English (BA)

You might watch a stunning film, hear a delightful song, enjoy a beautiful sunset, read a dreadful poem, attend an elegant dance, or see a garish building. Experiences like this can stimulate thoughts and feelings of great depth, and provide pleasure or d...

Africa has produced some of the world's outstanding literary texts, yet its literatures, cultures and people are often placed in opposition to the rest of the world. The module engages with the literary fictions by and about Africans, in order to ask: how...

The figures of King Arthur, Guinevere, his knights and court have exercised a powerful hold over the minds of readers for many centuries. But have you ever wondered about where this legend came from, how it developed, and about the enduring nature of its ...

Many writers begin with the short story. Through writing short stories they are able to experiment, learn the fundamentals of narrative composition, and have the satisfaction of completing something to a high standard in a relatively short period of time....

Children's literature is a rather slippery term encompassing a variety of genres, child/adult concerns, engagement with historical/contextual issues on, for example, gender; class; nonsense; the nature of time; slavery. Other issues addressed are subject...

Literary history is often told in epochs. In particular, it can be useful to understand the world in relation to some or other idea of “modernity”: for example, English literary studies is often organised through conceptions of the early modern, the mode...

Britain’s recent departure from the European Union has provoked a range of responses, raising urgent questions about our past and future relationship with our neighbours on the Continent. Such questions are not new. From a literary perspective, they promp...

This module presents a history of post-war multicultural Britain through the lens of British film and television, considering how our attitudes to 'race', sexuality and British identity more generally have been defined, challenged and changed by film and...

Many writers have penned essays about fiction and memoir: E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, Milan Kundera, A.L. Kennedy, A.S. Byatt, to name just a famous few. Indeed, it seems essential at some p...

In 1831 the philosopher John Stuart Mill struggled to define the ‘Spirit’ of the nineteenth century. ‘It is’, he wrote, ‘an age of transition. Mankind have outgrown old institutions and old doctrines, and have not yet acquired new ones.’ If the nineteenth...

What does it mean to make literature new? How do we describe writing now? In this module you will explore the transformations, revolutions, and innovations that have taken place in literature in English when writers have grappled with these questions acr...

Early modern England is a period associated with Elizabeth I and the Tudor court, the plays of Shakespeare, blood and violence on the Jacobean stage, the discovery of new worlds, and the persecution of witches and heretics. The diversity and vitality of t...

How do writers activate and amplify the sonic properties of language? Why do artists use vocal performance of text in video art? How can text ‘perform’ on the page (or onscreen), and what does it mean for language to be performative? What does writing for...

What can the voices and narratives of sex workers and asylum seekers depicted in world literature and visual culture tell us about the conditions and pressures of life in the contemporary world? How might considerations of narrative technique, genre, and ...

In this module, students will explore a wealth of different texts and different discourses, from the literary to the scientific, on humanity and the human body in the early modern period. Starting with a glimpse of ancient and modern visions of the body, ...

Blood, violence, terror, raids, pirates, rape and pillage are just some of the words associated with the Vikings in both the medieval and modern imagination. Their fearsome reputation is underlined by nicknames such as ‘Blood Axe' and ‘Skull-splitter', bu...

Joy, dejection, devotion, boredom—among the ways in which we respond to literary texts, feelings are perhaps the most immediate and the most permanent. And yet, feeling is often treated as reason’s less reputable cousin. For the Victorians, however, feeli...

This module will introduce you to German metropolitan culture and politics in the 20th century with particular reference to Vienna and Berlin, using a wide range of sources which will include literature, film and architecture.

Undertaking independent research into an aspect of literature or creative writing which particularly interests you is a cornerstone of your degree. A dissertation gives you the opportunity to study a subject in much greater depth than usual and, with gui...

What constitutes the experience of being American, or of America itself? America has been referred to as simultaneously a colony and a colonizer; the first democracy thus representing one of the first populist and anti-colonialist revolutions (1776), but...

As the Puritan colonialist John Winthrop said at Holyrood Church in Southampton before embarking for Boston, American was to be ‘as a city upon a hill’, a beacon of progress and enlightenment for the world. But from the beginning, America has been shadowe...

What can animals teach us about the human and non-human? What do the creative forms we use to describe them show us about human form and the other? In this module, you will read a range of poetic and critical material which explores the porous boundaries ...

Are you interested in helping young people study English? This module will introduce you to teaching creative writing in secondary schools by providing training in effective classroom management and guidance on designing lesson plans for studying fiction ...

Fantasy film and fiction spans a wide range of texts, from Gothic 'classics' and feminist fairy tales, to Utopian literature and musicals. Analysing fantasy texts alongside psychoanalytic and cultural theories will enable you to engage with questions conc...

The turbulent history of Austrian and German Jews during the twentieth century was accompanied by the production of a diverse and influential body of German-language literature by Jewish authors. Prior to World War Two, Jews played a crucial role in the c...

How has the Holocaust been represented? We will examine a range of responses to the Holocaust from the 1940s to the present day, including memoirs of camp survivors and experimental texts. Focusing on the limits of representation we will approach question...

This new module studies writing and visual representation in the early years of the republic of the United States. Focusing on the period from shortly before the American Revolution to the early years of the nineteenth century, this module will introduce ...

One of the socially and culturally most significant consequences of transnational mobility is that urban populations in particular are increasingly multilingual: in global cities such as London, New York and Berlin there are speakers of hundreds of differ...

The stereotype of Africa as a predominantly ‘natural’ space ignores the existence of large and cosmopolitan urban environments on the continent. Yet today, the sprawling conurbations of Lagos, Nairobi and Johannesburg (as well as Africa’s other towns and ...

Germany has had a long tradition of immigration and is one of the most multi-cultural countries in Europe today. We will examine the impact of diverse immigration movements on recent German history and notions of German identity. This includes examining b...

Monsters lurk at the edges of the medieval map and imagination. These creatures repulse, fascinate, disconcert, and challenge humans in many of medieval Europe’s most intriguing and compelling texts from Beowulf to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This mo...

The seventeenth century was a time of extreme change and political instability in England. In 1649, after years of civil war, Charles I, the King of England, was beheaded on Whitehall in front of a crowd of thousands. England, overnight, became a republic...

The 1790s was a decade of revolutions abroad and of chaos and state paranoia at home. Britain began its longest continuous war in 1792. In a letter years afterwards to Byron, Percy Shelley declared that the French Revolution was ‘the master theme of the e...

Has Shakespeare aged well? From the boys in wigs on the Elizabethan stage to the digital wizardry of the twenty-first century, the technology as well as the ideology that informs Shakespearean performance keeps evolving—sometimes in unexpected ways. This ...

Are we living in an age of climate change or climate crisis? In her 2019 speech to the World Economic Forum, Greta Thunberg famously declared “Our house is on fire”: a statement underscored by the Australian bushfire crisis of 2020 and the mass devastatio...

From Plato’s Republic and Thomas More’s Utopia to Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, utopias have always been haunted by the spectre of the dystopian. If utopias imagine alternative ways of organizing society, dy...

Once upon a time, no one called themselves queer; now it names everything from a kind of person to a type of weather. Queerness seems necessary, ubiquitous, paradoxical – but why? Ranging from the eighteenth century to the present day, this module will ex...

The essential elements of writing a novel include crafting beginnings and endings, constructing characters, manipulating structure and plot, and developing an intimate relationship with language. Writing exercises and discussions of work in progress will ...