present day white supremacy, the course highlights genres from medieval drama to life writing, with attention to the medieval history of race making and modern responses to medieval texts.

30 Credit Points

The early twentieth century was a time of great literary experimentation as literary modernists rose to the challenge to make it new. We will explore modernism’s stylistic experimentation while also considering the social contexts and changes that shaped this literature. The course will examine a range of writers, genres, movements and locations which prompt us to consider what, when and where was modernism.

30 Credit Points

This course examines an important and diverse period in the development of American literature, lasting from the mid-nineteenth century until the 1930s. During the course we will be analysing works by a variety of American writers from this period in their historical, social and political contexts as well as considering the ways in which they pioneered innovative literary forms and techniques.

30 Credit Points

The Victorian period is often seen as a time of sexual repression and rigid gender roles, in which men and women were expected to perform in accordance with established codes of behaviour that were based on assumptions about innate masculinity and femininity. While this perception of Victorian attitudes may be true to some extent, many Victorians were well aware of the dangers of gender stereotyping, and wrote fiction in order to interrogate and challenge these expectations. Focussing mainly on the novel, but including some poetry and drama, this module explores how Victorian writers engaged with gender stereotypes, and considers the literary tactics that authors used to re-examine, overthrow and sometimes reaffirm them. We will also consider how these stereotypes changed during the nineteenth century in response to public controversies and campaigns that kept questions of gender at the forefront of public consciousness. Figures such as the Fallen Woman, the Self-Made man and the Angel in the House will be explored in texts by authors including Emily Brontë, Christina Rossetti, Robert Louis Stevenson and Thomas Hardy.

30 Credit Points

The Romantic movement swept Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and produced some of the most innovative and exciting literature that has ever been seen. This rule breaking art helped shape the way that we consider art today and underpins many of our ideas about imagination, originality, creativity and self-expression. This course will explore the ways in which the Romantic movement manifested itself across Britain and Ireland and will consider writers such as Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Austen and Byron.

30 Credit Points

While the short story is often said to have developed in America, nineteenth-century Scottish writing is in fact instrumental in the emergence of the form. Often drawing on oral and folk traditions Scottish writers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries employ the supernatural, or our fear of it, to explore subjects such as guilt, fear, remorse and the extent to which we can control our own destinies. This course will explore the ways in which the short story in Scotland develops from the early nineteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth. It will include writers such as Walter Scott, James Hogg, John Galt, Margaret Oliphant, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle and Jane Findlater.

30 Credit Points

This course offers an overview of a wide range of twentieth-century Scottish literature, focusing on themes of haunting, death, and place. Including novels, short stories, poetry, and drama, the course explores questions of the relationship between self and society, the legacy of the past, and the formation of gendered and regional identities. There are lots of ghosts.

30 Credit Points

How is the artist to respond when the virtual becomes the real and when words cannot carry the weight of trauma? How can an author avoid the accusations of voyeuristic prurience or crass opportunism when he or she attempts to re-present events of public violence? This multi-disciplinary course examines work from a wide range of modes, including fiction, poetry, film and graphic art, and looks at the difficulties of inscribing trauma and the ethics and praxis of remembrance. Key events covered include the Holocaust, the Sabra and Shatila massacre, 9-11, the Gulf War and the conflict in the Balkans.

30 Credit Points

This course offers students the opportunity, through lectures and interactive 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 Credit Points

The Romantic (1782-1832) and Victorian (1832-1901) periods were ones of remarkable activity for British citizens abroad. Imperial expansion, increasing international trade, major conflicts and growing mass migration all drew more British citizens than ever into contact with the wider world. This course explores the footprints left by these interactions in nineteenth-century literature. Writers covered may include Henry Derozio, Jane Austen, Mary Prince, Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle.

30 Credit Points

This course examines several landmark texts of modern Austrian literature. We will look at Schnitzler’s examination of bourgeois hypocrisy in Fräulein Else, Kafka’s dystopian novel Das Schloss [The Castle], Bachmann’s depiction of a female subject’s struggle for identity in Malina, and Bernhard’s critique of the long shadow of Austria’s past in Heldenplatz. We will examine the works’ social and historical contexts, as well as the authors’ innovative style and use of language.

30 Credit Points

The course will study three of the best-known writers of fictions that engage the reader in a playful manner: Miguel de Cervantes from Spain, Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar from Argentina. We will read selections from Cervantes’ masterpiece the Don Quixote de la Mancha and short stories by the other two writers. We will study the digital inflections of these writers, all of whom challenge reality and the borders between virtual (fictional) and physical worlds.

30 Credit Points

This course will invite students to explore the ways film and literature can engage with and represent a variety of landscapes, and how, in turn, landscape can influence both the production of the work and the creation of meaning. We will study selected works of film and literature from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including mainstream and independent cinema, poetry, and fiction and non-fiction literary texts that have been adapted for film. We will look at ways in which various landscapes may have been appropriated for their emotive qualities: to connote feelings of desolation, oppression or plenitude; loneliness, fear or joy. We will also look at landscapes as sites of specific cultural history. As the course progresses, drawing on contemporary research in cultural and human geographies, and elsewhere, we will explore the ways that studying landscapes of film and literature can assist in our ability to conceive landscape not only as a static or symbolic entity, but as a highly mobile, interactive site in which history, experience and materiality converge in the ongoing production of space and meaning. In this way, we will consider how the works studied articulate John Wylie’s provocative claim that ‘landscape is tension’.

This interdisciplinary course will draw on writings from literary, film and cultural theorists, philosophers, artists and social scientists.

30 Credit Points

Students will have the opportunity to write a dissertation on a topic of their choosing within English literature.

