Undergraduate Degrees

BA English Literature (Part time)

Attendance:: Part Time
Award:: Degree of Bachelor of Arts
School of Study:: Literature, Drama and Creative Writing
Brochure:: Literature, Drama and Creative Writing Undergraduate Brochure (PDF)
Typical A-Level Offer:: AAA-AAB including English Literature

Overview
Why Choose Us
Course Profile
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BA English Literature The School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing is famous for the quality and adventurousness of its teaching. It embraces several interlinked disciplines; for example, you can choose to study drama or creative writing alongside English and related literatures. The English Literature degree programme explores a wide range of writing from the medieval period to the present day – from the Arthurian Tradition via Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, the Brontës, Joyce, to novelists who are still writing now – and it combines this with a range of innovatory approaches and specialist topics.

The degree course is studied in an interdisciplinary atmosphere. Alongside specialists in English Literature, you will also work with teachers and students who are involved with Creative Writing, Drama, Philosophy, Modern Languages, American Studies, Film Studies, History and History of Art. The options system also allows you to explore one or other of these subjects yourself: in each of the three years, besides your options within the English syllabus, you can choose one module from another discipline, according to your own interests and aptitude.

The whole programme is based on the awareness that literature is not an abstract or unworldly pursuit, but something which happens in the real world. That is why we teach historically, so that literature is seen in larger contexts; and it is why we host regular extra-curricular visits by contemporary writers who read and discuss their work. We also emphasise making literature as well as studying it: there is the opportunity to extend your awareness of literature through your own writing. To facilitate all this we employ a variety of teaching strategies (small group seminars, larger-scale lectures, writing workshops, individual projects and dissertations). Assessment is carried out in each teaching module (either by coursework, assessed practical project or by occasional short exams) so that there are no ‘finals’.

Course Structure:

Year 1

The first year provides a foundation for the study of literature at degree level, introducing important theoretical concepts, offering strategies for both reading and writing texts, and opening up problematic questions of literature’s historical and contemporary relation to the society which produces and receives it. All students take the module Literature in History, which runs throughout the year and introduces the sustained study of texts in their historical and cultural milieu, and teaches you how to interpret plays, poems and narratives in their historical contexts. You will also take the tutorial module Reading Texts, a small-group tutorial module which helps you to become a more resourceful and independent reader and again, is a year-long module. The third module to be taken in the first semester will be chosen from a range of complementary subjects: American Studies, Drama, Cultural Studies, Philosophy, Film Studies, and History. In the second semester, alongside Literature in History, and Reading Texts, most students will choose to study the module Writing Texts, which allows you to focus upon skills of critical and creative writing in addition to exploring the nature of the writing process itself. During the first year you have the opportunity to begin to pursue distinct ‘pathways’ in your studies relating to areas of individual interest.

Year 2

In the second and third years, you choose from an extensive range of options to assemble a course that reflects your interests. There are no compulsory modules, but we do constrain your choices so that you encounter a good historical range of different kinds of writing. In the second year, you choose five modules from the wide range on offer and available modules change regularly in order to stay fresh and relevant. The main "menu" is made up of lecture-and-seminar modules devoted to quite large topics in literature - for example Shakespeare, 19th Century Writing, or Modernism. Alongside these there are smaller modules that encourage you to venture outside the literary mainstream: modules for instance about critical theory, dramatic literature, postcolonialism, or journalism. It is at this point too, that many Literature students choose to take at least one module in Creative Writing: there are regular workshops in prose fiction, poetry, scriptwriting and literary translation. Even if you would not see yourself as "a writer", you can enrich your study of literature by trying to produce some. Your final module in the second year is "free choice" which opens up other directions of study to you.

Year 3

Third-year modules are more intensive: you take only four in the course of the year and this will be more specialised seminar-based work. These modules often reflect the research interests of the staff who teach them, and they demand more initiative from you. There are no lectures: each group works as a seminar and everyone is expected to contribute on the basis of their own reading. The range of topics is wide - about thirty such seminars run each year - and is constantly changing a little. Examples of current seminar topics include Regency Women Writers, Trauma, Psyche and Modern Literature, Henry James: Questions of Art, Life and Theory, Medieval Arthurian Traditions, Revenge Tragedy: Ancient and Modern, Biography, The Gothic. At this level there is an emphasis on independent projects and individually tailored dissertations, and you could choose to undertake an 8,000-word dissertation. This means that instead of joining a taught module, you undertake an individual study with a member of staff as your supervisor. You can also take courses in other disciplines such as film, dramatic literature, creative writing, philosophy, or history.

This programme can also be taken as a part-time course of study (lasting 5-7 years).

Teaching and Assessment:

Key skills, issues and ideas are introduced in lectures given by all members of faculty, including literary critics, literary historians and writers. More specialist study is undertaken in small group seminars. These are chosen from a range offered within the School and across the University. You will also spend time studying and researching in the library or carrying out practical work or projects. In most subject areas, you are assessed at the end of each year on the basis of coursework and, in some cases, project and examination results. In your final year, you will write a dissertation on a topic of your choice and with the advice of tutors. There is no final examination. Your final degree result is determined by the marks you receive in years two and three.

Course Organiser:Dr. Karen Schaller

Why Choose Us The School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing brings together writers, scholars, teachers and students in an exploration of the powers and possibilities of literature. Our aim is to make creative writing and critical reading confront one another in ways that sharpen and enliven both. We teach and research across the range of English Literature from the fourteenth century to the twenty-first. This coverage is supplemented by our interests in European Literature, in postcolonial writing in English across the world, and in literary and cultural theory.

Translation

UEA is home to the British Centre for Literary Translation, which is both a forum for professional translators and a focus for translation work with undergraduate and postgraduate students of literature. The School of Literature & Creative Writing runs the MA in Literary Translation course.

Creative Writing

For over thirty years UEA has been an important centre for established and upcoming writers, whether they come here as teachers, as students, as writers in residence, or to take part in the long-running literary festival organised by the Arthur Miller Centre and the Centre for Creative and Performing Arts.

Drama

Our drama programmes combine critical study with creative practice. The theoretical aspect draws on the expertise of LIT as a whole; the practical work is based in the purpose-built Drama Studio.

Literature

Literature at UEA is not a complete, finished object of study, but a living practice. Because we also do creative writing, translation and drama, we are aware that imaginative writing is not fixed; it is constantly being transformed, adapted, rewritten and reread. Students are invited to study these processes, and also to be part of them.

Among a diverse group of about twenty literature lecturers, there are experts on the various roles that the practice of literature can play, and has played, in society — how it can be something like praying, or like journalism, or like conversation, how it can be a form of political action, or a vehicle for ideas, or a working out of unmanageable experience, or a way of negotiating (or inflaming) differences of class and race and gender. We teach literature not in isolation, but in relation to this untidy bundle of social and psychological purposes.

It follows that we have no great respect for the boundaries that divide one academic discipline from another. We take a lively interest in the work of our colleagues in history, philosophy, film, the visual arts and music, and we encourage our students to do the same. That is why we offer a range of degree programmes which combine literature with other, related subjects. Our largest programme is the BA in English Literature: this is a single subject degree, but we work to keep it open and responsive to its multi-disciplinary surroundings.

Year 1
Year 2
Year 3
Year 4
Year 5
Year 6
Year 7

Students must enrol for 360 credits in a minimum of five and a maximum of seven years. Students must select 20 to 80 credits per year provided that the overall course requirement is met by the end of their final semester. Up to 40 credits may be taken outside the School of Literature and Creative Writing. Students must accumulate at least 60 credits from modules on writing before 1789 (i.e. modules with a 'Y' prefix - e.g. LITE2Y04 Shakespeare).

Compulsory Study (40 credits)

Students must study the following modules for 40 credits:

Name	Code	Credits
LITERATURE IN HISTORY 1	LDCE1F01	20
This is the main introductory module to the study of literature. It aims to help new students to read historically, by offering a range of models of the relationship between literature and history, as well as focussing on some key transitional moments in the history of literature. The module is taught by lectures, with an accompanying seminar.
READING TEXTS: TUTORIAL CLASS	LDCE1F03	20
This module provides the opportunity to work closely on selected texts within the contexts of a small group. It aims to develop and explore modes of textual analysis. By the end of the module the students will have highly developed reading skills, a sense of the implications of interpreting texts and the individual research skills essential for a university degree. Not available to Visiting Students.

Option A Study (20 credits)

Students will select 20 credits from the following modules:

Name	Code	Credits
LITERATURE IN HISTORY II	LDCE1F10	20
This module follows on from Literature in History I, taking in more recent history, and exploring how writers of the present make use of the past. The module is taught by lectures, with an accompanying seminar. Attendance at both lectures and seminars is compulsory.
READING TEXTS II	LDCE1F08	20
This module seeks to build on and develop the work of the Autumn semester, in particular that of Reading Texts. The focus will fall again on the reading of a small number of literary texts - including, where appropriate, a long text that will be read over successive weeks - and on small-group discussion. The module aims to combine skills of critical reflection, interpretation and analysis with close attention to some of the terms and ideas central to the study of literature and to the practice of interpretation. Not available to Visiting Students.
WRITING TEXTS	LDCE1F14	20
This module explores the culture and anthropology of writing, and addresses issues such as the differences between writing and speaking , between literary and non-literary texts, and the writer's relationship with readers. In weekly lectures and seminar groups, we will look at the writing process itself - drafting, revising, editing, translating - and will explore how and why texts come into being, and how they work to position the reader or to generate readerly interaction.

Free Choice Study (20 credits)

Students will select modules worth 20 credits from the course catalogue with the approval of their School

Option A Study (20 credits)

Students will select 20 credits from the following modules:

