On this year-long module, you will build on your organisational skills in planning, researching, preparing and revising a substantial piece of written work, developing high-level research and writing skills. It is also possible to add a Creative or Practice-based element: if you choose to develop your work in these directions you will, in addition to the traditional academic component of the Dissertation, include original creative material as an element of your final assessed work.

Examples of a Creative element might include a series of linked poems or monologues, short fiction, the opening of a novel, a short script for stage, TV or radio, or a portfolio of work around a theme or topic. In such cases, the traditional academic component of the Dissertation will consist of the same kinds of critical and analytical work which characterise conventional academic Dissertations.

This module is designed to enable you, through working with other students as part of a learning community, to discover and explore the ways in which Shakespeare adapted his source materials to produce the scripts we know, and how those scripts are in turn adapted in modern performance. This will involve closely studying Shakespeare’s scripts, his sources, and a range of relevant critical views.

This module aims to introduce you to a range of texts that represent the practice of punishment in American history from the nineteenth century to the present day. You will have the opportunity to examine the representation of punishment in American fiction and film in relation to three critical questions: Who is punished? How are they punished? Why are they punished? Studying novels, films, and documentaries, you will have the opportunity to analyse these texts in relation to social and historical contexts as well as competing theories of punishment.

On this module, you will have the opportunity to produce a scholarly edition of a literary work or historical text of your own choosing and to publish it in digital form. To prepare you for this task, you will develop an understanding of the theoretical and methodological concepts of scholarly editing. Through a series of weekly workshops, where you will learn some of the requisite coding, you will be supervised through the process of producing your own digital scholarly edition.

This module introduces you to a variety of British and Anglo-American poets of the twentieth century, giving you an opportunity to explore how these poets reinvented the notion of what poetry could be in the modern era as they questioned or rejected older notions of the ‘poetic’. How did war transform the idea of war poetry, and even the love poem? How did poets promote revolutionary movements such as Futurism and Imagism through influential manifestos and small publications? Reading a combination of canonical poets alongside those who have typically been more marginalised in discussions of the period, you will be able to explore the innovative strategies utilised by modern poets in order to find a new voice in a fast-moving world of urbanisation, world war, and socio-political change.

Writers have long been concerned with all sorts of aspects of health, mental or physical; they have written about cures, about characters – or entire societies – who are ill, and about how illness affects their own perceptions of the world, and their writing. On this team-taught module, you’ll discover a range of this writing, from an early modern account of depression or advice on diet, to poetry addressing male mental health in the twenty-first century. It’s a deep dive into issues that have been discussed for a long time, and which are still with us, and still affecting us.

This module introduces you to a range of writings from the late nineteenth century, including poems, short stories, and novels, considering the relationship between writing of the period to broader cultural, social, and literary concerns. The module will invite you to consider issues such as the campaigns for female suffrage and the Social Purity movement, as well as contemporary debates on marriage, motherhood, female education, ‘free love’, class, race, and eugenics.

This module is designed to introduce you to a representative range of Neo-Victorian fiction, exploring how a re-imagining and re-writing of Victorian literature and culture has led to the emergence of an exciting and dynamic new field of study. You will be encouraged to consider novels as well as related developments such as film and TV adaptations, Mash-ups, and themes including race, identity, disability, and biography.

The final core creative writing module combines developing your writing with professional development about publishing and other career opportunities. Instead of workshops, you’ll take part in four day-long writing retreats, each with a specific theme, discussions, exercises and time to write. Alongside these, professional development sessions will help you to discover how writers - including you – get their work published, and how writers earn a living. You assessments will be a long portfolio of writing, and a presentation about how you are going to make use of your knowledge of writing and the writing sector in future.  

One 10-credit module from a list supplied by the Language Centre, levels dependent on candidates’ previous qualifications.  Languages offered are: French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish.