BA (Hons) LITERATURE AND HISTORY

This module is designed to provide an introduction to medieval history. We survey the history of medieval Europe, including England, from c.1000 to c.1500, and also examine some archaeology, literature, art, and architecture from the period. We also aim to introduce you to a range of primary sources, including some of the physical remains to be found in East Anglia.

An introduction to key themes in early modern history, such as: gender, rebellion, religious conflict, the reformation, warfare, state formation, and other key aspects of the period 1500-1750.

You will gain a wide-ranging introduction to the political, social and economic transformation of Britain and Europe from the late eighteenth century to the First World War. Among the themes, you will consider industrialisation and its impact, revolution and reform, nationalism and imperialism, gender and society, great power relations, the impact of war and the collapse of the old Europe in 1917-18.

On this module you will learn the central currents of American Literature, from after the American Civil War, through the turn of the century and into modernism and the early 20th century, finishing at the close of World War II. You will follow the – often fiercely contested – development of a national literature, tracing the way this multitude of voices differs from place to place, from decade to decade, and from writer to writer. Writers studied on this module in past years have included: Henry James, Mark Twain, Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, T.S. Eliot and William Faulkner. You will be introduced to these vibrant voices through reading and discussing short stories, novels, poetry, non-fiction and critical work. You will attend lectures, and take part in follow-up discussion-based seminars. Each week you will consider the context of the texts you read, as well as working to analyse and explain how they work on the reader and in society at large. You will encounter debates about the meaning of freedom in life and in art, what it might mean to be modern (or to refuse that modernity), about the responsibilities of citizenship to other people and to the environment, and about what it might mean to write and be read in the modern United States of America. By the end of this module you will be familiar with a wide range of late 19th century and early 20th century American texts and writers. You will learn the major movements in American literature from the fin de siècle through to the Second World War, and will be able to talk about the issues surrounding the development of a national and literary culture. Through doing this, you will improve your ability to read and analyse literary texts, to describe how language works in history and on the reader, and to identify and present new and exciting patterns in what you read.

How has American culture been shaped by categories of race, gender, class and sexuality? How can we unpick and understand the complex experiences that shape American identity? This module will enable you to develop and expand the research methods, writing skills, and oral skills you’ll have acquired in ‘Reading Cultures I: American Icons’. You’ll continue your exploration of the contemporary United States, you’ll be introduced to the work of critical theorists, and you’ll be encouraged to think about America’s changing position in the world. Classes will further facilitate skills in reading, writing, analysis and independent thinking, through which you will gain the confidence and the tools necessary to be a self-supporting learner, giving you a strong academic foundation for the rest of your degree programme.

The fourteenth century represents a major watershed in the course of global history, and the major contours of change are explored through this outline study of events in England between c.1300 and c.1400. Foremost among those changes stands the Black Death of 1348-9, which is now recognised as the worst single catastrophe in documented history. The second plague outbreak of 1361-2 represents the second greatest health crisis of the second millennium. The pathogen that caused both epidemics has the dubious honour of being the worst killer in history. It is still present in five continents of the world, and, if antibiotics do become ineffectual during the course of our own century, then the Black Death will represent the greatest pathogenic threat to humanity. Historians have long debated whether the Black Death was a major turning point in history or a mere accelerator of trends already in motion. Part of the difficulty in assessing its impact is that it was just one of a number of major catastrophes to strike during the fourteenth century. The others were the Great Famine of 1315-17, the worst famine of the last millennium; the great cattle epizootic of 1318-19, the worst livestock disease of the millennium; and the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the worst civil uprising in English history. Modern science has cast new light upon the causes of these extreme epidemics and famines, and in doing so has revealed the dramatic instability of the climate as world temperatures cooled and the Little Ice Age began. Catastrophes of this magnitude and frequency reveal to the historian a great deal about human society, its beliefs and responses, and the resilience of its institutions. This was also a period of political turmoil. In 1326 Edward II was the first king to be removed violently from the throne since Harold in 1066, and a similar fate befell Richard II in 1388. Both were murdered subsequently. Despite these catastrophic events, English kings waged war as if nothing had happened and the English government greatly extended its powers to regulate the life of ordinary people in new and contentious ways. The foundation stones of modern state finance and labour legislation were laid in the fourteenth century. Central institutions of English life—such as the pub and the magistrate—also emerged. Catastrophes create opportunities, too, and the English response to those opportunities was markedly different to many other parts of Europe. At the start of the century, its society, economy and political institutions all lagged behind developments in the leading regions of Europe. At the end of the century, however, England was one of the regions diverging from the rest of the continent and taking the first tentative steps towards modernity. Some historians argue that women’s work and marriage patterns were transformed after the Black Death, and the modern nuclear family emerged. This module provides you with an entertaining, fresh and fascinating introduction to medieval history, whilst revealing how some of the most significant institutional features of modern Britain began to take shape during this period. The assessment regime includes a group presentation to encourage collaboration with other first year historians.

You will examine the history of early modern Europe through the history of witchcraft, witch-beliefs, and especially witchcraft prosecutions after 1500. Through learned demonology and folk traditions, you will explore the development of the idea of the witch, and see how during the turbulent era of the Reformation this thinking translated into legal trials and, occasionally some savage witch-panics. You will look in detail at subjects such as gender, fear and anxiety, state building, and scepticism, ranging across early modern Britain, continental Europe and colonial America.

Bonjour, comment ça va? Do you want to understand what this means and how to say it? This module will help you to master basics of French language and communication. This module is perfect for you if you have never studied French before (or have very little experience of it). Throughout the semester, you’ll develop reading, listening, speaking and writing skills at the A1 level of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). This means that you will learn to communicate about yourself and your immediate environment in a set of concrete, everyday situations. You’ll be taught in a very interactive and friendly environment, and will often work in pairs or small groups. Your two-hour seminar will focus on listening, reading and writing skills, while the oral hour will help you to develop your confidence in speaking. We’ll tackle some grammatical notions in class, but always as a means for you to improve your communication skills. You’ll also have opportunities to explore aspects of the cultures where French is spoken, thanks to the various documents we will use to develop your linguistic skills (songs, podcasts, leaflets…). You’ll be assessed by two course tests: the first will cover listening, reading, and writing skills and the second will cover your speaking skills. On successful completion of this module, you’ll be able to understand and use familiar everyday expressions aimed at both the satisfaction of concrete needs, or those used to describe areas of most immediate relevance. You’ll be able to introduce yourself and others, ask and answer questions about personal details, and interact in a simple way provided the other person talks slowly and clearly.

Do you want to learn a new language? Do you want to access the Spanish-speaking world? Are you about to travel through Spain or any Spanish-speaking country in Latin America? Then, it´s the right time to enrol to Beginners´ Spanish I. This module will improve your academic education and will provide you with the confidence to advance towards intermediate and advanced levels. It sounds good, doesn't it? You will develop your reading, writing, listening and speaking skills and you will have the opportunity to receive personal feedback on all your efforts. You will take part in classroom-based activities, working in pairs and/or small groups supporting each other in the process of learning the Spanish and engaging with a range of tasks. You will also be able to focus on real life situations as well as the ability to communicate effectively in those situations. There will also be opportunities to explore aspects of the cultures where Spanish is currently the main language. By the end of this module, you will have the linguistic competence necessary to understand and use common everyday language and simple sentences, to communicate both in writing and verbally. If you have a recent Spanish GCSE grade C or below, or an international equivalent, then this module is appropriate for you.

How would you converse with someone who is deaf? At work? In school? In an emergency? How can you avoid typical faux pas due to ignorance of a different culture? Can a 'signed'/'visual' language 'convey as adequately' as a 'spoken' language? These questions highlight the central learning achieved in this module. This is a course in British Sign Language assuming no prior, or minimal knowledge of the language. Throughout the course you will discover aspects central to the Deaf World and its Culture, and how to communicate through a unique 'visual' language, a language that uses your hands and body to communicate! Teaching and learning strategies involve signed conversation (from early on), role-play, and lots of games and exercises that make a truly 'fun and enjoyable' module to take. You will learn a little about the history of the Deaf and Sign Language itself, and its long battle to be recognised. You will discover how using your body and hands can be an exciting and meaningful way of communicating. You will acquire a wide range of easily usable vocabulary, a deeper look into various features that make the language unique, and very different to spoken languages. On successful completion of this module you will have developed knowledge and skills that will enable you to communicate with a Deaf person. You will be able to take your British Sign Language studies onto the next level, broadening your knowledge and developing further, the skill within this amazing 'Visual' language. Please note, students who are found to have a level of knowledge that exceeds the level for which they have enrolled may be asked to withdraw from the module.

Do you want to explore Japanese culture or travel to Japan? Would you like to enhance your career opportunities? This is a beginners' course in Japanese assuming little or no prior experience or knowledge of the language. In this module, you'll learn reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills. You'll gain the linguistic understanding of a number of real life situations, as well as the ability to communicate effectively in those situations. There will also be opportunities to explore aspects of the cultures where Japanese is spoken. Particular emphasis will be placed on your acquisition of a sound knowledge of grammar. Please note that if you are found to have a level of knowledge in a language that exceeds the level for which you have enrolled, you may be asked to withdraw from the module at the tutor's discretion. This is a subsidiary language module, and very occasionally, may need to be cancelled if there are low levels of enrolment.

This is a most lively, accessible and carefully-paced Arabic course, aimed at beginners with little or no previous knowledge of the language, who want to understand, speak and read Arabic confidently. The course is based on the best selling book series Mastering Arabic 1 series: - teaches Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), the universal language of the Arab world - covers a functional variety of situations you will encounter in the Arab world - offers a gradual introduction to the language, script and structures through the development of essential speaking, listening, reading and writing skills - some aspects of the Arab world and culture(s) are covered.

Have you ever wished you could order your mulled wine at the Christmas market in German? How would it feel be to be able to introduce yourself in German or survive a basic conversation in the language? Or do you simply want to understand what makes the Germans, the Austrians, or the Swiss tick? These questions highlight the central learning you will achieve within this module. Our beginners’ course in German is perfect if you have very little or no prior knowledge of the language. You will gain the confidence to use German in basic conversations as you develop a first understanding of German sounds and essential grammar. You will build up a bank of key vocabulary to survive in real-life situations. You will also gain a greater awareness of German traditions and ways of thinking to help you make sense of a country that is deeply rooted in the heart of Europe. In a relaxed environment you will participate in classroom-based activities, working in pairs and groups to try out and be creative with new sounds, words and phrases. The fun of language learning will never be far away and promises to give you the confidence to make the first steps in German. As well as speaking and listening to each other you will discover the joy of understanding an authentic German text and to write an amazing first paragraph in German. A first course in German will enable you to add a vital skill to your CV. At this crucial political and cultural moment in time the study of the German language and culture will without doubt make you a more attractive graduate and informed global citizen, whatever your specialism or area of interest. Please note that you should not have a level of German that exceeds the level of this course.

Global Politics 2 explores the most important controversies and debates in contemporary international politics. Because international politics is constantly changing, we review this module every year, altering the precise mix of topics to reflect the world that you see around you. All of our topics involve questions of power, ethics, transnational cooperation and security. Recently we have explored terrorism, nuclear weapons, our moral obligations to foreigners, as well as migration, the fate of the environment, and emerging powers in the international system.

Trump’s Tweets, Macron on TikTok, government sponsored troll farms and personalised campaign messages sent by algorithms…political communication has changed drastically in the last five years. Pundits and some scholars warn of serious dangers to democracy. What are the tricks of the trade in modern political communication and how different are they from those of the past? How does one now succeed to get across a message and gain support? Should we be worried about the implications for political discourse and decision-making? This module will enable you to critically assess the role of communication in national and international politics and help you understand the dynamics among political actors, media and citizens in opinion formation and decision-making. This is a professional practice module in which you will gain skills relevant to the conduct of political communications and to many other work environments, as well as experience working in a team on a task that requires critical thinking and collaborative strategizing. This module is ideal for anyone interested in working in politics, diplomacy, journalism, marketing, or for advocacy or activist civil society groups. Ideas about the power of communications and the ways that various political actors use that power are at the heart of this module. You’ll examine how these actors use the media in political communications. Lectures and readings will cover media effects, how political communication has changed with changes in media technology, branding and celebrity in politics, and soft power with political communication at the international level, as well as the tools used by various political actors, such as political parties or civic movements. Lectures are interactive, using an audience response system and open discussion. Seminar activities include practical tasks as well as ones to enhance understanding of the readings. The first assessed work is a group project in which you will play the role of junior analysts in a communications consultancy and you will work together to assess the political communications of a real political actor, your “client”, producing a report and presentation that includes recommendations for improvement. The second is an essay that gives you the chance to develop your ability to analyse and synthesise. By the end of this module you will be able to identify and describe the actors and their interests in a given political communications contexts, as well as formulate and articulate clear arguments about the relationships between political actors and the media in relation to power and agency. You will have gained experience in a simulated work scenario that will give you skills transferable across a number of professions as you will have delivered analysis and recommendations in a professional-style presentation and report. You will also be able evaluate political communications’ role in an international context, something increasingly necessary in the ever more globalized world both for political and corporate actors.

The module will offer an introduction to the developments in Western thought that shaped the emergence of modernity in the 17th century. The background will be the scientific revolution, begun with the new astronomy of Kepler and Galileo, culminating in the lawful model of the universe offered by Newton. In response to these developments, philosophy itself underwent a revolution in all its fields, from metaphysics, in the shape of materialism, to political philosophy, especially in the development of the concept of free speech and freedom of thought. Each week we will look at a different thinker, including Descartes, Hobbes, Cavendish, Spinoza, and Leibniz. We shall also look at some the developments in poetry throughout the century, including Milton, Donne, and Vaughan.

This is a module you will find helpful throughout your degree, informing and perhaps changing the way you read and analyse literature, film and other cultural forms. Across the twelve weeks, you’ll not only engage with the rich, complex and provocative work of literary critics and theorists – including deconstructive, feminist, post-colonial and queer theorists – but also of some of the thinkers and writers who have influenced them: such as Marx, Freud and Saussure. You will therefore encounter some of the most important and exciting thinkers of the modern period, acquiring an understanding of developments in linguistics, economics, psychoanalysis and philosophy, and tracing the ways in which these overlap with, and inform, literary and cultural study.

In this module, you’ll examine examples of twentieth-century European writing (all read in translation). Rather than (merely) place writers in their national contexts, you’ll deal with topics, issues and formal experiments that complicate, sometimes transcend, national boundaries. In fact you’ll interrogate what 'European' might mean in relation to literature - where are the borders? Are continental Europeans fundamentally 'other'? And if so, how does this otherness manifest itself aesthetically, thematically, tonally and formally? You'll look at how writers from different countries frequently challenge the conventions of genre and the conventions of reading and interpreting. Among a range of important innovations (or continuities), you may explore varieties of 'European' modernism, postmodernism, the absurd, fantasy, noir, and other genres. You’ll also ask how European writers have responded to the challenges, upheavals and catastrophes of the twentieth century and how they deal with the ethnic, religious and cultural diversity of Europe.

1780-1840 was the Age of Revolution and Romanticism, often regarded as a revolutionary style of writing. It was the age of the American and French Revolution and the Wars they entailed, the age of slavery and rebellion, of travel, exploration and the beginning of the later nineteenth-century British empire. You may think of Romantic writing as mainly nature poetry, primarily work by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Byron. But the signs of a ‘Romantic’ sensibility can also be found in a much broader constituency of writing: the novel, letter writing, the essay, political and aesthetic theory, and social commentary. In this module you’ll be introduced to some of the most exciting Romantic period writing, including poetry, fiction and non-fictional prose. You’ll also explore key period artistic and literary concepts such as the sublime, beautiful, picturesque, the Hellenic, and pastoral, and you’ll analyse the many ways in which the writers of the period exploited concepts of landscape. You will look at issues such as the Supernatural and Dreaming. Your understanding of Romantic writing will be enhanced by an analysis of aesthetics, politics, and of the work of women writers. During the course you’ll explore poetry by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, as well as Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park (1816) and Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818; 1831). You may also consider writings by poets, such as John Clare, Charlotte Smith, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Mary Robinson, as well as prose works by Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft and others. You’ll look at how writing is gendered in the period and the implications of this for both male and female writers. You’ll be taught through a mixture of one-hour weekly lectures and two-hour weekly seminars, as well as self-directed study. You’ll gain experience in communicating your ideas in tutorials, as well as through written work and presentations. You’ll be assessed through two formative pieces (a close reading and a project bibliography) and one summative piece on a project chosen by yourself in discussion with your seminar tutors.

In this module you will explore how words open out onto worlds in eighteenth-century literature. We begin by reading Samuel Johnson's Preface from his monumental Dictionary of the English Language in relation to a selection from David Dabydeen's novel Johnson's Dictionary. In the opening week, we'll see how paying close attention to language can help us think about the enrtwinement of eighteenth-century literature with exploration, empire, and enslavement. The first half of the module focuses on texts about people, real or imagined, who travel across geographical and cultural boundaries. The writers in the first half will include authors such as Jonathan Swift, who wrote the fictional travelogue Gulliver's Travels, Oliver Goldsmith, who impersonated a Chinese visitor to London in his series of essays The Citizen of the World, and Samson Occom, the first Native American writer to publish an autobiography. While the first half of the module focuses on the wider world, the second half of the module focuses on the inner world of the mind. We will read texts like the Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe's A Siclian Romance alongside the poetry of Anne Finch, Alexander Pope, and Phillis Wheatley, the first African American writer to publish a volume of poetry. In this part of the module, we will see how writers investigate the workings of the mind using the resources of literary form and trace the connections between the mind and the wide world. We conclude with the writings of the Black British writer Ignatius Sancho, whose letters are full of observations on eighteenth-century literature, and who will help us reflect on how we might read the literature of the eighteenth century today. By taking this module, you’ll be reading a range of exciting texts that will expand your sense of what literature can do. You’ll also gain sharpened analytical and research skills that will help you see significant textual patterns in texts and trace connections between literary texts and the larger world in which they move. You'll also read texts that will help you understand the history of women's writing and you'll be introduced to the beginnings of Native American and Black writing in English. The module fulfils the pre-1789 requirement.

In this module, you’ll discover a huge variety of writing from one of Britain's most exciting and turbulent periods of cultural, political and intellectual transformation: the seventeenth century. We begin by exploring how English literature was formed out of its encounters with classical texts and how women established a place for their writing within English literary culture for the first time. In the centre of the module, we discover how seventeenth-century people wrote about their encounters with other cultures, whether as travellers to the Ottoman Empire (which stretched across the Middle East), or as colonists meeting Native Americans in Massachusetts. In the module's latter section, we ask how literature was transformed by the tumultuous upheavals of the English civil war and the execution of the monarch, events which have sent shockwaves through the centuries which still resonate today. The modules’ themes come together in the study of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, one of the first novels and a pioneering work of women’s writing, which tells the terrible story of an African prince who was enslaved in Surinam. Authors we study include famous figures such as Ben Jonson and John Milton (including a look at his masterpiece, Paradise Lost), as well as many lesser-known writers, including women such as Lucy Hutchinson and Hester Pulter, or the astonishing Turkish travel writer, Evliya Çelebi. The module works through lectures, which establish larger questions we might ask of the week's material, and seminars, in which we read passages of texts together closely.

The modernist movement transformed literature and the arts worldwide in the early part of the 20th century, peaking in the period between 1918 and 1939. Although the term modernism was rarely used by authors in this period, in the period after World War II it became the usual term to describe a group of writers, responding to one another, whose work is characterised by radical experiments with language and form, which aimed to do justice to a range of many subjects such as the mysteries of consciousness and the unconscious, gender, sexuality, and desire, violence and democracy, the primitive and the mechanical. We will be reading a range of authors, including such long-canonised figures as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, HD, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf, but expanding the modernist canon in the light of recent scholarship to other more recently revived authors such as Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, Dorothy Richardson, and Jean Rhys. We will trace some of the origins of modernism in earlier literary movements such as Symbolism, Imagism, Aestheticism, and Impressionism, and explore its kinship with foreign literary movements such as Dada and Surrealism. Modernism invented modern methods of criticism and we will be placing a particular emphasis on the close reading of poetry and poetic prose. A study of modernism is essential for understanding all 20th century literature and this module is highly recommended for any students wishing to take any modules in 20th-century literature.

To read medieval writing is to encounter otherness, to engage with a culture (really a variety of cultures) that at times seems familiar, recognizable, yet which repeatedly reminds us of its difference and distance from us. When a huge and intimidating green knight enters King Arthur’s court at Camelot and issues his challenge, he is disturbing not because he is entirely alien, but because he is alike enough to unsettle the court’s sense of identity. The fourteenth-century poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of the most complex and challenging works of literature ever written, might serve as a metaphor for our experience of medieval writing, and of the language in which it is written: Middle English. It is strangely familiar. Yet through the experience of otherness we find our multiple identities, and in studying Medieval Writing you will (re)discover the genres and modes that have shaped our literary histories: lyric, comedy, tragedy, romance, allegory, satire, historiography, autobiography and fantasy, to name but a few. The module is configured along the themes of ‘pilgrimage, travellers and exiles’, which allows us to understand the diverse forms of interaction — real and imagined — between European and non-European cultures: military, religious, and mercantile exchanges, for example. You will discover a culture of dazzling intellectual richness and variety that will dispel any lazily pejorative modern clichés about the term ‘medieval’. And you will be given the tools to make those discoveries – in addition to learning how to read Middle English, you will learn about the materiality of medieval texts (e.g. how to understand manuscripts), and of the historical coordinates of those texts: the Black Death, the Peasants’ Revolt, religious persecution, the feudal system and its decline. Whether it’s the cosmopolitan intellectual brilliance of Chaucer, the fantastic realities of Arthurian romance, the autobiography of Margery Kempe, the travel writing of Sir John Mandeville, or the ethical dilemmas posed by the Gawain-poet, Medieval Writing has something for you.

This module aims to equip you with a knowledge of writing from across the Victorian period, in a variety of modes (fiction, poetry, science, journalism, criticism, nonsense). We will examine authors such as George Eliot, Tennyson, Dickens, Darwin, Charlotte Bronte, and the Brownings. You will thus develop an awareness of how different kinds of writing in the period draw on, influence, and contest with each other. Likewise, you will acquire a sense for the cultural, political and socio-economic contexts of 19th-century writing, and some of the material contexts in which that writing took place (serial publication, popular readership, periodical writing, public controversy).

What is the state of the art of the novel at present? And what are some of the distinguishing preoccupations and characteristics of the contemporary novel? This module seeks to consider these questions with a view to developing an understanding of the condition of the novel today. The module focuses on fiction published in the UK and Ireland in the last ten years, with a particular focus on more inventive writing. We’ll read a small set of contemporary novels, the content and form of each of which will exemplify some of the possibilities for fiction in the present day. We’ll consider the relation between the contemporary novel and the contemporary moment – for example, our concerns regarding the environment, identity, nationhood, and history – and think also about what it might mean to be or to call oneself contemporary: to be together with one’s own time. The list of authors chosen for the module changes regularly, as you would expect. Recently, it has included the likes of Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, Deborah Levy and Kamila Shamsie. You’ll consider a range of ways of conceiving and interpreting the contemporary novel, and discuss these ways with your peers. There is no consensus about what does or should constitute a canon of contemporary fiction, although there is a growing critical literature on the subject, some of which we’ll read. It will be our job, in lectures and in seminars, to think carefully about what novels published in the last ten years offer the best argument for the continued viability of the novel itself as a contemporary art form.

The aim of this lecture-seminar module is to help you become a better reader of Shakespearean drama. Shakespeare is now so universally known and read that it is easy to forget that he wrote at a specific historical moment for specific audiences, actors and theatrical spaces. What happens to our understanding of Shakespeare's plays when we read them within the context of theatrical performance?  This is what our module enables you to do -- and in doing so, it aims to give you fresh, new ways to interpret Shakespearean language and theatricality. Lectures equip you with methods and contexts for reading Shakespeare's plays; seminars give you the chance to put these into practice through close, attentive readings of his plays. Each week we study a different play in detail. The summative assessment asks you to put what you've been learning into practice by writing a critical analysis of more than one play using some of the module's methods.

In this module you will study literary practice within the context of the British Empire, and the political and cultural responses to it. It will enable you to understand the role of literature in imperialism, colonization and decolonization, how it both shaped and was shaped by these large historical forces, and how we might account for the continuing presence of these forces on the world today. The module will introduce you to the theoretical and conceptual apparatus of postcolonial literary studies and to some of the most important ideas for understanding the formation of the modern world, such as race and racism, nations and nationalism, colonial discourse and postcolonial theory, and how gender and sexuality were pivotal in the formation of colonial and post-colonial identities. Beginning with canonical works by British writers from the eighteenth century through the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, the module will then consider literary and political responses to the experience of empire and colonization by writers from South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Australasia, and the Americas. The module will discuss writers such as Daniel Defoe, Joseph Conrad, Chinua Achebe, Jean Rhys, Tsitsi Dangarembga, VS Naipaul, Amitav Ghosh, Kate Grenville, J.M Coetzee and Tessa McWatt.

A semester spent at a university abroad with the approval of the School. Students interested in European universities should see the Erasmus exchange modules. In all instances you must consult with Study Abroad Office.

You’ll examine the development of the English countryside during the Middle Ages. You’ll discuss the nature of rural settlement, high status buildings and landscapes and 'semi-natural' environments.

The Anglo-Saxon period spanned 600 years from the end of Roman Britain to the Norman Conquest. It was a period of turmoil, seeing waves of immigration, the clash of peoples and religions, and kingdoms jockeying for control. Out of this crucible England emerged. This is the story of how it came to be. Using contemporary sources, you will learn to handle evidence and reconstruct the worldview of people who lived over a thousand years ago. Anglo-Saxon history teaches you to go a long way with a little evidence; to use your imagination to fill in the gaps. Whether it's new to you or something you've studied before, you'll achieve a deeper and richer understanding of how the nation was formed. Via lectures, seminars and private study, you'll discover the Romans, Saxons and Vikings; the strange treasure they left behind; the cryptic and conflicting chronicles (learning to read between the lines), and debates we still haven't resolved today. Developing your powers of argumentation, you'll run into questions with no certain answer. Building with fragmentary evidence will boost your creativity, and you'll encounter ancient artefacts. (Trips have included West Stow Anglo-Saxon village and Norwich Castle Museum.) At the end of the module you'll command an overview of how England came into being. You'll also have built your ability to see other people's points of view, even if they lived a thousand years ago. This is a crucial ability whether in personal or professional relationships. Also learning to argue with evidence as fragmentary as the evidence we'll explore will hone your problem-solving skills to an unusual degree.

This module examines a critical period in English History. We begin with the Conquest of England by the Normans and look at the ways in which as a consequence England was drawn into European affairs. The mid point is the loss of those continental lands in 1204 and the Magna Carta crisis of 1215. We then explore the domination of Britain by the English kingdom and end with the start of England’s next great European adventure, The Hundred Years War.

You will explore one of the most turbulent and dynamic periods in English history: c.1400-1485. In addition to exploring the narrative of events as it unfolded chronologically you will also learn about topics such as: theories of medieval kingship, the relationship between church and state, the relationship between England and Continental Europe, medieval warfare, chivalry and knighthood, the relationship between national and local concerns, and the opportunities for people of all genders to participate in political struggle. You will have the opportunity to read a wide range of primary sources as well as considering key historiographical debates. Upon completion of your module, you should have a more nuanced understanding of the exercise of power in the 15th century and how the deeds and decisions of those in charge impacted the lives of people further down the social spectrum. You should also have honed your skills in primary source analysis and historiographical scrutiny.

We will introduce you to German history in the twentieth century, which was characterised by various radical regime changes and territorial alterations. Topics include German world policy and nationalism in the late imperial period; imperialism and expansionism during the First World War; the challenges of modernity in the Weimar Republic; the rise of Hitler and the formation of the Nazi empire in Europe; the post-war division of Germany and the legacy of the Third Reich; the nature of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) dictatorship and the problem of West German terrorism; as well as the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification. Special attention will be given to questions of nationalism and national identity, issues of history and memory, and Germany’s role in Europe and the world. On completion of this module you will have developed a solid understanding of one of the most dramatic periods of German history when the country oscillated between the two extremes of war and repression, on the one hand, and the return to peace and democracy, on the other.

What shapes our view of history and heritage? How do we balance academic approaches with the need to engage an audience? How do we assess the significance of historic buildings and sites? On this module you’ll explore these questions by studying the ways in which history is presented in the public sphere, in museums and galleries, at heritage sites and historic buildings, in the media and online. Through lectures, seminars and field trips you’ll gain an understanding of different current approaches to history and heritage, exploring themes such as the role of museums, the commemoration of historic events and the development of digital heritage.

You'll explore the experiences and fortunes of the peoples of the western peninsula of Eurasia between the rule of the Emperor Constantine I in the 330s and the call to crusade in the 1090s. At the beginning of the period, the lands centred on the Mediterranean and much of its hinterland were situated within the Roman empire. Yet, within three hundred years, this empire had disintegrated and been replaced by a number of successor states, ruled by competing dynasties. These states included Visigothic Hispania, Vandal Africa, and Merovingian Francia. Another—in fact, the longest lived of all the successor states—was the eastern empire centred on Constantinople, long known to historians as ‘the Byzantine empire’. By the close of the 7th century, many of these states had themselves been conquered by Arabic and African warriors committed to the new religion of Islam and been incorporated in the Caliphate centred on the city of Damascus—an empire which easily rivalled the might, spread, and power of Rome before its own collapse and fission in circa 1000. What Islamic rulers could do, so too could Christian ones. In 800 the son of a Frankish usurper, Charlemagne, was crowned emperor of the West. The actions and ambitions of this emperor were as formative and as formidable in the history of 9th and 10th century Europe as those of Napoleon in the 18th and 19th. The heirs and successors of Charlemagne—whether Frankish, Ottonian, or Scandinavian—were long compelled to negotiate his legacy and memory. By the 11th century, even the Roman pontiffs, now advancing a new programme of reform and renewal, were looking to situate themselves in relation to his Salian successors. The summons to liberate Jerusalem and rescue the Greek empire in the east, carefully tailored to the aspirations of the new élites of Francia and Catalonia, was perhaps the most explosive strategy advanced by these Roman pontiffs. This course is thus broad in chronological scope, covering more than eight hundred years, and extensive in geographical range, taking us from the Atlantic to the Euphrates, from the Atlas mountains to the North Sea. In the course of this journey we'll meet many warriors, saints, and rulers, both female and male.