Name	Code	Credits
ANALYSING FILM AND TELEVISION	FTMF1F09	20
The module is designed to provide students with core study skills and techniques and methods of textual analysis. The module will cover the analysis of a range of formal features and frameworks such as narrative, mise-en-scene, camera work, editing and sound used in the analysis of film and television. The study skills covered will include use of the library and internet for research, as well as note taking, essay planning and the conventions of academic writing. In the process the module will cover issues such as referencing and plagiarism. It will be taught by lecture, seminar and screening.
BEGINNERS' FRENCH I	LCSU1F11	20
A beginners' course in French assuming no, or very little, prior knowledge of the language. Can be taken in any year, but not by final-year LLT students. (NB: Alternative slots available depending on student numbers.) If you have GCSE or equivalent, you are not eligible. This is an intensive course designed to bring students to GCSE Level in two semesters. Much work is expected to be done at home, listening to tapes and grammar exercises, for consolidation.
BEGINNERS' GERMAN I	LCSU1G11	20
A beginners' course in German assuming no prior knowledge of the language. Can be taken in any year, but not by final-year LLT students.
BEGINNERS' SPANISH I	LCSU1H11	20
A beginners' course in Spanish assuming little or no prior knowledge of the language. Can be taken in any year, but not by final-year LLT students. (Orals are arranged separately.)
BEGINNERS' SPANISH I (SPRING START)	LCSU1H14	20
A repeat of module LCSU1H11 for those who wish to start their course in the Spring. This module is not available to LCS students.
CLASSIC READINGS IN PHILOSOPHY	PHI-1A01	20
This introductory unit for first year students is designed to invite you into philosophical enquiry by way of a detailed study of two or three of the most famous books by the founding fathers of Western Philosophy. The set texts will include a classic work by Plato, from the birth of philosophy in Classical Greece, and a classic work by Descartes, the father of modern philosophy Both texts are studied in modern English. No prior knowledge of philosophy is required, and this unit is suitable for students from other disciplines who are taking no other philosophy units. The unit is taught annually.
IMAGINING AMERICA: LITERATURE I	AMSA1F07	20
Imagining America is a level one module designed to introduce the major writers and themes of literature in the United States. For this module there will be a weekly lecture and a one-hour seminar. Lecture Slot: Monday, 1200-1300. Further information on the timing of the seminar can be found in the published timetable.
INTERMEDIATE FRENCH I	LCSU2F95	20
This is an intermediate course in French and is intended for students who have enough pre-A-Level experience of French and wish to develop their knowledge to a standard comparable to A-Level. The module is made up of three elements, each taught for one hour per week: Reading Comprehension, Listening Comprehension, and Grammar. While the emphasis is on comprehension, the speaking and writing of French are also included. The module is not available to students with AS or A-Level French. This module can be taken in any year. (Alternative slots may be available depending on student numbers.)
INTERMEDIATE GERMAN I	LCSU2G97	20
An intermediate course in German for students with German GCSE, O-Level or LLTU1G11/12. Includes revision of basic grammar and introduction of new grammar. Not available to students with AS- or A-Level German. Can be taken in any year.
INTERMEDIATE SPANISH I	LCSU2H11	20
An intermediate course in Spanish for those with no more than GCSE, O-Level or Beginners' Spanish. Begins with an intensive revision of Indicative Mood. Can be taken in any year. 3 hours per week. Orals are arranged separately. Alternative slots available depending on student numbers.
INTRODUCTION TO BRITISH SIGN LANGUAGE I	LCSU1OB1	20
A beginners' course in British Sign Language assuming no prior knowledge of the language. It is designed to provide students with basic training in communication with deaf people and an awareness of life in the deaf world. Teaching and learning strategies include the use of conversation, role play, dialogue and video work. Assessment is based on a number of sign language tasks and tests plus one short essay. Can be taken in any year. Alternative groups may be available depending on student numbers. Students will have to attend one of the groups which will be taught on Mondays, 10.00 am - 12.30 pm (B2B3E4), 1.30 pm - 4.00 pm (C5C6C7) or 5.00 pm - 7.30 pm ( A910EY), subject to student enrolment/timetables.
INTRODUCTION TO BRITISH SIGN LANGUAGE I (SPRING START)	LCSU1OB4	20
A beginners' course in British Sign Language assuming no prior knowledge of the language. It is designed to provide students with basic training in communication with deaf people and an awareness of life in the deaf world. Teaching and learning strategies include the use of conversation, role play and dialogue. Assessment is based on a number of sign language tasks and tests plus one short essay. Can be taken in any year. Alternative groups may be available depending on student numbers. These groups would be taught on Mondays from 10.00 - 12.30 pm (B2B3E4) or 5.00 - 7.30 pm ( A9A10EY) subject to student enrolments.
INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES	LDCE1F05	20
This module will introduce students to the development of cultural studies in this country and the work undertaken in the field. While it is a core module for those in Literature and History, it is suited to all those interested in interdisciplinary study and the history of academic disciplines, and it will introduce students to a range of approaches in study. It is taught through seminars.
INTRODUCTION TO MEDIEVAL HISTORY	HIS-1A13	20
This module is designed to provide an introduction to medieval history both for first year historians and students from other schools. It surveys the history of medieval Europe, including England, from c.1000 to 1300, and also examines some literature, art, and architecture from the period. The module also aims to introduce students to a range of primary sources, including some of the physical remains to be found in East Anglia.
INTRODUCTION TO MODERN HISTORY	HIS-1A19	20
This module provides a wide-ranging introduction to the political, social and economic transformation of Britain and Europe from the early nineteenth century to the First World War. Among the core themes are industrialisation, revolution, nationalism and imperialism. The module is taught thematically by a comprehensive series of lectures, accompanied by weekly seminars.
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD DRAMATIC LITERATURES 1	LDCD1X39	20
This module examines a wide range of influential plays in several genres, drawn from the work of major European dramatists, and with due attention given to issues of both text and performance. The plays are drawn from the work of Aeschylus, Euripides, Shakespeare, Webster, Wycherley, Moliere and Racine, as well as medieval and non-European theatre. A weekly lecture is accompanied by demonstrations/discussions of central scenes and/or video extracts.
POST A-LEVEL FRENCH LANGUAGE 1/I	LCSU1F21	20
A Post A-Level module designed to develop overall competence, with emphasis on grammatical accuracy and on the promotion of autonomous learning and transferable skills. Consisting of a lecture, one hour oral, and two hours of 'travaux diriges' in small groups for which extra slots are available. Not available to French native speakers or those with equivalent competence.
POST A-LEVEL GERMAN LANGUAGE 1/I	LCSU1G21	20
A basic module in post A-Level German (also open for students with AS-Level grade A) consisting of revision and extension of selected areas of advanced grammar and reading and discussion of newspaper articles. Its aim is to develop competence in all areas of spoken and written German. This module is not available to native speakers or those with equivalent competence.
POST A-LEVEL SPANISH 1/I	LCSU1H21	20
An advanced course in Spanish for students with Spanish A-Level, Intermediate Spanish (LCSU2H11 & 12), or any other equivalent qualification. This module can be taken in any year. (Alternative slots may be available depending on student numbers.) Orals are arranged separately. This module is not available to native speakers or those with equivalent competence.
READING TRANSLATIONS: TUTORIAL CLASS	LDCE1F13	20
This module provides the opportunity to work closely on translated texts, looking at how we read and analyse them and how we consider their relationship to their originals. We aim to develop the skills necessary for working with foreign texts in English translation. A thorough reading knowledge of another language besides English is essential. Compulsory for students of Comparative Literature.

Option B Study (20 credits)

Students will select 20 credits from the following modules:

Name	Code	Credits
LITERATURE IN HISTORY II	LDCE1F10	20
This module follows on from Literature in History I, taking in more recent history, and exploring how writers of the present make use of the past. The module is taught by lectures, with an accompanying seminar. Attendance at both lectures and seminars is compulsory.
READING TEXTS II	LDCE1F08	20
This module seeks to build on and develop the work of the Autumn semester, in particular that of Reading Texts. The focus will fall again on the reading of a small number of literary texts - including, where appropriate, a long text that will be read over successive weeks - and on small-group discussion. The module aims to combine skills of critical reflection, interpretation and analysis with close attention to some of the terms and ideas central to the study of literature and to the practice of interpretation. Not available to Visiting Students.
WRITING TEXTS	LDCE1F14	20
This module explores the culture and anthropology of writing, and addresses issues such as the differences between writing and speaking , between literary and non-literary texts, and the writer's relationship with readers. In weekly lectures and seminar groups, we will look at the writing process itself - drafting, revising, editing, translating - and will explore how and why texts come into being, and how they work to position the reader or to generate readerly interaction.

Free Choice Study (40 credits)

Students will select modules worth 40 credits from the course catalogue with the approval of their School

Option A Study (40 credits)

Students will select 40 credits from the following modules:

Name	Code	Credits
17TH-CENTURY WRITING: RENAISSANCE, REVOLUTION, RESTORATION	LDCE2Y13	20
This course explores 17th Century writing in diverse forms, familiar and unfamiliar: the masque, poetry, prose fiction, but also political prose and the antecedents of what we now call 'journalism'. We will consider the place of these works in society and in their intellectual and cultural contexts.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PRACTICE	LDCE2X15	20
This module will explore changing responses to the central questions of poetics. What kinds of truth, if any, do poetry and fictional writing tell? What is the nature of the imagination or the role of invention? How does fictional writing relate to philosophy, religion, rhetoric or science? This module will approach these questions through a combination of historical, theoretical and practical approaches.
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WRITING	LDCE2Y11	20
This lecture-seminar module provides an intensive introduction to British writing from the Glorious Revolution (1688) to 1780 considering such writers as Defoe, Swift, Pope, Richardson, Fielding and Sterne, and exploring the "rise of the novel", the development of literary periodicals and newspapers, and the relationship of neo-classical poetry to the development of the English landscape garden. The course considers literary writing in relation to the development of mercantilism and such new capitalist institutions as the stock market, the idea of the individual as entering a social contract with others to form society, and the changing status of women and the family.
EUROPEAN LITERATURE: ENCOUNTERS WITH 'OTHERNESS'	LDCE2X24	20
This module explores critical and aesthetic issues raised by general and comparative literature, issues of 'influence', reception, intertextuality, translation, formal and generic comparabilities, national identity and cultural borrowing. Theoretical questions will be examined through specific examples and case studies, ranging across different periods and geographies; however the focus is likely to be on the modern period. Works studied may include texts by eg Kafka, Sebald, Calvino, Celan.
GOODBYE TO BERLIN? LITERATURE & VISUAL CULTURE IN WEIMAR GERMANY	LDCE2Z40	20
This module aims to explore some of the exciting developments in verbal and visual culture of the Weimar Republic between the First and Second World Wars, e.g. experimental theatre, Weimar cinema, cabaret, visual arts, the Bauhaus, etc. Texts considered will include writings by Brecht et al. Thomas and Heinrich Mann, and less familiar authors as well as key films by e.g. Pabst (Threepenny Opera), Lang (Metropolis), von Sternberg (Blue Angel) and others. A particular focus is likely to be representations of gender on page, stage and screen. Active seminar participation is expected. NB: A knowledge of German, while useful, is not a prerequisite; translations are available.
MEDIEVAL WRITING	LDCE2Y15	20
This module is designed to provide an introduction to the study of medieval English language and literature. In a series of lectures and seminars students will work through a small but representative selection of medieval texts, including lyrics, romance, drama and prose, in order to develop a working knowledge of the language - Middle English - and an appreciation of different forms and genres found in medieval writing. Medieval texts and contexts will be used as a means of familiarising students with medieval language, and form the basis for further units in medieval writing that may be taken within the School.
MODERNISM	LDCE2Z15	20
The purpose of this module is to study the literature of the early decades of the twentieth century - very roughly 1900-1930 - in particular the work of those authors who attempted to break with received norms of literary style and content. The module is organised as a series of thematic explorations - poetic experiment, memory and desire, myth and innovation, and so on - and thus does not follow a chronological structure. The sequence of guiding lectures focuses its deliberations on a set of specific texts, with their contexts, and these are taken up for discussion in the accompanying seminars. 'Modernism' is this constructed gradually over the semester as a mosaic of closely related issues, each one reflecting on the others. As well as providing an overview of defining textual features, in prose and poetry, the module is concerned also with the interrelation of text and context, offering a range of ways of conceiving of modernist literature as both of, and self-consciously ahead of, its historical moment.
NINETEENTH-CENTURY WRITING	LDCE2Z30	20
This module focuses on the novel and society in the nineteenth century, reading Scott, Austen, the Bront��s, Dickens, Gaskell, Eliot, James and Conrad and considering how the writing responds to the material conditions of production - authorial biography, publishing economics, literary genres, contemporary politics, the subjection of women, the rise of the middle class and economic changes such as the growth of the city, the railway booms, Chartism and industrial relations and the development of the British empire.
ROMANTICISM 1780-1840	LDCE2X26	20
Romantic Literature is often thought of as poetry, primarily work by Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Bryon. But the signs and forms of Romantic sensibility can also be found in a much broader constituency of writing practice: the novel, letter writing, the essay, political and aesthetic theory, and writing of all kinds taken as social commentary. This module is taught through a combination of lectures and seminars.
SHAKESPEARE	LDCE2Y04	20
The aim of this lecture-seminar module is to help you become a better reader of Shakespearean drama. He was writing between about 1590 and about 1610; obviously his plays speak to us over a great cultural distance, and we can find fresh ways of reading them by exploring the theatrical, generic and historical frameworks in which they were written and staged. The lectures, then, will introduce a range of contexts, and the seminars will seek to turn them to account in the reading of the dramatic texts themselves.

