BA (Hons) English and History

Level One

Crisis and Confidence: Victorian Literature, 1832 to 1910
Students reading ‘English Literature 1832 to1910’ will study major and less well-known Victorian And Edwardian texts in the context of a number of themes. This approach enables students to explore historical contexts as well as to engage with the literature of the time within a framework that sees ‘literature’ not as a reflection of society but as an activity within society, an activity that is both the result of and contributing factor to social change. This module covers both semesters.

Introduction to Poetry
New students often find poetry intimidating. In this module we look at what makes poetic language different from ‘normal’ language, at how poets use the sounds and meanings of words, and at how poetry can be used to change and challenge our understanding of the world. Our aim is that students will be able to enjoy poetry more and be able to talk about it with confidence and clarity.

Introduction to Narrative
Narrative – stories – are everywhere in our lives: in books, on TV, in history, the news, in our conversation and in our heads. This module aims to give students an understanding of how stories work. Contemporary British fiction by writers such as Kate Atkinson, Hanif Kureishi, Irvine Welsh, Ian McEwan and Ali Smith will be used to introduce a set of critical concepts for the analysis of narrative fiction.

Problems of Historical Interpretation I: The English Civil War
This unit considers a variety of interpretations of the war and evaluates these in the light of available evidence.

Reform and Revolution
The socio-economic and political transformations of the ‘long’ nineteenth century in Europe is used to introduce students to terminology and concepts underlying much of historical analysis.

Representing the Past
Explore the ways in which the past has been and is represented in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Britain, examining how it has been preserved, displayed and reconstructed, and why.

The Social History of Medicine
Students will place the development of nineteenth and twentieth century welfare and medical provision within its social and economic context.

Level Two

Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures
In this double module covering both semesters, students examine novels of the British Empire together with a wide range of postcolonial writings from regions including Africa, India, the Caribbean, Australia and Canada. There is also the opportunity to study representations of Britain through colonial and postcolonial literatures.

Making It New: An Introduction to Literary Modernism
In this module students explore one of the most creative periods in English literature, the early twentieth century when writers like James Joyce, TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf and DH Lawrence were at work. Our aim is to enable students to read and even enjoy these often notoriously difficult texts, to understand what light they throw on literature more widely and to relate them to the contexts in which they were generated.

Theory Wars
During the 20th century new theoretical approaches to literature were developed such as structuralism, dialogics, deconstruction, new historicism, feminism, queer and traumatological theory, all of which questioned traditional notions of Literature. This module will look in detail at the new theories and their effects upon the study of literature as an academic discipline.

New Directions in History
Students are encouraged to think critically and creatively about History within the academy, as a particular branch of knowledge and as a discipline with its own rules and procedures.

Radical Cultures 1750-1830
Explore the relationship between politics and culture during a period when political ideas and their expression underwent rapid change.

Semester A History Options
Choose one from either:

• The Family in Pre-industrial Society (option) - Students will look at a number of ways in which historians have studied the family in Britain between c.1500 and 1800.

OR

• Environmental History (option) - Here you consider the history of human interaction with the environment and nature as well as how economic, cultural and social change has shaped the natural world.

Semester B History Options
Choose from either:

• Themes in Regional and Local History (option) - Students are allowed to develop an understanding of some key issues and discussions on the definition and practice of local and regional history.

OR

• Representation of History: Multimedia (option) - This module provides students with the opportunity to consider recent debates concerning the nature of history and the way in which it is presented in the form of ‘public history’. It also allows students to present history in the form of a computer based multimedia application/presentation.

Level Three

The Making of English Literature: Georgian Literature, 1710-1832
Students reading 'Literature 1710-1832' study a selection of canonical and less well-known texts from the period, and the historical and cultural context of the texts' production. They will investigate the rise of the novel and the development of poetry from the time of Pope to that of the Romantics along with topics such as satire, realism, sensibility, the Gothic and the sublime. Issues explored include anxieties and conflicts around the notions of class, gender, nation, empire, nature, reason and imagination. This module covers both semesters.

Level Three English Options
Students choose either a single option from each semester or a double semester option which covers both.

• Postmodernism: Apocalypse and Genesis 1967-2000 (Semester A option) - This module will explore the nature of the contemporary through analysis of selected literary texts. The initial date, 1967, has been chosen as it marks a point of transition from a post-war world based upon a liberal consensus to a time of radical uncertainty, extreme and experimental forms of expression, the breakdown of notions of realism in all the arts, sciences and philosophy. The Postmodern marks the end of a modern programme which begins in the Renaissance and concludes around the end of World War Two. It is a period of extreme scepticism regarding inherited ways of explaining the world. It is also an age dominated by electronic media and the dissolution of previously held concepts of time and space. Given this, it is not surprising to see previously held assumptions being questioned and reformulated. Literature, alongside the radicalisation of all intellectual concepts, including reason and common-sense, has played a significant role in debating, illustrating, and disseminating these new ways of thinking both in terms of form and content.

