Research Skills and Methods

This module enables you to pursue effective independent research and to develop the skills essential to the preparation and writing of a Master's dissertation, as well as key transferable skills in areas of personal and professional development appropriate to either further study or a chosen career path.

Resources and Methods for Research in Medieval Studies 

If you choose to take the MA in English Literature and concentrate on medieval and early modern literature you can choose to do this research training module instead of Research Skills and Methods.

This module introduces the key resources, skills and methods used in Medieval Studies research: bibliographies, databases, palaeography, codicology, diplomatic, principles and practices of editing and textual criticism, computer-assisted text analysis, approaches to medieval art and music, and the study of medieval Latin. The design of the module reflects the fact that research in medieval studies often draws on the resources, skills and methods of a number of disciplines as well as on resources, skills and methods that are not discipline-specific.

Guided Reading for Dissertation

This module is designed to lay the foundation of the 12,000-word dissertation and to establish the your ability in research and critical inquiry. The module is based on meetings between you and your dissertation supervisor, working from a starting synopsis of the proposed dissertation to develop an outline, extend research into primary and secondary sources, and test and refine an analysis.

Topics in Medieval Texts *

Topics in Medieval Texts has two 10-credit strands (both taken in one semester) that offer you an opportunity to tackle problems and issues that are at the forefront of current research on medieval texts, cultures and societies.  Working independently, but with the regular guidance and feedback of a supervisor, for each of the two 10-credit strands you will research and write an essay on a current problem or issue related to the chosen topic, selected in consultation with the supervisor.

Medieval Studies Research: Theories and Practices *

Much work at the forefront of medieval studies in all arts disciplines is informed by contemporary critical and cultural theories and associated modes of analysis. Postmodern theory challenges medievalists to scrutinise their critical and interpretative practices, offers new explanatory paradigms and modes of analysis, and makes traditional disciplinary boundaries more porous. The aim of this module is to enable you to understand and discuss currently theoretical positions adopted by medievalists from a variety and disciplines and also to understand and discuss how these theories and methodologies offer different approaches to reading and interpreting materials from the past.

Plays and Poems of Shakespeare A: Comedies, Histories, Poems

 This module engages in the detailed examination of most of Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Poems, and enables you to develop your critical thinking in the light of current criticism.

Plays and Poems of Shakespeare B: Problem Plays, Tragedies, Late Plays

This module engages in the detailed examination of most of Shakespeare’s Problem Plays, Tragedies, Late Plays and enables you to develop your critical thinking in the light of current criticism.

Shakespeare in Performance

The module is an introductory survey of the theory and practice of Shakespearean performance in the theatre and other media. These are considered (a) in a historical context (b) in relation to other critical and cultural theory and practice; (c) as reflections of the development of the media in question.  It addresses relationship between adaptation and performance, and the interpretative significance works derived wholly or in part from Shakespearean originals.

The History of Shakespeare Criticism

This combines a historical overview of the main developments in Shakespeare criticism from the 1590s to the present with detailed investigation of key texts, covering: the canonization of Shakespeare; character criticism; biographical criticism; imagery and symbolist criticism; critical study of the plays as created artefacts; the relationship between criticism and performance; historicist criticism; and new critical approaches.

Writing Revolutions 1: Politics, Publics and Professionalism in Literary Culture, 1580-1700

This provides a theme and topic-based survey of English literature of the period 1580-1700 (excluding Shakespeare). Drawing on traditional and contemporary scholarship, both historical and theoretical, it encompasses literature from all the principal genres of the period, addressing literary texts from the time of Sidney and Spenser through the Civil War to Dryden and Rochester in the late seventeenth-century. Engagement with issues such as politics, literary professionalism, textual production and circulation, religion and gender will facilitate a complex understanding of literary texts within the dynamic and radically changing cultural contexts of the court, city and country.

Writing Revolutions 2: Politics, Publics and Professionalism in Literary Culture, 1700-1832

This module provides a theme and topic-based survey of English literature of the period 1700-1832. Drawing on both traditional and contemporary scholarship, it will encompass literature from the principal genres of the period. The module will examine literary writing within the dynamic and radically changing cultural context of Britain in this period. It will engage with such issues as politics, literary patronage and professionalism, the form and function of the novel, writing within public and private spheres, and the representation of gender.