Free Choice Study (20 credits)

Students will select modules worth 20 credits from the course catalogue with the approval of their School

In their final stage students must accumulate 120 credits of third-level English Literature modules (LITE3X*, LITE3Y*, LITE3Z*).

Free Choice Study (60 credits)

Students will select modules worth 60 credits from the course catalogue with the approval of their School

In their final stages students must accumulate 120 credits of third-level English Literature modules (LITE3X*, LITE3Y*, LITE3Z*).

Option A Study (60 credits)

Students will select 60 credits from the following modules:

Name	Code	Credits
BIOGRAPHY	LDCE3X46	30
How do writers attempt to capture 'life' in all its various forms? What, if any, are the different requirements in writing the life of a famous (or not so famous) person and that of a city or landscape? What about the 'life' of travel or food and how do you approach writing about the natural world? These are just some of the questions that this module sets out to address. We will be reading a wide variety of texts, from the 'traditional' biography to some of the more experimental examples of creative non-fiction. From Samuel Johnson to essays in The New Yorker, all human (and non-human) life will be there! Students may choose between writing their own piece of Biography or creative Non-Fiction as their final project or submitting a critical essay.
CHAUCER	LDCE3Y05	30
This module explores Chaucer's major writings in their historical, cultural and literary contexts. The module will introduce Chaucer's writing in a range of genres and will examine his works' representation and exploration of society, identity, chivalry, politics, religion and gender, and will also consider the medieval reception of Chaucer's writing. Previous experience of medieval literature will be useful but is not required.
CHILDREN'S LITERATURE	LDCE3X67	30
This module offers students the chance to learn about children's literature and its development and also to try to write a piece of children's literature themselves. It starts with the history of children's literature, looking at its use as a pedagogical tool, moving through fairy tales, Lewis Carroll's Alice books and their influence on the field, and examining other authors such as Charles Kingsley, Roald Dahl, Judy Blume and Lemony Snicket. By studying the development of children's literature, this module also analyses the development of the concept of childhood in Western society.
CONTEMPORARY DRAMA AND FILM	LDCD3X34	30
The module will examine emergent voices and trends in recent theatre, film and television (mainly British but with some American or European contributions). Issues covered include the (questioned) demise of explicitly political drama and the appearance of previously silenced voices (e.g. gay and lesbian themes, feminist playwrights and writing ethnicity, physical theatre practitioners).
CREATIVE WRITING	LDCC3W18	30
This is an advanced module for final year Creative Writing minors and students who have previously achieved a grade of at least 68% in a level 2 Creative Writing module. Under the guidance of an experienced, practising writer, the seminar will take the form of workshops designed to promote group discussion both of students' own work and the work of established authors. Consideration will be given to the technical and expressive aspects of drafting and re-drafting in any genre with a view to shaping and completing a substantial piece of work. Reserved for students on courses: Q3W8U1, QT37U1, QV31U1, VQ53U1, Q300U1, Q300U2, Q200U1, Q201U1.
DRAMA AND LITERATURE: THE QUESTION OF GENRE	LDCE3X06	30
This seminar will explore the boundaries between drama and other genres (kinds, art-forms, media) in an attempt to investigate a number of interrelated theoretical questions. We shall explore these issues via various types of activity - practical criticism, critiques of literary theory, performance analysis, dramatising prose narrative. The set texts are works of literature which do not quite fit generically - particularly plays that seem to be in some sense 'epic', or novels in some sense 'theatrical', ranging from Shakespeare in the 17th century through to Gay and Fielding in the 18th and Dostoyevsky and Chekhov in the 19th.
EARLY ENGLISH DRAMA	LDCE3Y81	30
This module focuses on the medieval and early sixteenth century period, exploring conceptions and deployments of drama. Comparative work of different forms of drama, the drama and other artistic media, and the drama and social attitudes will be encouraged. You will explore whether drama successfully produces civic unity; how audiences are addressed and constructed; the theatricality of how the Biblical past is imagined, the significance of staging, place, and gesture; the social and political functions of drama, the representation of women; and protests against the drama from various quarters. Our period ends just as the suburban professional theatre was establishing itself in London in a form that was fundamentally influenced by these much earlier dramatic activities. We shall explore how spectacle and ceremony enabled pre-Reformation communities to celebrate their existence and assert an often contested or otherwise problematic sense of their cultural identity.
FIN DE SIECLE: FANTASIES OF DECADENCE AND DEGENERATION	LDCE3X50	30
Max Nordau's 1892 Degeneration, attacking fin de siecle decadence, draws together fears of cultural decline and corrupting artistic practice through pseudo-Darwinian thinking about devolution. Yet Nordau's urgent and apocalyptic claims about 'diseased' art draw an ambivalent response from contemporary writers, such as those associated with the aestheticism and decadence of The Yellow Book. It is within the fantastic, however, that Nordau is most directly confronted and social norms most explicitly deformed by art. Wilde's swift move from pedestal to pederast may remove a key figure, but texts such as The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; The Novel of the White Powder; Dracula; Wells' science fiction dystopias and, more recently, Moore and Campbell's From Hell, rehearse, react to, or reflect upon such concerns. These writings share a central tension: are the effects of decadence and degeneration offering pessimistic prophesy or optimistic alternatives? This module would complement nineteenth-century options and offer a perspective on the Modernist module. For students also taking the Gothic it would be related, although usefully focusing on the closing years of the nineteenth century with a different emphasis.
HENRY JAMES: QUESTIONS OF ART, LIFE AND THEORY	LDCE3Z42	30
In this module students engage with the range of Henry James's writing and also the reproduction of his life and work in contemporary culture. This module aims not simply to add to understanding of James but also to explore the issues that his work raises in relation to the art and history of fiction, philosophy and cultural reproduction. It is suitable not only for literature students who want to study this writer who spans realism and modernism, and short stories, literary criticism and fiction, but also for creative writing students and literature and philosophy students. It can be taken by students who have studied modules in nineteenth-century writing or modernism. Reserved for students on course(s): Q300U1, Q300U2, Q200U1, Q201U1, Q3W8U1, QT37U1, QV31U1, W400U1, WQ43U1, VQ53U1, TQ73U1.
JOHN MILTON'S PARADISE LOST	LDCE3Y70	30
Paradise Lost is perhaps the finest poem in the language. Its ambition is breathtaking: it begins before time, ends with time, spans the whole of the created universe, and yet focuses on a single, human relationship, on betrayal, recrimination and reconciliation. It is an attempt to explain the co-existence of evil and an omnipotent good God, a response to defeated political aspirations, and an attempt to create a republican poetics. In the module we will read the poem intensively, and seek to understand it in its historical context. Was there a republican aesthetic? How did writers respond to the collapse of radical political ideals and (comparative) religious toleration when 1660 brought the restoration of Charles II? How have literary historians participated in the occlusion of Britain's republican traditions? While there are no pre- or co-requisites, some knowledge of seventeenth-century literature or history, especially through LITE2Y13 Seventeenth-Century Writing, would be an advantage.
LITERATURE AND DECONSTRUCTION	LDCE3X87	30
In an interview with Derek Attridge, Jacques Derrida describes literature as ��this strange institution which allows one to say everything��. This module explores the writings of Derrida and related thinkers alongside a range of literary texts, including works by Keats, Shakespeare and Joyce. Through a combination of lectures and seminars, we will think about the strangenesses of literature, look at the ways in which it is an ��institution�� and consider the kinds of freedom �� of speech, writing and thinking �� it permits. Our aim throughout will be to establish the possibilities for literary criticism opened up by deconstruction. The module is open to everyone, but may be of particular interest to those who studied critical theory in the second year.
LITERATURE AND HUMAN RIGHTS	LDCE3X54	30
Reading key philosophical, political, legal and literary texts, this module will track the emergence of human rights as a cultural idea from their conception in the eighteenth century, through to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and beyond in the period after World War Two. The module will address the following questions: What type of human being was presupposed by the declarations of rights? How did the novel help form perceptions about rights and human sympathy? In what ways did the UDHR re-imagine concepts of human rights after the Holocaust? How were these changes reflected in new forms of post-war writing, such as post-colonial and late modernist writing? How can we think about the relation between rights and literature today? This module will suit students who have enjoyed the challenges of philosophy and literary theory. It should also appeal to those who are interested in thinking seriously about the relationship between literature and its ‘real world’ applications and significance.
LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY	LDCE3X45	30
This module explores the relations between literature and philosophy and differing understandings of the self, love and ethics through close reading of philosophical and literary texts. It is organised chronologically and moves from the classical writing of Plato to modern literature. The module designed for final year students who are studying Literature and Philosophy. It is also open only to students in Literature who have taken modules in Philosophy in years one and two; or by special concession at the discretion of the module organiser to other students who have substantial experience in both Honours level Literature and Honours level Philosophy.
LITERATURE DISSERTATION: POST-1789 (AUT)	LDCE3X15	30
This module is an advanced-level module, for final year students only. It provides students with the opportunity to write an 8000-word dissertation on literature of the period from 1830 to the present day (excluding American literature). The dissertation topic must be agreed by a supervisor, and both topic and supervisor approved by the unit organiser by the end of the previous semester.
LITERATURE DISSERTATION: POST-1789 (SPR)	LDCE3X18	30
This module is an advanced-level module, for final year students only. It provides students with the opportunity to write an 8000-word dissertation on literature of the period from 1830 to the present day (excluding American literature). The dissertation topic must be agreed by a supervisor, and both topic and supervisor approved by the module organiser by the end of the previous semester.
LITERATURE DISSERTATION: PRE-1789 (AUT)	LDCE3Y77	30
This module is an advanced-level unit, for final year students only. It provides students with the opportunity to write an 8000-word dissertation on literature of the period up to 1830 (excluding American literature). The dissertation topic must be agreed by a supervisor, and both topic and supervisor approved by the module organiser by the end of the previous semester.
LITERATURE DISSERTATION: PRE-1789 (SPR)	LDCE3Y78	30
This module is an advanced-level module, for final year students only. It provides students with the opportunity to write an 8000-word dissertation on literature of the period up to 1830 (excluding American literature). The dissertation topic must be agreed by a supervisor, and both topic and supervisor approved by the module organiser by the end of the previous semester.
MADNESS, MEDICINE, SCIENCE AND WOMEN'S WRITING IN THE REGENCY	LDCE3X75	30
This module will study late 18th-century and early 19th-century writings in the context of scientific and medical innovation. We consider whether it may be appropriate to view the work of novelists such as Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen and Mary Shelley as a response to, and even a protest against these newly (or, more correctly, nearly) professionalised, male-dominated worlds. These women writers often concern themselves with the 'consumers' as well as the providers of the services offered by these professions; this module considers why that might be and how this kind of contextualisation might impact upon our readings of their work.
MEDIEVAL ARTHURIAN TRADITIONS	LDCE3Y82	30
