Classics and English BA

These two modules are for complete beginners. They are also suitable if you have already done some study of Latin or Classical Greek (up to GCSE level). They cover the same material as ‘Beginners’ Latin or Greek 1’ and ‘Beginners’ Latin or Greek 2’. They just let you start your chosen language at a later point in your degree.

You’ll get an introduction to the grammar and vocabulary of your chosen language and you will be supported to analyse and understand basic sentences and to translate short passages.

There is no speaking and listening element - the main focus will be on reading text.

If you take these modules in your second year, you can continue onto the ‘Intermediate’ modules in your third year. Note: this is mandatory for Classics BA students.

This module is worth 20 credits.

Continue your study of Latin or Classical Greek, following on from the beginners’ level modules.

You will thoroughly consolidate the vocabulary and grammar of your chosen language and begin the detailed linguistic and literary study of an unadapted Latin or Greek text.

In Latin, you will typically read a text such as Cicero’s Pro Archia, or a book of Virgil or Ovid.

In Greek, the text might be a complete speech by Lysias or selections from a longer text such as the Odyssey or a Greek tragedy.

The assessment for these modules emphasises comprehension and analysis of grammatical structures over memorisation and translation.

Each module is worth 20 credits.

You will study prose and verse texts in your chosen language, building on the skills you learned in the Intermediate modules.

By this stage you will be at or above A-level standard, and will benefit from being taught together with first-year students who have an A-level in the language.

The modules may involve in-depth study of a single text, or may cover a group of texts representative of an author, genre, period, or theme. They will combine literary and linguistic discussion with consideration of the historical and social background.

The texts covered change each year. In Latin, recent modules have focused on the following topics:

• Flavian personal poetry (Martial and Statius)
• The emperor Claudius (Suetonius and Tacitus)
• The Cupid and Psyche story from Apuleius’ novel Metamorphoses
• Ethnicity and Empire in Latin Epic (Virgil and Silius Italicus)
• The Power of Love (Ovid and Propertius)

In Greek, recent topics have covered:

• Tragedy (Sophocles’ Antigone)
• Selections from Homer’s Iliad
• Longus’ novel Daphnis and Chloe
• Plutarch’s Life of Antony
• Paradoxography (a portfolio of texts exploring the weird and marvellous)

Each module is worth 20 credits.

The dissertation is your opportunity to carry out an in-depth investigation of a chosen area, to be agreed with a supervisor in advance. You will use the skills that your degree has equipped you with thus far to plan, research and complete a 10-12,000-word essay. There will be a mix of contact to achieve this, including workshops, lectures and one-to-one tutorials.

This is a discipline-bridging cross-campus module, involving colleagues from across the School of Humanities.

The Silk Road will be presented as a range of archaeological, historical and scientific themes. Broad cultural themes will be balanced with the presentation of specific case studies, such as:

• The definitions of the Silk Roads
• Byzantine, Islamic and later medieval Silk Roads
• Luxury production
• Trade and exchange from the Roman and later periods
• Ming Dynasty links with the West

Scientific techniques for the analysis of materials, and their role in the interpretation of trade and exchange along the Silk Roads, will also be considered. This could be between, for example, China, central Asia, Scandinavia and the Middle East.

This module is worth 20 credits.

This module explores the urban image and visual culture of the best-preserved ancient Roman city, Pompeii, throughout the early imperial period and to its end in AD 79. It examines its history and topography, and analyses individual urban structures, architectural choices, sculptural and other artistic displays and monuments, their place in Roman urban development, their political, social, economic or religious function and their subsequent use and influence, including in the modern reception of ancient Pompeii. 

Topics include:

• problems of studying "urban fabric"
• Pompeii as a melting pot of different cultural traditions
• public and religious spaces in a Roman town (fora and temples, routes through the city, trade and commerce, sculptural/pictorial displays)
• entertainment and hygiene (theatres, baths and brothels)
• the domestic context (intra- and extra-mural living, interior decoration and wall-painting)
• the funerary sphere (self-representation and cultural traditions).

This module examines a fascinating and tumultuous period of Roman history: from Diocletian’s seizure of power (A.D. 284) to the sack of Rome by a Visigothic army (A.D. 410). In the 126 years which separated these two events, the Roman world was fundamentally transformed, by (amongst other things) the rise of Christianity and the decline of imperial power. This transformation is documented for us by a range of captivating sources: from St. Augustine’s disarmingly frank autobiography, his Confessions, to Zosimus’ savage indictment of the damage he alleged Christianity had done to the empire.

Over the semester, we will work our way through the period, looking at key political, social, religious, and cultural developments and analysing the source material for this absorbing chapter in Rome’s imperial story.

This module involves a detailed study of Virgil's Latin epic poem, the Aeneid, in English translation, and focuses on its interactions with the epic genre.

The Aeneid was always and immediately characterised as a 'great' poem: how does Virgil react against his predecessors to carve out his own literary territory? How is the Aeneid received and re-used by poets and other artists down the ages?

Themes will include:

• career and poetics
• Homer and Apollonius
• reception in later epic (Roman imperial, Neo-Latin, Milton)
• politics and identity
• games and reality
• gender and genre
• vision and spectacle.

This module will explore the ancient evidence for the myth of Oedipus and selected representations of the myth in the post-Classical world.

In terms of evidence, students will have the opportunity to explore ancient drama and other poetry as well as visual culture and mythographic writings.

In terms of post-Classical representations, there will be a particular focus on performance and on modern popular culture, including (but not necessarily limited to) film, popular mythology books, material aimed at children, on-line representations, and humour.

Module description to be confirmed.

This module explores the representation of animals in ancient Greek and Roman literature and culture. Core questions include:

• What criteria did the Greeks and Romans use to distinguish humans from animals?
• What responsibilities were human beings said to have towards the natural world?
• How were animals used to explore ideas about ‘nature’, ‘culture’, and ‘civilisation’?
• How close are these ideas to our contemporary attitudes toward non-human beings?

While incorporating discussion of material evidence and the day-to-day realities of animal life in the ancient world, the module focuses primarily on the ways in which animals were perceived, analysed, and represented in ancient texts, from philosophy and natural history to satire, fable, and tales of metamorphosis. Both ancient and modern theoretical approaches will be considered, and all material will be read in translation.

During the period 800-500 BC the Greek world transformed from a collection of relatively small communities led by local strongmen to complex city-state societies with elaborate institutions, magistracies, and systems of public finance. Law shifted from an oral to a written basis; Greek settlements spread across the Mediterranean basin and Black Sea; and Greek individuals travelled to Egypt and the east, fuelling a process of dynamic cultural fusion. This period was, too, the crucible from which emerged remarkable works of literature, art, and the beginnings of Greek philosophy.

But it was an era of conflict and disruption as much as cultural and economic progress. Major inequalities in wealth between rich and poor led to social breakdown in many communities. The solutions were various: in Attica, Solon attempted to reshape Athenian institutions to place the poor in a stronger position and curb some of the more egregious abuses inflicted by the wealthy. In Sparta, a culture of material austerity emerged that hid from plain sight the visible aspects of inequality whilst maintaining the economic structures that underpinned elite dominance. For some Greek communities, the answer to these problems lay in entrusting one man with the direction of the community, that is, tyranny, which led to disaster in places like Athens and the emergence of the institutional outlines of the classical democracy. And warfare was rife: the archaic age saw the emergence on land of the tactics of the hoplite phalanx, and at sea the development of the trireme and the fiscal structures that underpinned the first state-owned navies.

This module will enable students to chart continuity and change during the epoch in which the contours of classical Greek society were firmly established. It will focus in particular on the interpretative strategies required in evaluating a highly diverse body of evidence and the methodological problems that challenge historians when reconstructing an era whose evidence is far more lacunose that that which survives for the ensuing periods

This module will consider:  

• the Persian Empire, and in particular contacts between Persians and Greeks in the approximate period 560-330 BC  
  
• major events including: the foundation of the empire by Cyrus the Great; the consolidation of the empire by Darius; the Ionian Revolt and the invasions of Greece; the Delian League and the Peace of Callias; the Peloponnesian War; the Peace of Antalcidas; Alexander’s conquest of the Persian Empire  
  
• major themes regarding the interactions between Greeks and Persians, including military and political conflict, but also trade and cultural engagement  
  
• Greek literary evidence, and the diverse representations of Persians and the Persian Empire presented in it  
  
• non-Greek evidence for the Persian Empire, including cuneiform writings, inscriptions, and visual evidence. 

This module will be questioning how various film presentations of the ancient world can be used to better understand both the ancient world itself and our relationship to it.

This will involve a critical understanding not just of the content of certain films but also of the related theories of cultural studies, reception studies, film theory, queer theory, semiotics, race and colonialism, sexuality and morality in both the ancient and modern world. As such this module will be heavily theoretical and will expect the students to be able to deal with complex issues not just about the ancient world, but of modern film production too. This also means that the module will have more teaching hours attached to it than other optional modules to accommodate the extra viewings for discussions.

Amongst the themes to be discussed will be the use of Greek mythology, Greek and Roman historical events, ancient religion, ancient sexuality, morality, special effects, new technologies and comparative cultural studies; all the while dealing with such case-studies as post-War European cinema, British Art House cinema, Hollywood Blockbusters and comedy and animation.

The module will be assessed by a source-analysis commentary and an exam. 

The Roman Empire was a mad, mad place! How else would you call an empire where any individual city can decide it wants to start issuing its own money – and the authorities let them do it? A place where hundreds of cities produced hundreds of currencies of local bronze coinage, each city with its own weight standards, and each using its coinage for self-promotion, celebrating local gods, temples, festivals and any other attractions that made their hometown special.

According to one calculation, some 500 cities across the Roman Empire minted coins in the 350 years from Caesar to Diocletian, churning out approximately 100,000 different coin types. This module is all about this city or ‘civic’ coinage. We won’t have quite enough time in this life to discuss 100,000 coin types, so we focus especially on what we call the Near East, i.e. Roman Syria, Phoenicia, Judaea and Arabia (30 BC to AD 270). Dozens of Near Eastern cities produced coins during this time, contributing to an immensely rich and varied tapestry of local cultures.

We will first grapple with the historical circumstances which put cities in a position to issue their own money despite being subject to Rome. The local autonomy the cities enjoyed was not a consequence of Roman folly, negligence, or administrative malpractice, but a deliberate and well-advised hands-off approach whose wisdom is proven by hundreds of years of stable and successful rule over the provinces.

In Coins, Cults and Cities, you will learn how the coins can shed light on the life of the issuing city in all its facets:

1. World of art: reception of Classical models; Greek-inspired art forms vs. local traditions; stylistic developments over time
   
2. Religious life, cults and gods: significance of religious imagery, local cult images, ‘icons of difference’
   
3. Civic pride, local identity: coins as vehicles for expressions of patriotism and public self-congratulation
   
4. Ideology and propaganda: coins as the only mass medium of the ancient world, as tools for collective self-promotion.
   
5. Complex dynamics between audience and authority: Who was responsible for text and image on coins? Who was the target audience?
   

You will get your hands on actual ancient coins of Damascus, Palmyra, Tyre, Sidon and many other cities (you get to choose which ones). Holding actual 2,000-year-old pieces of history in your own hands and examining them will teach you how to apply the knowledge and understanding you’ve gained in class to get the most out of the evidence. You will learn how to observe, analyse and interpret the evidence, and how to turn your thoughts and observations into building blocks for arguments when addressing questions or engaging in scholarly debate.

The civic coins of the Roman Near East have been the focus of my research for close to 20 years. Like me, you will find that these coins are inexhaustible fonts of insight and inspiration. There is no other kind of evidence from the Roman Near East even remotely as rich and deep as this coinage, and yet this precious source is unknown to the general public and under-appreciated even by historians and archaeologists.

In this module, we will study a varied selection of Greek tragedies from the fifth century BC, from a variety of critical perspectives.

These may include approaches such as:

• historicism (how do the tragedies fit into and interact with the world of the fifth century Athenian democracy?)
• performance (including the study of tragedy as a form of choral poetry)
• mythology and religion
• literary approaches (construction of plays, the representation of character, imagery).

