English Literature Modules
For more information visit the School of English, Communication and Philosophy website.
Autumn Semester Modules
Semester: Autumn
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
This module offers an introduction to Shakespeare’s comedies, situating them within a broader cultural, historical, and dramatic context.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminar
Assessment:
Examination: 100%
Tennyson: Texts and Contexts SE2225
Semester: Autumn
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
This module examines the reciprocal relations between the poetry of Tennyson and the cultural and ideological formations which characterize the Victorian period in which that poetry is produced.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminars
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Semester: Autumn
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
The module focuses on the first book of Spenser's epic poem, concentrating on a close reading of the text. The aim of the module is to introduce students to the poem, concentrating on the first book, and looking at some of the issues raised by close reading of the text, including its sexual politics, the unstable nature of allegory, the use of visual imagery, irony and the role of the reader.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminars
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Reading 18th Century Fiction SE2262
Semester: Autumn
Length: One Semester
Credits: 20
This module offers an introduction to Eighteenth-Century Fiction. This module seeks to introduce students to the formal and thematic concerns which characterise early to mid eighteenth-century fiction.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminars
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Welsh Fiction in English SE2271
Semester: Autumn
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
This module traces the development of Welsh fiction in English from c. 1900 to the present. The aims of this course are to introduce students to the range and variety of twentieth-century Welsh fiction in English, and to gain an understanding both of the contexts in which these texts were produced and consumed and of the differing modes and methods used in their production.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminars
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
African American Writing 1900-1940 SE2277
Semester: Autumn
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
The module explores African American texts produced during the period 1900-1940, locating them in their literary, historical and cultural contexts. Particular emphasis will be given to the following issues: the aftermath of slavery and the idea of ‘double consciousness’; gender and sexuality; racial and cultural hybridity; bodies and psyches; oppression and resistance; orality, literacy and music. The formal and linguistic complexity of the texts will also be highlighted.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminars
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Introduction to Woman’s Poetry SE2292
Semester: Autumn
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
This module aims to introduce students to a range of women’s poetry. It will focus on selected works by major British and American women poets and will explore them comparatively, with a view to identifying common themes and techniques, as well as significant differences. The module will concentrate on close reading of texts, set in the context of social, political and cultural change. Underpinning the module is the question of whether a separate women’s poetic tradition can be said to exist. The poems will be considered therefore in relation to dominant literary movements, foregrounding questions about the relation of women’s poetry to the canon.
Teaching Methods:
Seminars
Lectures
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Shakespeare’s Histories SE2306
Semester: Autumn
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
This module offers students the opportunity to consider Shakespeare's Histories from a range of critical perspectives. To introduce students to Shakespeare's History plays in the light of current scholarship and criticism. On the basis of close attention to plays, students will examine the history plays to explore their meanings and themes.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminars
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Twentieth-Century Children’s Literature SE2337
Semester: Autumn
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
Through the Twentieth Century, literature has developed as one of the most interesting, innovative, entertaining and culturally significant areas of literature. This module explores major elements of that development such as narrative stance, gender and sexuality, popular culture and postmodernism, reading the texts against the socio-cultural contexts in which they are produced and consumed.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminars
Assessment:
Coursework 100%
Semester: Autumn
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
The module will entail close analysis of selected novels by Toni Morrison. The language of the texts will be examined in detail, together with Morrison’s reworking of Euro-American and African American literary and cultural traditions. In addition to this, the historical and political contexts in which the texts are situated will be drawn out. There will be particular emphasis throughout the module on the ways in which Morrison’s writing attempts to address the memory of American slavery.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminar
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Semester: Autumn
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
This module will introduce students to some of the approaches and debates that have shaped feminist criticism since the 1970s and 1980s – a period often referred to as the ‘second wave’ of feminism (e.g. essentialism/constructionism, pornography, technology, politics, literary and visual representation, marginalization, the intersections of race, class, gender and sexuality). Beginning with an exploration of feminist histories, it will examine the debates and controversies that have emerged in and enlivened feminist thinking and, in so doing, it will consider the future of feminist criticism in the twenty-first century.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminars
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Contemporary Woman’s Writing SE2421
Semester: Autumn
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
Students will explore some of the key themes and issues characterising contemporary women’s writing (e.g. art, history, sex, family, sexual relations, friendship, feminist politics, community and marginality) as well as questions of identity and selfhood in relation to gender, sexuality, class, race and nationality. Focusing on women’s prose fiction, the module will provide an opportunity for students to consider and employ various feminist approaches to literary studies and to address questions about gender and genre, literary traditions and canon formation, and the relationship between women’s writing and feminist thinking since the 1970s.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminars
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Semester: Autumn
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
This course will cover a variety of plays from the Restoration period. It will explore subgenres such as libertine drama, Shakespeare adaptation, tragedy, and comedy of manners. We will explore works by both male and female playwrights and address issues of influence and development in generic modes during the course of the period. We will also pay close attention to the development of the stage in relation to dramatic writings (e.g., set and theatre design, acting techniques, the introduction of the actress), as well as developments in the theory of drama.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminars
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Semester: Autumn
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
The aims of this module are to introduce students to the major literary works of John Milton (1608-1674), and to develop students’ understanding of the literary and historical contexts in which these texts were produced. Paradise Lost is generally agreed to be one of the greatest works in the English language; however, Milton wrote many other significant works, and this module will explore a representative range of pieces from his early poems and drama, to his late, great epic. While a significant amount of teaching time will be spent introducing contextual issues, the module will also utilise a range of secondary critical works to model formal analyses.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminars
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Semester: Autumn
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
This module is an introduction to the language and literature of Anglo-Saxon England including close study of a selection of Old English poetry in the original language. Texts studied will include a heroic poem about the Battle of Maldon and an acclaimed dream vision retelling the crucifixion from the perspective of the cross. The module should also appeal to students with an interest in the history of the English language. No previous experience of language-learning is necessary.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Workshops
Seminars
Assessment:
Examination: 100%
Semester: Autumn
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
The aim of this module is to examine a range of plays from the period 1580-1640. Students will be asked to think about Renaissance drama from a number of complementary angles—staging, spectacle, and emblem—together with such issues as temptation, sin, revenge, justice, the state.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminars
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Religion, Politics and Sex 1640-1714 SE2541
Semester: Autumn
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
This course will focus on the religious, political and social contexts that shaped intellectual and creative writing in the period 1640-1714 (i.e., the Civil Wars to the death of Queen Anne). We will explore discourses about kingship and patriarchy, religious enthusiasm, epistemology, libertinism, and the status of women. Some of the writers we will cover include Hobbes, Locke, Dryden, Rochester, Behn, Milton, and Astell. Special attention will be paid to the literary tactics deployed by non-literary writers and tropes of revolutionary thought (e.g., destruction, creation and reconstruction).
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminars
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Modern Drama, Page, Stage and Screen SE2551
Semester: Autumn
Length: One Semester
Credits: 20
This module aims to examine plays representative of early twentieth-century trends in British, American, and European theatre. It will then examine the evolution of those trends in British and American theatre, paying close attention to the engagement of that theatre with cultural and historical events, as well as the close relationship of that theatre to developments in music drama and film.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminars
Assessment:
In-Class Assessment: 100%
Semester: Autumn
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
This module combines an introduction to the language of medieval Iceland with the study of Old Norse mythology. Students will study selections from Snorri Sturluson’s Edda, as well as reading other mythological sources in English translations. No previous experience of language-learning is necessary.
Teaching Methods:
Workshops
Seminars
Assessment:
Examination: 100%
Contemporary Black & South Asian SE2554
Semester: Autumn
Length: One Semester
Credits: 20
This module analyses how British writers of Black and South Asian descent have represented migration, settlement and life in Britain since the Second World War. The module encourages students to acquire (1) a knowledge of the history of Black and South Asian settlement in Britain with an emphasis on the period 1945-present and (2) an ability to analyse how British writers of Black and South Asian descent have addressed the social, political and cultural issues that have arisen with the development of multi-ethnic Britain since 1945, including racism and questions of identity and belonging.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminars
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Semester: Autumn
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
The purpose of this module is to introduce major twentieth-century French ‘theorists’ of literature from, and in relation to, a range of disciplines (philosophy, aesthetics, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, semiology, feminism) that have been influential in redefining what literature is and how it operates. Emphasis will be on the historical and ideological contexts within which these new ideas were developed as well as on the re-conceptualization of practices of reading and writing they involved, redefining or introducing notions like authorship, intertextuality, deconstruction, poetics, écriture and écriture feminine, the opposition between language and discourse, the relationship of textual production to economics, etc.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminars
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Semester: Autumn
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
The purpose of this module is to explore how speed, in all its meanings (from velocity to narcotics), has become an entire way of life and thinking across a wide range of disciplines: from its rise with modernity’s new technologies and progress to its latter-day necessity in communication (broadband Internet) and computers, via its advent as a political force (in the nuclear arms race, for instance), its representation in contemporary cinema, or even its critical role in the analysis of literature (‘narcoanalysis’). Its antidote, slowness, will also be considered in the light of Kundera’s eponymous novel. Students will be encouraged to think laterally and deeply—rather than speedily.
Teaching Methods:
Seminars
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Semester: Autumn
Length: One Semester
Credits: 20
Since its emergence in the late 1980s, queer theory has been one of the most controversial strands of gender studies, heralded variously as the ally, successor, and nemesis of feminism and lesbian and gay studies alike. Students taking this module will study in detail queer theory’s development and significance, with special reference to key queer ideas of community, embodiment, and identity. In the light of texts that argue for the endless mobility of relations between gender, sexuality, sex, and subjectivity, students will be asked to interrogate the usefulness of ‘queer’ as a political strategy as well as a theoretical standpoint.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminars
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Semester: Autumn
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
This module will explore the fascination of twentieth-century novelists and filmmakers with the city. It will be structured around the distinction between the ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’ city, and will ask how the characteristic features of these differing modes of urban space are registered in fictional and film texts. It will also consider how the waves of immigration that followed decolonization have given rise to the multi-cultural and multi-ethnic make-up of the contemporary metropolis, and the literary responses that this has prompted. The emphasis throughout will be on the city’s ambiguous role as a site both of grandeur, energy, and excitement, and of danger, alienation, and oppression.
Teaching Methods:
Seminars
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Spring Semester Modules
Semester: Spring
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
The module aims to introduce students to critical theory, to provide them with the vocabulary and conceptual tools needed to discuss this theory, and to explore the ways in which theoretical propositions affect the reading of texts.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
The Canterbury Tales II SE2212
Semester: Spring
Length: One Semester
Credits: 20
The aim of this module is to encourage close study of selected Tales from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in relation to their contexts and to current critical debates. This course is complementary to CHAUCER'S CANTERBURY TALES I but does not assume prior knowledge of Chaucer.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminars
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Shakespeare’s Tragedies SE2217
Semester: Spring
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
This module aims to introduce students to a selection of Shakespeare’s Tragedies in the light of modern theories of tragedy, and to help them contextualise these plays in relation to early modern English history.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminars
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Sir Gawain & The Green Knight SE2268
Semester: Spring
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
The module will introduce students to the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and to the range of critical approaches that modern criticism has opened up to the text. Students will be asked to read Sir Gawain in a parallel edition of the text with translation before going on to discuss some of the recent critical approaches to the text.
Teaching Methods:
Seminars
Lectures
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Fiction of the Indian Subcontinent SE2283
Semester: Spring
Length: One Semester
Credits: 20
This module will introduce students to the fiction of the Indian subcontinent and will examine relationships between race, nation and sexuality. Questions analysed are: how are gender relations constructed within the cultural specificities of the Indian subcontinent? Are notions of masculinity and femininity constructed through national history? Is sexuality underpinned by discourses on the nation? Is there a difference between the indigenous and diasporic writers in their invocation of the nation? How is language shaped according to the needs of the nation? What is the meaning of the body? How is it constructed within discourses of the nation?