From Welsh folklore to Monty Python, the tales of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table have excited and intrigued generations. Why? To answer this question we explore the development of the legend from its twelfth-century Celtic roots through to a number of twentieth-century film adaptations. How the legend has been translated across form, genres, cultures and ages will be studied, including examples from Middle English Arthurian Texts, translations of the Welsh Mabinogion, of Monmouth's Latin chronicle and French romance texts. This module will enable students familiar with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to enhance their awareness of the wider Arthurian traditions within which this text belongs, but is also suitable for students who are encountering medieval literature for the first time.
MIND, BODY AND LITERATURE	LDCE3X09	30
The sense of loss in a Hardy poem, the parallel universe of a science fiction story, the sombre world of a Scandinavian crime novel: all have in common that they make the reader think, feel and possibly act. Drawing on an understanding of literature as writing which both engages and affects us, we look at a variety of literary texts (e.g, by Blake, Hardy, Lawrence, Hughes) and consider what they have in common with the everyday (clocks, teddy-bears, congregation ceremonies) and the bizarre (zombies, unicorns, ghosts). We consider how we understand text worlds, how metaphor relates to the body, whether real emotions can arise from fictional texts. Participants should have an open mind, a desire to understand literary theories, and a readiness to think outside the box.
NERVOUS NARRATIVES	LDCE3X83	30
‘We all say it’s nerves, and none of us knows what it means’, says a character in Wilkie Collins’ 1860 novel, The Woman in White. Our aim is to think about how a discourse of the ‘nerves’ – the ‘nervous temperament’ and nervous illness – can be both so pervasive culturally and so slippery in its meaning. This interdisciplinary module takes you from the late 17th century, when the concept of ‘neurologie’ first emerged, to the 21st century, linking literary, medical and philosophical writing to explore the representation of the ‘nerves’. The historical range of the module is not meant to imply a transhistorical understanding of nervous illness or temperament, but rather will enable us to analyse the historically specific nature of the nervous body and what it is made to mean, culturally, within different contexts. In this way, we will be working with issues as diverse as religious ‘enthusiasm’, hysteria and hypochondria, sensibility, sensation, fear of modernity, manliness and effeminacy, shell-shock, PTSD and the concepts of the healthy or fragile body of the nation. Spanning time and genre, the literary texts studied will take us from the earliest, Jonathan Swift’s satire, A Tale of a Tub (1704) up to the contemporary: Siri Hustvedt’s novel, What I Loved (2003) and her analytical memoir, The Shaking Woman, Or, A History of My Nerves (2010).
POETRY AFTER MODERNISM	LDCE3Z60	30
This module will survey a wide range of post-war British poetry actively engaged with the Modernist tradition of Eliot, Pound and others. Reading critical texts alongside poems, it will introduce students to lesser-known writers, such as the Welsh poet Lynette Roberts and the Scottish poet W.S. Graham, as well as considering well-known English poets such as Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes from a Modernist perspective. Recognising the influence of contemporary American verse on experimental poets such as J.H. Prynne and Paul Muldoon will also be an important theme. A chronological syllabus will take students from 1945 up to the present day, and there will be a chance to write creatively as well as critically as part of the assessment. Students wishing to take this module must have taken LDCE2Z15 Modernism.
POETRY OF THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY	LDCE3X71	30
The poetry of the nineteenth century is often thought of as being caught between the two stools of Romanticism and Modernism. This module examines the development of poetry from Romanticism to Modernism, and asks in particular whether the poetry of the nineteenth century can claim our attention in its own right, rather than as a late avatar of Romanticism or as a foretaste of the excitements of Modernism. The focus of the module, then, is on close critical engagement with a large range of nineteenth century poetry and poetics, including the work of poet-critic Matthew Arnold, poet-priest Gerard M. Hopkins, and of other writers from Christina Rossetti to Algernon Charles Swinburne. Due notice will also be taken of nineteenth-century continental and American poetry.
QUEER LITERATURE AND THEORY	LDCE3X58	30
This module offers students the chance to learn about LGBTQ literature and its development in English-speaking countries, as well as approaches to queer theory. Authors studied will include Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, Alison Bechdel, Armistead Maupin, Charlotte Mendelson, and Sarah Waters, as well as young adult novels by David La Rochelle, Alex Sanchez, Nancy Garden, Julie Anne Peters, and David Levithan. Using queer theory will also allow us to analyse literature from the perspective of gender and sexuality, and authors looked at will include Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, and Teresa de Lauretis. Understanding how lgbtq characters are featured in literature also helps us to see how queer people are understood in a given society in general.
REGENCY WOMEN WRITERS	LDCE3X80	30
This module situates the work of various women writers of the Regency period in literary and historical contexts. The main texts under discussion are by Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Maria Edgeworth. The unit considers themes which - although not exclusive to women's writing at this time - occur strikingly frequently in the work of Regency women. These themes include sanity, madness and ideas about the mind, and literary devices such as the love-mad woman. Health, ill-health and the development of medicine are central to these fictions and the course, and we also discuss the figure of the doctor, the quack and the 'psychiatrist' in these texts. We look at writings by Regency women travellers whose destinations ranged from Italy to Bath, Sweden and Revolutionary France.
REVENGE TRAGEDY: ANCIENT AND MODERN	LDCE3Y86	30
This seminar explores the different ways in which the concept of revenge has been conceived and represented in a range of dramatic texts. The module covers three distinct groups of primary materials: classical tragedy (in translation) including Aeschylus's Oresteia; early modern revenge tragedy including works by Shakespeare, Tourneur and Kyd; and modern cinematic explorations of the revenge formula including Get Carter, Old Boy and Tarantino's Kill Bill movies. Topics discussed include the relationship between classical and Christian attitudes to revenge, contemporary strictures upon private vengeance, the representation of justice through the ages, the limitations of the revenge tragedy formula.
SATIRE	LDCE3X62	30
��Satire is problematic, open ended, essayistic, ambiguous in relation to history, uncertain in its political effects, resistant to final closure, more inclined to ask questions than provide answers, ambivalent about the pleasures it offers�� (Dustin Griffin). The aim of this module is to investigate the problematic territory of satire. Using examples from modern and contemporary fiction and journalism alongside early modern and classical satire, we will formulate a critical and conceptual map, which will in turn allow us to discuss some of the problems of satire (those of genre, of gender, of politics, of morality, of history), and to explore some of the paradoxes of its strategies and functions (freedom versus limits; subversion versus conformity; transformation versus stasis). Writers under discussion will include Juvenal, Horace, Swift and Pope; John Dryden, Aphra Behn, and Lady Mary Wortley Montague; Evelyn Waugh, Stella Gibbons, and Jonathan Coe.
SHAKESPEARE: SHADOW AND SUBSTANCE	LDCE3Y36	30
Platonist epistemology permeated Elizabethan culture: the aim of this module is to explore the relationship of Shakespeare's topic of the world as a stage to Neoplatonic conceptions of perception, politics, poetry and love.
THE CONDITION OF ENGLAND NOVEL 1818-2000	LDCE3Z09	30
This module will examine the classic nineteenth-century 'Condition of 'England' novel alongside mid-to-late twentieth-century representations of England (and myths of national identity). Attention will be given to post-colonial writing as a significant part of the question: What is it to be English (or British)?
THE GOTHIC	LDCE3X41	30
This module seeks to cover some 'canonical' texts of the Gothic Novel (1764-1820) in Walpole, Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and to consider some later developments of the gothic mode in later 19th and 20th centuries: Poe, Le Fanu, Stevenson, MR James, Elizabeth Bowen, David Storey and Angela Carter. The course also seeks to introduce students to some of the theoretical and historical arguments around the contested nature of the term 'gothic', the Uncanny, the subversiveness or otherwise of this kind of writing, and its relation to the novel genre.
THE LITERATURE OF WORLD WAR ONE	LDCE3Z10	30
The module will examine representations of World War One. As a Level 3 unit, the focus will be inter-disciplinary. Literary materials will be contextualised using historical and other sources. Use will also be made of memoirs, letters, diaries, and photographs. Students will be encouraged to conduct research using the internet and other facilities.
THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS: NONSENSE AND MODERN WRITING	LDCE3X01	30
It's widely recognised that modernist literature is characterised by a revolution of the word. Less widely recognised, and little explored, is the relationship between modernist linguistic experimentalism and literary nonsense, as practised by Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and others. This course will begin with these well-known nonsense writers and explore their roots in earlier nonsense, including Shakespeare's, before going on to examine some of the adventures in language of major modernist and postmodernist writers. Authors studied are likely to include late Joyce, early Auden, Stein, Stevens, Cummings, Crane, Nabokov, Koch, Muldoon, Ashbery. The course will also set these avant-garde writers in the unfamiliar context of the mainstream fantasy writers who also come out of Carroll and the nonsense tradition, most likely Tolkien and Peake, whose imaginary worlds are based on their own invented languages. This is not a course on children's literature, but on some very challenging modern literature, though it should appeal to those who take a childish pleasure in wordplay and fantasy, and equally to those intrigued by philosophical issues around language. It would follow on very well from the second-year Modernism module.
TRAUMATURGIES: READING AND WRITING TRAUMA ACROSS CONTEXTS	LDCE3X91	30
Trauma haunts the writing of the twentieth century. Slavery, war, patriarchy, terrorism, genocide, colonialism, modernity, technology and post-modernity: these legacies demand to be written and read, and engender a writing singular to their traumas. Yet the writing of these wounds, and the critical work that reads it, raises fundamental questions about whether trauma can ever be represented or understood. Spreading beyond their contexts, these questions effect their own traumas, cracking open our assumptions about what it is possible to read, to write, and indeed to think. Working roughly from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, this module reads a selection of theoretical, literary and critical texts that aim to write and read trauma across cultural, historical, personal and public contexts.
ULYSSES	LDCE3Z50	30
This module will provide students with the opportunity to read one of the most famous, yet notoriously unread, novels of the twentieth century. The module has a number of aims. First, it will give students the time and opportunity to try to read and understand James Joyce's Ulysses. Secondly, the module will introduce students to some of the formal innovations typical of modernist writing through the close analysis of techniques such as interior monologue and mythic analogy. Thirdly, it will allow students to read a wide range of responses to Ulysses, both among Joyce's contemporaries, and in the history of twentieth century criticism. Fourthly, the module will situate the text historically, with a particular focus on the way that the text's obscenity affected its reception and circulation in the 1920s and 1930s.
VIRGIL'S CLASSIC EPIC	LDCE3Y18	30
This module will explore the centrality of Virgil's Aeneid to Medieval and Renaissance culture. It will examine developing attitudes to the Classical literary legacy and accommodation and reinvention of Virgil's epic poem within new religious, political and literary contexts. The course will begin with exploration of Virgil's poem on its own terms before turning to reworkings of the 'Aeneid' by Augustine, Dante, Chaucer, Douglas and Marlowe, the Renaissance invention of a 13th Book to 'complete' Virgil's poem, and the recasting of classical epic within the very different conventions of medieval and Renaissance romance. Previous experience of classical or medieval literature is not required.

