English (Joint Honours)

Three years full-time or flexible part-time.

The course aims to provide students with a comprehensive and thorough understanding of English Literature from the Renaissance to the present day. It also allows students to develop their own research interests through a wide range of option modules and a final year dissertation.

Students engage with texts through extensive reading, the study of literature's intellectual and historical contexts, lectures, seminar discussions and group projects in which ideas can be shared and developed.

Stage one

Here we set down the foundations of your degree. At stage one we have two period modules. The first is Nineteenth-Century Literature: Romance and Revolution, where students encounter important genres (such as poetry and fiction) and writers (from Charles Dickens and the Brontes to Oscar Wilde). The second is Writing the Present: Post-War and Contemporary British Literature where you will explore the development of English Literature from the end of the Second World War to the present.

Stage two

Here we build on the knowledge you now possess. In Modernism in Britain students read and discuss a wide range of literature from the first half of the twentieth century, whilst in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Satire and Sensibility you will focus on 'the long eighteenth century' (1660-1800), a period of stunning intellectual and cultural progress, but also of wicked wit and violence. There is also a wide range of option modules to choose from at stage two in addition to these core period modules.

Stage three

For our most advanced students, Renaissance Literature provides new perspectives on that period, from 'Renaissance sexualities' to 'visions of the new world'. Students will also write an English dissertation at stage three, an independent study of 8-10,000 words in which students learn how to research into a topic they have chosen after tutorial consultation.

• Core period modules from the Renaissance to the present day
• Wide range of option modules from which to choose
• Opportunities to develop creative writing skills
• Opportunities to study American literature
• Diverse range of assessment methods

• Nineteenth-Century Literature
• Post-War and Contemporary Literature
• Modernism
• Eighteenth-Century Literature
• Women's Writing
• Gothic Writing
• Twenty-First-Century Shakespeares
• Colonial and Postcolonial Literature
• Romanticism
• Renaissance Literature
• American Literature
• Creative Writing
  

English modules are assessed through a variety of modes of assessment, including academic essays, individual and group presentations, blogs, participation in online discussion groups, creative writing and formal examinations.

Students who have studied with us have gone on to a wide range of careers, including: teaching; postgraduate study (via MA courses in English or related areas); adult education; social work training; marketing; editorial work with major publishers; librarianship; bookselling; management trainee schemes with large companies and local government.