In your final year, you will extend your analysis of specialist themes and develop your research skills through independent study. In both subjects, you can choose from a wide range of advanced-level modules. You will also write a dissertation in either English or American studies on a topic of your choice, supported by a member of staff. As the culmination of your degree, the dissertation might be used to compare topics, writers or texts in North American and British cultures, or to examine literary forms, genres and cultures in both national and international contexts.
You must pass year 4 which is weighted at 67% of your final degree classification.
Prohibition America
Why did National Prohibition officially begin in the United States in 1920?
What were the goals and intentions of the powerful women's reform movements and religious pressure groups calling for dramatic restrictions on alcohol?
Why was there so much political support for state and national restrictions, particularly during the First World War? Why was prohibition so hard to police during the 1920s?
The restrictions on what and how you could drink reshaped American society, politics, and culture during the 1920s and 1930s. Prohibition transformed alcohol consumption, opened up new leisure activities, and increased bootlegging, smuggling, and other criminal activities. However, popular histories and media representations of the prohibition years are full of myths and stereotypes. On this module, you will challenge these to build a better understanding of an important period in the 20th century United States.
This module is worth 20 credits.
Ethnic and New Immigrant Writing
This module will consider the development of ‘ethnic’ and new immigrant literature in the United States from the late 19th century to the contemporary era. You will examine a range of texts from life-writing to short fiction and the novel by writers from a range of ethno-cultural backgrounds, including Irish, Jewish, Caribbean and Asian American. Issues for discussion will include the claiming of the United States by new immigrant and ‘ethnic’ writers; race and ethnicity; gender, class and sexuality; labour and economic status; the uses and re-writing of American history and ‘master narratives’; the impact of US regionalism; how writers engage with the American canon; multiculturalism and the ‘culture wars’; and the growth of ‘ethnic’ American writing and Ethnic Studies as academic fields.
Popular Music Cultures and Countercultures
This module examines the role played by American popular music in countercultural movements. We focus on the ways in which marginalised, subordinate or dissenting social groups have used popular music as a vehicle for self-definition and for re-negotiating their relationship to the social, economic and cultural mainstream. We explore how the mainstream has responded to music countercultures in ways that range from repression to co-optation and analyse how the music and the movements have been represented and reflected on in fiction, film, poetry, journalism and theory. Among the key moments examined are the folk revival and the 1930s Popular Front, rock 'n' roll and desegregation in the 1950s, rock music and the 1960s counterculture, and postmodernism and identity politics in the music of the MTV age.
Recent Queer Writing
This module explores lesbian, gay, transgender and queer writing, focusing especially on the search for agency and the representation of gender and sexuality in selected contemporary texts. The majority of writers studied will be Canadian, although some American examples will also be included. The module is multi-generic, engaging with forms including novels, short fiction, life writing, poetry, drama and graphic narratives. Topics for discussion will include:
- LGBTQ sexuality;
- constructions of masculinity and femininity;
- the politics of representation: the extent to which writing can enable agency as subjects or citizens;
- intersections between race, ethnicity, class, nationality, religion, and the construction of gender and sexual identites
- writing for LGBTQ youth
- literature studies will be contextualized in relation to relevant debates in feminist, queer, post-colonial and transnational theories
Representative authors for study may include James Baldwin, Jane Rule, Dionne Brand, Dorothy Allison, Shyam Selvadurai, Tomson Highway, Leslie Feinberg, and Ivan Coyote.
A History of the Civil Rights Movement
This module examines a range of documents and scholarly controversies pertaining to the Civil Rights Movement between 1940 and 1970. Documents will include public and organisational records, photo-journalism, speeches, memoir and personal papers. Controversies will include those relating to the chronological limits, spatial dynamics, and gender politics of the movement, as well as those relating to the movement's goals and achievements.
American Madness: Mental Illness in History and Culture
Experiences of and ideas about madness, insanity, and mental illness have varied and changed radically within American history and culture. This module will survey and analyse these changes from the mid-19thcentury to the present. We will consider how and why medical authority, gender, and class have all impacted the way in which mental illness is understood, and consider the significance of changing approaches to treatment. Sources used on this interdisciplinary module range from medical accounts and psychiatric theory to memoir, fiction and film. The aim is to place representations of mental illness in their historical context, and to ask what they reveal about related ideas about identity, conformity, social care and responsibility.
Photographing America
This module examines the development of photography in America from roughly 1945 onwards. The module breaks the period down into themes and considers:
1. the transformation of ‘documentary’ photograph;
2. the emergence and importance of colour photography;
3. experimental, conceptual and post-conceptual photography;
4. issues of serialism and seriality;
5. landscape photography;
6. the photobook
7. analogue/digital
The module will draw on the work of a diverse range of photographers, including Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, Ed Ruscha, Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams, Robert Heinecken, Stephen Shore, Todd Hido, William Eggleston and Doug Rickard.
US Foreign Policy, 1989 - present
Explore US foreign policy in the post-Cold War period.
You will examine the historical narratives of American international relations, considering the drivers behind the foreign policies of Presidents George H W Bush, Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
More specifically, we will consider:
- Whether the post-1989 period constituted a break from previous traditions in US foreign policy, or whether there has been an essential continuity through the war on terror and beyond
- The impact of economics, geopolitics, ideology and security issues on post-1989 strategy in different regions of the world
- The impact of a new international environment, marked by the demise of bipolarity and the rise of globalisation
You'll spend around three hours per week in lectures and seminars on this module.
This module is worth 20 credits.