30 Credit Points

This course will focus on the ways in which non-standard English is used within anglophone literary texts from the late-eighteenth century to the present day. Classes will cover a wide range of geographical spaces and publishing contexts discussing Scots-language poetry, postcolonial approaches to English, and African-American literature. Authors covered may include: Robert Burns, Zora Neale Hurston, Anne Donovan, Jackie Kay, Chinua Achebe, Tom Leonard, and Percival Everett.

30 Credit Points

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 Credit Points

This course explores the relationship between literature and medicine, and asks what kind of ground the two disciplines might share and how they might enrich one another. The use and abuse of literary concepts in medical practice and of medical ideas and history in literature will be considered along with the literary representations of the physician and narratives of illness, focusing on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The final part of the course explores the representation of psychiatry and psychiatric theory in twentieth- and twenty-first century literature.

30 Credit Points

This course explores the work of women writers with particular emphasis on the role of place (focused mostly, but not exclusively, on modernist women writers from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries). We will look at a number of different environments including urban, rural, domestic and trans-national spaces. We will analyse place in relation to a number of other themes such as gender, sexuality, race, spirituality and creativity. We will read a number of canonical and lesser known women writers, working across various genres, including fiction, poetry and life-writing. Authors may include: Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Rhys, Andrea Levy, Bernadine Evaristo, Elizabeth Bishop. Previous study of modernism is not required.

30 Credit Points

This course analyses a range of twenty-first-century postcolonial dystopian texts that focus on ‘other’ bodies and thematize corporeality and the spectrum of exploitation that is tied to the flesh. Bringing into focus contemporary anxieties around the fertile, racialized, and ‘other’ bodies in literary dystopias, the course theorises bodies as sites of violence and vulnerability, as well as sites of rebellion and resistance.

30 Credit Points

This course will focus on the practical techniques of writing short stories, extended fiction and some poetry. It will encourage students to consider assembling a block of skills which they will require to repeatedly construct functioning narratives. The course will examine the practical skills of creating subtle fictional depictions – or high drama – and consider how we establish what is at stake for the readers of our fiction. By the completion of the course, students will have assembled a skill set to tackle creative work in a variety of modes, and present and structure it to a professional level.

30 Credit Points

Writing has not always been viewed as self-expression but for long periods of history was perceived as a branch of rhetoric or ‘persuasive speech’. ‘Brief Encounters’ examines some of the implications of this, combining textual analysis from a writerly perspective with creative writing practice in a workshop format.

30 Credit Points

This course focuses on the emphasis on sameness in conceptions of love and friendship in medieval and early modern literature, considering its implications for the history of sexuality, and its impact on political ideology. Students will be introduced to a variety of medieval texts in translation and supported in reading these alongside queer theory, trans studies, and work on the history of emotions.

30 Credit Points

This course will explore the work of some of the most influential and innovative voices in 20th century British poetry. Beginning with the Modernist revolution in technique, theory and taste, it will trace some of the main continuities and reactions that stemmed from the first decades of the century and which culminated in a richly diverse and fascinating late 20th century/early 21st century poetic landscape.

30 Credit Points

This course begins by considering the theatre that gave us Marlowe and Shakespeare, among other major dramatists, as an institution actively engaged in the controversies of politics and religion of the age. Part 1 of the course focuses on the plays of Christopher Marlowe, whose controversial life is unusually well documented and whose plays starkly anticipate later tensions in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama . Part 2 considers how those tensions in politics and religion developed in later drama, giving particular attention to the genre of revenge tragedy.

30 Credit Points

This course, taught jointly by staff in English and Music, explores the connections between literature and music. How have these art forms informed or overlapped with one another? What sorts of collaboration have taken place? How might literary and musical studies work across disciplinary boundaries? While the focus will be on the British nineteenth century, with case studies addressing different aspects of literary-musical interaction, there will be opportunities for students to address trans-historical theoretical issues and to research topics from other places and periods.

30 Credit Points

What does it mean to inhabit a vulnerable body, or to embrace and celebrate ideas of vulnerability more generally? How can literature help us understand the precarity and uncertainty that seem like an inherent part of contemporary life? This course offers an overview of twenty-first-century women’s fiction from a variety of traditions, and centres on themes of embodiment, community, fragmentation, and environment. Examined together, these texts highlight the generic and thematic diversity of contemporary women’s writing, and the way the self must always be reconstructed through literature in new ways.

30 Credit Points

This course will investigate different forms of scriptwriting by writers from a range of historical periods. We will be considering narrative form and content as shaped by subject selection and storytelling devices and structures. The filmic themes will be considered from aesthetic, historical and theoretical perspectives. Through a series of seminars, workshops and screenings, students will develop approaches to visualising film narratives, culminating in a scriptwriting folio of work.

30 Credit Points

From 1968-1994, Northern Irish writers and visual artists found themselves addressing key questions: what is the role of the artist in a divided society, and must s/he engage with political events? This course considers how the artists framed these dilemmas and how they have been framed by them. Following the outbreak of peace in the province, the role of artists changed: their work now focused on the victims of violence and to demand justice. This course examines the different approaches taken to remembrance by writers/artists and explores the ways in which memory and trauma are framed in their work.

30 Credit Points

This course looks at how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic Fiction confronts themes and concepts which are considered taboo, unpleasant or strictly. Sexuality and mortality are key themes here, as well as the crossing of class, racial and gender boundaries. We explore how the Gothic can be simultaneously deeply conservative and shockingly radical, and speaks to private fears and desires whilst bringing to public light social injustices and inequalities. This course focuses mainly on the Gothic novel, but may also include poetry and short stories.