Between the sixteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, the English crossed the oceans and claimed territory on every continent other than Antarctica. This module surveys the creation and growth of British Empire, examining its origins and its impact on an array of peoples. In the context of studying how the empire spread and functioned, we will consider the varied experiences of Africans, Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians, Protestant refugees from the continent of Europe, the peoples of India, the Irish, and British settlers across the globe. The complex, intimate, and often violent interactions of these groups led to ideological battles pitting loyalism against republicanism, for example, and imperial “civilization” against an array of indigenous cultural revivals. At first glance these struggles may seem to place the British against the subject peoples of their empire, but on closer examination it becomes apparent that they fractured nearly every population within the imperial domains. The creative energy of the British Empire stemmed in large part from collaborations between British groups and individuals and segments of their purported imperial subjects in building, reforming, or in some cases seeking to destroy the structures of imperialism

We will look at the modern history of the Middle East, primarily concerning the political history of the region as well as relations between Middle Eastern countries and Western powers. Our aim is to encourage you to think critically about historical processes of state formation, the legacy of colonialism/imperialism, the role of culture and identity, and the significance of natural resources and economic factors.

This module introduces you to the history and theory of propaganda, and its role in society. You’ll consider what constitutes and defines propaganda. Focusing on the 20th century, we examine propaganda in a range of political settings, both totalitarian and democratic, in the local context of the relationships of power and communications. The module is structured chronologically, starting with the development of propaganda during World War I and finishing with a consideration of propaganda in the 21st century.

The Great War transformed domestic expectations and ushered in an age of Mass Democracy and economic hardship. After 1945 the welfare state and full employment saw rising affluence, accompanied by the emergence of youth cultures, a sexual revolution and new forms of radicalism and identity politics. The economic crisis of the 1970s sped-up deindustrialisation whilst the neoliberalism of Thatcher and her successors deepened inequalities and stoked nationalist sentiment. We explore the social, political and economic history of these tumultuous years.

The beginning of the twentieth century witnessed a period of immense instability and change with the emergence of the United States as an international actor in the West and the Japanese break from the Chinese sphere of influence in the East. This was underpinned by technological developments, the expansion of global empires, extreme economic dislocation and two global wars. You will examine the conduct and content of the foreign policies of the major powers from the 1890s, with the Sino-Japanese War and the Spanish-American War, to the Japanese occupation of Asia. This will include assessing the interplay of the political, military, economic, strategic and cultural forces that shaped the beginning of the twentieth century and which continue to resonate in the contemporary world.

World War II and the immense sacrifices the Soviet people made in defeating Nazism left multiple long-lasting legacies that shaped the multi-ethnic Soviet and post-Soviet Russian state, society and economy. This module aims to give you a better understanding of the state of contemporary Russian politics, society and economy through detailed historical enquiry of Russia’s path since 1945. It is divided into two main parts: in part one you will examine key periods of post-war Russian history in chronological order, and in the second part you will look more closely at key contemporary in their historical perspective. These will include the question what it meant to be Soviet and its legacy; geopolitical imperatives, which only recently led Putin to invade Crimea; identity politics and historical commemoration; the transition of the economy from a planned economy to a market economy; and the complex mutations and adaptations of power structures in Russia that gave birth to Putin’s ‘managed democracy’.

The Tudors are England’s most famous royal dynasty. This module seeks to move beyond the traditional stories of Henry’s turbulent marriages and Elizabeth’s stunning victory over the Spanish Armada. You'll gain a better understanding of the change and turmoil the Tudor century caused, not just to the monarchs themselves but to the lives of their subjects, the everyday people of England. Beyond establishing a strong chronological knowledge of the 16th century and its religious upheavals, the module will consider issues of gender; the changing construction of the social order; the importance and developing role of local elites; problems caused by poverty and dearth; and the position of England within Britain itself and within Europe.

This module will explore the diversity and histories of literatures emerging from transatlantic crossings and exchange. Taught through a lecture circus format, it will draw on the research expertise of colleagues in both AMA and LDC, in order to demonstrate the breadth of the Transatlantic as both a geography and an imaginary. Materials will include literary responses to the Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade, writing from the Caribbean, the work of writers whose careers took them from America to Paris—or from London to New York—and transatlantic literary networks. Each lecture will be given by a different academic, based on their own areas of research, and include Q&A's on how they conceive of the Transatlantic as a critical concept and constellation, and as a crucial site for understanding decolonisation.

This module will provide you with the opportunity work within a creative/cultural/charity/ heritage/media or other appropriate organisation in order to apply the skills you are developing through your degree to the working world and to develop your knowledge of employment sectors within which you may wish to work in the future. The module emphasises industry experience, sector awareness and personal development through a structured reflective learning experience. Having sourced and secured your own placement (with support from Careers Central), you work within your host organisation undertaking tasks that will help you to gain a better understanding of professional practices within your chosen sector. Taught sessions enable you to acquire knowledge of both the industries in which you are placed as well as focusing on personal and professional development germane to the sector. Your assessment tasks will provide you with an opportunity to critically reflect on the creative and cultural sector in which you have worked as well as providing opportunities to undertake presentations, gather evidence, and articulate your newly acquired skills and experiences.

How do notions of gender and sexuality shape culture, and how are in turn our understanding and experiences of gender and sexuality shaped by cultural production? How important are other times, places and identifications – associated with class, race, ethnicity – to these understandings and experiences? And to what extent can a film, an image, a testimony, or a place capture such complexity? Addressing these questions from an interdisciplinary approach, the aim of the module is to explore the ways in which gender and sexuality are constituted through a broad array of experiences, practices, and cultural products. The module focuses on issues raised in classical and contemporary research in history, politics, media, cultural studies and visual cultures such as: representation and cultural production; subjectivity; identity; identification; bodies and embodiment; performance and performativity; among others. Overall, by exploring theory in conjunction with queer cultural production that explores questions of power, identity, and desire across different racial, national, and cultural landscapes, the module aims to problematise how gender and sexuality are not stable identities or classifications but are instead processes involving normalisations, hierarchies and relations of domination that can be challenged, troubled and/or queered.

This module offers students the opportunity to develop a comprehensive understanding of the cultural, political, and economic contexts of the videogames industry, and the techniques and principles used in game design. The module will give an overview of the key academic debates from video game history from production to reception, considering the current state of the industry, issues of representation in games, and study of games culture within a broader context. The module will provide students with the opportunity to play and critique a variety of games hardware and software. In addition, the module provides an understanding of hardware platforms and software tools used in the creation of videogames, making use of UEA's Media Suite to offer a practice-based component to aid in the understanding of the principles behind games development. Students will be able to learn entry level games design practices. No previous experience of coding or games development is required to undertake the module, just an interest in the subject.

What does it mean to publish, which, from the Middle French ‘publier’ means ‘to make public, to make known, to make famous’? How do you do it? This module will provide you with an introduction. With support from live project examples from UEA Publishing Project (UPP) and practical resources provided by the Media Suite, this module will help you acquire the basic skills for designing and publishing your own short publication; a book, a magazine, a fanzine, audiobook, or podcast. It will also act as preparation for internships available with UPP the following academic year, for those interested in pursuing them. In seminars you will learn what it takes to be a successful editor, and, by considering issues of readership, marketing, promotion, finance, scheduling, and copyright law, you will know how to successfully plan and manage your project. You will be introduced different kinds of publishing —commercial, independent, DIY, and digital — and gain understanding of editorial roles and processes, the ins-and-outs of pre-production, and the best way to market and publicise your creative product. Students will also have the opportunity to attend the annual London Book Fair.

Have you ever wondered what it means to write creatively? Or how you might articulate what Zadie Smith calls ‘your way of being in the world’? Together we’ll address these questions. You’ll explore the work of some of the finest writers in the world, while also receiving clear guidance on how you might bring shape to the promptings of your imagination. This module will get you writing prose fiction and/or poetry. While there is no single, authorised way to write, there are things worth knowing about. You’ll discover some of these things in class; others you’ll pick up through being alert to what you have read and the way in which it functions. The most important thing, however, is to discover your own way of doing things. What drives you to capture a certain moment, or tell a certain story in a certain way? That’s what we'll be aiming for. Along the way you’ll develop an understanding of the craft of writing – the technical nuts & bolts – while acquiring the disciplines necessary to being a writer - observation, drafting, and submitting to deadlines. You'll be guided through a series of themes and concepts that go to the heart of creative writing, from voice and structure, to imagery and form. You'll generate material throughout the course, both through guided exercises and private study. Very often you'll be asked to write about ‘what you know’, drawing on notebooks, memory, family stories, your sensory impressions. In prose you will go on to look at such things as character, dialogue, point-of-view, ‘showing’ versus ‘telling’, plotting, etc. In poetry, there will be an exploration of the possibilities of pattern and form, sound, voice, imagery, and rhythm. By the end of the course you’ll have developed a body of work to call your own and a sense of what it means and what it takes to write seriously.

Have you ever wondered what it means to write creatively? Or how you might articulate what Zadie Smith calls ‘your way of being in the world’? Together we’ll address these questions. You’ll explore the work of some of the finest writers in the world, while also receiving clear guidance on how you might bring shape to the promptings of your imagination. This module will get you writing prose fiction and/or poetry. While there is no single, authorised way to write, there are things worth knowing about. You’ll discover some of these things in class; others you’ll pick up through being alert to what you have read and the way in which it functions. The most important thing, however, is to discover your own way of doing things. What drives you to capture a certain moment, or tell a certain story in a certain way? That’s what we'll be aiming for. Along the way you’ll develop an understanding of the craft of writing – the technical nuts & bolts – while acquiring the disciplines necessary to being a writer - observation, drafting, and submitting to deadlines. You'll be guided through a series of themes and concepts that go to the heart of creative writing, from voice and structure, to imagery and form. You'll generate material throughout the course, both through guided exercises and private study. Very often you'll be asked to write about ‘what you know’, drawing on notebooks, memory, family stories, your sensory impressions. In prose you will go on to look at such things as character, dialogue, point-of-view, ‘showing’ versus ‘telling’, plotting, etc. In poetry, there will be an exploration of the possibilities of pattern and form, sound, voice, imagery, and rhythm. By the end of the course you’ll have developed a body of work to call your own and a sense of what it means and what it takes to write seriously.

What kinds of writing skills produce great journalism? This question is essential to creating powerful journalism and it’s a central concern of this module. The Writing of Journalism enables you to develop a critical awareness of the skills and structures involved in creating effective journalism. You’ll consider a range of journalistic forms and find out how best to nurture and develop your own writing. You'll have the opportunity to explore the ways in which journalistic writing works – its contexts, its demands, and its inventiveness. This will enable us to approach journalism as a discourse with its own conventions, practices, and ideologies. This module is concerned with journalism as a practice, and a genre. As such, it involves discussion, peer-workshops, and practical experience of reading and writing news and feature articles. In addition to writing your own journalism, you will examine journalistic writing and critical work concerning the craft, in order to probe and challenge your own ideas and assumptions about the practice and production of this writing form. Rather than see the practice of journalism and the critical study of journalism as distinct activities, this module aims to engage you as critical readers and writers whose work is informed by both contexts. In so doing, you’ll gain a greater understanding of the demands and conventions of journalistic writing, develop and sharpen your own work, and gain the discursive flexibility which will allow you to navigate the writing of journalism today.

How can theatre change the world? You'll attempt to find out by examining the use of theatre and performance by theatre artists and activists to challenge power and create the possibility of change. You’ll look at political theatre in the USA, South America, South Africa, and Europe in the 20th century and beyond; week by week you will encounter plays, writers, performers, and theorists and build up your own toolkit of political theatre. You’ll also create short plays and performance works, and take part in forum theatre, dance, stagings, and events which will enhance your political and theatrical understanding. You will be assessed through writing a short play, a sustained comparative essay, and an original performance work. Themes studied might include feminism, LGBTQ theatre, anti-racism, and Marxism. You will debate, create, and study and emerge having found your own voice as a political theatre-maker.

Module Description What was the feminist theatre movement and what does it mean for you now as a writer, theatre maker and/or scholar? Feminist Theatre allows you to explore key feminist theatre makers from the Suffrage movement to the present, focusing on radical companies and writers of the 1970s and 1980s. Combining seminars and practical workshops, you will investigate what feminist historiography is and how you can engage creatively with archives. The module invites you to draw on a lineage of feminist ideas and methods to consider and challenge the continued under representation of women in theatre (and beyond). Assessment will be part analytical and part creative or creative-critical work, with an option to create a performance. All welcome! No need to identify as a woman or feminist to take part.

How do we convey the experience of one language and culture in the words of another? What is at stake intellectually, artistically and politically in translation? This module will provide you with a descriptive vocabulary for the analysis of literary translation and an introduction to key theoretical explanations of what happens when we translate. You’ll study translations from a range of historical periods, genres and languages. In the past, we have worked on authors such as Marina Tsvetaeva, Pablo Neruda, Adonis, Clarice Lispector, Thomas Mann and Knut Hamsun. Theories have included the classic controversies of St. Jerome and Vladimir Nabokov as well as debates about cultural equivalence and political issues such as the representation of the foreign. The module is taught by seminar where we engage with translation in a variety of ways, for example comparing different translations of a single text, translating the Bible from multiple languages into English, rewriting existing translations and studying draft manuscript translations of a novel by Georges Perec. Assessment is by summative coursework for which you can either produce a comparative analysis of existing translations or an original translation with commentary. On successful completion of this module you’ll be able to describe the linguistic and stylistic features of a variety of texts as well as critically assess and apply different theories of translation. A thorough reading knowledge of another language besides English is advisable but not essential.

In this module we will study some of the most important poetry and prose of the English Renaissance, including masterpieces by Christopher Marlowe, Sir Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser, as well as Shakespeare's early narrative poetry (not covered on the Shakespeare module). We will be studying these writers in a unique way. Behind this great outpouring of Elizabethan writing lay a vibrant literary culture which valued rhetoric, argument, elaborate and often playful self-presentation, and which insisted that good reading helped you to develop an individual style as a writer. In response to your reading of Renaissance literature, you will put the tenets of this culture into practice, building up over the course of the module a collection of short pieces of writing in prose (or sometimes, if you wish, poetry). When reading Sidney's ground breaking 'Defence of Poetry', for instance, you might draw on his rhetorical and argumentative techniques to write your own defence of any modern art form of your choice. Or when looking at the way Thomas Nashe plays with the form of his printed books you might have the opportunity to experiment with innovative ways of presenting your own writing to its readers. Revised versions of these short pieces of writing, built up across the module, constitute your summative assessment. This module allows you to think critically in genres other than conventional academic essays, and in doing so aims to foster connections between critical and creative writing. You will have the chance to develop more confidence and self-awareness as a writer and critic through studying some of the greatest English literature.

What do you identify with and what are you identified by? How are you embodied, how you inhabit space and communicate? Which groups and communities are you as an individual connected to, or perhaps assigned to by others? The ways in which we as individuals and groups are read in the world shape our experiences. These experiences in turn, shape our ways of knowing and understanding ourselves, our world, and each other. This module will encourage students to think in fresh ways about themselves, their university work and the world around them, through critical reading and experimental writing. It will give students tools, skills and ideas which they may apply to their studies and further research more broadly. This module replaces the modules I Am and He Said, She Said: Gender and Perspective in Contemporary Fiction

The module will explore the relationship between words and images in contemporary literature. It will cover what is meant by reading images, examine the varying but related stories that words and pictures tell, and analyse the narrative techniques employed in illustrated texts. As well as developing a critical vocabulary with which to discuss how these two media can be combined, the module will survey shifts in the generic conventions of such literature over the last few decades so that students will develop an awareness of the various narrative techniques utilised by the medium. Rather than assuming comics, graphic novels, and picture books are simplistic, debased or ‘low-brow’, the module aims to address the medium as a site of exciting and innovative literary and artistic experimentation. Students will also have the chance to carry out their own creative work in the genre.

This module will offer a series of different approaches to the question of how Literature and Philosophy can speak to each other as academic disciplines, demonstrating the breadth and diversity of the two fields, as well as acquainting students with the research in literary criticism and philosophy currently being pursued at UEA. As well as examining the ways in which literature can illuminate and trouble philosophical argument, it will explore literature and 'the literary' as a topic for philosophical analysis, and the kinds of thinking such a topic would demand. Setting literature and philosophy into dialogue in this way will engender a more capacious understanding of the particular philosophical issues, and literary techniques, under discussion. The course will allow students to develop an awareness of the limits and advantages of various modes of literary and philosophical expression, and to foster more sophisticated skills in both literary and philosophical criticism. The module will be made up of a lecture circus, with two weeks given to each lecturer on a particular topic related to their current research (there will be five in all, including a lecture from the module convener, plus two from Philosophy and two from Literature, Drama and Creative Writing). The seminars will discuss issues arising from these lectures, working with texts set by the lecturer.

Using the reading and study of poetry from the post-war context up to the present day, you'll consider some of the concerns of poetry, including voice, form/structure and the 'poetry of witness'. You'll also look at contemporary visual art to consider correspondences between the arts. The poets studied will be drawn principally from an Anglo-American tradition and may include such writers as Frank O'Hara, Adrienne Rich, Yusef Komunyakaa, Carol Ann Duffy, Carolyn Forché, Patience Agbabi and Hannah Silva among others. Formative work includes creating a mini-anthology of contemporary poetry and there will be the chance to discuss poems you've written or read. You'll be able to write creatively and/or critically for assessment.

What is a short story? What do short story writers have to say? What about short story critics and theorists? Is the short story a narrative in miniature? Or is there more to a short story than simply being 'short'? And why are critics so concerned with whether the short story is alive or dead? These are the kind of questions this module will investigate by asking you to think as a short story reader, theorist, critic and writer. Reading will be drawn from short story writers - and writing about the short story - roughly spanning the 19th century to the present, and from a range of cultural contexts. Our interest will not be to establish a history of the short story, but instead to explore the range of thematic preoccupations, changing definitions, and critical debates surrounding the form, including its political and ideological perspectives. You will have the opportunity to respond to these questions in critical and/or creative forms of assessment. Writers studied might include Edgar Allan Poe, Katherine Mansfield, Julio Cortazar, Anton Chekov, Ali Smith and Ryunosuke Aqutagawa. This list is suggestive only.

En avant ! Do you want to become more proficient in French? Do you want to develop independent language-learning skills? This module will allow you to push the boundaries of your French further and develop listening, reading, speaking, and writing skills at A2+/B1 level of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). In this module you’ll learn to express and justify opinions, debate, negotiate and be able to solve problems in unexpected situations in French. You’ll be taught in a very interactive and friendly environment and will often work in pairs or small groups. Your two-hour seminar will focus on listening, reading, and writing skills, while the oral hour will help you develop your confidence in speaking. We’ll tackle grammatical concepts in class, as a means for you to improve your communication skills. You’ll also have opportunities to explore aspects of Francophone culture, thanks to the variety of material we use (songs, podcasts, leaflets…) to develop your linguistic skills. During the semester, you’ll explore topics such as the press, cinema, leisure, and tourism.

Would you like to take your German to a higher level and start to become a more independent user? Wouldn’t it be tempting to take part in a job interview or pitch a start-up idea in German? How about describing your favourite student recipe? Maybe you simply love discussing your views in person and on digital platforms. This follow-on course is perfect if you have completed the Intermediate module or have basic A-level experience in German but not if you are already working at a higher level than this. You will become more independent in conversation with others as you continue to explore essential grammar and vocabulary at a higher level. You will learn how to talk about experiences, hopes and ambitions in a more complex way and how to master the skill of persuasion. During this module you will develop a deeper understanding of the German way of thinking through looking at current affairs and some iconic German language films and series. In a relaxed environment you will participate in interactive, collaborative activities, working in groups to try out and be creative with new words and grammar structures. The fun of language learning will never be far away and promises to give you the confidence to hold your own in discussions and presentations. As well as speaking and listening to each other you will apply strategies to help you produce and understand longer texts. A sound intermediate course in German will enable you to add a vital and highly valued skill to your CV. At this crucial political and cultural moment in time the study of the German language and culture will without doubt make you a more attractive graduate and informed global citizen, whatever your specialism or area of interest. The module is not suitable for students already working at B2 or a higher level of German. Pre-requisite is a language level assessment test with the tutor.

Do you want to be able to communicate effectively with 538 million people worldwide and develop your intercultural awareness? Are you looking for a vital skill to add to your CV and becoming more employable? Wouldn’t it be nice to do so in a friendly and amusing environment? Take your Spanish skills to a higher level! Whatever your specialism or area of interest, this follow-on module is perfect for you, if you have already successfully completed the Intermediate level or have GCSE/pre-A level experience (or equivalent) of Spanish and wish to develop this to a standard comparable to A level/ Baccalaureat / B1 in the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). You will become more independent in conversation with others as you continue to explore essential grammar and vocabulary at a higher level. In a relaxed environment you will participate in interactive, collaborative activities, working in groups to try out and be creative with new words and grammar structures. Through Spanish, you’ll learn to present information and engage in discussions. Using popular cultural forms such as film and media, you’ll develop your reading, writing, listening and speaking skills. Upon successful completion of this module, you will have achieved an upper-intermediate level of Spanish. Not enrolled yet?

‘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 - the discursive formation - 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, neurasthenia, 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 Siri Hustvedt’s analytical memoir, The Shaking Woman, Or, A History of My Nerves (2010). The module equips you to work within an interdisciplinary frame and across historical periods from the late 17th century to the present.

On this module, you'll gain a deep understanding of Shakespeare's plays by immersing yourself in the contemporary theatrical scene within which he wrote - his dramatic worlds. When Shakespeare was emerging as a playwright in the 1590s, there was already one writer whose uniquely rhetorically flamboyant, even bombastic, plays, dominated the theatrical market place: Christopher Marlowe. By the time Shakespeare was a leading figure of the London theatre scene in the early 1600s, a counterpoint to his work was emerging: the plays of Ben Jonson, which embody a sceptical attitude towards the 'magic' of the theatre, very different to Shakespeare's. You'll read across this theatrical landscape, the most important period of English writing for the stage, casting some of Shakespeare's greatest plays into a new light by reading them alongside plays such as Marlowe's Tamburlaine and Jonson's The Alchemist. What conceptions of performance and theatricality seem to be embodied in these plays? How do they imagine politics and government, and how do they conceptualise gender and women's role in society? What is ultimately distinctive about Shakespeare's achievements in his own dramatic worlds? We envisage reading one play each week, and seminars will be devoted to close-reading and discussion of that play, directly preparing you for your essay-based summative assessment. Although this module will appeal to you if you studied the 'Shakespeare' module in your second year, it imagines no prior knowledge and is absolutely suited to someone coming to Shakespeare and the theatre of this period for the first time. This module's credits count toward the fulfilment of the pre-1789 requirement

The Holy Grail, Merlin, King Arthur, the Round Table, Lancelot or Guinevere - how and why do these medieval figures and tales still inspire storytelling in our society today? To answer this question, we return to the medieval origins. You will discover the development from Celtic folklore and court sponsored chronicles, through Saxon heroes to a Romance cuckold, from Marie de France’s rebel females to Malory’s prose adventures. You will explore how the literary and ideological innovations evolve, the intertextual relations which hold between Arthurian texts and how they are culturally translated, taking us through to modern film and television renditions. You will examine the genres and voices of Arthurian narratives, including its resort to prophecy, epic discourse, pseudo-exegesis and courtly romance. Medieval understandings of magic, dreams and prophecies will be studied. The various national responses to contestations between history, myth and legend, the cultural significance of differences in the representations of women, as well as questions regarding selfhood that arise in literature produced in a volatile period of religious and social uncertainty and dissent will be explored. By the end of this module, you should develop a nuanced understanding of what makes a literary tradition and an increased awareness of the varied source base of the Arthurian legend. You will be able to critically engage with comparative readings or will produce a creative writing of an Arthurian text, presented according to editorial conventions surrounding medieval texts or translations.

Did medieval people really believe in monsters? Giants, dragons and half-human hybrids are just some of the fantastical creatures that populate Middle English literature. Too readily dismissed by modern readers as mere whimsy, or else the product of credulous minds, instead this module takes monsters seriously as revealing facets of a sophisticated myth-making society. You will consider monsters in a range of genres such as romance, saints' legends, travel writing and visual imagery, as well as their reception by medieval and modern readers and critics. You will interrogate the various discourses of monstrosity and consider what makes a monster through consideration of topics such as: the horror and allure of the monstrous body; monstrous appetites; sexuality and sexual deviance; geography and racial alterity. You will also explore the literary and cultural construction of 'human monsters' (women, pagans, Jews) rendered 'other' due to their perceived divergence from societal and religious norms. You will be able to apply your developing understanding of the discourse of monstrosity in a range of practical contexts such as field trips. Previous experience of Middle English literature will be an advantage but is not required. By the end of the module you should have a more nuanced understanding of the place of monstrosity in medieval literature and have an increased awareness of the ways in which language is used to both shape and respond to perceived differences.

'Who would have imagined fifteen years ago that writings of the outcast Chilean Roberto Bolaño who washed ashore in Barcelona via Mexico, would exercise so wide an influence on writers in Spain, Latin America and across the world?' (Granta, Issue 113) And yet, Bolaño's literary output is unthinkable without Borges, just as the Colombian Juan Gabriel Vásquez's Secret History of Costaguana is inconceivable without Conrad’s Nostromo. Throughout this module you’ll discover the ways in which literatures travel across national boundaries. You’ll explore the web of literary influences woven into some of these Latin American narratives, as well as trace the itinerary of these influential threads as they travelled from the South of the American continent to other literatures. You’ll explore the core of storytelling that underpins Latin American literature and which surfaces in various forms of writing, from the short story to the prose poem and the novel, as well as the 'rewriting' exercise/critical appraisal, such as Alejandra Pizarnik's The Bloody Countess. You’ll read works by Borges, Cortazar, Bolaño, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Clarice Lispector, Alejandra Pizarnik, Valeria Luiselli, amongst others. You’ll be encouraged to close read texts and share your ideas in seminars and one-to-one tutorials, as well as through written work.

According to Roland Barthes, emotion is 'a disturbance, a bordering on collapse: something perverse, under respectable appearances; emotion is even, perhaps, the slyest of losses'. This module takes this 'perversity, under respectable appearance' as the starting point for asking how an attention to our emotions - our feeling, affects, and intimacies, as well as our aversions - can make us rethink what it means to be critical and creative readers and writers. Drawing on a range of theoretical and critical work from literary studies, cultural theory, art, philosophy, sociology, neuroscience, psychology, creativity and creative writing studies, cognitive science, history and anthropology, we will ask what it means to read, and write, 'with feeling'. What is the relationship between language and feeling? Between the body and emotion? How does literature touch and move us? Are our 'aesthetic' emotions real? How does technology - the digital, virtual, prosthetic and online - affect our ideas about emotion? Are emotions universal and timeless, or historically and culturally specific? Private and personal, or collective and public? How do emotions construct gender, class, race, nationality, and other kinds of identity? Why do some feelings attract more critical interest than others? How does an attention to emotion affect our work as readers and writers? We will begin by building a theoretical and critical literacy for thinking feeling, before focusing our inquiry around specific themes that might include: Animal Passions; Psyche, Pathology and Resistances to Psychoanalysis; Feeling Texts: Touch, Texture and Fictional Fabrications; Moving Fictions: Cinema, Virtuality, and E-motion; Zombies: Can Dead Subjects Feel?; Affective Economies; Queering Feeling; and Feeling Human: Robots, Artificial Intelligence and Clones. We will engage with a range of literary texts and other aesthetic forms (such as art, film, etc.) chosen to correspond with our critical concerns. Please note that this is an indicative description only, and the weekly themes and reading are revised each year to stay up to date with current work in the field. You will have the opportunity to engage both as critical and creative readers and writers, and there will be critical and creative assessment options. This module is open to all students. It will complement level 3 options such as 'Literature and Deconstruction', 'Nervous Narratives', 'Traumaturgies', ' Literature and Human Rights' and 'Queer Literature and Theory'.

Crime, like death, has always been with us, yet it was only in the 19th century that de Quincey proposed considering murder as one of the fine arts and Poe established many of the central tenets of crime fiction with his 'tales of ratiocination'. Currently, crime fiction is the most bought, and read, literary genre and one diverse enough to include 'whodunits'; Baker Street's most notable resident; the genteel amateur detectives of the 'Golden Age'; hard-boiled thrillers; noir; psychological fiction and even the post-modern iterations of anti-detective fiction. Narratives about crime and criminals, detection and sleuths (not forgetting the violence and victims) can be both conservatively formulaic and radically diverse. It can articulate dangerous and disturbing transgressions against society (the crime) while also revealing the ideological forces of law (what constitutes a crime) order (the various detective figures) and the systems of justice and ill-justice (courts and punishment, state and government) with which a society protects and proscribes itself. Crime fiction is also concerned with interpreting clues, discovering secrets and solving enigmas, much in the way that critical theory investigates and analyses literary texts. In this module you will explore key texts and writers in the development of crime fiction as well as examining critical and theoretical responses to such texts. It will allow you to respond both creatively and critically to the concerns of, and thinking about this diverse genre.

In the words of Sara Ahmed “Feminism is bringing people into the room”. We are witnessing an upsurge in activism that some are describing as the fourth ‘wave’ of feminism. It is timely then to reconsider how feminist writing - the essay, memoir, the novel, poetry, and literary criticism and theory - has helped to shape, influence and articulate important past debates about gender, sexuality, race, class and society, and how it continues to be part of that conversation in the present. The Feminist Writing module is taught via a combination of lectures and seminars. On Feminist Writing, we are committed to offering an inclusive learning environment to all students of any gender identity and to teaching diverse world views and ways of knowing. Feminist Writing is an intersectional and antiracist module that includes a transhistorical and transnational range of creative and critical texts. The module considers: Feminist Positionality, Early Feminist Arguments and Texts, The Feminist Essay and Memoir forms, Queer Feminist Love Poetry, Trans Queer Families and Motherhood, and Speculative Eco-Feminist Futures. The module is assessed via two assignments – the first is a response to a passage from one of the module texts, and the second is an independent project. Either assignment can be critical, creative-critical, creative, or a personal essay.

This interdisciplinary module explores how 'the city' has been thought about and represented through a selection of writings (fiction, poetry, theory), visual material (painting, photography, film, street art) and occasionally other sensory material (sound, smell), spanning around 1850 to the present day and focused on two particular cities and great capitals of modernity, Paris and London. In this period the growth of the great European cities has created a new and diverse set of environments and possibilities. Utopias, dystopias, sites of ruin and construction of all kinds; what different, contradictory or coherent versions of urban experience do these texts and images offer? We'll investigate what kinds of writing, art, discourses and attitudes cities seem to generate. Was modernism, for example, as Malcolm Bradbury asserts, an ‘art of cities'? How do textual and pictorial techniques intersect, for example, in the case of nineteenth-century Impressionist art and writing, twentieth-century Surrealism, Situationist provocations, or contemporary street art and photography? What is ‘psychogeography’? In the company of the flâneur/flâneuse, the detective and other urban wanderers, we'll consider aspects such as space, place, urban being and time, love and eroticism, hauntings, crime, memory and the presence of the past, the individual and the crowd, consumption, nature and the natural, urban Gothic, and the pressures, preoccupations and thrills peculiar to urban living and imagining. The main mode is seminar discussion, supported by short lectures, virtual gallery visits and film viewings. Assessment is by means of an individually designed project which is supported by individual tutorials and formative work of various kinds, including the opportunity to practise reading images and spaces, as well as literary texts. There is scope to produce creative-critical (including visual) work as part of your assessment.

Is all creative writing really a form of re-writing? And can creative writing itself be a form of literary criticism? From Virgil's imperialist taming of Homer, to Helen Fielding's homage to Jane Austen by way of Bridget Jones, writers have always engaged their literary predecessors in ways that claim new imaginative and critical space. In this creative-critical module you will explore the many modes in which homage, parody, borrowing, repositioning, intervention and creative (mis)reading may be practised and developed. You will examine exciting examples, and write some of your own. You will discover what literary adaptations, adoptions and updatings reveal about important moments and movements in literary history. You will explore how re-writing may also be a rogue and subversive form of reading; one that functions both as critique of canonical literature, and a means of generating fresh directions in your own creative writing. NB this is not a technical course in film/screen adaptation.

From Defoe’s True Relation of Mrs Veal’s posthumous visit to her friend Mrs Bargrave through the classic English ghost stories of MR James to the ghosts in the machine of modern media, the ghost, shade, revenant or spectre continues to haunt human imagination. Subtle shadings of the spectre materialise at different times, in different contexts – materialised reminder of unquiet remains; manifestation of memory or the unconscious; physiological disturbance; psychical stain. These undecidable and ambivalent presences, or uncanny sensations of hauntedness, will be explored in this module. Writers studied on the module might include Daniel Defoe, M.R. James, Henry James, Margaret Oliphant, May Sinclair and Susan Hill. The module will draw on studies mapping the development of the belief in ghosts (Sasha Handley’s Visions of an Unseen World) and exploring the cultural history (Andrew Smith’s The Ghost Story 1840 – 1920). It will also consider critical engagements, such as Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx and Jodey Castricano’s Cryptomimesis.

The right to free expression is seriously threatened in many places in the world; it has also never been so passionately defended. You will focus on the history of banned books from the early 20th century to contemporary literature. Novels, poems and plays have often been banned on the grounds of political sedition, obscenity, and blasphemy. You will consider the changing nature of literary censorship, the legalistic and philosophical arguments for and against censorship, the nature of arguments in defence of free expression, why literary writers have so frequently pushed the boundaries of the acceptable and the impact of technology on the history of censorship and free speech. You will trace a series of shifting arguments about why free speech matters: from the drive to explore sexuality in literature, to the politicisation of free speech during the cold war, to current debates about blasphemy and free speech, as well as the idea that free speech is a so-called key Western value. Some of the texts studied on the course will be set because they are, in themselves, explorations of the boundary of prohibition and free expression. Of importance too will be the impact of global communication networks on free speech debates: in the context of the internet, does the nation state control the dissemination of literary texts? If not, what are the implications of the absence of legal control? You will consider both English language texts and texts in translation. Authors considered will probably include James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Radclyffe Hall, Boris Pasternak, Salman Rushdie, Elif Shafak and Margaret Atwood, but the authors studied on the course are likely to change to include unfolding censorship events and issues.

Where do debates in environmentalism, cultural geography and literary criticism meet? What does contemporary literature have to tell us about our relationship with space, place, landscape, nature, rurality, ecology, and even a ‘sense of planet?' You will encounter a range of post-war and contemporary forms, from poetry, short stories, the novel, and literary non-fiction to visual art, the radio essay, and film. Each will offer fresh and surprising ways of thinking about a range of different contemporary environments and about our place in a changing world. We will consider in what ways literary genres and traditions have helped to create and produce our understanding of geography in the past and how recent literary works have reworked some of these genres and traditions to mark contemporary changes. We will consider, for example, how authors since the environmental crisis have engaged with/inherited/reworked early modern chorography, the Romantic travelogue, the naturalist’s journal, and the rural essay. To what new ends are these forms put in an uncertain and unstable modern world? Among others, the course will explore work by Alice Oswald, Rana Dasgupta, Tim Robinson, Kathleen Jamie, Patrick Keiller, J.G. Ballard, and Robert Macfarlane. It will also include trips to investigate the nature writing holdings at UEA’s British Archive for Contemporary Writing. Assessment will give you the opportunity to, initially, create your own critical or creative radio essay/podcast (formative) and, later, develop a deeper knowledge of one of the week’s themes, building your own critical (or creative non-fiction) project around it (5,000 word summative). While there are no pre-requisites, this module complements and develops themes explored in ‘Writing the Wild’ and ‘Urban Visions: The City in Literature and Visual Culture.'

Who hath not loiter'd in a green church-yard, And let his spirit, like a demon-mole, Work through the clayey soil and gravel hard, To see scull, coffin'd bones, and funeral stole; Pitying each form that hungry Death hath marr'd, And filling it once more with human soul? (John Keats, 'Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil (1817) 'Dark Romanticism' is a literary subgenre of 'Romanticism', reflecting a fascination with the irrational, the demonic and the grotesque. Intimately related to Gothicism, it has haunted the Romantic movement ever since its beginnings in the eighteenth century. Romanticism's celebration of unity, creativity, and sublimity has always been menaced by a dark and contrary fascination; with melancholia, insanity, nightmare, criminality and death; with ghosts, monsters and vampires; and with the grotesque and the irrational. The term 'Dark Romanticism' was coined by Mario Praz in his classic study, The Romantic Agony (1933) to discuss European Romanticism's obsessive concern with duality, desire, agony, suicide, morbidity and decadence in the decades following the French Revolution. Numerous recent scholars have since discussed Romantic writing's preoccupation with the psychologically unusual and aberrant from a variety of perspectives including the literary, historical, philosophical and, more recently, a medical point of view. In this module, we will explore this compelling but dangerous interrelation between Romanticism and the Gothic at work in a range of 'agonies' preoccupying our writers: addiction, depression, insanity, cannibalism, monstrosity, homosexuality, the femme fatale, the double, the demonic lover, the vampire, and the Romantic pre-occupation with Lucifer himself. Our module will focus on writers such as J. W. Goethe, S. T. Coleridge, Lord Byron, John Keats, Thomas De Quincey, James Hogg, and Percy and Mary Shelley, as well as Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Dacre and Dr John William Polidori, author of that most influential story 'The Vampyre' (1819). We will read key Romantic period texts including Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, Byron's Don Juan, Keats's 'Isabella or the Pot of Basil', Coleridge's 'Christabel', James Hogg's Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, and Percy Shelley's drama, The Cenci, as well as lesser known but influential works. You will be encouraged to deliver group presentations on these key texts and subjects, developing your own interests and ideas and working towards the longer research essay by which the module will be assessed.

How did the legacy of its empire affect and shape British society during the period of increasing immigration from its former colonies following the Second World War and even now? How did the writing of those immigrants represent the social conflicts and tensions of that period, especially experience of racism and the resistance to it? How have contemporary minority ethnic writers responded to the challenges of the contemporary period, in which racism has taken new forms, such as Islamophobia and anti-refugee movements? You’ll focus on the ways in which postcolonial ideas can help us to understand and reflect upon the aftermath of empire in Britain. You’ll use selected writings by Black and Asian British writers to explore questions of race and racism, culture and ethnicity, religion, multiculturalism, gender and sexuality, identity, and belonging that have been stimulated by post-war migration to Britain by residents of its former colonies. These issues will be set in the context of past and contemporary debates about British identity, and how these debates have been shaped and reshaped in response to the successive arrivals of migrants from other parts of the world, and by the creative, intellectual and everyday interventions of those migrants themselves. The main topics of study will be The literature of arrival – post-war Britain and ‘first generation’ migrants; The cultural politics of race, racism and anti-racism; Multiculturalism, belonging, hybridity and negotiation – the re-shaping of British identities; The new politics of exclusion – asylum seekers and Islamophobia.

New Narrative began as a late 20th century creative rebellion. From its origins in 1970s punk, second-wave feminism and the gay rights movement, New Narrative writers explored and exploited the relationship between the personal and the political, gossip and literature, high and low art. It is the place where the tell-all memoir meets critical theory, and the place from which writers talked about their own desires and their own experiences in order to challenge the status quo. It is also a writing of friendship and coterie, a place to collaborate and to be influenced: many texts from the New Narrative movement were worked on in workshops that took place in the back rooms of bookshops or in each others’ apartments in San Francisco. Over the last 40 years, New Narrative has spawned generations of radical, experimental, genre-defying writers, from Kathy Acker to Chris Kraus to Maggie Nelson. You'll explore the major themes of New Narrative through reading key texts from the movement. You'll also explore the theoretical and cultural influences surrounding the movement. You will think carefully about the role of the writer in relation to the text, particularly the phenomenon of the ‘cult’ writer; you'll be encouraged to focus your critical studies on one particular New Narrative author in order to explore their life and legacy alongside their body of work. Finally, there will be opportunities to produce your own ‘freak’ and genre-defying texts.

‘It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)’ —R.E.M. (1987) ‘The etymological root of the word apocalypse is the Greek apokalypsis, meaning “unveiling” or “uncovering”.’ —Rosen (2008) This module will explore the origins and development of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction by British writers from the nineteenth century to the present day, with a particular emphasis on late twentieth and twenty-first century writing. In this module you will consider how in apocalyptic fiction the moment of catastrophe is also a moment of truth-bearing revelation, an unveiling which brings with it the opportunity to make a fresh beginning. You will also examine the biblical narratives and other ancient stories that frequently underpin such fictions; reflect on what apocalypse means to us culturally; consider the way such fictions reflect the anxieties of the cultural moment in which they were written; and explore some of the major trends of apocalyptic fiction, such as eco-catastrophe, nuclear holocaust, pandemics, survivalism, apocalyptic visions, and technology gone wrong. You will also attend to the way such narratives frequently participate in the genres of dystopian and speculative fiction. The module will conclude by interrogating what apocalypse means to us today through the study of recent works of apocalyptic fiction. You will be encouraged to explore and discuss a range of associated literary criticism and theory. You will, in the second of the summative assessments, have the opportunity to write your own apocalyptic fiction with an accompanying critical reflection.

What is style? It is the most essential and yet most elusive property of writing. How can we possibly describe something so intangible? and how can we discover and develop our own distinctive styles as writers, of fiction and non-fiction? These questions were raised with new urgency, precision, and ambition by modernist writers, who urged both that an attention to style was the first aim of good criticism, and that any good writer must develop by trying their hand at imitating and parodying the styles of previous writers, in the way that painters once were taught by imitating previous painters. This creative-critical module approaches these questions and explores these techniques through a particular focus on one of the central strands in modernist fiction, the representation of consciousness. We will focus on novelists and writers including Henry and William James, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Dostoevsky, Ralph Ellison, Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, and Eimearr McBride, subjecting to close analysis each writer’s style: among many other topics this will include the way they break up the linearity of the sentence to do justice to the non-linear nature of the mind; how they explore self and other through the figure of the double and the full range of characters across a novel; and how they render the story-telling property of consciousness through experiments in plot. We will consider such subjects as desire, anxiety, memory, sexuality, gender, and race.

For something to be reborn it must first die. The Italian Renaissance (‘rebirth’) sought to disinter the past in order to reanimate the present, but in order to do so the present had to come to terms with its loss — as Petrarch asked, ‘who can doubt that Rome would rise again instantly if she began to know herself?’. How can we best understand this process of loss and reanimation? How did Renaissance writers understand it, and how did they bridge the gulf between death and rebirth? And can we do the same? In order to answer these questions, this module examines the twin practices of imitation and translation in English responses to some of the most exciting and influential texts of the Italian Renaissance. It does so in two ways: through a sustained analysis of those practices as they can be located in two of the most popular forms of the period (the sonnet and the epic), and by imitating the process of creative imitation ourselves. In other words, we step into the shoes of the Renaissance imitator. The module allows us to understand how Italian poets such as Dante, Petrarch and Ariosto responded to the classical past (and each other), and how English poets and playwrights such as Wyatt, Spenser, and Shakespeare responded to Italian models. It also illustrates the important and vocal interventions made by Italian women poets such as Gaspara Stampa and Veronica Franco. By imitating the imitators – for example by writing sonnets – we gain a deeper understanding of how imitation is both a creative practice and a critical process, both a reading and a rewriting. Students are not expected or required to know any Italian in advance. (Pre-1789)

This module offers students the chance to learn about children’s literature and its development. It starts with the history of children’s literature, looking at its use as a pedagogical tool, moving through Aesop’s fables, fairy tales, Victorian and Edwardian literature, and examining authors such as A.A. Milne, Dr. Seuss, Shaun Tan, and Sally Nicholls, amongst others. The course looks at issues of genre and content as well as at historical context. Theoretical readings on children’s literature are also closely engaged with. By studying the development of children’s literature, this module also analyses the development of the concept of childhood in Western society. In addition, we also discuss writing, translating, editing, marketing, reviewing, mediating, and teaching children’s literature.

Description Students will See This module invites you to explore how novelists from Miguel de Cervantes to Machado de Assis have created new kinds of fiction by bringing fantasy and realism—often thought of as mutually exclusive categories—together. Our starting point is Part One of Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote (1605), which juxtaposes the fantastic delusions of the titular character and the mundane reality he mistakes for the magical world of romance. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-67) will draw our attention to how fantasy is bound up with even our ordinary apprehensions of reality. Ann Radcliffe’s gothic novel The Romance of the Forest (1791) plays off against each other natural and supernatural explanations for the reports of ghostly happenings at the abbey at the centre of the novel. Finally, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’s Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881) draws on Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy in order to create new kinds of fantastic realisms in the context of nineteenth-century Brazil. Far from telling a story of the triumph of realism over fantasy, this module instead draws attention to the persistence of fantasy and the self-reflexive impulse within the novel tradition. Through this module we shall address the overarching questions: “how does reality enter into fantasy?” and “how does fantasy enter into the representation of reality?” We will be reading novels over several weeks, which will give us the opportunity to investigate “fantastic realisms” from many different angles. Our critical readings will allow us to think about different thematic approaches each week including the uncanny, self-reflexivity, connections between literary and pictorial art, and fantasy as a means of engaging with social reality. The module, then, both traces out a significant tradition of “fantastic realisms” across three centuries and also introduces students to a series of thematic paradigms for understanding the novels. The summative work on the module will be split between one essay on a pre-1789 text and another essay in which you will have a choice to write on another pre-1789 text or a post-1789 text. Projected Week by Week Pattern of Reading Week 1: Don Quixote, chpts. 1-24 Week 2: Don Quixote, chpts. 25-52 (end of Part One) Week 3: Half Term Break Week 4: Tristram Shandy Books 1-4 Week 5: Tristram Shandy Books 5-9 Week 6: The Romance of the Forest, vol. 1 Week 7: The Romance of the Forest, vol. 2 Week 8: The Romance of the Forest, vol. 3 Week 9: Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas Chpts. 1-80 Week 10: Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. Chpts. 81-160 Week 11: Summative Essay Workshop Week 12: Tutorials Summative Assessment Pattern: 1,500 words analysis of a particular passage, making it open out into a reading of the whole text. The critical readings for the first weeks give students models of close analysis of the novels by Auerbach, Shklovsky and others that they can draw on, develop, or resist as they see fit in order to develop their own critical voice. Students write either on Don Quixote or Tristram Shandy. 3,500 words essay. Open topic but students encouraged to use a concept we have already explored through the critical readings to create a focused essay on one of the readings that they have not already written on. Topic to be honed in consultation with the seminar leader.

If anyone were to look down on the world from the sky, the whole hugeness of its mountains and deepness of its valleys would appear less than the finger of one who, travelling, held a staff in hand. Honorius of Autun’s statement, written in the first half of the twelfth century, moves dizzyingly between two perspectives of the world: the all-encompassing, cartographic birds’ (or God’s) eye view and the overwhelmingly vast view of the world as a human traveler experiences it. It is this flickering of perspective between the imagined and the experienced, the spiritual and the practical, the eternal and the present, that underpins many medieval accounts of travel and place. Because, according to Augustine, the world is a book, its legibility granting access to spiritual meaning, travel becomes an act of reading. Travel writing, in turn, relays the world’s legibility to others, and by reading these narratives we can not only gain insight into the ways that those in the Middle Ages moved through the world in a practical sense, but they also grant us access to medieval imaginations more broadly. In recent years, there has been a global turn in medieval studies, and greater emphasis on considering the ways that people, goods, and texts moved across boundaries and formed networks of trade, travel, pilgrimage, and migration. This research-led Level 6 module will allow students to explore the dynamism of the medieval world by examining travel narratives, pilgrimage texts, missionary and mercantile itineraries, as well as accounts of exploration, conquest, colonization, and wandering. These accounts of medieval mobilities will not be from a solely Christian, English tradition; the module will also highlight texts and maps by Muslim and Jewish writers and cartographers, as well as other non-English Christian texts. By comparing these sources, engaging in close reading, and inserting these texts into their historical, material, and literary contexts, we can understand the ways that texts influenced each other across space and culture and how generic conventions shaped medieval understandings of the world. By gaining an understanding of the multilingual, polyvocal, and intercultural material Middle Ages, students will not only become more sophisticated and nuanced readers of medieval literature, but they will also be able to place English literature within a broader network of textual traditions that will deepen their understanding of literature from all periods. The first half of the module will be devoted to understanding the purpose of travel and travel writing in different traditions; the way that conventions are deployed and subverted; questions of authorship and translation, witnessing and subjectivity; ideas of wonder and exoticism; the texts’ relationships with audiences; how travel affects identity and how cultural encounters are navigated. Informed by critics and cultural theorists such as Michel de Certeau, Yi-Fu Tuan and Homi Bhabha, as well as Classical and medieval philosophers and theologians (Augustine, Hugh of St Victor), students will develop the tools to read these accounts as literary as well as historical documents. Bringing postcolonial theory into dialogue with premodern texts, we will also consider questions of colonialism and examine the dynamics of ‘otherness’ and alienation at play in these works. The second half of the module will zoom in on key locations in the medieval world (Jerusalem, Constantinople, Rome, Karakorum) to examine how places carried meaning. This will not only allow us to engage in in-depth comparative work by approaching the same locations from several traditions, but also examine how medieval travelers –and readers of travel narratives– read the world around them. As a pre-1798 module, Middle English will be read in the original language and the assessment will require that students engage with at least one Middle English text. Non-English texts will be read in translation. This would build on work currently explored in the Level 5 ‘Medieval Writing’ module and some of the texts would be revisited (The Book of Margery Kempe, Mandeville’s Travels, both of which are read in extracts in ‘Medieval Writing’), but these would be reframed and recontextualised by placing them within a larger body of travel narratives and theories of geography and movement. Allowing students to engage in more cross-cultural comparative work would bring into relief the way that texts and literary traditions cross cultural borders, which would nuance their understanding of texts that may be familiar. This module would also feed into the MA in Medieval and Early Modern Textual Cultures by giving students an in-depth understanding of medieval cosmologies, building their confidence in working with Middle English, and by providing them with an understanding of how texts cross borders. This will help students to understand the way that twelfth century European philosophers and historians encountered Arabic texts, for instance, or how Chaucer incorporates non-English textual traditions into his works, both of which will lay important foundations for the MA module in Medieval and Renaissance Humanisms. It would also feed into the East Anglian literatures module by providing students with an understanding of how cultural encounters affect local understandings of place. Indicative reading list: The Travels of Marco Polo; The Book of Margery Kempe; Middle English Liber Celestis of St Bridgit of Sweden; The Book of John Mandeville; The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela; Journals of Christopher Columbus; Ibn Battuta, The Travels (extracts); Sidi Ali Reis, Mirror of Countries; Ibn Fadlan, Risala (extracts); William Wey, Itineraries; William of Rubruck, Itinerarium; Navigatio Sancti Brendani; ‘Adventures of Bulukiya’ and ‘City of Brass’ from One Thousand and One Nights; Chaucer, ‘Squire’s Tale’, ‘Shipman’s Tale’, ‘Man of Law’s Tale’; Stacions of Rome; Bokenham, Mappula A

At the end of the seventeenth century, Aphra Behn became the first woman in England who could be called a ‘professional writer’. But in this period, it was still seen as transgressive for women to write at all, and especially to publish their own imaginative writing. How did early-modern women develop and defend their identities as writers and authors? How did the material forms in which women wrote and circulated their work shape their writing? And how did women situate their writing in traditions and spheres that were usually the preserve of men? This module explores the vast and inventive array of writing by early-modern women, ranging from lyrical poetry to personal letters. You will read writing by women who were successful in the print marketplace, such as Katherine Philips, a figure also celebrated today as a pre-eminent writer about lesbian experience. You will encounter women who kept their writing in manuscript, and whose work challenges canonical conceptions of ‘authorship’, such as the diarist Anne Clifford and the letter-writer Dorothy Osborne. We will explore key places and contexts from which women’s writing emerged, including the vibrant and complex domestic space of the ‘household’. And we will travel outside of England, too, including to Massachusetts, where we will confront the relationship between the emergence of female authorship and the growth of English colonialism, as we read Anne Bradstreet: the first colonial American poet to be published. This module’s major focus is seventeenth-century women’s writing, but you will also read some texts by sixteenth-century women. This module may appeal to students who took ‘Seventeenth Century Writing’, but no prior knowledge of the early-modern period is needed or assumed.

What kinds of mechanisms, processes, and negotiations turn a writer’s work into a marketable commodity? How do the social and economic conditions of writing (who, when, what for) affect the kinds of work writers produce? And what kind of impact might printed works, and print technologies, have on the activity of reading, and on how subjects conceive of their relationship to the wider world? On this module, you’ll discover how a new and commercial booktrade contributed to broader kinds of literary, cultural, and social change: you’ll see how books as a market driven business challenged traditional notions of authorship; gave rise to modern concepts of copyright and intellectual property; and forged new kinds of correspondence between books and an emergent reading public. You’ll investigate the workings of the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century booktrade under three interconnected headings: bookselling (key publishers, such as Bernard Lintott, Jacob Tonson, and Edmund Curll, alongside ‘trade’ publishers such as Morphew and Roberts); writers and writing (a variety of authors, such as Elizabeth Rowe, Mary Wortley Montague, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, and more obscure ‘hack’ writers); and reading (kinds of circulation, from the manuscript, to subscription publication, to the lending library). This module will sharpen your sense of writing as an activity that is shaped by economic factors, and it will deepen your understanding of what it means, historically, to be an author. There are no prerequisites for this module, although it will be of interest to those who have studied Eighteenth-Century Writing in the second year. THIS MODULE FULFILS THE PRE-1789 REQUIREMENT.

One of the major cultural concerns that arose from Japan’s decision to modernise, following its renunciation of isolationism post-1868, was the need to create a bespoke modern literary canon that would compete with those of other nations. In terms of fiction, this was not a straightforward task. The literary form that we call “the novel”, simply hadn’t existed hitherto in Japan; there was no prose fiction that sought to be “authentic” in its inscription of contemporary Japanese language, or self-consciously “literary”, or intellectually as rigorous. Japan has been successful not only in creating such a canon, but also in ensuring that it has become a global phenomenon through which the home country is now able to wield considerable soft power. Various acts of translation, both into and out of Japanese, were necessary to achieve this. What were these acts? Who carried them out? How did the texts they resulted in contribute to the creation of a modern Japanese canon, and what has been omitted from that canon? This module offers a broad introduction to those questions through the reading(in translation) of selected major Japanese texts. The module will start by giving an overview of the major genres that existed in Japan prior to the late 19th Century by studying The Tale of Genji. Through this foundational text we will examine how Japanese literature evolved over centuries through different forms of literature, drama and the visual arts. In particular, here we will focus on how any potential meanings of the text shifted as it took on new forms through translation and adaption by different generations. We will then compare correlating chapters of three or four different modern English translations of The Tale of Genji, including: the very first translation by an attaché to the Japanese Embassy in London, Kenchō Suematsu in 1882; Arthur Waley’s iconic version (1925-33); and the first post World War II translation by Edward Seidensticker (1976). In reading these chapters we will consider how the literary and cultural context of the translator informs the meanings which are generated through each. In approaching this material we will draw upon literary and translation theory, such as: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’; Laurence Venuti’s The Translator’s Invisibility and Roland Barthes’ introduction to S/Z. Next, we will turn to the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, when key academic figures from the US worked to select and translate the texts they felt would most appeal to a Western readership while writing literary critical accounts of them in order to establish Japanese Literature as a western academic subject. We will examine discussions by and between scholars and translators such as Donald Keene, Ivan Morris, Edward Seidensticker and Howard Hibbert on their means of selection and translation alongside reading key novels translated during this time. These may include: Kawabata Yasunari’s Snow Country and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s The Makioka Sisters and Mishima Yukio’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. After this, we will spend one week looking at the movement by female translators, from 1970s onwards, to introduce Japanese women writers (such as Enchi Fumiko, Ohba Minako, and Tsushima Yūko) to an anglophone audience through either three or four short stories, or one novel, and examine how such texts allow us to question the role that gender plays in determining canonicity, especially in the case of Japan. One week will be dedicated to considering the emergence of Murakami Haruki’s globally successful oeuvre and the role that (freelance) translation played in that success. This will include comparing across different translated versions of the same extract from a novel or short story. Finally, a week will focus on one contemporary novel (for instance: Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of the Hills, or Tawada Yōko’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear) and examine how it challenges our very conception of a national literary canon. No knowledge of Japanese is required as all texts studied in class will be in English; and there is no requirement for you to have studied Japanese literature or society. Final assessment will take the form of one 1500-word and one 3500-word critical essay

This module considers how mass migration and global trade transformed literature in the long nineteenth century. How did the global circulation of people and goods affect the development of literary forms? How does a global approach reframe what we mean by the term “Victorian literature”? The module begins with two iconic Victorian novels – Jane Eyre (1847) and The Moonstone (1868) – and postcolonial criticism that foregrounds their imperial contexts. We then re-frame these novels by reading them alongside writings on opium, cotton, and slavery, including Lin Zexu’s letter to Queen Victoria protesting the British opium trade in China (1839) and Frederick Douglass’s Narrative and Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845). The final unit looks to hybrid literary forms by writers confronted with experiences of migration and dislocation. Bengali poet Toru Dutt draws upon the tropes of British Romanticism in her lyric poetry about cultural hybridity and her attachment to Bengal. Frances E. W. Harper adapts the bildungsroman and the marriage plot in Iola Leroy, a novel about African American communal bonds in the aftermath of slavery. Lao She’s 1929 novel, Mr. Ma and Son, dramatizes the experience of a Chinese immigrant in London, which falls short of his expectations from reading English literature. The module thus ends by asking students interrogate the shadow cast by “Victorian” literature on the twentieth century.

More than a century after Lenin's Bolsheviks proclaimed the world's first socialist revolution in Petrograd, the events of 1917 retain their power to fascinate, inspire, bewilder and repel. How can we understand the Russian revolution, why did it happen, and what did it mean for the people who made and lived through it? On this module we'll use a range of sources, including contemporary documents, newspaper reports, and memoirs - some translated specially for this module - to answer these questions. We start with the run-up to the revolutionary events of 1905, when the whole empire was convulsed with strikes, uprisings and armed clashes. We then take the story through the Tsarist regime's attempt to shore up its authority through limited consitutionalist concessions, before looking at World War One and the fall of the monarchy. We'll look in detail at what happened in 1917 and why - not only in the Russian heartland but also in certain non-Russian parts of the empire. Finally, we'll examine the civil war and why the Reds won. Throughout, we put the story in its historical, political and geographical context, always with an eye to its impact on later developments up to today. By understanding the events of a century ago, you'll gain insights into the Russia of today and the troubled and turbulent post-Soviet area. You'll also gain invaluable experience of carrying out in-depth independent research and presenting your findings.

This module investigates the complex and thorny relationship between history and the historical fiction genre from the standpoint of the historian. While questions of historical ‘accuracy’ commonly disrupt historical approaches to fiction that uses a setting in the past, this module seeks to look at the myriad ways in which historical fiction not only engages with historiography but also can - to some degree - amplify the historical record. This interdisciplinary module works through from the conception of the modern genre with Sir Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando to more recent forays into historical fiction from authors which may include Anne-Marie Crowhurst, Octavia L. Butler, Zen Cho, and Hillary Mantel. The module moves through novels and short stories thematically, thinking about questions of projections of present-day issues on the historical stage, the place of the historical novel in terms of the historical record, the time travel story, and the counterfactual narrative.

You’ll explore key themes and topics in the history of twentieth century sport, from the founding of the modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896 to the impact which the Cold War had upon sport in the second half of the twentieth century. Sport’s interaction with empire, nationalism, fascism, socialism and capitalism will be considered, demonstrating that the political history and international relations of the century are deeply entwined with it. As an aspect of social history, issues of gender, race, sexuality, and disability are inseparable from this topic, as are the harnessing and exploitation of sport as a means of war or reconciliation at various periods throughout the century.

This module will begin with the 1905 Aliens Act and end with the 2016 Brexit referendum. Students will be introduced to the most important historiographical debates and themes in the history of 'race' in Modern Britain, including: colonial migrations, refugee settlement, the Windrush myth, the colonial roots of 'race relations' and the politics of white nationalism. The module will challenge students to approach 'race' as an unstable economic, political and cultural formation. We will consider: How did ideas about 'race' intersect with ideas about sovereignty, welfare, social class, gender, nationhood and local identity in twentieth-century Britain? What is racial capitalism? How did Black Britons challenge the structures of racial hierarchy? In what ways did the British Empire (and its ending) contribute to British racial formations? How was ‘race’ at work in the making and unmaking of Britain’s welfare state? How does including histories of the Irish, Italians, East Europeans and Gypsies and Travellers in Britain help to complicate our understanding of 'race' and the conceptual, political and cultural work it does in society?

Fieldwork is a key part of landscape history and this module will give you hands-on practical experience of a range of landscape survey methods. Our fieldwork week takes place during the summer and will provide you with training in various survey techniques that can be applied to earthworks and buildings. Your surveys will form the basis for site drawings and a research project on the site we have surveyed. Seminars and field trips take place in the Autumn semester and will cover topics such as drawing earthwork plans and carrying out original research using archive maps and documents. By the end of the module you will be able to recognise and interpret historic landscape features in the field and use a combination of survey work and original research to understand them.

This module tackles the major phenomena affecting the late medieval and early modern world (from religious reformations and industrialisation to European colonisation and political revolution) but uses sources from towns and cities to assess how such changes were experienced by ordinary people on the streets. Using case studies of urban centres in the British Isles, continental Europe, and the Atlantic world between 1300 and 1800, you will be immersed in the sites, smells, and sounds of the city. Some of the focus cities will be British ones, which may include: London, York, Coventry, Norwich, Portsmouth, Exeter, Canterbury, Oxford, Cambridge, Colchester, Chester, Manchester, Bath, Bristol, plus Edinburgh and Dublin, but you will also be introduced to developments in Damascus, Ghent, Venice, Constantinople, Amsterdam, New York and Paris and other places across the pre-modern globe. Our focus will take in urban governance, rebellion and revolution, immigration, ceremonies, memorialisation, religion, bodies (including disability, sexuality, and gendered spaces), neighbouring, work and leisure, commerce, slavery, industry, pollution, and housing and the built environment.

You will examine in depth the history of nationalism in Europe from the late eighteenth to the twentieth century. The central theme is the relationship between the rise and development of nationalism and the shaping of images and discourses about Europe. You will consider and compare the strength of nationalism to the weakness of Europeanism in order to improve your historical understanding of identity formation processes in the modern age. In this sense, it does not consider the nation and Europe as being one the denial of the other, but as forces interacting in complex ways and, in given instances, feeding upon one another. Centred on this theoretical concern, you will be offered a broad survey of the history of nationalism from the Age of Enlightenment to the European integration process, explaining how it has developed into a mass movement and an ideology affecting so deeply the life of millions of individuals across Europe. The perspective used will be that of the cultural historian and the historian of ideas and ideologies. A variety of different primary sources – including pictures, novels, private correspondence, newspaper articles, political tracts and pamphlet, history books, films, songs, etc… – will be used to highlight, on the one hand, the ambiguities of modern nationalism, to explain its quasi-religious nature and explore its strength and resilience. On the other hand, they will help us investigate how and to what extent discourses about Europe affected, after the Second World War, one of the greatest projects of political engineering ever attempted, highlighting the economic success of EU integration and considering its incapacity to create a strong attachment to EU institutions. The course is interdisciplinary in nature. While it is essentially addressed to historians, especially if you are interested in cultural history and in the history of ideologies, it also considers sociological issues and topics that would appeal if you are interested in politics.

This module explores the eventful and troubled history of modern Iraq. Taking its starting point in the nineteenth century, when Iraq was part of the Ottoman Empire, the module explores how the country came under British tutelage following the Great War and how it subsequently experienced a turbulent history as various political actors sought to wrest control of the newly established state. The module pays special attention to key moments when the course of Iraq’s history changed, such as wars, military coups, and revolutions, but also periods in between when society returned to some sort of normality. It will particularly focus on the rise of political ideologies, especially Arab nationalism, and its local counterpart, Iraqi nationalism – but also other ideologies such as socialism, communism and Baᶜthism. Saddam Hussein’s domination of the country (1979-2003) is also an important element of the module.

You will be introduced to the darker side of life in Victorian Britain. Though this was undoubtedly a period of economic prosperity, not everyone shared in the gains. You will look at those who, for reasons of poverty or ‘deviance’ were confined to the margins. Topics include the criminal and insane, gender and insanity, prostitution, drink, slums, the London Irish, and Jack the Ripper. By looking at the margins and the misfits, we will seek to gain a deeper understanding of British society in the 19th century.

On this module you’ll explore how 500 years of change shaped the modern landscape. You’ll study the development of rural and urban landscapes in the post-medieval period and see how a landscape approach can shed light on wider social, political and economic changes. In seminars you’ll use a wide range of contemporary documents, including maps and paintings alongside written sources, to examine key aspects of landscape change in the period c.1450-1950 and to identify shifts in the way the landscape was represented and perceived. Each week you’ll explore a different topic relating to key themes such as the development of country house architecture and garden design, the evolution of urban landscapes and the transformation of the working countryside. A number of field trips will take place throughout the year to give you first hand experience of relevant sites and landscapes.

In this module you’ll study the history of the Third Reich from an international and comparative perspective through the extensive use of primary sources. You’ll examine the origins and the rise of National Socialism, the seizure and consolidation of power, the nature and political structure of the dictatorship, and the transformation of German society under Nazi rule, but you’ll focus in particular on foreign policy and the impact of the regime’s policies on Europe and the world. You’ll explore Nazi Germany’s relationship with other autocracies and right-wing forces in Europe, German geopolitical thought and the role of the Foreign Office, the formation and administration of the Nazi empire, issues of collaboration and resistance in occupied territories, combat motivation and war crimes of ordinary soldiers, the importance of non-German perpetrators of the Holocaust, the German home front and the effects of Allied aerial bombings, the various plans for a post-war Europe, and the problem of ethnic cleansing both before and after 1945.

You will begin with a search for the origins of the Yugoslav idea, before turning to the Kingdom’s formation in 1918. The turbulent interwar years provide the indispensable backdrop to the second, communist, Yugoslavia. You shall explore the course of the Second World War and the bitter fighting between fascists, nationalists and communists which resulted in victory for Tito’s partisans. After 1945, they built a state which took an independent path to communism and survived until 1991. Yugoslavia then fragmented into ethnically homogenous states. In some cases this transition was largely peaceful, but wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo witnessed bloody fighting and ethnic cleansing. You will look at the role of individuals, such as Slobodan Milošević, and end by assessing the international community's response to the crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia.

We will explore the impact of the First World War on European and non-European states, societies, and cultures. Our aim is to broaden and deepen the students’ knowledge by introducing some of the lesser known aspects of the conflict, such as the campaigns on the Eastern front, in Africa, or the Middle East. You will investigate the role and perception of colonial troops in the European theatre of war and examine the war efforts of such countries as Italy, Serbia, the Ottoman Empire, and Australia. Further topics to be discussed include alliance politics and the role of neutral states, psychological effects of ‘industrialised slaughter’, atrocities against non-combatant civilians, captivity and occupation, state propaganda and the spiritual mobilisation of intellectuals, as well as processes of social change with regard to home and family life, ethnicity and class. We will draw on a wide range of primary sources, including poems, paintings, and film. In their coursework, students will have the opportunity to study more specific issues, such as naval and aerial warfare, British military strategy, civil-military relations in democratic and autocratic states, medical innovations, the war experiences of children, or questions of memory and commemoration.

In medieval England, death and what lay beyond it were constantly visible out of the corner of the eye. Large portions of the landscape were given over to the dead: there were barrows, haunted by the ancient pagan dead; cemeteries for the Christian dead; and lonely hermitages, whose occupants spoke with the dead. ‘King Death’, shown as a skeleton with spear or bow, would strike down the living at any age. And if prayers were not said for them, their ghosts would wander forth from the grave to terrify their neighbours. Vivid images of what happened to the dead were painted and carved over the archways of churches, haunting the living every Sunday and dancing before their mind’s eye in their dreams. Visions of the dead were not uncommon, and sometimes they made such demands on the living that the latter spent their lives serving them. This module examines beliefs about death and the otherworld in medieval England; how medieval people prepared for death; how ghosts and the ‘undead’ irrupted into their world; the role of those who served the dead or acted as mediators between the dead and the living; demons, the evil dead and saints (the holy dead); and how death was represented in medieval art. There will be a trip to see tombs and wall paintings.

The reign of Elizabeth I, the last of the Tudor monarchs, is traditionally viewed as a golden age in English History. The defiant and plucky English inflicted a dramatic defeat on the Spanish Armada. William Shakespeare’s Loves Labour’s Lost was performed at the royal court over Christmas 1597. Sir Walter Raleigh returned from the New World, having named the colony of Virginia in his queen’s honour. We are led to believe that the end of the Tudor century was undoubtedly its highlight. A Protestant England had emerged victorious from years of struggle to bask in a moment of cultural and political Renaissance. This is made all the more extraordinary for happening under the leadership of a woman. Yet are we being hoodwinked by the propaganda of the past? Was the age of Gloriana all it appeared to be? The Elizabethan regime was adept at using the printing press to circulate its own version of events and to promote an image that often differed drastically from reality. Looking beneath the surface, it is possible to glimpse a different perspective. Elizabethan society was fractured, tense and paranoid. Many of the queen’s subjects clung to the Catholic faith. They were nervous of foreign invasion and deeply suspicious about the prospect of female rule. This course will explore and examine this central paradox to the reign of Elizabeth I. We will use a range of primary evidence, both written and visual, to reconsider the realities of the Gloriana myth. An examination of Elizabeth’s childhood and her turbulent upbringing will underline the insecurity of the Tudor century and the myriad of problems the queen would come to face. Bastardised at the age of three, Anne Boleyn’s daughter would face serious and life-threatening challenges before ever ascending to the throne of England. To many who repudiated the religious changes her father had forced on the country, Henry VIII’s marriage to her mother was never legitimate. The young princess was excluded from the line of succession by her own brother on these very grounds. Elizabeth only just survived the reign of her Catholic half-sister, Mary I, and learnt dramatic lessons about the realities of female rule along the way. On being told that she had become queen on 17 November 1558, tradition tells us that Elizabeth fell to her knees exclaiming “this is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes.” This course will consider how the new young queen coped with the many challenges that faced her. Her country had been in religious turmoil for nearly twenty-five years and there was no obvious solution to the problem. Elizabeth faced serious threats at home and abroad from those who doubted her claim to the throne. She was also a woman in a man’s world, ruling a polity created by men to support and counsel a king. And, of course, she was under intense pressure to marry. How did the queen steer a course through these problems? How serious were the plots she faced? With what success did she govern her country and secure its future? Did the myth ever really match the reality?

This module looks the events and the institutions of eleventh-century England and Normandy, as well as the big personalities who contributed to the story of the Norman Conquest of England. We will approach the problems of understanding the Conquest through the primary sources in translation. Topics will include Women and the Conquest, The Battle of Hastings, Court Culture, Anglo-Saxon Society, Norman Society, Architecture, responses to the Conquest (both contemporary and later), Anglo-Norman Society, and the personalities: Emma of Normandy; Edward the Confessor; Queen Edith; Earl Harold; William the Conqueror; and Queen Matilda. We shall be looking at some of the iconic documents of the eleventh century such as Domesday Book (the very first official governmental record to survive) and the Bayeux Tapestry (the only large embroidery to survive from the eleventh century), as well as some of the eleventh-century material culture that sits on our doorstep: Norwich Castle Keep; Norwich Cathedral; and Castle Acre Castle and Priory. Assessment will be by a portfolio of written responses to set texts.

The decade from 1935 to 1945 was one of the most tumultuous in global history. In this module, you’ll examine Britain’s peacetime diplomacy and wartime strategy, as it responded to three totalitarian powers: Germany, Italy and Japan. The policy of ‘appeasement’ adopted by the Baldwin and Chamberlain governments remains hugely controversial, and the subject of vigorous debate. Britain's role in the global war that erupted in 1939 has, similarly, fascinated historians ever since. In the autumn semester, you’ll explore the foreign policies adopted by Britain's 'National' Government, from Baldwin’s victory in the 1935 election to the outbreak of war in September 1939. You’ll consider why and how these policies were adopted, the wider political and economic context within which policy was made, and the national and international consequences. In the spring semester, you’ll examine Britain’s wartime role in the context of grand strategy and international politics. In addition to considering topics such as Churchill’s ‘finest hour’, we’ll spend some time examining the operation of the Grand Alliance and the series of wartime conferences between Britain and its allies. Throughout, you will explore the rich historiography of the period, and examine its complexities. We’ll draw upon a wide range of primary documentation, which will provide the basis of debate and discussion.

In this module, you will explore how the past is constantly constructed and reconstructed in the present. In the first part of the module we will consider how mnemonic processes are created, by who, and for what purpose. Commemoration, memorialisation, and visual representations form a key part of this process. In the second part of the module, we will study the ways in which individuals and groups remember and how this often differs from official or mediated discourses. In the third and final part, we will explore various ‘memory conflicts’ and their present day consequences. Throughout, film, photography, visual and audio media, and oral history will form key components of our studies.

The late philosopher Zygmunt Bauman called the 20th century 'a century of camps'; for him, camps were testing grounds for totalitarian regimes. In this module, we will study the history of the violent last century through the unique lens of camps: concentration camps, forced labour camps, POW camps, refugee camps, and others. Through diverse material selected for the course, we will analyse the well-known events of the 20th century by looking at camps as places of detention, indoctrination, re-education, labour exploitation, and extermination. This unique angle provides insights into the politics of great totalitarian powers, as well as their models for organising and governing society and interacting with other nations of the world. Camps did not appear out of nowhere; each place of detention was part of an institutional network driven by divergent aims: to contain, correct, re-educate, punish. We will study these networks within their historical contexts, using diverse materials specific to each case. Also, a study of camps cannot be limited to camp walls and barbed wire; while static themselves and built to limit people's movements, camps were ironically dependent on the movements of people from place to place. Thus a study of camps inevitably involves the study of forced migrations. To acquaint you with the less studied side of global, regional and transnational interactions, this module will use a variety of sources, analyses, and methods in order to make sense of international regimes of detention, control, and punishment.

In 1968, Japan astonished the world by overtaking West Germany as the world’s second largest capitalist economy. It was easy to forget that two decades earlier the nation lay in ruins, defeated by the Allies in WWII. And a mere century before, in 1868, Japan had been a samurai-ruled feudal backwater, forced open by western gunboat diplomacy and under threat of colonisation. How did this East Asian nation attain its impressive position in the modern world in such a short time? In this module, we will explore Japan’s modern history through its formative exchanges with the outside world. By looking at a wide variety of primary sources - media reports, government documents, memoirs, autobiographies, travelogues, and others - we will explore the transnational encounters that shaped Japan’s modern society, economy, culture and ideas. We will retrace the nation’s often bumpy transition from tradition to modernity in the late nineteenth century; the humiliations and anxieties vis-a-vis the “great powers”; the appeal of foreign “dangerous thoughts” to homegrown dissidents; the impact of imperialist ideologies following the European “Age of Empire”; the militarist revolt against party politics in the 1930s; the harsh reality of war both at home and overseas; the post-WWII recovery and alliance with the United States; and the subsequent refashioning of Japan’s place in the world. By examining Japan’s links with North America, Western Europe, Russia and the Soviet Union, and East and South East Asia, we will analyse how flows of ideas, people and goods helped shape the nation as we know it today.

The French Revolution destroyed age-old cultural, institutional and social structures in France and beyond. Yet, in their attempt to regenerate humanity, the revolutionaries were creative as well as destructive, creating a new political culture with far-reaching implications. This special subject will provide an opportunity to study different aspects of the Revolution in depth. You will become familiar with the Revolution’s key political turning points and personalities from Maximilien Robespierre to Napoleon Bonaparte. But a great part of this special subject will be devoted to exploring the artistic, cultural and intellectual dimensions of this eventful period. In doing so, you will master the art of interpreting and contextualizing a variety of different kinds of primary sources, such as caricatures, constitutions, legislative decrees, philosophical tracts, artisan memoirs and private letters.

This module will help you prepare for a career in History teaching. Through a blend of vocational and academic delivery, you will develop appropriate specialist, technical, and transferable skills. You will learn about different pedagogical approaches to teaching History and an understanding of the requirements for a career in teaching. You will be offered support to arrange teaching observations; a necessary precondition for a PGCE application. Teaching History will also enable you to design learning activities and accompanying materials and to deliver these to your peers in a friendly environment.