Victorian Modernity: 1880-1910

This module will allow you to explore the diversity of literary impulses in a turn-of-the-century period characterised by literary non-conformity.  Major topics to be covered include: Decadence, counter-Decadence, aestheticism, and early modernism. These will be studied across a variety of genres and authors, with reference to formative theorists/philosophers of the period. 

Modernism: 1910-1940

This module will enhance your knowledge of a range of key issues within the study of literature in the 1910s, 20s and 30s, introducing some of the more challenging texts written during these years, as well as recent scholarly thinking on the literature of the period more generally. You will be encouraged to rethink mainstream definitions of the literary history of the early twentieth-century, and examine the complexity of the literary and cultural moment of modernism. Major topics to be covered include: literary nostalgia and innovation, narrative and traumatic-memory, the concept of Modernism, High Modernism and its aftermath, and the social and aesthetic politics of the 1930s. These will be studied across a variety of genres and authors, with reference to formative theorists/philosophers of the period.

Contemporary Literary Cultures: Performance

Focusing on texts written since about 1990, this module explores the production and dissemination of literary texts, as well as recent developments of style and content. You will consider contemporary literary cultures from a variety of perspectives, and employ a range of methodological, theoretical and critical approaches that enable the appraisal of the literary work within diverse social and artistic contexts.

Contemporary Literary Cultures: Politics

Focusing on texts written since about 1990, this module explores the production and dissemination of literary texts, as well as recent developments of style and content. You will consider contemporary literary cultures from a variety of perspectives, and to employ a range of methodological, theoretical and critical approaches that enable the appraisal of the literary work within diverse social and artistic contexts.

Film, Theory, Politics

This module examines the interaction between film, film theory, and politics. It will provide you with a solid grounding in some of the critical debates of the discipline, and in related cultural issues central to its development and our focus on American Film. As such, it will enable you to assess the impact of politics on various levels of film analysis and production: from the ideology of the classical apparatus and text to the race or sexual politics of Hollywood cinema, from the censoring of the Production Code era to the attempted radicalism of post-modern film practices.

Narrative Analysis in Fiction and Film

This module provides an introduction to some of the fundamental components of narratives, approached from a linguistic and narratological point of view. We will explore temporal manipulation; point of view (or focalization); setting; structure; characterization; narrativity and the non-narrative; the semiotics of visual images; narrative expectation; suspense, surprise, secrets and gaps; print and tv narratives (in news, documentary, adverts, etc.). A particular focus will be those similarities and differences between prose narrative fiction and film narrative fiction which stem from (or in the case of similarities, transcend) their different media and technologies.

Films we are likely to consider in some detail include Citizen Kane; The Dead; Short Cuts; Babette's Feast; Run, Lola, Run; The Spider's Stratagem; and Adaptation . There will be showings of short passages from these films. These will be studied alongside their literary antecedents where relevant (e.g., various Raymond Carver short stories, for Short Cuts, Joyce's "The Dead", for the Huston film of the same name, Susan Orlean's “The Orchid Thief” for Adaptation, etc.).

The course is as much about literary prose narrative as film; other texts for study include stories by Alastair Macleod, Kipling, Mansfield, Woolf and, especially, Alice Munro.

Performance, theory and culture

This module investigates performance as a cultural practice. You will examine ways in which the relationship between performance and culture has been conceptualised by key thinkers within drama and theatre studies. You will also consider the way that scholarship from outside drama and theatre studies challenges ways of understanding and analysing theatre commonly employed within the discipline. Issues for discussion include: the conceptual and methodological challenges posed by framing performance as a cultural practice; the relationship of performance to other forms of cultural production and consumption; and how the intervention of performance in the public realm and wider polity may be understood.

Historicising performance

This module investigates key problems in performance history and historiography. You will consider a range of conceptual and methodological issues raised by the historical analysis of theatre and performance. This module will focus particularly on the strategies and politics of historical representation in drama and theatre studies: how have performance practices been narrated within theatre studies, and how do these narratives represent theatre’s relationship with other social practices?

* availability of these modules may vary year to year.