ROYAL HOLLOWAY
ENGLISH DEPARTMENT
Open Day Presentation, updated Nov 2010.
Single Honours Year 1
Two courses per semester, on this pattern:
 Autumn Term: ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘Inventing the
Novel’.
 Spring term: ‘Introduction to Medieval Literature’
and ‘Introducing English Poetry’.
‘Inventing the Novel’
First part of term, 18th century
J. M. Coetzee, Foe (Penguin)
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. John Richetti (Penguin)
Aphra Behn, ‘Oroonoko’, in Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works, ed. Janet
Todd (Penguin)
Samuel Richardson, Pamela, or, Virtue Rewarded, ed. Thomas Keymer (Oxford
World's Classics),
Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela, ed. Judith Hawley (Penguin)
These nineteenth-century novels are studied in the second part of the term:
Ann Radcliffe, The Italian ed. Robert Miles (Penguin Classics); Jane Austen,
Sense and Sensibility ed. Ros Ballaster (Penguin Classics); Jane Austen,
Persuasion ed. Gillian Beer (Penguin Classics); Mary Shelley's Frankenstein:
ed. J Paul Hunter (Norton Critical Edition); James Hogg, The Private
Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner ed. John Carey (Oxford World's
Classics); Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, ed. Philip Horne (Penguin Classics)
~ Professor Hawley has a ‘bundle’ deal struck with Penguin!
‘Shakespeare’, term 1
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The Merchant of Venice
As You Like It
Twelfth Night
Richard II
Henry IV Part I
Henry V
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Hamlet
Othello
King Lear
The Winter's Tale
The Tempest
With the obvious moral to be drawn: University English is not like ‘A’
level English. More texts, more quickly, far wider experience as readers.
‘Introducing English poetry’ (Spring term)
Week 1, Lecture 1, Shakespeare Sonnet 18; lecture 2 John Donne: 'The Sunne Rising'
Week 2 lecture 3 John Milton, 'Lycidas' (elegiac poetry); lecture 4 Andrew Marvell, 'To his Coy
Mistress' (poems of erotic persuasion)
Week 3 lecture 5 Wordsworth: 'Tintern Abbey’; lecture 6 Alexander Pope, 'The Rape of the Lock'
(mock heroic)
Week 4 lecture 7 Coleridge, 'Frost at Midnight‘; lecture 8 Poems by Charlotte Smith
Week 5 lecture 9 John Keats, 'Ode to a Nightingale’; lecture 10 Shelley: 'Ode to the West Wind‘
Week 7, lecture 11: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘Ulysses’; lecture 12: Robert Browning, ‘A Toccata of
Galuppi’s’
Week 8, lecture 13: sonnets by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti; lecture 14: Emily
Dickinson, 754: 'My Life Had Stood - A Loaded Gun' [Professor Hampson]
Week 9, lecture 15: Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘The Windhover’; lecture 16: T S Eliot, 'The love song
of J Alfred Prufrock ' and 'Preludes’
Week 10, lecture 17: Ezra Pound, ‘The Cantos’; lecture 18, Dylan Thomas, 'Fern Hill‘
Week 11, lecture 19: Frank O'Hara, 'The Day Lady Died’; lecture 20: Denise Levertov, 'O Taste &
See'
Single Honours Year 2
Five core units from which students choose three:
 Contemporary Debates in Literary Theory
 Renaissance Literature 1525-1670: ‘Love, Honour,
Obey’.
 Romantic Literature
 19th Victorian Literature
 Modernist Literature
Plus two further half units from options
EN2010: Love, Honour, Obey: Literature 1525-1670
Course Tutors: Dr Roy Booth*,
Dr. Elaine McGirr and Dr. Deana Rankin
Description: This course is organised around the three major themes
specified. Each of the three strands features a combination of authors,
selected works and contextualising lectures which together illustrate the
general subject.
‘Love’ will explore Elizabethan erotic-mythological poems (for instance
Shakespeare's 'Venus and Adonis' and Marlowe's 'Hero and Leander'), John
Donne's love poetry, the poetry of Katherine Phillips, and, from the poems
of Edmund Spenser, his marriage poem, 'Epithalamion' and extracts from
The Faerie Queene.
‘Honour’ will include texts like Shakespeare's 'Lucrece', a selection of
revenge tragedies, as well as material on duelling, honourable quarrels and
dishonourable friends.
‘Obey’ will explore both secular and religious allegiances and may include
plays about kingship like Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great and John Ford’s
Perkin Warbeck, occasional poetry by Milton, Marvell and Dryden, and the
religious poetry of Herbert and Donne.
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Medieval Dream and Vision
Medieval Epic & Romance
The Gawain Poet
Old English Literature
Drama and Witchcraft 1576-1642
Gender and Writing in the Eighteenth Century
Ritual & Society in 19th century Fiction and Painting
Modernity and the Twentieth-Century British Novel
Writing of World War I
Dark Reform: Scandal and Satire in American Culture
Old English Literature
Intensive Shakespeare: Comedy, History, Tragedy
Philosophy and Art
British Drama Since 1956
The Postcolonial Novel
The current
array of
second
year halfunit options
Single honours Year 3
Options include 3 full units from:
1. Dissertation
2. A choice from a range of Special Author projects
3. A choice from an array of ‘Special Projects’…
And two further half units from the list of courses
available.