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminars
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Introduction to Romantic Poetry II SE2296
Semester: Spring
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
This module extends the study of the first generation Romantic poets, studied on the Introduction to
Romantic Poetry I, with the aim of providing an introduction to well-known second generation poets, such as Keats, Byron and Shelley, and to some of their contemporaries who were tremendously popular in their day but have since fallen into relative critical neglect, namely, the Welsh-identified poet Felicia Hemans, Thomas Moore, ‘the Bard of Erin’, and the English ‘peasant’ poet, John Clare.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Group Discussions
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Charlotte Brontë: Fictions of an Empire SE2315
Semester: Spring
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
This module examines questions of colonialism, race and slavery across the full range of Brontë’s literary production and analyses the ways in which these relate to issues of gender and class within Brontë’s domestic context. Particular emphasis is placed on the relationships of continuity and difference between the earlier and later phases of Brontë’s literary career.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminars
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Semester: Spring
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
This module seeks to explore a number of Renaissance plays in relation to ideas about marriage, the family, women, and the variety of staging practices found in Renaissance drama.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Group Discussions
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Postmodern American Poetry SE2354
Semester: Spring
Length: One Semester
Credits: 20
The aim of this module is to provide a critical survey of the contemporary avant-garde in American poetry by tracing their relationship to the poetic heritage of their modernist predecessors. Emphasis will be on the close reading of texts in conjunction with more "theoretical" approaches (space, rewriting, the nature of Postmodernism, open form in recent poetics, etc.) and on "genealogies" of postmodern American poetic writing.
Teaching Methods:
Lecture
Group Discussions
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Power & Politics in Pre-Raphaelite Art SE2363
Semester: Spring
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
This module aims to teach students how to ‘read’ pictures, to enhance their interpretative skills by introducing different methods of interpretation, and to make them aware of the significance of Pre- Raphaelitism in its historical context.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminars
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Nineteenth Century Crime Fiction SE2390
Semester: Spring
Length: One Semester
Credits: 20
To introduce students to the major stages in the development of crime fiction up to the beginning of the twentieth century in order to explore the nature and variety of the genre and its materials in relation to their literary and cultural contexts. Students will read a wide variety of short stories, full-length novels and periodical articles supported by appropriate secondary and contextual material.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminars
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Virginia Woolf’s Modernism SE2404
Semester: Spring
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
The aim of this module is to introduce students to four key works by Virginia Woolf: three of her experimental fictions, Mrs Dalloway, Orlando and The Waves, as well as her influential feminist polemic on women’s writing, A Room of One’s Own.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Semester: Spring
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
To consider why Marlowe’s writing has been so important for the development of New Historicism and Queer Theory, and to situate his plays and poems in relation to modern formations of sexuality and self and to contemporary debates about pornography, religion and violence.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminars
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Twentieth-Century Welsh Poetry in English SE2412
Semester: Spring
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
This course examines the development of English poetry in Wales during the twentieth century, identifying the characteristic techniques, modes, and concerns of this vibrant and often challenging body of work. It explores the links to Welsh-language poetry on the one hand and to contemporary English poetry from the rest of Britain and America on the other. It engages closely with the poetry itself, encouraging students to develop a greater appreciation and understanding of the often innovative uses of the English language in the hands of Welsh poets.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminars
Individual Tutorials
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Semester: Spring
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
The aim of this module is to explore the formal and thematic aspects of four Victorian novels. Discussions will be informed by a close consideration of some key developments in the Victorian novel, focusing particularly on social realism and narrative voice. The module will focus on the reading of novels within a discussion of some key social, cultural and economic concerns of the Victorian period, paying close attention to the ways in which the novels engage with these concerns.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Semester: Spring
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
The module will introduce students to four major novels by Joseph Conrad and will explore how they inscribe, critique, and contest key aspects of the politics, society, and culture of modernity. Particular emphasis will be placed on the ways in which Conrad’s stylistic, formal, and generic strategies function to register historical change. The module will also foreground Conrad’s interest in how advances in transportation and communications and the rapid integration of the globe affect radical shifts in the experience of space and time.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Workshops
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Semester: Spring
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
Medieval Iceland produced a unique literature of great intrinsic interest that has appealed to many notable writers in English. This module introduces the island’s rich prose literature through study of a selection of sagas read in English translation. Lectures also introduce relevant historical, social, and literary contexts in order to arrive at an informed appreciation of some of the achievements of Old Norse-Icelandic literature.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminars
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Semester: Spring
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
The aim of this module is to introduce students to the cultural study of gender, through critical engagement with texts that question the meaning of gender. Specifically, students will take second-wave feminism (1960- ) as a starting point for the examination of gendered cultural practices, because it is within feminism that masculinities and femininities have been most rigorously studied. Students will appraise arguments both for and against the existence of gender.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminars
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
The Irish Literary Revival SE2510
Semester: Spring
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
Irish culture at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century underwent a profound series of changes, resulting in what is variously described as a renaissance, revival or reawakening of literary consciousness. At no other time has Ireland produced so many writers of exceptional ability. The period was one of the most intense, creative and contentious in Irish cultural history, with the period’s meanings and legacy still the subject of intense debate.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminars
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Reading Post/Colonial Fiction SE2517
Semester: Spring
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
The aims of the module are to introduce students to the study of colonial and postcolonial fictions, the various concerns of postcolonial nations and identities, and the ways in which colonialism impacted on postcolonial writing in English. Particular attention will be paid to how gender and sexuality were shaped by the colonial experience, the experience of whiteness and the comprehension of racial difference, and the political and social concerns of the newly emergent nation. This course will also introduce students to postcolonial theory and will emphasise the application of theory to fiction. Close readings of the texts, both theoretical and fictional will be maintained throughout the course.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminars
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Semester: Spring
Length: One Semester
Credits: 20
This module will study major stages in the development of sensation fiction in the nineteenth century in order to explore the construction of the genre and the different textual and narrative forms that contributed to that construction. The material will be considered in relation to cultural and literary contexts. Students will be expected to read a wide variety of texts including short stories, journal articles and novels. This reading, in combination with lectures and supporting seminars, will give students a critical understanding of the history, range and changing nature of the genre of sensation fiction and the questions it both poses and responds to at different cultural moments over the nineteenth century.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminars
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Semester: Spring
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
The aim of this module is to explore some of the formal innovations characteristic of literary modernism. Foregrounding the modernist challenge to the dominance of realist aesthetics, it will examine the ways in which writers such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf aimed to ‘make it new’. With reference to relevant literary, historical and political debates, the course will focus on the modernist sense of fragmentation, emphasising the importance of the visual arts and the cinema for a developing modernist aesthetics. The analysis of formal techniques such as interior monologue and free indirect discourse and close reading will be of particular importance.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminars
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
British South Asian Film SE2553
Semester: Spring
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
This module focuses on the treatment of questions of cultural difference, race, ethnicity and social cohesion in recent British film and television. In seminars organised with maximum student participation, we analyse examples of recent South Asian film and television in the context of current debates about representation and multi-ethnic Britain.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminars
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism SE2557
Semester: Spring
Length: One Semester
Credits: 20
This module examines the meaning of reading, through an engagement with psychoanalytic literary criticism. Psychoanalysis is a way of reading unintentional meanings in speech and behaviour; the literary is a property of all texts that enables meanings in excess of the literal. Therefore, psychoanalytic literary criticism holds that reading is always partial, a framing of some meanings to the exclusion of others.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminars
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%
Semester: Spring
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
This module introduces students to key questions in understanding the relationship between culture and identity. It covers relevant theoretical approaches and encourages students to develop the necessary skills with which to analyse the construction of identities in cultural texts. Students encounter, read and reflect critically on texts from a variety of media and a range of cultural backgrounds.
Teaching Methods:
Lectures
Seminars
Assessment:
Examination: 100%
Writing Slavery: 1789-Present SE3339
Semester: Spring
Length: One Semester
Credits: 10
This module examines representations of slavery in the British Caribbean and in America from the abolitionist period of the late 1780s and early 1790s to the present.
Teaching Methods:
Seminars
Assessment:
Coursework: 100%