‘The mother of our own’: that was Jacob Burckhardt’s famous claim about the civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Certainly its influence in art and thought has been lasting and profound. But is this culture really so familiar? Only by recognising its strangeness can we truly understand it and bring that world, its values, and its mentalities to life. That is our task in this journey from the revival of Antiquity to the renewal of papal Rome; from the cosmopolitan centres of Venice and Florence to the scintillating sprezzatura of the princely courts; from the squalor and splendour of city streets to the routes travelled by pilgrims, armies, manuscripts, minorities, scholars, and slaves. What made the German artist Albrecht Dürer feel himself a 'gentleman' in Venice, or made Titian call his paintings ‘poems’? Why did people get so excited when the preserved body of an ancient Roman girl was discovered on the Appian Way, translating her like a holy relic and drawing her like a fragment of sculpture? And why did so many men after 1500 start growing beards? Paintings and other works of art will be at the heart of our source base as we try to answer these and other questions. Alongside texts by those such as Petrarch, Machiavelli, and Leonardo da Vinci, we will encounter the Jewish philosopher and Iberian exile Isaac Abravanel, arguing the superiority of republics on the basis of Hebrew scripture from his new Venetian home – before the opening of its Ghetto; the cultured courtesan Tullia d’Aragona, disputing frankly in defence of sexual desire and the intellectual and spiritual equality of women; and the theories of love and art of a homosexual artist and poet (Michelangelo).

This module offers students the chance to explore and examine in detail the reign of Louis VI, who ruled as king of the Franks from 1108 until his death in 1137. The life and rule of this king was characterised by some of the most dramatic events of medieval European history: the insurrection of the burgess community of Laon and the murder of leading members of the household of the bishop of Laon in 1112; the incessant campaigning for control of key castles in the Seine basin throughout the 1110s and 1120s; the combination of war and peace-making with the king-duke of the English and Normans and with other leading princes of northern Francia in 1116–1120; the invasion of the emperor of the Romans in 1124; the murder of Charles, count of Flanders in 1127 and the subsequent struggle for his lands and territories; and the death of the king’s nominated son and co-ruler in the streets of Paris in 1131. A theme of this module is survival—the survival of a king against all the odds. Louis VI was by no means the most skilful and most successful of the western princes ruling in the early twelfth century west. But by the time he was buried in the abbey church of St Denis—then in the process of being converted into one of the premier architectural masterpieces of the Latin West—he and his faithful men had staked out claims for the rights and reach of Frankish kings and established the foundation for the emergence of a more enduring and more ambitious style of kingship. How Louis and his men survived in the face of such mighty challenges and how they secured these small, but significant, victories are some of the key questions of this module. At the heart of this module are three contemporary narrative texts—perhaps three of the most remarkable examples of historical writing produced over the course of the middle ages. The first is the uita of Louis composed by Suger, abbot of St Denis—a man of many parts, with a formidable commitment to his abbey’s status and landholding. This text is unlike any other life of a king. The second text is the Monodies (or Autobiography) composed by the monk, Guibert of Nogent. This fascinating work of autobiography and history (it is neither one nor the other) provides the most detailed account of the insurrection in Laon as well as a discursive, gossipy, and revealing insight into one man’s perception of his own childhood, monastic career, and circle of friends. The third key text will be Galbert of Bruges’s exceptionally detailed account—in what has been described as an almost journalistic narrative—of the murder of Charles, count of Flanders, and the subsequent war for his territory. Students will be required to explore the genesis, composition, structure, and purpose of all three texts and will be encouraged to make their own judgements about their function and design. They will also be required to examine these texts within the context of other evidence—the evidence of royal charters, episcopal uitae and acta, material items, coins, church design, and castle archaeology. Their close reading of these texts will allow them to explore such essential themes as the status and active role of aristocratic women; the ideals and operation of kingship; the workings of regnal and élite politics; the forms and functions of contemporary historical writing; and the nature of castle warfare and military campaigning.

This course offers students the opportunity to engage critically with a wide range of issues relating to the Arab-Israeli question as it has developed since the late nineteenth century into the present day. The history of the Arab-Israeli question is both complex and deeply contested, and students will be exposed to a range of perspectives and methodological reflections by historians of the conflict, with the intention of gaining a greater appreciation of the practical and conceptual challenges of ‘doing’ the history of such a divisive and contemporary subject. The course does not assume prior knowledge, and grounds students in the historical development of the Arab-Israeli question, familiarising them with key events in this history like the Balfour Declaration, the 1948, 1967, and 1973 wars, the Oslo peace process, and the first and second intifadas. As well grounding students in the overarching political narrative and equipping them to assess the reasons for the longevity and seeming intractability of the conflict, this course also adopts a thematic approach in order to introduce students to some of the more recent and interesting developments in the scholarship. In the second half of the term, students will engage the Arab-Israeli question through consideration of more specific themes: the uneasy place of Palestinian citizens of Israel, Arab Jews, and Druze in this history; life in the divided city of Jerusalem; and the politics of LGBT+ rights in contemporary Israel-Palestine.

The 1980s has finally entered the radar of historians. As they make their mark on a terrain once reserved for political scientists and sociologists, scholarship on Britain in the Eighties is undergoing a marked transformation. For too long, accounts of 1980s Britain was overdetermined by Margaret Thatcher, the Thatcher governments or, at best, Thatcherism. Using a diverse set of historical accounts and archival sources this module will make clear that we must look beyond Thatcherism to truly understand the unmaking of the social democratic experiment and the new, neoliberal order that emerged in its wake. Introducing you to a wide range of sources – from film and song to state, community and personal archives – this module will track how a 1980s politics of individualism - long seen as a product of the Thatcherite revolution - has deep ideological roots in British political and cultural life. We will track transformations in the political economy: the restructuring of state power, the revolution of the City, the reshaping of geographical divisions and inequalities as well as the emergence of ‘multiculturalism’, diverse political and individual identities, changes in homeownership and the gendered division of labour. By placing Britain’s experience of deindustrialisation, decolonisation and its gender and sexual revolutions in deeper historical and comparative contexts, we can better understand the emergence – and durability – of Britain’s neoliberal order. In this way across the module we will not only extend our gaze back to the 1960s, but also draw it forward to the end of the century. Critically, we will approach ‘politics’ broadly in this module, considering for instance everyday conservatism, the politics of the home, social aspiration and mobility, as well as communities of radical activism – on the left and right. The 1980s has been written as a story of the political defeat of the Left, with the destruction of mining communities and, with that, the destruction of the political voice of an industrial working class as the decade’s defining story. But this metanarrative misses the fracturing and diversification of resistance at this time; defeat tells only one (albeit important) story. We will introduce students to the political subjectivities of those who continued to transform Britain’s cultural and political life from the margins: black feminists, Irish republicans, LGBT activists, New Travellers, ravers, Black and Asian youth, punks and radical environmentalists. Ultimately this module will show how neoliberalism was embraced, but also contested and resisted in high politics, in the streets, in homes, intimate relationships and personal identities.

Much like twenty-first-century Britain, England in 1300-1700 had a problem with ‘fake news’: rumours could threaten kings, start rebellions, and ruin the reputations of individuals in their communities. In this thematic module, we shall consider the role that gossip and rumour played in a changing society rocked by the Black Death, the Wars of the Roses, the Reformation, popular riots, and the arrival of the printing press. We shall also place the England of 1300-1700 in a broader conceptual context, using it to evaluate anthropological and sociological arguments about why humans gossip. How did people establish what was ‘true’? And did gossip tend to subvert authority, or to further disempower already marginalised individuals? The module stands at the intersection of political, social, cultural, and religious history, and will address topics ranging from the Peasants’ Revolt and English Revolution to tavern culture and sex scandals. Students will analyse court records, popular ballads, and literature from the period, as well as consider how urban space in late medieval and early modern Norwich facilitated or checked the spread of rumour.

The study of the Vikings has undergone a revolution in the last decades. Long viewed as a disruptive force in Christian Europe, recent scholarship has argued that the Vikings were a positive catalyst for economic and social change. This module looks at the Vikings at home – in Scandinavia, examining society and state formation, and asking what prompted the first Viking raids on the English and Frankish kingdoms. It will explore Viking religion and culture, and look at the impact of Christianity upon the Scandinavian kingdoms. The impact of the Vikings away – in England, Francia and Eastern Europe – is examined from the point of view of early medieval warfare and the defence against the Vikings, Viking settlement, and crucial role played by the Vikings in initiating urbanisation. The Viking world will be studied as a transnational network and the module will look at not only the impact of the Vikings on Europe but also the effect of interactions with Christian kingdoms upon the Vikings. Students will study a wide range of sources – literary and narrative sources from England and Francia, Viking poetry and sagas, and the evidence of archaeology and art history. Preliminary List of Topics: 1. Introduction: The Viking World 2. What caused the Viking Age? 3. Traders and Raiders – the Vikings in England in the Eighth- and Ninth-Centuries. 4. The Vikings on the Continent. 5. Viking Settlement In England. 6. Visit to the Castle Museum, Norwich 7. Viking Society. 8. Viking Religion. 9. Towns and International Networks. 10. The Vikings in the East. 11. State Formation in Denmark, Norway and Sweden 12. Nationalism and the Myth of the Vikings.

The rise and demise of the Japanese Empire happened at an extraordinary speed. In the course of a few decades from the late nineteenth century onward, Japan secured colonial territories that stretched from Inner Mongolia and Manchuria to the South Pacific. This ambitious expansion unsettled the Western powers and affected the destiny of millions of ‘fellow Asians’, only to come to a disastrous end in 1945. Japan’s imperialist legacy remains complex and contentious today. Primary and secondary literature assigned in this module will take you to the specific ‘spaces’ – local, regional, national, transnational - that provided the context for Japanese imperialism. You will explore such topics as racial encounters in Taiwan, assimilation policies in Korea, utopian development in Manchuria and pan-Asian ideologies. At a micro-level, you will familiarize yourself with the lives of planners, settlers, colonized subjects, soldiers, and others. In a broader sense, you will acquire critical insights into imperialism as it unfolded in a non-western setting.

This module will explore the relationship between biography and history, including the changing role of biography as a mode of studying history, its uses and limitations, and the practicalities of putting together biographies. It will present opportunities for students with interests in any period of history: we will examine the role of biography across two millennia, from ancient Rome to the present. We will consider the ways in which biography can be invaluable in revealing previously hidden histories as well as illuminating so-called ‘great lives’. In addition to examining biography in its many forms, you will also have the chance to put together your own biographical study.

This module will begin with the 1905 Aliens Act and end with the 2016 Brexit referendum. Students will be introduced to the most important historiographical debates and themes in the history of 'race' in Modern Britain, including: colonial migrations, refugee settlement, the Windrush myth, the colonial roots of 'race relations' and the politics of white nationalism. The module will challenge students to approach 'race' as an unstable political and social idea. We will consider: How did ideas about 'race' intersect with ideas about sovereignty, welfare, social class, gender, nationhood and local identity in twentieth-century Britain? What is racial capitalism? How did Black Britons challenge the structures of racial hierarchy? In what ways did the British Empire (and its ending) contribute to British racial formations? How was ‘race’ at work in the making and unmaking of Britain’s welfare state? How does including histories of the Irish, Italians, East Europeans and Gypsies and Travellers in Britain help to complicate our understanding of 'race' and the conceptual, political and cultural work it does in society?

This module looks the events and the institutions of eleventh-century England and Normandy, as well as the big personalities who contributed to the story of the Norman Conquest of England. We will approach the problems of understanding the Conquest through the primary sources in translation. Topics will include Women and the Conquest, The Battle of Hastings, Court Culture, Anglo-Saxon Society, Norman Society, Architecture, responses to the Conquest (both contemporary and later), Anglo-Norman Society, and the personalities: Emma of Normandy; Edward the Confessor; Queen Edith; Earl Harold; William the Conqueror; and Queen Matilda. We shall be looking at some of the iconic documents of the eleventh century such as Domesday Book (the very first official governmental record to survive) and the Bayeux Tapestry (the only large embroidery to survive from the eleventh century), as well as some of the eleventh-century material culture that sits on our doorstep: Norwich Castle Keep; Norwich Cathedral; and Castle Acre Castle and Priory.

This module offers you the opportunity to submit a dissertation of 10,000 words on a topic approved by the School. For you to be considered for this module you will have achieved an aggregate of 68% across the Level 5 Autumn semester modules.

In the Literature Dissertation, you get to conduct independent research on a literary topic of your choosing, with supervision from an academic with relevant expertise. In addition to guidance from your supervisor, you will have group workshops helping you to define and delimit your topic, to plan your research and writing, to structure your argument, and to contextualise your work within broader critical debates. By the end of the semester you will have completed an extended essay of 8000 words. To be confirmed on the dissertation, you need signed agreement from a dissertation supervisor by the end of June. You do not need a concrete topic to bring to a supervisor in the first instance: just a general subject area (this could be an author, a period, a genre, a critical approach), so you and the supervisor can devise a more focused topic together. There will be a briefing session at the beginning of June where you will be able to think about subject areas and potential supervisors. If you do not have supervisory agreement by the end of June, you will automatically move to one of your reserve choices.

In the Literature Dissertation, you get to conduct independent research on a literary topic of your choosing, with supervision from an academic with relevant expertise. In addition to guidance from your supervisor, you will have group workshops helping you to define and delimit your topic, to plan your research and writing, to structure your argument, and to contextualise your work within broader critical debates. By the end of the semester you will have completed an extended essay of 8000 words. To be confirmed on the dissertation, you need signed agreement from a dissertation supervisor by the end of June. You do not need a concrete topic to bring to a supervisor in the first instance: just a general subject area (this could be an author, a period, a genre, a critical approach), so you and the supervisor can devise a more focused topic together. There will be a briefing session at the beginning of June where you will be able to think about subject areas and potential supervisors. If you do not have supervisory agreement by the end of June, you will automatically move to one of your reserve choices.

In the Literature Dissertation, you get to conduct independent research on a literary topic of your choosing, with supervision from an academic with relevant expertise. In addition to guidance from your supervisor, you will have group workshops helping you to define and delimit your topic, to plan your research and writing, to structure your argument, and to contextualise your work within broader critical debates. By the end of the semester you will have completed an extended essay of 8000 words. To be confirmed on the dissertation, you need signed agreement from a dissertation supervisor by the end of June. You do not need a concrete topic to bring to a supervisor in the first instance: just a general subject area (this could be an author, a period, a genre, a critical approach), so you and the supervisor can devise a more focused topic together. There will be a briefing session at the beginning of June where you will be able to think about subject areas and potential supervisors. If you do not have supervisory agreement by the end of June, you will automatically move to one of your reserve choices.

In the Literature Dissertation, you get to conduct independent research on a literary topic of your choosing, with supervision from an academic with relevant expertise. In addition to guidance from your supervisor, you will have group workshops helping you to define and delimit your topic, to plan your research and writing, to structure your argument, and to contextualise your work within broader critical debates. By the end of the semester you will have completed an extended essay of 8000 words. To be confirmed on the dissertation, you need signed agreement from a dissertation supervisor by the end of June. You do not need a concrete topic to bring to a supervisor in the first instance: just a general subject area (this could be an author, a period, a genre, a critical approach), so you and the supervisor can devise a more focused topic together. There will be a briefing session at the beginning of June where you will be able to think about subject areas and potential supervisors. If you do not have supervisory agreement by the end of June, you will automatically move to one of your reserve choices.