• Nineteenth-Century Literature and Exploration (Semester A option) – This module will be primarily concerned with the formulation and transformation of identity in the far reaches of the British Empire. Students will be required to read fictional and nonfictional accounts of exploration of a variety of regions subject to imperial conquest, including India, Africa, the Arctic and potentially other regions. We will be primarily concerned with interactions between explorers and indigenous people as well as accounts of explorers who “went native.” The aim will be to investigate the different types of hybrid identities that can arise in different regions and to ask what similarities exist between them.

• Gothic in Literature and Film (Semester B option) - Monsters and attics, desolate landscapes, imprisonment and pursuit: the gothic genre emerged in the late eighteenth century to depict our darkest fears and desires. Termed ‘the literature of nightmare’ and ‘the dark side of fantasy’, gothic departs from a realistic mode of representation and employs a powerful means of symbolic expression. This course investigates ways in which the genre has explored psychological and political anxieties, including sexual and scientific transgression.

• Women’s Writing & Feminist Theory (Semester A option) - A diverse range of prose, poetry, and drama written by women from the seventeenth century to the contemporary moment is considered alongside key concepts in feminist theory. Writers range from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen to Zora Neale Hurston to Jeanette Winterson. Topics range from the feminine aesthetic and French feminism to feminist utopianism and cyberfeminism.

• Literature, Film & Gender (Semester B option) - This unit explores a wide range of gender topics (masculinities, the backlash against feminism, crossdressing, queer theory, and transgendering) through a variety of literary texts and films. Shakespeare, Ibsen, Hardy, and Woolf, are considered alongside more popular fiction by writers, such as Susanna Moore, and films, including Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Mrs Doubtfire, Boys Don’t Cry, and Peeping Tom.

• Contempory Drama (Semester B option) - This is a study of drama and performance from the 1960s to the contemporary moment, and involves a consideration of plays by writers including Peter Handke, Edward Bond, Howard Brenton, Caryl Churchill, Sarah Kane, and Steven Berkoff. Topics emphasised include political theatre, postmodernism, ‘in-yer-face theatre’, and issues of censorship. This unit is taught through workshops involving both academic discussion and practical work.

• Literature & The Environment (Semester B option) - The first principle of ecological thinking is that other things exist beside humans, and that we are neither so separate from, nor so dominant over, the nonhuman as we tend to think. In this unit we explore what difference it makes to read literature from this perspective. We study literature as part of our complex interaction with our environment, and perhaps, in some ways and on some occasions, as a uniquely valuable one.

• Life Writing (Semester A option) - The module will introduce students to a range of life writing (including biography, autobiography, letters, confessions, memoirs, and poems) from the Romantic period to the contemporary moment. Students will explore the relationship between self and society, private and public, fact and fiction, and think about autobiography as a social, political, and literary practice.

• Cross Cultural Representations (Semester B option) - This unit explores issues of identity and culture through the study of cross cultural representation. Students will examine textual and filmic representations of the encounter between different cultures and compare the production and reception of similar texts in different cultural contexts. Our basic proposition is that, in part, such cultural texts call in to being imagined communities which serve to construct cultural identity.

• Adaptation (Semester A option) - This unit explores the concept, practice and processes by which a finished text is 'rewritten'. Students will examine instances of adaptation, and although the unit will primarily focus on the adaptation of novels into drama and film, other forms such as musical theatre will be discussed. We will examine the move from one medium to another, and study the categories of adaptation and the techniques and methods available to the adaptor.

• Southern Accents (Semester A option) - This optional module explores representations of the southern states of America in prose fiction, film, drama and music. In the first section southern stereotypes and ‘resistant’ representations, produced by southerners and others, are examined in relation to social, political and historical contexts. This is followed by a section on African American representations of the south. Finally, a section on music and vernacular traditions explores the influence of the south on American popular music. Students are encouraged to adopt an interdisciplinary approach to examine questions of regional identity in a wide range of texts.

• American Modernism and Modernity (Semester B option)- American prose, poetry, visual art and popular music during the first period of ‘High Modernism’ 1909- 1939 saw a conflict between ‘realist’ and ‘experimental’ forms of representation. The module explores this artistic period with special reference to constructions of ‘American Identity’ and alternative identities as constructed by dissonant and dissenting voices. With regard to the latter, there is an emphasis upon gendered identities (the New Woman/ vamp/flapper and “it” girl), and ethnic identity (the First Harlem Renaissance). Key themes are: reactions to ‘The Great War’; European Influence (especially as evidenced in the visual arts following The Armory Exhibition of 1913); the expatriate experience; the re-emergence of ‘realism’ during the depression.

• Modern Drama (Semester A option) - This module explores a variety of drama texts and practitioners from the 1880s to the 1950s. A study of naturalism as a key movement is followed by an examination of some early twentieth-century Irish plays. We then consider problematic aspects of categorization and practice in a variety of ‘anti-naturalistic’ plays. The module will examine plays both as written texts and in terms of performance practice/potential.

• American Genre and Popular Culture (Double Semester option) – Students will be able to examine changing representations of cultural, political and social issues by examining American drama and film from the 1930s to the present day. This will form the background to a detailed case study of the popular genre of hard-boiled detective fiction, drawing together the themes outlined earlier in the module.

• English Independent Study (Double Semester option) - In this unit, students, having agreed a topic with a tutor, have the opportunity to study in depth an author or topic of their choice. Students have regular, one-to-one meetings with a tutor specialising in their area of interest who offers advice and direction, but primarily this unit encourages independent research and independent thought leading to the production of a 10,000-word dissertation.

Level Three History Options
Students choose between a wide range of specialist subjects listed below. Students must take at least one 'Sources & Methods' option and at least one 'Concepts & Debates' option.

Semester A options:

• The Middle Class in Urban Britain 1780-1900 (Concepts & Debates Option) - Students will examine how the urban form reflected and constructed nineteenth century middle class identities.

• Imperial History : Britain and Empire c.1850-1968 – (Concepts & Debates option) - This module considers some of the central issues which characterised the relationship between Britain and its Empire from the mid-nineteenth century, the high point of imperial confidence, to the introduction of the second Race Relations Act.

• History & Computing (Sources & Methods Option) - Students are provided with an introduction to the practical application of IT skills to historical research, as well as a critical appraisal of its potential and limitations.

• Coal, Culture and Community, 1842-1985 (Sources & Methods Option) - Students examine the relationship between the coal industry and the communities which developed around it. It explores the period from the exclusion of women workers underground in 1842 to the end of the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike.

• Sport in American Culture (American Studies module option) - Examine the development of modern American sport and the myriad ways sports have shaped American culture during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

• Representations of the First World War (Culture and Identity option) - This module examines some of the many representations of the First World War which developed in Europe and the British Empire in the twentieth century. A variety of different media will be considered including film, fiction, poetry and sculpture.

• Weimar Culture and Society (Culture and Identity option) – Students will investigate the relationship between ideological and political struggles and cultural production. The focus will be on ‘high culture’ texts such as novels and films, as these tend to be more easily available in translation or with subtitles in English.

• The European Union since 1945 (State and Society option) - This module will focus on the process of economic and political integration, which has taken place in Western Europe since 1945. The emphasis will be placed on the global forces which have shaped, and are still shaping, this process of integration.

Semester B options

• Russia 1861-1945 (Concepts & Debates Option) - One of the primary objectives of this module is to further develop skills of interpretive analysis acquired at levels 1 and 2. Students are asked to apply these skills to competing narratives portraying Russian history in the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries.

• The Social Construction of Sexuality 1780-1830 (Concepts & Debates Option) - This unit challenges the notion that sexuality is ‘natural’ behaviour. Through the examination of literary sources, the module will investigate how, during the period under scrutiny, sexuality has been constructed (and re-constructed).

• Film and History (Sources & Methods Option)- Here, students will consider film as a cultural artefact which can be used as primary source for the exploration of social tensions, fears, anxieties and changing values of a society. As the focus will be on the Western as a genre, the question will also be asked as to how these concerns shape representations of the past.

• ‘Victory Culture’: America during the Cold War (American elective American Studies option)- This module examines some of the key social, political, economic, and diplomatic developments in the United States between 1945-1990. The key theme of the module is the rise, fall and resurgence of American triumphalism—a narrative of triumph against all odds—between Hiroshima and the Gulf War.

• China and the West 1793-1911 (Culture and Identity option) - This module examines concepts of cultural identity and belief by exploring western contacts with China during the period 1793-1911, a well-documented era of unusually intense cultural conflict and change. The focus will be on specific documented events that exemplify key aspects of cultural conflict and change.

• British Youth Culture 1950-1980 (Culture and Identity option) - Students will consider the complexities and contradictions of youth culture in Britain between c1950 and c1980. Consideration will be given to the social, political and economic forces which brought about cultural change in the post-war period. The module will then consider the way in which youth culture and a variety of youth sub-cultures manifested themselves through behaviour, music, literature, film, fashion , recreational drugs, politics and sexuality.

• Ireland: The Politics of Home Rule (State and Society option) - Here students will explore the political relations between Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom which have been cross-cut by a number of traditions – Nationalism, Liberalism, Unionism and Republicanism for instance. This module examines some of the complexities in the struggles between these movements over the period from the 1860s to the 1920s.

2012 Entry	UK/EU	International
Full-time	£9000	£10499
Part-time	£75 per credit point	£88 per credit point
Placement (optional)	Exempt	Exempt
Assessment Only	£38 per credit point	£44 per credit point

For further information and funding your studey please see our Fees & Funding pages.

Fees and Funding