English BA(Hons)

This module introduces students to the study of the English language. Students will explore primarily descriptive and some theoretical approaches to the English language and be introduced to a range of sub-disciplinary areas in the field of language study like phonology, phonetics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics. The module focuses on the establishing core linguistic concepts relevant to the study of English and building the practical skills necessary to analyse language structure and interpret English language data. The module will familiarize students with a wide range of terminology, concepts, approaches, methods of analysis and key scholars.

This module introduces you to a diverse range of literary texts, representing the principal genres on which the Western literary tradition is built. It also explores how these genres have been adapted, modified, and reformed in response to historical and cultural change. It helps you situate this knowledge in relation to overarching questions about the key concepts, skills and terms used throughout the study of literature at university level.

This module aims to develop creative thinking alongside Creative Writing skills. It also aims to clarify the principles of good writing and to enable you to reflect upon and improve your own abilities. It will also cover a variety of related academic skills in organisation of research, revising drafts and preparation of the final copy.

This module will provide you with an understanding the history of the English language from the early medieval period to the present day. There will be a focus on literary sources, like Chaucer, especially when studying the earliest periods. Students will gain a strong understanding of how the English language looked and sounded in different periods. We will examine how the English language has changed over time in its phonology, syntax, morphology, and lexicon, and consider more macro-level changes like standardization. Sociolinguistic issues will also be covered where relevant. We will consider how internal factors and external factors, especially language contact with Norse and French, have caused changes to English in these different areas. The module will introduce to a range of different resources available to scholars studying the history of English, and you will apply several theoretical and empirical approaches to language history.

Gothic emerged as the dark twin of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century and has remained perennially popular ever since. Gothic novels, ghost stories and horror films offer scintillating and often scandalous popular entertainment, while counterbalancing the values of modernity and order celebrated in realism and rational philosophy. This module will explore the origins and development of the Gothic, from its emergence in the age of revolutions and Regency decadence, through nineteenth-century parodies and re-appropriations, to its manifold transformations within the cultural industries of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This module develops the research skills you acquired at Foundation level, giving you the skills and confidence required to complete a major piece of independent research in your final year of your degree. You will learn from expert researchers and archive/heritage professionals. We will discover together how research uses different methods and approaches to answer specific research questions, engaging in scholarly debate to further knowledge. We’ll learn about the ways in which we build on existing research to generate new insight, and how research findings make a difference in the real world. The module gives you the freedom to research a wide range of relevant topics in your discipline with the structure and support of subject specialists.

No English degree would be complete without the opportunity to study the greatest writer in the language – Shakespeare. This module is your chance to do just that, both by situating Shakespeare’s plays in relation to their historical and cultural backgrounds, and by considering their rejuvenation in recent film and stage productions. For a greater understanding of Renaissance drama, the module will also compare Shakespeare’s work to some of his contemporaries, such as Marlowe, Jonson, or Webster.

When did the Victorians become Victorian? What does 'Victorian' mean to us in the twenty-first century? This module explores some of the literature and culture of 1837 to discuss Victorianism as a period and an idea. We’ll encounter some of the greats of early Victorian literature (Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thackeray) and look at themes such as colonialism, childhood, travel, neo-Victorianism, and legacies of Romantic literature. We’ll use creative techniques to understand our relationship with early Victorian literature today.

This module gives you the chance to study some of the most exciting and experimental novels ever written. Beginning at the start of the twentieth century, with ground breaking works of modernist fiction by the likes of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, you will study innovative new developments in form, style, and technique, as well as the historical context behind these transformative texts. The module then introduces you to the postmodernist experimentation of the later twentieth century. Together, we will explore new departures in narrative, style and language; the relationship between fiction, history and text; and the breakthrough novels that shaped the twentieth century.

The nineteenth century was the period in which the novel was the dominant literary form, in the wake of the heyday of Romantic poetry and before the advent of cinema. In this module we will study and analyse a selection of novels that represent some of the most significant developments in the genre during the Victorian age. We will explore the ways in which the Victorian novel reflected the most important issues of the day, from industrialisation and political reform to women’s rights and class conflict. The module will also investigate the significance of novelistic subgenres such as Sensation fiction and the late gothic novel during the second half of the nineteenth century, mapping these onto shifting attitudes towards the politics of gender, race and empire.

This module takes a tour through modern and contemporary American poetry. We’ll explore history, politics, identity, and competing ideas of what is means to be ‘American’, by studying the work of 10 extraordinary poets. We’ll be exploring American poetry from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, looking at significant poetic movements and sociopolitical contexts. The module explores a range of poets which may include Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Claudia Rankine, and Robert Lowell.

This module aims to develop skills enabling you to communicate the value and importance of literary study to a non-specialist audience. More broadly, you'll be encouraged to think about the real-world applications of a degree in English Literature, and about the role of the humanities in challenging and changing society. The module is based around, and explores numerous strategies for community and public engagement, with an emphasis on considering different ways in which literary study can be taken outside the academy and into society.

World Literature is a module that invites you to look beyond the “Englishness” of English Literature. Your reading list will take you on a voyage of discovery around different cultures, countries, and continents, which you will explore through their literary texts. These texts will reflect both the global reach of the English language and the enthralling experience of reading works in translation. Besides embracing the challenges posed by studying works from unfamiliar cultures and traditions, this module will consider some of the important questions raised by the study of world literature, such as the nature of hybridity, the limitations of the canon, and the globalisation of literature.

The late nineteenth century witnessed surging interest in the market for popular fiction and the emergence of new genres that responded to and helped to shape public attitudes to empire and criminality through the invention of characters that embodied various forms of heroic and/or demonic masculinity. The ‘Extraordinary Gentlemen’ of this era of popular fiction have retained an appeal that has proved resilient to transformations in attitudes to national identity, class and gender, as well as to the challenging of stigmas associated with ‘otherness’ and queered identities. In this module we will try to understand the basis for the appeal of ‘Extraordinary Gentlemen’ for late-Victorian and Edwardian audiences, and to examine their plasticity and openness to subsequent adaptation.

The twentieth century saw a golden age of experimental playwriting, to rival any since ancient Greece. From the pathos of Arthur Miller’s resurrection of tragedy to the hilarity of Dario Fo’s farces; from the politically motivated criticism of Bertolt Brecht’s plays to the bafflingly enigmatic absurdities of Samuel Beckett’s; from the witty repartee of Tom Stoppard’s dialogue to the grotesque brutality of Sarah Kane’s in-yer-face theatre – this is a unit in which no two weeks are even remotely the same. Besides embarking on an odyssey of innovation and controversy in modern drama, this module will also take you far beyond the English-speaking world, giving you a chance to study playwrights from a range of countries who changed the face of the western tradition of dramatic literature.

This module explores British poetry produced in the twentieth century. We may study poets from England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. There will be a consideration of political events and their impact on poetry. This may include The Troubles in Ireland and the Thatcher government in Britain. There will also be an exploration of sociopolitical and minority identities which may include gender, race, sexuality, and disability. We will go on a journey, exploring different poetic movements and the development of poetry from the early to late twentieth century.

This module provides an introduction into the way in which children acquire language from their earliest experience in utero to the role language plays in their socialisation. The acquisition of sounds, vocabulary, grammar and semantics will be covered in detail with some exploration of the procedure of acquiring social skills through language learning. Students will be introduced to a range of approaches to language acquisition though principal focus will be on the nativist tradition. The module will train students to critically analyse language data produced by children.

The module will introduce and develop your understanding of a range of current approaches in the area of psycholinguistics. The module covers a range of psycholinguistic theories and models, and you will learn how these theories and models are developed and refined through evidence and experimental methodologies.

On this module we will study the Holocaust through the words of those who survived and/or bore witness to it. Bringing together both literary and historical perspectives, we will approach this bleak yet defining episode of human history in a unique interdisciplinary fashion, focusing on non-fictional texts such as memoirs, diaries, and verbatim theatre. By studying how those who witnessed the events of the Holocaust chose to put the experience into words, we will attempt to understand these events neither in terms of traditional history textbooks nor in terms of their representation in our culture, but in terms of some of the individual stories behind it. This will allow us better to grasp issues such as trauma, memorialisation, the relationship between testimony and truth, and the difficulties involved in putting the events of the Holocaust into words.