MA
English Literature

Module Overview

The Extended Project is offered as an alternative to the traditional Dissertation, either of which can be taken to complete the MA English programme. Like the Dissertation, the Extended Editorial Project enables students to conduct a sustained piece of work on a subject of their own choice from the broad field of literary studies, and draws on draws upon their skills of research, analysis, self-organisation, and advanced writing skills.

With the guidance of an academic supervisor, students are expected to conceptualise, develop and execute a scholarly edition of a primary text(s) of their choice. They will produce an introduction, and other scholarly apparatus (such as suggested reading list, a selection of existing critical material, and scholarly notes to the text itself). The primary material may be a single text e.g. a novel, or a collection of shorter texts, e.g. an anthology of poems. The texts may be printed, or in manuscript form. The emphasis is on texts with little publication history.

In producing these editorial materials, students will demonstrate high-level skills relating to literary studies: extensive research into (and synthesis/selection of) secondary literature; engagement with relevant critical/theoretical debates; detailed analysis of a body of primary material; and clear, accurate and fluent writing with a strong sense of audience and purpose relevant to a scholarly edition (i.e. oriented towards the student reader, researcher, and educated general reader). As such, the Extended Editorial Project offers the opportunity to gain skills relevant to the professional practice of editing, copywriting, publication, and the production of educational materials.

Module Overview

This module explores Gothic representations of haunted locations and environments which provoke, or symbolise, psychological and social disturbances.

Space has always had a central conceptual significance in the Gothic mode, which is dominated by haunted houses, desolate or extreme landscapes, and claustrophobic interiors, environments where safety and sanity are threatened. Gothic texts of all periods and cultural contexts use spatial tropes and metaphors to focalise themes of alienation, repression, monstrosity and mental fragmentation. They give form to the fear, violence and ideological contradictions that haunt the settings we would prefer to regard as familiar and homely.

The module considers a variety of texts (novels, short stories and films), from the Victorian era to the contemporary period. Settings typically range from urban and suburban locations to rural fringes, islands, mountains and wildernesses. Collectively, these texts dramatize anxieties centring on childhood, gender relations, urbanization, mental illness, the sublime, climate change, race, ethnicity and nationhood.

Module Overview

This module involves a four-week placement in a museum, historic house, heritage site, or educational institution. It is designed to develop students' professional skills and practical experience, enhancing their employability.

By the end of the module, students will have gained a strong understanding of the professional practices relevant to their placement setting. They will have hands-on experience in identifying and addressing key challenges and research opportunities within that environment. Additionally, they will develop the communication skills needed to present their findings effectively to both academic and public audiences, helping to broaden engagement.

Module Overview

Since the Enlightenment, much human thought has assumed control of the non-human and has increasingly had only human interests in mind. The first principle of ecological and post-humanist thinking, however, is that other things exist beside humans, and that we are neither so separate from, nor so dominant over, the non-human as Christian and post-Christian Humanism has taught us to think. This module introduces students to key theoretical texts on ecology and post-humanism, and challenges them to reassess the anthropocentric ways of thinking that have brought us to our current ecological crisis and consequent focus on sustainability. Students will examine literature as an exploration and expression of our complex interaction with our environment, from the non-human to the inorganic. Their subject matter will be not just ‘nature writing’, but also texts in various forms and media, from the ancient to the contemporary, that look very different when viewed without Humanist presuppositions. Overall, this module familiarises students with developments in literary criticism in the late twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, asking them to reevaluate their own relationships with the surrounding world.

Module Overview

Robin Hood is arguably one of the most notorious figures in history and literature; he has captured the imagination of countless writers, in the medieval period and beyond. Yet he is not the only outlaw of the medieval period. Other outlaws—some historical, some fictional, and some considerably more famous than others—preceded and even shaped what became the Robin Hood legends. This module introduces students to outlaws and outlawry as historical and literary constructs. Students will examine what the figure of the outlaw meant to the people of Britain in the Middle Ages, especially in the post-Conquest period, as well as how he was, and still is, connected to history and myth in literature. They will examine the glorification of crime associated with outlaw narratives and the resistance to primarily clerical and state authority they present; the underlying issues of friendship and loyalty; and other themes prevalent in outlaw legends, such as nature, human and animal relations, gender, religion, tricksters and trickery, class, warfare and weaponry. Finally, students will asses how outlawry and outlaw figures (especially Robin Hood) have been transmitted, as a type of ‘medievalism,’ to later periods and what the outlaw figure means in contemporary society. Overall, students will analyse and evaluate representations of outlaws in a range of media, from chronicles, ballads, and dramatic texts to children’s literature, film, and television.

Module Overview

In the nineteenth century, the novel reached maturity as a form and, arguably, its zenith. This module addresses some of the riches of fiction of this era in which we encounter the roots of our own modernity. Students explore how the novel articulated pressing social and philosophical concerns in the wake of radical cultural change and a newly empowered bourgeoisie.

Whether they present panoramas of community or focus on the trials and triumphs of a single protagonist, nineteenth-century novels explore the pains and pleasures of the individual attempting to find belonging in an often alienating environment.

While realism is the dominant mode, other generic influences include Gothic, naturalism, 'sensation' and satire. Longer works are studies alongside shorter novels and novellas. The module takes an international approach, including examples from North America as well as British classics, and potentially works (in translation) from non-anglophone settings including Russia and Europe.

Module Overview

Dreaming of a better life and a perfect world has been part of the human condition for all of human history, but utopian fiction as a separate and identifiable genre began in 1516 with the publication of More’s Utopia, the foundational utopian text. In this module we identify key features and characteristics of the literary utopia and trace the development of the genre from More through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth and twenty-first. Although dystopia is the dominant form up to the 1950s, a revival of (feminist) interest in utopianism, both as an aesthetic mode, and as political practice, arises in the 1960s and the utopian novel re-emerges in the form of the ‘critical utopia’. Twenty-first-century utopias will then form a focus for thinking about the significance of utopia and utopian writing today. We will explore the relationship between literary form and theories of utopianism, consider whether utopian/dystopian writing has become the principal vehicle for social and political critique in contemporary fiction, and discuss its relationship to the crisis of the Enlightenment project of modernity as well as the treatment of language and nature.