Free Choice Study (20 credits)

Students will select modules worth 20 credits from the course catalogue with the approval of their School

In their final stages students must accumulate 120 credits of third-level English Literature modules (LITE3X*, LITE3Y*, LITE3Z*).

Option A Study (30 credits)

Students will select 30 credits from the following modules:

Name	Code	Credits
BIOGRAPHY	LDCE3X46	30
How do writers attempt to capture 'life' in all its various forms? What, if any, are the different requirements in writing the life of a famous (or not so famous) person and that of a city or landscape? What about the 'life' of travel or food and how do you approach writing about the natural world? These are just some of the questions that this module sets out to address. We will be reading a wide variety of texts, from the 'traditional' biography to some of the more experimental examples of creative non-fiction. From Samuel Johnson to essays in The New Yorker, all human (and non-human) life will be there! Students may choose between writing their own piece of Biography or creative Non-Fiction as their final project or submitting a critical essay.
CHAUCER	LDCE3Y05	30
This module explores Chaucer's major writings in their historical, cultural and literary contexts. The module will introduce Chaucer's writing in a range of genres and will examine his works' representation and exploration of society, identity, chivalry, politics, religion and gender, and will also consider the medieval reception of Chaucer's writing. Previous experience of medieval literature will be useful but is not required.
CHILDREN'S LITERATURE	LDCE3X67	30
This module offers students the chance to learn about children's literature and its development and also to try to write a piece of children's literature themselves. It starts with the history of children's literature, looking at its use as a pedagogical tool, moving through fairy tales, Lewis Carroll's Alice books and their influence on the field, and examining other authors such as Charles Kingsley, Roald Dahl, Judy Blume and Lemony Snicket. By studying the development of children's literature, this module also analyses the development of the concept of childhood in Western society.
CONTEMPORARY DRAMA AND FILM	LDCD3X34	30
The module will examine emergent voices and trends in recent theatre, film and television (mainly British but with some American or European contributions). Issues covered include the (questioned) demise of explicitly political drama and the appearance of previously silenced voices (e.g. gay and lesbian themes, feminist playwrights and writing ethnicity, physical theatre practitioners).
CREATIVE WRITING	LDCC3W18	30
This is an advanced module for final year Creative Writing minors and students who have previously achieved a grade of at least 68% in a level 2 Creative Writing module. Under the guidance of an experienced, practising writer, the seminar will take the form of workshops designed to promote group discussion both of students' own work and the work of established authors. Consideration will be given to the technical and expressive aspects of drafting and re-drafting in any genre with a view to shaping and completing a substantial piece of work. Reserved for students on courses: Q3W8U1, QT37U1, QV31U1, VQ53U1, Q300U1, Q300U2, Q200U1, Q201U1.
DRAMA AND LITERATURE: THE QUESTION OF GENRE	LDCE3X06	30
This seminar will explore the boundaries between drama and other genres (kinds, art-forms, media) in an attempt to investigate a number of interrelated theoretical questions. We shall explore these issues via various types of activity - practical criticism, critiques of literary theory, performance analysis, dramatising prose narrative. The set texts are works of literature which do not quite fit generically - particularly plays that seem to be in some sense 'epic', or novels in some sense 'theatrical', ranging from Shakespeare in the 17th century through to Gay and Fielding in the 18th and Dostoyevsky and Chekhov in the 19th.
EARLY ENGLISH DRAMA	LDCE3Y81	30
This module focuses on the medieval and early sixteenth century period, exploring conceptions and deployments of drama. Comparative work of different forms of drama, the drama and other artistic media, and the drama and social attitudes will be encouraged. You will explore whether drama successfully produces civic unity; how audiences are addressed and constructed; the theatricality of how the Biblical past is imagined, the significance of staging, place, and gesture; the social and political functions of drama, the representation of women; and protests against the drama from various quarters. Our period ends just as the suburban professional theatre was establishing itself in London in a form that was fundamentally influenced by these much earlier dramatic activities. We shall explore how spectacle and ceremony enabled pre-Reformation communities to celebrate their existence and assert an often contested or otherwise problematic sense of their cultural identity.
FIN DE SIECLE: FANTASIES OF DECADENCE AND DEGENERATION	LDCE3X50	30
Max Nordau's 1892 Degeneration, attacking fin de siecle decadence, draws together fears of cultural decline and corrupting artistic practice through pseudo-Darwinian thinking about devolution. Yet Nordau's urgent and apocalyptic claims about 'diseased' art draw an ambivalent response from contemporary writers, such as those associated with the aestheticism and decadence of The Yellow Book. It is within the fantastic, however, that Nordau is most directly confronted and social norms most explicitly deformed by art. Wilde's swift move from pedestal to pederast may remove a key figure, but texts such as The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; The Novel of the White Powder; Dracula; Wells' science fiction dystopias and, more recently, Moore and Campbell's From Hell, rehearse, react to, or reflect upon such concerns. These writings share a central tension: are the effects of decadence and degeneration offering pessimistic prophesy or optimistic alternatives? This module would complement nineteenth-century options and offer a perspective on the Modernist module. For students also taking the Gothic it would be related, although usefully focusing on the closing years of the nineteenth century with a different emphasis.
HENRY JAMES: QUESTIONS OF ART, LIFE AND THEORY	LDCE3Z42	30
In this module students engage with the range of Henry James's writing and also the reproduction of his life and work in contemporary culture. This module aims not simply to add to understanding of James but also to explore the issues that his work raises in relation to the art and history of fiction, philosophy and cultural reproduction. It is suitable not only for literature students who want to study this writer who spans realism and modernism, and short stories, literary criticism and fiction, but also for creative writing students and literature and philosophy students. It can be taken by students who have studied modules in nineteenth-century writing or modernism. Reserved for students on course(s): Q300U1, Q300U2, Q200U1, Q201U1, Q3W8U1, QT37U1, QV31U1, W400U1, WQ43U1, VQ53U1, TQ73U1.
JOHN MILTON'S PARADISE LOST	LDCE3Y70	30
Paradise Lost is perhaps the finest poem in the language. Its ambition is breathtaking: it begins before time, ends with time, spans the whole of the created universe, and yet focuses on a single, human relationship, on betrayal, recrimination and reconciliation. It is an attempt to explain the co-existence of evil and an omnipotent good God, a response to defeated political aspirations, and an attempt to create a republican poetics. In the module we will read the poem intensively, and seek to understand it in its historical context. Was there a republican aesthetic? How did writers respond to the collapse of radical political ideals and (comparative) religious toleration when 1660 brought the restoration of Charles II? How have literary historians participated in the occlusion of Britain's republican traditions? While there are no pre- or co-requisites, some knowledge of seventeenth-century literature or history, especially through LITE2Y13 Seventeenth-Century Writing, would be an advantage.
LITERATURE AND DECONSTRUCTION	LDCE3X87	30
In an interview with Derek Attridge, Jacques Derrida describes literature as ��this strange institution which allows one to say everything��. This module explores the writings of Derrida and related thinkers alongside a range of literary texts, including works by Keats, Shakespeare and Joyce. Through a combination of lectures and seminars, we will think about the strangenesses of literature, look at the ways in which it is an ��institution�� and consider the kinds of freedom �� of speech, writing and thinking �� it permits. Our aim throughout will be to establish the possibilities for literary criticism opened up by deconstruction. The module is open to everyone, but may be of particular interest to those who studied critical theory in the second year.
LITERATURE AND HUMAN RIGHTS	LDCE3X54	30
Reading key philosophical, political, legal and literary texts, this module will track the emergence of human rights as a cultural idea from their conception in the eighteenth century, through to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and beyond in the period after World War Two. The module will address the following questions: What type of human being was presupposed by the declarations of rights? How did the novel help form perceptions about rights and human sympathy? In what ways did the UDHR re-imagine concepts of human rights after the Holocaust? How were these changes reflected in new forms of post-war writing, such as post-colonial and late modernist writing? How can we think about the relation between rights and literature today? This module will suit students who have enjoyed the challenges of philosophy and literary theory. It should also appeal to those who are interested in thinking seriously about the relationship between literature and its ‘real world’ applications and significance.
LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY	LDCE3X45	30
This module explores the relations between literature and philosophy and differing understandings of the self, love and ethics through close reading of philosophical and literary texts. It is organised chronologically and moves from the classical writing of Plato to modern literature. The module designed for final year students who are studying Literature and Philosophy. It is also open only to students in Literature who have taken modules in Philosophy in years one and two; or by special concession at the discretion of the module organiser to other students who have substantial experience in both Honours level Literature and Honours level Philosophy.
LITERATURE DISSERTATION: POST-1789 (AUT)	LDCE3X15	30
This module is an advanced-level module, for final year students only. It provides students with the opportunity to write an 8000-word dissertation on literature of the period from 1830 to the present day (excluding American literature). The dissertation topic must be agreed by a supervisor, and both topic and supervisor approved by the unit organiser by the end of the previous semester.
LITERATURE DISSERTATION: POST-1789 (SPR)	LDCE3X18	30
This module is an advanced-level module, for final year students only. It provides students with the opportunity to write an 8000-word dissertation on literature of the period from 1830 to the present day (excluding American literature). The dissertation topic must be agreed by a supervisor, and both topic and supervisor approved by the module organiser by the end of the previous semester.
LITERATURE DISSERTATION: PRE-1789 (AUT)	LDCE3Y77	30
This module is an advanced-level unit, for final year students only. It provides students with the opportunity to write an 8000-word dissertation on literature of the period up to 1830 (excluding American literature). The dissertation topic must be agreed by a supervisor, and both topic and supervisor approved by the module organiser by the end of the previous semester.
LITERATURE DISSERTATION: PRE-1789 (SPR)	LDCE3Y78	30
This module is an advanced-level module, for final year students only. It provides students with the opportunity to write an 8000-word dissertation on literature of the period up to 1830 (excluding American literature). The dissertation topic must be agreed by a supervisor, and both topic and supervisor approved by the module organiser by the end of the previous semester.
MADNESS, MEDICINE, SCIENCE AND WOMEN'S WRITING IN THE REGENCY	LDCE3X75	30
This module will study late 18th-century and early 19th-century writings in the context of scientific and medical innovation. We consider whether it may be appropriate to view the work of novelists such as Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen and Mary Shelley as a response to, and even a protest against these newly (or, more correctly, nearly) professionalised, male-dominated worlds. These women writers often concern themselves with the 'consumers' as well as the providers of the services offered by these professions; this module considers why that might be and how this kind of contextualisation might impact upon our readings of their work.
MEDIEVAL ARTHURIAN TRADITIONS	LDCE3Y82	30
From Welsh folklore to Monty Python, the tales of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table have excited and intrigued generations. Why? To answer this question we explore the development of the legend from its twelfth-century Celtic roots through to a number of twentieth-century film adaptations. How the legend has been translated across form, genres, cultures and ages will be studied, including examples from Middle English Arthurian Texts, translations of the Welsh Mabinogion, of Monmouth's Latin chronicle and French romance texts. This module will enable students familiar with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to enhance their awareness of the wider Arthurian traditions within which this text belongs, but is also suitable for students who are encountering medieval literature for the first time.
MIND, BODY AND LITERATURE	LDCE3X09	30
The sense of loss in a Hardy poem, the parallel universe of a science fiction story, the sombre world of a Scandinavian crime novel: all have in common that they make the reader think, feel and possibly act. Drawing on an understanding of literature as writing which both engages and affects us, we look at a variety of literary texts (e.g, by Blake, Hardy, Lawrence, Hughes) and consider what they have in common with the everyday (clocks, teddy-bears, congregation ceremonies) and the bizarre (zombies, unicorns, ghosts). We consider how we understand text worlds, how metaphor relates to the body, whether real emotions can arise from fictional texts. Participants should have an open mind, a desire to understand literary theories, and a readiness to think outside the box.
NERVOUS NARRATIVES	LDCE3X83	30
‘We all say it’s nerves, and none of us knows what it means’, says a character in Wilkie Collins’ 1860 novel, The Woman in White. Our aim is to think about how a discourse of the ‘nerves’ – the ‘nervous temperament’ and nervous illness – can be both so pervasive culturally and so slippery in its meaning. This interdisciplinary module takes you from the late 17th century, when the concept of ‘neurologie’ first emerged, to the 21st century, linking literary, medical and philosophical writing to explore the representation of the ‘nerves’. The historical range of the module is not meant to imply a transhistorical understanding of nervous illness or temperament, but rather will enable us to analyse the historically specific nature of the nervous body and what it is made to mean, culturally, within different contexts. In this way, we will be working with issues as diverse as religious ‘enthusiasm’, hysteria and hypochondria, sensibility, sensation, fear of modernity, manliness and effeminacy, shell-shock, PTSD and the concepts of the healthy or fragile body of the nation. Spanning time and genre, the literary texts studied will take us from the earliest, Jonathan Swift’s satire, A Tale of a Tub (1704) up to the contemporary: Siri Hustvedt’s novel, What I Loved (2003) and her analytical memoir, The Shaking Woman, Or, A History of My Nerves (2010).
POETRY AFTER MODERNISM	LDCE3Z60	30
This module will survey a wide range of post-war British poetry actively engaged with the Modernist tradition of Eliot, Pound and others. Reading critical texts alongside poems, it will introduce students to lesser-known writers, such as the Welsh poet Lynette Roberts and the Scottish poet W.S. Graham, as well as considering well-known English poets such as Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes from a Modernist perspective. Recognising the influence of contemporary American verse on experimental poets such as J.H. Prynne and Paul Muldoon will also be an important theme. A chronological syllabus will take students from 1945 up to the present day, and there will be a chance to write creatively as well as critically as part of the assessment. Students wishing to take this module must have taken LDCE2Z15 Modernism.
POETRY OF THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY	LDCE3X71	30
The poetry of the nineteenth century is often thought of as being caught between the two stools of Romanticism and Modernism. This module examines the development of poetry from Romanticism to Modernism, and asks in particular whether the poetry of the nineteenth century can claim our attention in its own right, rather than as a late avatar of Romanticism or as a foretaste of the excitements of Modernism. The focus of the module, then, is on close critical engagement with a large range of nineteenth century poetry and poetics, including the work of poet-critic Matthew Arnold, poet-priest Gerard M. Hopkins, and of other writers from Christina Rossetti to Algernon Charles Swinburne. Due notice will also be taken of nineteenth-century continental and American poetry.
QUEER LITERATURE AND THEORY	LDCE3X58	30
This module offers students the chance to learn about LGBTQ literature and its development in English-speaking countries, as well as approaches to queer theory. Authors studied will include Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, Alison Bechdel, Armistead Maupin, Charlotte Mendelson, and Sarah Waters, as well as young adult novels by David La Rochelle, Alex Sanchez, Nancy Garden, Julie Anne Peters, and David Levithan. Using queer theory will also allow us to analyse literature from the perspective of gender and sexuality, and authors looked at will include Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, and Teresa de Lauretis. Understanding how lgbtq characters are featured in literature also helps us to see how queer people are understood in a given society in general.
REGENCY WOMEN WRITERS	LDCE3X80	30
This module situates the work of various women writers of the Regency period in literary and historical contexts. The main texts under discussion are by Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Maria Edgeworth. The unit considers themes which - although not exclusive to women's writing at this time - occur strikingly frequently in the work of Regency women. These themes include sanity, madness and ideas about the mind, and literary devices such as the love-mad woman. Health, ill-health and the development of medicine are central to these fictions and the course, and we also discuss the figure of the doctor, the quack and the 'psychiatrist' in these texts. We look at writings by Regency women travellers whose destinations ranged from Italy to Bath, Sweden and Revolutionary France.
REVENGE TRAGEDY: ANCIENT AND MODERN	LDCE3Y86	30
This seminar explores the different ways in which the concept of revenge has been conceived and represented in a range of dramatic texts. The module covers three distinct groups of primary materials: classical tragedy (in translation) including Aeschylus's Oresteia; early modern revenge tragedy including works by Shakespeare, Tourneur and Kyd; and modern cinematic explorations of the revenge formula including Get Carter, Old Boy and Tarantino's Kill Bill movies. Topics discussed include the relationship between classical and Christian attitudes to revenge, contemporary strictures upon private vengeance, the representation of justice through the ages, the limitations of the revenge tragedy formula.
SATIRE	LDCE3X62	30
��Satire is problematic, open ended, essayistic, ambiguous in relation to history, uncertain in its political effects, resistant to final closure, more inclined to ask questions than provide answers, ambivalent about the pleasures it offers�� (Dustin Griffin). The aim of this module is to investigate the problematic territory of satire. Using examples from modern and contemporary fiction and journalism alongside early modern and classical satire, we will formulate a critical and conceptual map, which will in turn allow us to discuss some of the problems of satire (those of genre, of gender, of politics, of morality, of history), and to explore some of the paradoxes of its strategies and functions (freedom versus limits; subversion versus conformity; transformation versus stasis). Writers under discussion will include Juvenal, Horace, Swift and Pope; John Dryden, Aphra Behn, and Lady Mary Wortley Montague; Evelyn Waugh, Stella Gibbons, and Jonathan Coe.
SHAKESPEARE: SHADOW AND SUBSTANCE	LDCE3Y36	30
Platonist epistemology permeated Elizabethan culture: the aim of this module is to explore the relationship of Shakespeare's topic of the world as a stage to Neoplatonic conceptions of perception, politics, poetry and love.
THE CONDITION OF ENGLAND NOVEL 1818-2000	LDCE3Z09	30
This module will examine the classic nineteenth-century 'Condition of 'England' novel alongside mid-to-late twentieth-century representations of England (and myths of national identity). Attention will be given to post-colonial writing as a significant part of the question: What is it to be English (or British)?
THE GOTHIC	LDCE3X41	30
This module seeks to cover some 'canonical' texts of the Gothic Novel (1764-1820) in Walpole, Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and to consider some later developments of the gothic mode in later 19th and 20th centuries: Poe, Le Fanu, Stevenson, MR James, Elizabeth Bowen, David Storey and Angela Carter. The course also seeks to introduce students to some of the theoretical and historical arguments around the contested nature of the term 'gothic', the Uncanny, the subversiveness or otherwise of this kind of writing, and its relation to the novel genre.
THE LITERATURE OF WORLD WAR ONE	LDCE3Z10	30
The module will examine representations of World War One. As a Level 3 unit, the focus will be inter-disciplinary. Literary materials will be contextualised using historical and other sources. Use will also be made of memoirs, letters, diaries, and photographs. Students will be encouraged to conduct research using the internet and other facilities.
THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS: NONSENSE AND MODERN WRITING	LDCE3X01	30
It's widely recognised that modernist literature is characterised by a revolution of the word. Less widely recognised, and little explored, is the relationship between modernist linguistic experimentalism and literary nonsense, as practised by Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and others. This course will begin with these well-known nonsense writers and explore their roots in earlier nonsense, including Shakespeare's, before going on to examine some of the adventures in language of major modernist and postmodernist writers. Authors studied are likely to include late Joyce, early Auden, Stein, Stevens, Cummings, Crane, Nabokov, Koch, Muldoon, Ashbery. The course will also set these avant-garde writers in the unfamiliar context of the mainstream fantasy writers who also come out of Carroll and the nonsense tradition, most likely Tolkien and Peake, whose imaginary worlds are based on their own invented languages. This is not a course on children's literature, but on some very challenging modern literature, though it should appeal to those who take a childish pleasure in wordplay and fantasy, and equally to those intrigued by philosophical issues around language. It would follow on very well from the second-year Modernism module.
TRAUMATURGIES: READING AND WRITING TRAUMA ACROSS CONTEXTS	LDCE3X91	30
Trauma haunts the writing of the twentieth century. Slavery, war, patriarchy, terrorism, genocide, colonialism, modernity, technology and post-modernity: these legacies demand to be written and read, and engender a writing singular to their traumas. Yet the writing of these wounds, and the critical work that reads it, raises fundamental questions about whether trauma can ever be represented or understood. Spreading beyond their contexts, these questions effect their own traumas, cracking open our assumptions about what it is possible to read, to write, and indeed to think. Working roughly from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, this module reads a selection of theoretical, literary and critical texts that aim to write and read trauma across cultural, historical, personal and public contexts.
ULYSSES	LDCE3Z50	30
This module will provide students with the opportunity to read one of the most famous, yet notoriously unread, novels of the twentieth century. The module has a number of aims. First, it will give students the time and opportunity to try to read and understand James Joyce's Ulysses. Secondly, the module will introduce students to some of the formal innovations typical of modernist writing through the close analysis of techniques such as interior monologue and mythic analogy. Thirdly, it will allow students to read a wide range of responses to Ulysses, both among Joyce's contemporaries, and in the history of twentieth century criticism. Fourthly, the module will situate the text historically, with a particular focus on the way that the text's obscenity affected its reception and circulation in the 1920s and 1930s.
VIRGIL'S CLASSIC EPIC	LDCE3Y18	30
This module will explore the centrality of Virgil's Aeneid to Medieval and Renaissance culture. It will examine developing attitudes to the Classical literary legacy and accommodation and reinvention of Virgil's epic poem within new religious, political and literary contexts. The course will begin with exploration of Virgil's poem on its own terms before turning to reworkings of the 'Aeneid' by Augustine, Dante, Chaucer, Douglas and Marlowe, the Renaissance invention of a 13th Book to 'complete' Virgil's poem, and the recasting of classical epic within the very different conventions of medieval and Renaissance romance. Previous experience of classical or medieval literature is not required.

