English Literature, BA (Hons)

Course summary

Not only does English Studies provide a thorough grounding in the ‘great tradition’ of English literature – from Chaucer and Shakespeare through to plays, poems and novels written in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – and in literary theory, but it also offers a wide range of imaginative and research-led modules.The comprehensive syllabus combines traditional areas of literary study with new and developing areas of the discipline. It aims to develop your conceptual abilities and analytical skills by exposing you to a variety of literary-critical approaches. This will promote and develop the clarity and persuasiveness of your argument and expression, enabling you to develop, to a high degree of competence, a range of skills which are both subject-specific and transferable.You can also apply to add a placement year or a year abroad to your degree; this would increase the course from three years to four.The first year will focus on advancing skills of critical analysis and argument you have already acquired at in your education to date. This includes close reading and analysis of texts, such as the awareness of formal and aesthetic dimensions of literature and of the affective power of language, alongside the introduction of more advanced concepts and theories relating to literature.In the second year, you will build on the knowledge and skills developed in your first year by broadening the range of literary texts and periods with which you will engage. You will study a substantial number of authors, topics and texts and gain awareness of the range and variety of approaches to literary study.The final year includes a dissertation on a subject of your choice related to English literature. The dissertation involves guided research on a self-formulated question, the gathering and processing of relevant information and materials, and results in a work of sustained argumentative and analytic power.

Year 1 Core modules: Introduction to Drama introduces the work of, and critical debate about, a wide historical range of drama and dramatists writing in English, typically covering work from all or most of the following areas: the medieval, early modern, Restoration and Augustan, Romantic, Victorian, and twentieth and twenty-first century: post-medieval dramatists to be covered might include, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Behn, Gay, Shelley, Wilde, Shaw, Beckett, Kushner and Butterworth. Introduction to the Novel introduces ways of reading English novels and various contexts for studying them. You will be familiarised with strategies for engaging with fictional texts formally as well as historically, by situating the novels studied in their distinctive cultural environments while also being taught the ways in which novelistic form and technique have changed over time. Introduction to Poetry introduces a wide range of poems by poets writing in English from the early modern to the contemporary periods including some American poetry. You will develop your understanding of traditional major verse forms, modes of organisation and genres (e.g. blank verse, the couplet, the stanza, lyric, elegy, sonnet, epic, pastoral, ode, open form). In recent years, optional modules have included: Romance and the Literature of Chivalry Epic and Literature of Legend Ancient Worlds and English Literature