Through approaches such as these and others, we will try to find ways of handling central tragic questions:

• why might we be attracted to watching the enactment of suffering?
• what did these profound, moving and frequently strange dramas mean in their own world and what can they mean in ours? 

This module uses literary, artistic and historical material to explore the idea of what it is to be a man and an accepted citizen in ancient Greece and Rome.

It explores how good citizens should behave and what should they look like.? How do they represent this citizenship to the rest of the world and how does this change over time? These questions bring literature, art and ancient history together with gender studies to examine the importance of gender in both bolstering and denigrating public personae.

Topics to be covered include:

• homoeroticism and Athenian identity
• dress and cultural identity
• sexual invective
• citizenship and empire
• Roman representation in the provinces
• women, politics and patronage.

The concept of the “Other” has proved extremely influential in Western culture from antiquity until the present. Societies create the “Self” and the “Other” using their own set of categories, including race, ethnicity, culture, gender, sexuality, age and religion.

This course explores the notion of “Otherness” in Greco-Roman visual culture from the eighth century B.C. to the fifth century A.D., discussing how artistic representation and self-representation contributed to constructing and challenging ideas about Greek and Roman identity.

How did the Greeks and Romans use art to construct the “Other” and what can we learn from these representations about the relationships between in-groups and out-groups in the ancient world?

The course also investigates the ways in which Classical art escapes the structuralist binary model of Self-and-Other, merging or inverting these categories. In a brief introduction we will discuss a variety of theories and methodologies that will help students to engage effectively with the visual evidence.

The first part of the course will focus on how different categories of “Other” were gradually shaped in ancient Greek art, reflecting contemporary political, social and cultural developments. We will look at images of hybrid creatures, foreigners, women, slaves, disabled and elderly people, analysing positive and negative connotations of their apparent “Otherness”.

In the second part of the course, we will explore the diversity of Roman visual culture from the Late Republican period to Late Antiquity. As the Empire expanded, images of “Otherness” acquired a broader spectrum of meanings. Sculpture, painting and mosaic decoration from public and private contexts show how “Otherness” could be either repressed or embraced in order to impose, resist or manipulate traditional views of Romanness.

Jason and Medea, the quest for the golden fleece, the journey of the first ship, Greek civilisation meets Colchian barbarism: the myth that pre-dates Homer and brings together the famous fathers of Homeric heroes (Peleus, Telamon); the gathering of the marvellous, the semi-divine and the ultra-heroic; a quest that replaces war with love.

The central texts will be the Hellenistic Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius and the Roman epic version of Valerius Flaccus, both read in translation, but a wide range of texts, images and films, Greek, Roman and beyond will be part of the module.

This module will explore:

• How myth works in the ancient world
• How representations in different media interact
• When myth-making becomes reception
• How the Greeks represent Greek culture and the barbarian other
• How Roman literature re-appropriates and re-works Greek myth
• How modern versions reflect on and construct the ancient world

Themes include: the Greeks and the other; civilisation and colonisation; Jason and Medea; gender and sexuality (the Lemnian women, Hercules and Hylas); the nature of heroism (Cyzicus and friendly fire); monsters, marvels and magic.

This module is worth 40 credits.

This module uses literary, artistic and historical material to explore the idea of what it is to be a man and an accepted citizen in ancient Greece and Rome.

It explores how good citizens should behave and what should they look like.? How do they represent this citizenship to the rest of the world and how does this change over time? These questions bring literature, art and ancient history together with gender studies to examine the importance of gender in both bolstering and denigrating public personae.

Topics to be covered include:

• homoeroticism and Athenian identity
• dress and cultural identity
• sexual invective
• citizenship and empire
• Roman representation in the provinces
• women, politics and patronage.

This module will consider: The history of Sparta from its origins in the archaic period through to its decline as a leading Greek power in the fourth century BC, with major events including: the ‘sixth-century revolution’; Sparta’s territorial expansion within the Peloponnese; Sparta’s leading role in resisting the Persian invasions; Sparta’s rivalry with Athens during the fifth century, culminating in the Peloponnesian War; the period of Spartan hegemony; Thebes’ rise and Sparta’s fall.

Spartan society, its institutions and cultural idiosyncracies, including: the communal upbringing; the communal dining of Spartan males; the Spartan political, property, and military systems; the position within Spartan society of helots, other subordinate groups, and women; Spartan attitudes towards war, wealth, religion, age, and outsiders.

The significant challenges posed by our available evidence, the issue of the ‘Spartan mirage’, and the fundamental question of how far we can hope to reconstruct Sparta and Spartan society.

Any reassessment for this module will be by essay or assignment.

This module introduces map-making for the Arts and Humanities. You will be introduced to the field of spatial humanities and will learn how to carry out spatial analyses of humanities datasets and present their findings to a high standard.

You’ll be introduced to the key principles of spatial analysis and digital cartography using open-source Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software. We will also explore the broad and exciting applications of spatial analysis.

We will also work with you to help you understand the role of GIS in digital humanities, the role of this in research and practice more widely, and the employability value of GIS as a skill.

This module introduces the archaeology of the Mycenaean world. It will familiarise you with the achievements and material culture of one of the greatest European Bronze Age civilizations of the second millennium BC. This will be through discussing the historical, social, cultural and economic context of the period.

You will explore:

• The world of the Mycenaean palaces and citadels, their towns and trading ports
• Warfare
• Religion and cult activities
• Mortuary practices and ancestor worship

We also consider their wider connections across the Mediterranean world.

This module is worth 20 credits.

You have the option of writing an individual research project in your final year. This can be on a topic of language, literature or performance.

You will work on a one-to-one basis with a supervisor, producing a detailed and sustained piece of writing.

There is also the option of completing a project-based dissertation. This is useful if you are interested in applied or practical aspects of English.

Recent dissertation titles include:

• 'From Diamonds to Dust: An Ecocritical Comparison Between Modernist Literature and Contemporary Environmental Fiction'
• 'The Representation of Racial Injustices in Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric'
• 'Seamus Heaney and Samuel Beckett in Relation to British Imperialism'
• 'Ethical Criticism and Zadie Smith'

This module is worth 20 credits.

The years from 1660 to 1830 are enormously important, especially in terms of the representation of the self in literature: Milton promoted the idea of the poet inspired by God; Pope and Swift mocked the possibility of anyone truly knowing their self; Wordsworth used poetry to explore his own life; and Byron and Austen provided ironic commentaries on the self-obsessions of their peers. This period also saw the rise of the novel (a form that relies upon telling the story of lives), a flourishing trade in biography, and the emergence of new genre, autobiography. This module will look at some of the most significant works of the period with particular reference to the relationship between writers and their worlds. Topics might include: the emergence, importance and limitations of life-writing; self- fashioning; the construction – and deconstruction - of the ‘Romantic’ author’; transmission and revision; translation and imitation; ideas of the self and gender; intertextuality, adaptation, and rewriting; creating and destroying the past; and writing revolution. Texts studied will range across poems, novels and prose.

This stranded module provides students with a detailed introduction to the major works of a single author (e.g. James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence). Students will select one author to study from a range on offer. They will then have the opportunity to consider in detail important thematic and stylistic aspects of their chosen author’s work, taking account of the chronological development of his/her writing practice (if relevant), and his/her relationship to key historical and literary contexts.

This module focuses on the connections between literary texts, politics, and relevant historical/cultural contexts in gothic texts. You may cover:

• poetry
• novels
• graphic novels
• films

Examples include The Haunting of Hill House (both Shirley Jackson’s novel and the Netflix adaptation), The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez, and Saga of the Swamp Thing by Moore, Bissette and Totleben, and The Visions of the Daughters of Albion by William Blake.

You will explore various critical and theoretical approaches to literature, film, comics, adaptation, and popular culture. The module also seeks to decolonise Gothic Studies, including work by creators from a wide range of backgrounds who identify with a diverse range of subject positions.

This module is worth 20 credits.

Examine 20th century Irish literature and drama.

Taking the Irish Literary Revival as a starting-point, you will consider authors in their Irish and European context. Such authors include:

• W.B. Yeats
• J.M. Synge
• Lady Gregory
• James Joyce
• Seán O'Casey
• Seamus Heaney
• Brian Friel
• Marina Carr

We focus on reading texts in relation to their social, historical, and political contexts.

This includes tracking significant literary and cultural responses to Irish experiences of colonial occupation, nationalist uprising and civil war, partition and independence, socio-economic modernisation, and the protracted period of violent conflict in Northern Ireland.

This module is worth 20 credits.

Literature and Drama across the early modern period contributed to, and was often caught up in, dramatic changes in social, political, and religious culture which changed the way that people experienced their lives and the world around them. This module gives students the opportunity to read a wide range of texts in a multitude of genres (from drama, to prose fiction, pamphlets and poetry) in their immediate contexts, both cultural and intellectual. This module will situate the poetry, prose and drama between 1580 and 1700 against the backdrops of civil war and political revolution, scientific experimentation, and colonial expansion; in doing so, it will ask how the seventeenth century forms our current understandings of the world. Students will be encouraged to read widely, to develop a specific and sophisticated understanding of historical period, and to see connections and changes in literary and dramatic culture in a period which stretches from the Spanish Armada of 1588 to the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688.

Through the exploration of lyric poetry, this module examines cultural and literary change from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. It will consider the rise of ‘named poet’, the interaction of print and manuscript culture, the representation of love, and the use of the female voice. It will develop further students’ confidence in handling formal poetic terminology and reading poetry from this period. It will also enable students to think pragmatically about the transmission of lyric in modern editions, and about how best to represent the form.

This module examines the late twentieth and early twenty-first century globe through its correlates in fiction. The primary materials for the module will be post-war Anglophone works drawn from a wide geographical range across the world. After introducing the history of the idea of world literature, these works will be situated within a series of theoretical ‘worlds’: world literary systems; post-colonial criticism; cosmopolitanism; world ecologies; resource culture; literary translation theory. The module will also attend to critiques of 'world literature’ as a concept.

The module is designed to provide students with an understanding of the process of English Language Teaching (ELT) and of the theoretical underpinnings of this practice. In this module students will learn the principles behind the learning and teaching of key aspects and skills of English, including:

• vocabulary
• grammar
• reading
• writing
• speaking
• listening
• intercultural communicative skills

Students will also learn how to apply these theoretical principles to the development of teaching materials. This module will therefore be of interest to students who want to pursue a teaching career, and in particular to those interested in teaching English as a second or foreign language.

This module is worth 20 credits.

Speaking, listening, reading, and writing are a complex set of behaviours that are a fundamental part of our daily lives. And yet they remain difficult to fully explain.

When you hear ‘FIRE’, you immediately look for an exit and start moving. Yet all that a speaker has done is produce a string of sounds. Your mind distinguishes these from the murmuring of other voices, feet clomping on the floor, and any background music. Your mind matches the sounds f-i-r-e with a word, retrieves the meaning, and relates them to the current circumstances and responds accordingly.

How does the mind do this? And what makes our minds so special that we can do this? On this module, we begin to address these questions.

You will consider:

• Is there a language gene?
• What makes human language different from animal communication?
• What is the relationship between thought and language?
• Does everyone talk to themselves? What purpose does our inner voice serve?
• How do we learn language? And does cognition underpin our ability to learn language?
• What do language deficits tell us about language and the brain?
• How do we understand and produce speech, words, and sentences?
• What is the best way to teach children to read?
• How is sign language similar to/different from spoken language?

This module is worth 20 credits.

This module offers an advanced study of the language of literary texts and how it impacts reading and interpretation. It bridges the gap between the literary and linguistics aspects of our BA degrees. It also equips you with skills that will be useful in the teaching of English, or for a career in publishing.

You will study:

• literary style and technique
• the style of poetry and narrative
• the representation of characters' voices and consciousness
• the style of difficult texts, such as surrealism
• the history of literary style

You will learn to explain how style contributes to meaning and interpretation, and why texts affect you in different ways.

This module is worth 20 credits.

This module explores the vital role that discourse plays in various communicative domains in healthcare and workplace settings. Students will explore these domains through a variety of contemporary frameworks for examining discourse and communication, including critical discourse analysis, multi-modal discourse analysis, and interactional sociolinguistics.The module offers the opportunity to analyse and reflect on the discourses of healthcare and the workplace, as two crucially important domains of social and professional life. To this end, professional and healthcare discourses will be investigated through a range of genres and communicative modes, including face-to face communication advertising, media discourse and digital interactions. The module offers a rich resource for discourse-based studies of language in professional and social life and enables students to examine the strategic uses of communicative strategies in specific social settings.

This module provides comprehensive knowledge of feminist theory, as applied to a series of language and linguistic contexts.

You will explore a range of analytical approaches to language, including conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, and interactional sociolinguistics. You will also respond to, and critically engage with, contemporary real-world problems associated with gender and sexuality, through the consideration of discourse-based texts.

Topics covered include:

• gender and sexual identity construction in a range of interactive contexts
• sexist, misogynistic, homophobic and heteronormative representations in texts
• feminist theory from the 1970s to the present, with particular focus on contemporary approaches to gender theory

This module is worth 20 credits.

The module uses the study of place-names to show the various languages – British, Latin, French, Norse and English – that have been spoken in England over the last 2000 years.

You will learn how place-name evidence can be used as a source for the history of English, including:

• its interaction with the other languages
• its regional and dialectal patterns
• its changing vocabulary

We also consider the interdisciplinary contribution that place-names offer to historians and geographers.

For this module's assessment, you can choose a geographical area of particular interest.

This module is worth 20 credits.

The genre of dream-vision inspired work by all the major poets of the Middle Ages, including William Langland, the Pearl-Poet, and Geoffrey Chaucer. The course will aim to give you a detailed knowledge of a number of canonical texts in this genre, as well as ranging widely into the alliterative revival, and chronologically into the work of John Skelton in the early sixteenth century. The course will depend upon close, detailed reading of medieval literary texts, as well as focusing on the variety and urgency of issues with which dream poetry is concerned: literary, intellectual, social, religious and political.

Our images of Vikings come largely from the Icelandic sagas. These present a Viking Age of daring exploits, global exploration and bloody feuds, as carried out by valiant warriors and feisty women. But how accurate are the sagas when it comes to understanding what really happened in the Viking Age? Can they provide an insight into the Viking mind?

This module explores Norse and Viking cultural history, using an interdisciplinary approach grounded in the study of texts. 

Topics covered include:

• The Viking Age and Viking society
• Exploration and diaspora
• Gender, marriage and family
• Religion and belief
• Outlaws
• Poetry
• The supernatural

Your one-hour lectures will provide the evidence base for discussion in the two-hour, student-led seminars. The seminars also include some language work.

Assessment for this module is by a one-hour exam of comment and analysis, and a 3000-word project on a topic of your choice in consultation with a tutor.

This module is worth 20 credits.

Through the exploration of lyric poetry, this module examines cultural and literary change from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. It will consider the rise of ‘named poet’, the interaction of print and manuscript culture, the representation of love, and the use of the female voice. It will develop further students’ confidence in handling formal poetic terminology and reading poetry from this period. It will also enable students to think pragmatically about the transmission of lyric in modern editions, and about how best to represent the form.

Examine 20th century Irish literature and drama.

Taking the Irish Literary Revival as a starting-point, you will consider authors in their Irish and European context. Such authors include:

• W.B. Yeats
• J.M. Synge
• Lady Gregory
• James Joyce
• Seán O'Casey
• Seamus Heaney
• Brian Friel
• Marina Carr

We focus on reading texts in relation to their social, historical, and political contexts.

This includes tracking significant literary and cultural responses to Irish experiences of colonial occupation, nationalist uprising and civil war, partition and independence, socio-economic modernisation, and the protracted period of violent conflict in Northern Ireland.

This module is worth 20 credits.

Peter Pan, Les Misérables, Hamilton... just a few of the iconic productions that started life in London’s West End, or on Broadway in New York. But why and how did they become so successful?

The 20th and 21st centuries have seen major changes in the way theatre is financed, produced and presented, both on stage and on screen. This module explores the fascinating world of theatre production, covering:

• the development of long-running, commercial productions
• the role of the theatre producer in making theatre
• subsidised theatre
• touring and national theatre companies
• reviewing cultures
• relationship between the theatre and film industries
• the advent of the mega-musical

Examining the mainstream and the fringes, we apply case studies including Shakespeare in production, new plays, revivals, and international hits like the ones listed above, illustrating how theatre responds to changing contexts and audiences.

This module is worth 20 credits.

Literature and Drama across the early modern period contributed to, and was often caught up in, dramatic changes in social, political, and religious culture which changed the way that people experienced their lives and the world around them. This module gives students the opportunity to read a wide range of texts in a multitude of genres (from drama, to prose fiction, pamphlets and poetry) in their immediate contexts, both cultural and intellectual. This module will situate the poetry, prose and drama between 1580 and 1700 against the backdrops of civil war and political revolution, scientific experimentation, and colonial expansion; in doing so, it will ask how the seventeenth century forms our current understandings of the world. Students will be encouraged to read widely, to develop a specific and sophisticated understanding of historical period, and to see connections and changes in literary and dramatic culture in a period which stretches from the Spanish Armada of 1588 to the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688.

Explore the novel from the late twentieth century onwards, in Britain and beyond.

We will concentrate on the formal operations and innovations of selected novelists, considering how the contemporary socio-historical context influences these questions of form. Topics considered include:

• an interrogation of the ‘post-consensus novel’
• an exploration of postcolonial texts which represent the transatlantic slave trade
• the cultural politics of late twentieth-century and twenty-first century Scottish literature

Contemporary fiction is focused on writing emerging from Britain and closely-related contexts in the post-war period. This module offers strands structured around a number of political, social and cultural frameworks in Britain. These include:

• formal analysis and literary innovations in Britain
• temporalities and the representation of time
• issues of gender, race and class
• histories of colonialism and slavery
• national traditions and politics of state
• the country and the city
• postmodernism

This module particularly explores the network of relationships between context, content and form, supported by related literary and cultural theory and philosophy.

This module is worth 20 credits.

This module introduces key modern and contemporary poets.

You will build a detailed understanding of how various poetic forms manifest themselves in particular historical moments. Unifying the module is an attention to poets’ responses to the political and ideological upheavals of the 20th century.

The module will include such (primarily) British and Irish poets as:

• W.B. Yeats
• T.S. Eliot
• W. H. Auden
• Dylan Thomas
• Ted Hughes
• Sylvia Plath
• Wislawa Szymborska
• Tony Harrison
• Seamus Heaney
• Derek Mahon
• Adrienne Rich
• Geoffrey Hill
• Jo Shapcott
• Patience Agbabi
• Alice Oswald

Some of the forms examined will include: the elegy, the pastoral (and anti-pastoral), the ode, the sonnet (and sonnet sequence), the ekphrastic poem, the version or retelling, the villanelle, the parable and the sestina.

To develop a more complete perspective on each poet’s engagement with 20-century formal and political problems, we also examine these figures’ writings in other modes. This includes critical essays, manifestos, speeches, and primary archival materials such as letters and manuscript drafts.

Grounding each week will be readings on poetry and the category of the ‘political’ from an international group of critics, including such thinkers as Theodor Adorno, Charles Bernstein, Claudia Rankine, Peter McDonald, Angela Leighton, Christopher Ricks and Marjorie Perloff.

This module is worth 20 credits.

This module focuses on the creative process of making theatre as an ensemble. The first half of the module introduces a range of practical and theoretical approaches, including Stanislavski, Lecoq, Laban, Meyerhold, along with approaches to devised and physical theatre influenced by companies such as Frantic Assembly and Gecko. This work builds on the understanding of performance conventions developed through practical workshops begun in the first year Drama, Theatre, Performance module, and the performance theory through practice approach of the second year Stanislavski to Stelarc module. For the second half of the module, students assess which of these practical and theoretical models they wish to draw on through rehearsal practice and discussion as they develop a short , assessed, ensemble piece(s) for public performance.