Varieties of Classic American Film, Television and Literature since 1950
What is a film, television or literary classic? How has this term come under pressure and fractured over the past half century or so? In this module you will consider the concept of the mid and late twentieth century American “classic” in a variety of contrasting and overlapping contexts. These contexts will be elaborated on the basis of their formal, generic, period and/or cultural designations that will cover university and exam curricula reading lists, popular opinion and widespread critical consensus (such as the currently prevalent view, for instance, that the early twenty-first century constitutes a ‘golden age’ of US television).
North American Film Adaptations
This module examines North American short stories and novels and their film adaptations, paying attention to the contexts in which both the literary and the cinematic texts are produced as well as to the analysis of the texts themselves. In particular, the module takes an interest in literary texts whose film adaptations have been produced in different national contexts to the source material.
Sexuality in American History
From the Puritans to Playboy, sexuality has been a focal point in the culture, politics, and society of the United States. This module will examine Americans' differing attitudes over time toward sexuality. Representative topics covered may include marriage and adultery, homosexuality and heterosexuality, nudity, abortion, birth control, prostitution, free love, and rape.
The Special Relationship, Spit and Slavery - Britain and the US 1776-1877
Reassess the Anglo-American relationship, during an era of major upheaval in both nations.
Spanning from the American Revolution through to the end of the Reconstruction era, you will be challenged to examine how events and ideas forced Britons and Americans to reconceptualize their relationship.
You will engage with concepts that are crucial in the formation of the modern world, including:
- race
- ethnicity
- liberty
- republicanism
- class
- gender
- manners
- reform
This module is worth 20 credits.
Troubled Empire: The Projection of American Global Power from Pearl Harbor to Covid-19
This module will challenge students to critically engage with the period that Henry Luce referred to as the “American Century”. It will cover a range of case studies between Luce’s injunction and the subsequent US entry into World War Two in 1941 and the recent twin-crises marked by the 2008 Great Recession and the Covid-19 global pandemic. In doing so, it will prompt students to consider both the projection of American power on a global scale after 1941 and the considerable challenges that this project faced. Incorporating a series of focused case studies and reflections on the wider contexts relating to them, it will give students first-hand experience of weighing up the practical challenges US policymakers faced and the way that historians have subsequently assessed their efforts and understood their actions.
Film and Television Genres
Many films share common traits. Together they might be classed as “action”, “made for television” or “low budget”. But how does as film get assigned a genre? Who does the assigning? And what impact does this assigning have?
During the module we’ll delve deep into a particular genre. We’ll examine it’s:
- key concepts and texts
- development
- influence and influences
Building on what you’ve learnt in years one and two you’ll also look at the genre in the context of production and consumption.
As well as knowledge of a specific genre you’ll also develop the skills to apply your learning to other genres.
This module is worth 20 credits.
Depending on your module choices in your first and second year, you will choose three modules in your final year in English that cover at least two areas of study.
The Self and the World: Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century
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.
Contemporary Fiction
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.
Making Something Happen: 20th Century Poetry and Politics
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.
Single-Author Study
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.
The Gothic Tradition
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.
Island and Empire
While the vexed questions of British identity and its relationship to empire have been at the forefront of political debate in the last decade, they have also been integral to literary production for many centuries. This module interrogates English and British representations of colonisation and empire, within Great Britain and Ireland and with particular reference to India. Well known writers such as Edmund Spenser, Jonathan Swift, Walter Scott, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling and Salman Rushdie, will be set against less familiar voices, to consider the ways in which dominant narratives come about and can be challenged.
Oscar Wilde and Henry James: British Aestheticism and Commodity Culture
Henry James and Oscar Wilde had a passionate dislike of each other, as well as very different values. Even so, they moved in similar circles. Both men found themselves at the centre of British cultural and intellectual life, experimenting within the same set of literary, critical and theatrical modes.
This module uses the writings of Oscar Wilde and Henry James, alongside some of their contemporaries, to examine changes in literary culture and the practices of literary composition in the late 19th century.
We will explore:
- The role of new technology in literary creativity
- The growth of mass and 'celebrity' culture
- The development of consumerism and resulting commodification of literary art
- The changing relationship of art to politics
- Anxieties about artistic originality and plagiarism
- Attempts (via censorship) to police literary expressivity
You will study a range of texts by Wilde and James, including drama, fiction and criticism. These will be compared with pieces by a number of their contemporaries (including Walter Pater and William Morris), in order to assess both the modernity and radicalism of their writings.
This module is worth 20 credits.
Modern Irish Literature and Drama
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.
Reformation and Revolution: Early Modern literature and drama 1588-1688
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.
Songs and Sonnets: Lyric poetry from Medieval Manuscript to Shakespeare and Donne
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.
One and Unequal: World Literatures in English
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.
English Place-Names
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.
Dreaming the Middle Ages: Visionary Poetry in Scotland and England
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.
Old English Heroic Poetry
This module gives an opportunity to those who already have a basic knowledge of Old English language and literature to explore some of the astonishing range of texts from the earliest stages of English literature. The texts studied are heroic and Christian. Themes include Germanic myth and legend, heroic endeavour, Christian passion. A study of the epic poem Beowulf — its characters, its themes, its ‘meaning’ — is essential to the module. Texts are read in Old English (with plenty of help given).
The Viking Mind
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.
Songs and Sonnets: Lyric poetry from Medieval Manuscript to Shakespeare and Donne
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.
Modern Irish Literature and Drama
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.
Changing Stages: Theatre Industry and Theatre Art
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.
Reformation and Revolution: Early Modern literature and drama 1588-1688
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.