Free Choice Study (30 credits)

Students will select modules worth 30 credits from the course catalogue with the approval of their School

In their final stages students must accumulate 120 credits of third-level English Literature modules (LITE3X*, LITE3Y*, LITE3Z*).

Option A Study (30 credits)

Students will select 30 credits from the following modules:

Name	Code	Credits
BIOGRAPHY	LDCE3X46	30
How do writers attempt to capture 'life' in all its various forms? What, if any, are the different requirements in writing the life of a famous (or not so famous) person and that of a city or landscape? What about the 'life' of travel or food and how do you approach writing about the natural world? These are just some of the questions that this module sets out to address. We will be reading a wide variety of texts, from the 'traditional' biography to some of the more experimental examples of creative non-fiction. From Samuel Johnson to essays in The New Yorker, all human (and non-human) life will be there! Students may choose between writing their own piece of Biography or creative Non-Fiction as their final project or submitting a critical essay.
CHAUCER	LDCE3Y05	30
This module explores Chaucer's major writings in their historical, cultural and literary contexts. The module will introduce Chaucer's writing in a range of genres and will examine his works' representation and exploration of society, identity, chivalry, politics, religion and gender, and will also consider the medieval reception of Chaucer's writing. Previous experience of medieval literature will be useful but is not required.
CHILDREN'S LITERATURE	LDCE3X67	30
This module offers students the chance to learn about children's literature and its development and also to try to write a piece of children's literature themselves. It starts with the history of children's literature, looking at its use as a pedagogical tool, moving through fairy tales, Lewis Carroll's Alice books and their influence on the field, and examining other authors such as Charles Kingsley, Roald Dahl, Judy Blume and Lemony Snicket. By studying the development of children's literature, this module also analyses the development of the concept of childhood in Western society.
CONTEMPORARY DRAMA AND FILM	LDCD3X34	30
The module will examine emergent voices and trends in recent theatre, film and television (mainly British but with some American or European contributions). Issues covered include the (questioned) demise of explicitly political drama and the appearance of previously silenced voices (e.g. gay and lesbian themes, feminist playwrights and writing ethnicity, physical theatre practitioners).
CREATIVE WRITING	LDCC3W18	30
This is an advanced module for final year Creative Writing minors and students who have previously achieved a grade of at least 68% in a level 2 Creative Writing module. Under the guidance of an experienced, practising writer, the seminar will take the form of workshops designed to promote group discussion both of students' own work and the work of established authors. Consideration will be given to the technical and expressive aspects of drafting and re-drafting in any genre with a view to shaping and completing a substantial piece of work. Reserved for students on courses: Q3W8U1, QT37U1, QV31U1, VQ53U1, Q300U1, Q300U2, Q200U1, Q201U1.
DRAMA AND LITERATURE: THE QUESTION OF GENRE	LDCE3X06	30
This seminar will explore the boundaries between drama and other genres (kinds, art-forms, media) in an attempt to investigate a number of interrelated theoretical questions. We shall explore these issues via various types of activity - practical criticism, critiques of literary theory, performance analysis, dramatising prose narrative. The set texts are works of literature which do not quite fit generically - particularly plays that seem to be in some sense 'epic', or novels in some sense 'theatrical', ranging from Shakespeare in the 17th century through to Gay and Fielding in the 18th and Dostoyevsky and Chekhov in the 19th.
EARLY ENGLISH DRAMA	LDCE3Y81	30
This module focuses on the medieval and early sixteenth century period, exploring conceptions and deployments of drama. Comparative work of different forms of drama, the drama and other artistic media, and the drama and social attitudes will be encouraged. You will explore whether drama successfully produces civic unity; how audiences are addressed and constructed; the theatricality of how the Biblical past is imagined, the significance of staging, place, and gesture; the social and political functions of drama, the representation of women; and protests against the drama from various quarters. Our period ends just as the suburban professional theatre was establishing itself in London in a form that was fundamentally influenced by these much earlier dramatic activities. We shall explore how spectacle and ceremony enabled pre-Reformation communities to celebrate their existence and assert an often contested or otherwise problematic sense of their cultural identity.
FIN DE SIECLE: FANTASIES OF DECADENCE AND DEGENERATION	LDCE3X50	30
Max Nordau's 1892 Degeneration, attacking fin de siecle decadence, draws together fears of cultural decline and corrupting artistic practice through pseudo-Darwinian thinking about devolution. Yet Nordau's urgent and apocalyptic claims about 'diseased' art draw an ambivalent response from contemporary writers, such as those associated with the aestheticism and decadence of The Yellow Book. It is within the fantastic, however, that Nordau is most directly confronted and social norms most explicitly deformed by art. Wilde's swift move from pedestal to pederast may remove a key figure, but texts such as The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; The Novel of the White Powder; Dracula; Wells' science fiction dystopias and, more recently, Moore and Campbell's From Hell, rehearse, react to, or reflect upon such concerns. These writings share a central tension: are the effects of decadence and degeneration offering pessimistic prophesy or optimistic alternatives? This module would complement nineteenth-century options and offer a perspective on the Modernist module. For students also taking the Gothic it would be related, although usefully focusing on the closing years of the nineteenth century with a different emphasis.
HENRY JAMES: QUESTIONS OF ART, LIFE AND THEORY	LDCE3Z42	30
In this module students engage with the range of Henry James's writing and also the reproduction of his life and work in contemporary culture. This module aims not simply to add to understanding of James but also to explore the issues that his work raises in relation to the art and history of fiction, philosophy and cultural reproduction. It is suitable not only for literature students who want to study this writer who spans realism and modernism, and short stories, literary criticism and fiction, but also for creative writing students and literature and philosophy students. It can be taken by students who have studied modules in nineteenth-century writing or modernism. Reserved for students on course(s): Q300U1, Q300U2, Q200U1, Q201U1, Q3W8U1, QT37U1, QV31U1, W400U1, WQ43U1, VQ53U1, TQ73U1.
JOHN MILTON'S PARADISE LOST	LDCE3Y70	30
Paradise Lost is perhaps the finest poem in the language. Its ambition is breathtaking: it begins before time, ends with time, spans the whole of the created universe, and yet focuses on a single, human relationship, on betrayal, recrimination and reconciliation. It is an attempt to explain the co-existence of evil and an omnipotent good God, a response to defeated political aspirations, and an attempt to create a republican poetics. In the module we will read the poem intensively, and seek to understand it in its historical context. Was there a republican aesthetic? How did writers respond to the collapse of radical political ideals and (comparative) religious toleration when 1660 brought the restoration of Charles II? How have literary historians participated in the occlusion of Britain's republican traditions? While there are no pre- or co-requisites, some knowledge of seventeenth-century literature or history, especially through LITE2Y13 Seventeenth-Century Writing, would be an advantage.
LITERATURE AND DECONSTRUCTION	LDCE3X87	30
In an interview with Derek Attridge, Jacques Derrida describes literature as ��this strange institution which allows one to say everything��. This module explores the writings of Derrida and related thinkers alongside a range of literary texts, including works by Keats, Shakespeare and Joyce. Through a combination of lectures and seminars, we will think about the strangenesses of literature, look at the ways in which it is an ��institution�� and consider the kinds of freedom �� of speech, writing and thinking �� it permits. Our aim throughout will be to establish the possibilities for literary criticism opened up by deconstruction. The module is open to everyone, but may be of particular interest to those who studied critical theory in the second year.
LITERATURE AND HUMAN RIGHTS	LDCE3X54	30
Reading key philosophical, political, legal and literary texts, this module will track the emergence of human rights as a cultural idea from their conception in the eighteenth century, through to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and beyond in the period after World War Two. The module will address the following questions: What type of human being was presupposed by the declarations of rights? How did the novel help form perceptions about rights and human sympathy? In what ways did the UDHR re-imagine concepts of human rights after the Holocaust? How were these changes reflected in new forms of post-war writing, such as post-colonial and late modernist writing? How can we think about the relation between rights and literature today? This module will suit students who have enjoyed the challenges of philosophy and literary theory. It should also appeal to those who are interested in thinking seriously about the relationship between literature and its ‘real world’ applications and significance.
LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY	LDCE3X45	30
This module explores the relations between literature and philosophy and differing understandings of the self, love and ethics through close reading of philosophical and literary texts. It is organised chronologically and moves from the classical writing of Plato to modern literature. The module designed for final year students who are studying Literature and Philosophy. It is also open only to students in Literature who have taken modules in Philosophy in years one and two; or by special concession at the discretion of the module organiser to other students who have substantial experience in both Honours level Literature and Honours level Philosophy.
LITERATURE DISSERTATION: POST-1789 (AUT)	LDCE3X15	30
This module is an advanced-level module, for final year students only. It provides students with the opportunity to write an 8000-word dissertation on literature of the period from 1830 to the present day (excluding American literature). The dissertation topic must be agreed by a supervisor, and both topic and supervisor approved by the unit organiser by the end of the previous semester.
LITERATURE DISSERTATION: POST-1789 (SPR)	LDCE3X18	30
This module is an advanced-level module, for final year students only. It provides students with the opportunity to write an 8000-word dissertation on literature of the period from 1830 to the present day (excluding American literature). The dissertation topic must be agreed by a supervisor, and both topic and supervisor approved by the module organiser by the end of the previous semester.
LITERATURE DISSERTATION: PRE-1789 (AUT)	LDCE3Y77	30
This module is an advanced-level unit, for final year students only. It provides students with the opportunity to write an 8000-word dissertation on literature of the period up to 1830 (excluding American literature). The dissertation topic must be agreed by a supervisor, and both topic and supervisor approved by the module organiser by the end of the previous semester.
LITERATURE DISSERTATION: PRE-1789 (SPR)	LDCE3Y78	30
This module is an advanced-level module, for final year students only. It provides students with the opportunity to write an 8000-word dissertation on literature of the period up to 1830 (excluding American literature). The dissertation topic must be agreed by a supervisor, and both topic and supervisor approved by the module organiser by the end of the previous semester.
MADNESS, MEDICINE, SCIENCE AND WOMEN'S WRITING IN THE REGENCY	LDCE3X75	30
This module will study late 18th-century and early 19th-century writings in the context of scientific and medical innovation. We consider whether it may be appropriate to view the work of novelists such as Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen and Mary Shelley as a response to, and even a protest against these newly (or, more correctly, nearly) professionalised, male-dominated worlds. These women writers often concern themselves with the 'consumers' as well as the providers of the services offered by these professions; this module considers why that might be and how this kind of contextualisation might impact upon our readings of their work.
MEDIEVAL ARTHURIAN TRADITIONS	LDCE3Y82	30
