English Literature

Core Modules

Students on the English Literature MA take the compulsory Cultural Keywords module, three additional modules from any period of literary history, and write a dissertation on a topic of their choice, to be agreed with their supervisor. Students must also complete an academic integrity course and a one-day course on research methods and materials.

• Cultural Keywords

  This module investigates some of the common keywords used regularly and perhaps often unconsciously in literary and cultural studies and around which whole discourses have emerged. This module explores how the meaning of chosen keywords evolves over time, place, language, and culture, using a cultural studies approach. It aims to build students’ methodological skills by developing a reflexive and critical understanding of what words ‘do’ and how we use them. Materials used to explore the keywords will be drawn from a transnational corpus of literary, historical, philosophical and creative works and will make connections across languages, cultures, times, and geographic regions, developing skills in comparative analysis and cross-cultural awareness. 

• Dissertation

  This will be a piece of original written work, of between 12,000 and 15,000 words. The topic of the dissertation will be agreed between you and whichever member of staff is allotted a supervisor and is normally required to be submitted by the beginning of September in the year of the completion of the programme.

• Academic Integrity

  This module will describe the key principles of academic integrity, focusing on university assignments. Plagiarism, collusion and commissioning will be described as activities that undermine academic integrity, and the possible consequences of engaging in such activities will be described. Activities, with feedback, will provide you with opportunities to reflect and develop your understanding of academic integrity principles.

   

• Research Methods and Materials

  This module is designed to introduce you to a number of key topics related to the methods of postgraduate research, and to some of the resources and materials that will be useful to your studies.

Optional Modules

There are a number of optional course modules available during your degree studies. The following is a selection of optional course modules that are likely to be available. Please note that although the College will keep changes to a minimum, new modules may be offered or existing modules may be withdrawn, for example, in response to a change in staff. Applicants will be informed if any significant changes need to be made.

• Modernist and Contemporary Literature

  This module introduces some of the key texts in modernist and contemporary writing. It seeks to provide students with the critical contexts necessary to engage with the critical debates surrounding these respective areas. It will familiarise students with key terms such as modernism, postmodernism and late modernism. During the latter part of the course students will be encouraged to compare different works, and the critical debates surrounding them, across historical time frames.

• King Lear and The Tempest: Critical Debate and Creative Response

  This module offers a sustained, intensive study of King Lear and the Tempest, considering the plays themselves, the controversies they have provoked, and the diverse ways in which they have been adapted and transformed by poets, dramatists, novelists, and by film and theatre directors since Shakespeare’s time. You will begin with a detailed discussion of the plays themselves, before turning to critical debate and later adaptations and responses.

• Victorian London

  This module will introduce you to the theories and methods of a variety of humanities disciplines through an in-depth study of the literature, history, geography, and visual culture of nineteenth-century London. You will be asked to reflect critically on your own approach to the material studied, through engagement with both primary materials and a variety of recent secondary sources.

• Arthurian Literature and Tradition in England

  This module examines the development of Arthurian literature and legend across four centuries and three languages. Beginning with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, it focuses on the different ways in which Arthur’s reign was represented and understood in the Middle Ages.

• Victorian Climates: Writing Empire and Environments

  This module explores the relationship between Victorian literature and the ‘climates’ of the British Empire: its ecologies, social systems, aesthetics, politics, and histories of slavery, resource extraction, wealth, and violence. The module encourages students to reflect on the imbrication of Empire into a seemingly ‘domestic’ canon of Victorian literature and culture to rethink what (or where) we mean by the term ‘Victorian’, and to bring our analysis of the nineteenth century into the present day discussing how we continue to grapple with the legacies of nineteenth-century colonisation.

• The Nineteenth-Century Novel - Contexts, Theories and Readers
  This module aims to equip you with a systematic understanding of the scope and range of the mid nineteenth-century novel in the context of Victorian publishing, reading and critical practices. We study a range of novels in depth, and discuss recent critical approaches to each text in order to provide you with a comprehensive understanding of the critical techniques and discourses that will be applicable to your own advanced scholarship in the assessed essay and final dissertation.

   

• Medieval Narratives in Cultural Contexts

  This interdisciplinary module explores the traditions and forms and varieties of medieval story-telling. You will read texts in Old and Middle English, French, Latin and Italian in translation. You will explore various narrative genres, such as epic, chronicle, romance, and fabliau, and two of the major tale collections of the period, the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales.

• Old English Riddles

  In this module you will develop an understanding of the Old English poetic tradition, particularly as exemplified by the Exeter Book Riddles. You will look at unusual perspectives on Anglo-Saxon culture and literature, and examine topics such as military, religious and everyday worlds, the wonders of creation, animals, sources and analogues, sexuality and runic riddles.

• Literature of Medieval London

  This module invites you to read and discuss a wide range of late medieval texts in relation to the city of London. You will interrogate the way that London, its inhabitants and its institutions are represented in medieval literature, from the court at Westminster to the pulpit at St Paul’s, the 'lewed ermytes' of Cornhill and the inns of Southwark. You will read Middle English texts in glossed editions, and Latin texts in modern English translations.

• The Pre-Raphaelite Revolution - Poetry and Painting

  This module aims to equip you with a systematic understanding of the scope and range of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement in the context of Victorian art criticism, attitudes to gender and poetics. The first five-week block concentrates on poetry and the visual arts in the first decade of the movement; the second five-week block deals with the second generation of Pre-Raphaelites and their links with Aestheticism.