From Welsh folklore to Monty Python, the tales of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table have excited and intrigued generations. Why? To answer this question we explore the development of the legend from its twelfth-century Celtic roots through to a number of twentieth-century film adaptations. How the legend has been translated across form, genres, cultures and ages will be studied, including examples from Middle English Arthurian Texts, translations of the Welsh Mabinogion, of Monmouth's Latin chronicle and French romance texts. This module will enable students familiar with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to enhance their awareness of the wider Arthurian traditions within which this text belongs, but is also suitable for students who are encountering medieval literature for the first time.
MIND, BODY AND LITERATURE	LDCE3X09	30
The sense of loss in a Hardy poem, the parallel universe of a science fiction story, the sombre world of a Scandinavian crime novel: all have in common that they make the reader think, feel and possibly act. Drawing on an understanding of literature as writing which both engages and affects us, we look at a variety of literary texts (e.g, by Blake, Hardy, Lawrence, Hughes) and consider what they have in common with the everyday (clocks, teddy-bears, congregation ceremonies) and the bizarre (zombies, unicorns, ghosts). We consider how we understand text worlds, how metaphor relates to the body, whether real emotions can arise from fictional texts. Participants should have an open mind, a desire to understand literary theories, and a readiness to think outside the box.
NERVOUS NARRATIVES	LDCE3X83	30
‘We all say it’s nerves, and none of us knows what it means’, says a character in Wilkie Collins’ 1860 novel, The Woman in White. Our aim is to think about how a discourse of the ‘nerves’ – the ‘nervous temperament’ and nervous illness – can be both so pervasive culturally and so slippery in its meaning. This interdisciplinary module takes you from the late 17th century, when the concept of ‘neurologie’ first emerged, to the 21st century, linking literary, medical and philosophical writing to explore the representation of the ‘nerves’. The historical range of the module is not meant to imply a transhistorical understanding of nervous illness or temperament, but rather will enable us to analyse the historically specific nature of the nervous body and what it is made to mean, culturally, within different contexts. In this way, we will be working with issues as diverse as religious ‘enthusiasm’, hysteria and hypochondria, sensibility, sensation, fear of modernity, manliness and effeminacy, shell-shock, PTSD and the concepts of the healthy or fragile body of the nation. Spanning time and genre, the literary texts studied will take us from the earliest, Jonathan Swift’s satire, A Tale of a Tub (1704) up to the contemporary: Siri Hustvedt’s novel, What I Loved (2003) and her analytical memoir, The Shaking Woman, Or, A History of My Nerves (2010).
POETRY AFTER MODERNISM	LDCE3Z60	30
This module will survey a wide range of post-war British poetry actively engaged with the Modernist tradition of Eliot, Pound and others. Reading critical texts alongside poems, it will introduce students to lesser-known writers, such as the Welsh poet Lynette Roberts and the Scottish poet W.S. Graham, as well as considering well-known English poets such as Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes from a Modernist perspective. Recognising the influence of contemporary American verse on experimental poets such as J.H. Prynne and Paul Muldoon will also be an important theme. A chronological syllabus will take students from 1945 up to the present day, and there will be a chance to write creatively as well as critically as part of the assessment. Students wishing to take this module must have taken LDCE2Z15 Modernism.
POETRY OF THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY	LDCE3X71	30
The poetry of the nineteenth century is often thought of as being caught between the two stools of Romanticism and Modernism. This module examines the development of poetry from Romanticism to Modernism, and asks in particular whether the poetry of the nineteenth century can claim our attention in its own right, rather than as a late avatar of Romanticism or as a foretaste of the excitements of Modernism. The focus of the module, then, is on close critical engagement with a large range of nineteenth century poetry and poetics, including the work of poet-critic Matthew Arnold, poet-priest Gerard M. Hopkins, and of other writers from Christina Rossetti to Algernon Charles Swinburne. Due notice will also be taken of nineteenth-century continental and American poetry.
QUEER LITERATURE AND THEORY	LDCE3X58	30
This module offers students the chance to learn about LGBTQ literature and its development in English-speaking countries, as well as approaches to queer theory. Authors studied will include Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, Alison Bechdel, Armistead Maupin, Charlotte Mendelson, and Sarah Waters, as well as young adult novels by David La Rochelle, Alex Sanchez, Nancy Garden, Julie Anne Peters, and David Levithan. Using queer theory will also allow us to analyse literature from the perspective of gender and sexuality, and authors looked at will include Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, and Teresa de Lauretis. Understanding how lgbtq characters are featured in literature also helps us to see how queer people are understood in a given society in general.
REGENCY WOMEN WRITERS	LDCE3X80	30
This module situates the work of various women writers of the Regency period in literary and historical contexts. The main texts under discussion are by Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Maria Edgeworth. The unit considers themes which - although not exclusive to women's writing at this time - occur strikingly frequently in the work of Regency women. These themes include sanity, madness and ideas about the mind, and literary devices such as the love-mad woman. Health, ill-health and the development of medicine are central to these fictions and the course, and we also discuss the figure of the doctor, the quack and the 'psychiatrist' in these texts. We look at writings by Regency women travellers whose destinations ranged from Italy to Bath, Sweden and Revolutionary France.
REVENGE TRAGEDY: ANCIENT AND MODERN	LDCE3Y86	30
This seminar explores the different ways in which the concept of revenge has been conceived and represented in a range of dramatic texts. The module covers three distinct groups of primary materials: classical tragedy (in translation) including Aeschylus's Oresteia; early modern revenge tragedy including works by Shakespeare, Tourneur and Kyd; and modern cinematic explorations of the revenge formula including Get Carter, Old Boy and Tarantino's Kill Bill movies. Topics discussed include the relationship between classical and Christian attitudes to revenge, contemporary strictures upon private vengeance, the representation of justice through the ages, the limitations of the revenge tragedy formula.
SATIRE	LDCE3X62	30
��Satire is problematic, open ended, essayistic, ambiguous in relation to history, uncertain in its political effects, resistant to final closure, more inclined to ask questions than provide answers, ambivalent about the pleasures it offers�� (Dustin Griffin). The aim of this module is to investigate the problematic territory of satire. Using examples from modern and contemporary fiction and journalism alongside early modern and classical satire, we will formulate a critical and conceptual map, which will in turn allow us to discuss some of the problems of satire (those of genre, of gender, of politics, of morality, of history), and to explore some of the paradoxes of its strategies and functions (freedom versus limits; subversion versus conformity; transformation versus stasis). Writers under discussion will include Juvenal, Horace, Swift and Pope; John Dryden, Aphra Behn, and Lady Mary Wortley Montague; Evelyn Waugh, Stella Gibbons, and Jonathan Coe.
SHAKESPEARE: SHADOW AND SUBSTANCE	LDCE3Y36	30
Platonist epistemology permeated Elizabethan culture: the aim of this module is to explore the relationship of Shakespeare's topic of the world as a stage to Neoplatonic conceptions of perception, politics, poetry and love.
THE CONDITION OF ENGLAND NOVEL 1818-2000	LDCE3Z09	30
This module will examine the classic nineteenth-century 'Condition of 'England' novel alongside mid-to-late twentieth-century representations of England (and myths of national identity). Attention will be given to post-colonial writing as a significant part of the question: What is it to be English (or British)?
THE GOTHIC	LDCE3X41	30
This module seeks to cover some 'canonical' texts of the Gothic Novel (1764-1820) in Walpole, Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and to consider some later developments of the gothic mode in later 19th and 20th centuries: Poe, Le Fanu, Stevenson, MR James, Elizabeth Bowen, David Storey and Angela Carter. The course also seeks to introduce students to some of the theoretical and historical arguments around the contested nature of the term 'gothic', the Uncanny, the subversiveness or otherwise of this kind of writing, and its relation to the novel genre.
THE LITERATURE OF WORLD WAR ONE	LDCE3Z10	30
The module will examine representations of World War One. As a Level 3 unit, the focus will be inter-disciplinary. Literary materials will be contextualised using historical and other sources. Use will also be made of memoirs, letters, diaries, and photographs. Students will be encouraged to conduct research using the internet and other facilities.
THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS: NONSENSE AND MODERN WRITING	LDCE3X01	30
It's widely recognised that modernist literature is characterised by a revolution of the word. Less widely recognised, and little explored, is the relationship between modernist linguistic experimentalism and literary nonsense, as practised by Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and others. This course will begin with these well-known nonsense writers and explore their roots in earlier nonsense, including Shakespeare's, before going on to examine some of the adventures in language of major modernist and postmodernist writers. Authors studied are likely to include late Joyce, early Auden, Stein, Stevens, Cummings, Crane, Nabokov, Koch, Muldoon, Ashbery. The course will also set these avant-garde writers in the unfamiliar context of the mainstream fantasy writers who also come out of Carroll and the nonsense tradition, most likely Tolkien and Peake, whose imaginary worlds are based on their own invented languages. This is not a course on children's literature, but on some very challenging modern literature, though it should appeal to those who take a childish pleasure in wordplay and fantasy, and equally to those intrigued by philosophical issues around language. It would follow on very well from the second-year Modernism module.
TRAUMATURGIES: READING AND WRITING TRAUMA ACROSS CONTEXTS	LDCE3X91	30
Trauma haunts the writing of the twentieth century. Slavery, war, patriarchy, terrorism, genocide, colonialism, modernity, technology and post-modernity: these legacies demand to be written and read, and engender a writing singular to their traumas. Yet the writing of these wounds, and the critical work that reads it, raises fundamental questions about whether trauma can ever be represented or understood. Spreading beyond their contexts, these questions effect their own traumas, cracking open our assumptions about what it is possible to read, to write, and indeed to think. Working roughly from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, this module reads a selection of theoretical, literary and critical texts that aim to write and read trauma across cultural, historical, personal and public contexts.
ULYSSES	LDCE3Z50	30
This module will provide students with the opportunity to read one of the most famous, yet notoriously unread, novels of the twentieth century. The module has a number of aims. First, it will give students the time and opportunity to try to read and understand James Joyce's Ulysses. Secondly, the module will introduce students to some of the formal innovations typical of modernist writing through the close analysis of techniques such as interior monologue and mythic analogy. Thirdly, it will allow students to read a wide range of responses to Ulysses, both among Joyce's contemporaries, and in the history of twentieth century criticism. Fourthly, the module will situate the text historically, with a particular focus on the way that the text's obscenity affected its reception and circulation in the 1920s and 1930s.
VIRGIL'S CLASSIC EPIC	LDCE3Y18	30
This module will explore the centrality of Virgil's Aeneid to Medieval and Renaissance culture. It will examine developing attitudes to the Classical literary legacy and accommodation and reinvention of Virgil's epic poem within new religious, political and literary contexts. The course will begin with exploration of Virgil's poem on its own terms before turning to reworkings of the 'Aeneid' by Augustine, Dante, Chaucer, Douglas and Marlowe, the Renaissance invention of a 13th Book to 'complete' Virgil's poem, and the recasting of classical epic within the very different conventions of medieval and Renaissance romance. Previous experience of classical or medieval literature is not required.

Free Choice Study (30 credits)

Students will select modules worth 30 credits from the course catalogue with the approval of their School

Disclaimer

Whilst the University will make every effort to offer the modules listed, changes may sometimes be made arising from the annual monitoring, review and update of modules and regular (five-yearly) review of course programmes. Where this activity leads to significant (but not minor) changes to programmes and their constituent modules, there will normally be prior consultation of students and others. It is also possible that the University may not be able to offer a module for reasons outside of its control, such as the illness of a member of staff or sabbatical leave. Where this is the case, the University will endeavour to inform students.

Entry Requirements

A Level:: AAA-AAB including English Literature
International Baccalaureate:: 34-33 points overall with 6 in HL English
Scottish Advanced Highers:: AAA-AAB including English Literature
Irish Leaving Certificate:: AAAAAA-AAAABB
Access Course:: Please contact the university for further information.
HND:: Please contact the university for further information.
European Baccalaureate:: 85-80% overall, with 80% in English Literature

Entry Requirement

The combined English Language and Literature A-level is acceptable instead of English Literature. A second Arts or Humanities subject at A-Level is encouraged, alongside English Literature. Students studying the IB programme should offer a second Arts or Humanities subject at Higher Level.

Students for whom English is a Foreign language

We welcome applications from students from all academic backgrounds. We require evidence of proficiency in English (including writing, speaking, listening and reading). Recognised English Language qualifications include:

IELTS: 6.5 overall (minimum 6.0 in all components)
TOEFL: Internet-based score of 88 overall (minimum 18 in the Listening and Writing components; 19 in the Reading component; and 21 in the Speaking component)
PTE: 62 overall with minimum 55 in all components

If you do not meet the University's entry requirements, our INTO Language Learning Centre offers a range of university preparation courses to help you develop the high level of academic and English skills necessary for successful undergraduate study.

Interviews

The majority of candidates will not be called for an interview. However, for some students an interview will be requested. These are normally quite informal and generally cover topics such as your current studies, reasons for choosing the course and your personal interests and extra-curricular activities.

Gap Year

We welcome applications from students who have already taken or intend to take a gap year, believing that a year between school and university can be of substantial benefit. You are advised to indicate your reason for wishing to defer entry and may wish to contact the appropriate Admissions Office directly to discuss this further.

Special Entry Requirements

English Literature A-Level is required.

Intakes

The School's annual intake is in September of each year.

Alternative Qualifications

We encourage you to apply if you have alternative qualifications equivalent to our stated entry requirement. Please contact us for further information.

GCSE Offer

Students are required to have Mathematics and English at Grade C or above at GCSE Level.

Assessment

For the majority of candidates the most important factors in assessing the application will be past and future achievement in examinations, academic interest in the subject being applied for, personal interest and extra-curricular activities and the confidential reference. We consider applicants as individuals and accept students from a very wide range of educational backgrounds and spend time considering your application in order to reach an informed decision relating to your application. Typical offers are indicated above. Please note, there may be additional subject entry requirements specific to individual degree courses.

Fees and Funding

University Fees and Financial Support: UK/EU Students

Further information on fees and funding for 2012 can be found here

University Fees and Financial Support: International Students

The University will be charging International students £11,700.00 for all full time School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing undergraduate programmes which start in 2012.

Please click to access further information about fees and funding for International students

Applying for Part-Time Degrees

The University of East Anglia offers some of its undergraduate degrees on a part-time basis. Applications are made directly to the University: More information and an application form can be found at our Part-Time Study pages. For further information on the part-time application process, please contact our Admissions Office at admissions@uea.ac.uk.

Each year we hold a series of Open Days, where potential applicants to our Undergraduate courses can come and visit the university to learn more about the courses they are interested in, meet current students and staff and tour our campus. If you decide to apply for a course and are made an offer, you will be invited to a School specific Visit Day. Applicants may be invited for interview or audition for some courses.

For enquiries about the content of the degree or your qualifications please contact Admissions at 01603 591515 or email admissions@uea.ac.uk We can then direct your enquiry to the relevant department to assist you.