Current set of year 3 Special Authors
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Virginia Woolf
Geoffrey Chaucer
Joseph Conrad
John Ashbery
John Donne
J. M. Coetzee
Salman Rushdie
And the ‘Special Projects’
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‘Opium, Empire, Art’
Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture
Poetic Practice
The Booker Prize and Beyond
Theatre and the City 1590-1730
Idea of America in Philosophy and Literature
Autumn term third year half unit options
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Medieval drama
Advanced Shakespeare
Medieval Dream and Vision
Beowulf and the Critics
18th century bodies
Literatures of genocide
Postmodernism and Poetry
Art of Noise
1855: a year in the life…
Spring term half unit options
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Reading Beowulf
The Gawain Poet
Old English literature
Drama and Witchcraft 1576-1642
Medieval Epic and Romance
Material Poetics
James Joyce: Revolutions of the Word
Shakespeare Adaptation
Reading Tristram Shandy
Oysseus’s scar: Time in Modern Literature and Film
Departmental faces
Medieval and Modern
Jennifer Neville,
Finn Fordham
Catherine Nall,
Anne Varty
(Head of
Department)
Ruth Kennedy
Andrew Gibson
Also member of the
Conseil Scientifique
of the Collège
International de
Philosophie, Paris
Shakespeareans: Professor Kiernan Ryan, Dr Christie Carson
http://ahds.ac.uk/p
erformingarts/collec
tions/designingshakespeare.htm
Man of the
Renaissance*, and
Women of the
Enlightenment
Dr Roy Booth
Dr Elaine McGirr
Professor Judith
Hawley
* No available picture of
Dr Deana Rankin!
Nineteenth-Twentieth century specialists: Dr Sophie Gilmartin,
Dr Ruth Livesey, Professor Robert Hampson…
…and Professor Adam Roberts, who also
does…
Science fiction, both critically
and in very regular practice
Tim Armstrong is Professor of Modern English and
American Literature at Royal Holloway. The main focus
of his work has been the cultural history of modernism.
His publications include Modernism, Technology and
the Body (1998), Haunted Hardy: Poetry, History,
Memory (2000), and Modernism: A Cultural History
(2005). He is editor of American Bodies (1996) and
Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems (1993; 2009); and coeditor of Beyond the Pleasure Dome: Writing and
Addiction from the Romantics (1994). He is presently
working on an account of the cultural resonances of
slavery, a book which includes chapters on technology,
the weather, and insurance.
Our other avant guard-ists, Dr Will Montgomery and Dr Redell Olsen
And two of the
Department’s
Creative Writing
team
And Susanna Jones you have met, http://www.susanna-jones.com/
And among our Departmental poets/artists,
Professor Jo Shapcott and Dr Kristen Kreider
http://www.kreider-oleary.net/
And leaving the best for last,
Professor Sir Andrew Motion
who teaches at M.A. level.
(Creative Writing)
'Causa Belli'
They read good books, and quote, but never learn
a language other than the scream of rocket-burn
Our straighter talk is drowned but ironclad;
elections, money, empire, oil and Dad.
http://www.rhul.ac.uk/English/studying/Undergraduate-Study/English-andCreativeWriting.html
FIRST YEAR
Creative Writing students take:
CW1010 Introduction to Creative Writing: Fiction & Poetry (1 Unit); seminar/workshop
CW1020 Why Write? The History and Theory of Creative Writing (1 Unit) seminar/workshop
with the English courses:
EN1107 Inventing the Novel
EN1112 Introducing English Poetry
SECOND YEAR
Creative Writing Students take TWO of the following options:
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DT2310A Playwriting
CW2020A Fiction
CW2030A Poetry
(with 2 units or equivalent from the range offered for English)
THIRD YEAR Creative Writing students take either of the two following options:
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CW3101: Contextual Practice, or
CW3102: Reading as a Writer
and take ONE of the following courses:
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CW3010A Playwriting 2, or
CW3020A Fiction 2, or
CW3030A Poetry 2
(with two units worth of English courses)
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http://www.amazon.com/Doing-English-Robert-Eaglestone/dp/productdescription/0415284228
Something to read before
you come here: Professor
Bob Eaglestone’s famous
Doing English.
How much work? On the timetable, Year 1
4
3.5
3
2.5
Lectures
Seminars
Study groups
2
1.5
1
0.5
0
Year 1 hours a week
Writing essays
You will be expected to commit your precious musings to
paper!
~ approximately, two essays for each full unit, one assessed
and one ‘formative’ (i.e., not part of the assessment of the
course of 1,000-2,000 words). The essays will be wordprocessed, with proper scholarly documentation. On all
courses, students are asked to upload their essays to
www.submit.ac.uk (self-monitoring for plagiary).
 Seminar presentations may take the place of essays.
A screen grab from ‘Moodle’,
the Royal Holloway Virtual Learning Environment
Another screen grab of a Moodle site: http://moodle.rhul.ac.uk/
Rather than use ‘Moodle’, some of our courses operate with course blogs:
EN3515 Dickens http://rhuldickens.blogspot.com/
And EN3314 ‘The Booker Prize’ http://rhulbookerprize.blogspot.com/
http://xerxes.rhul.ac.uk/databases/subject/english
Some of RHUL’s electronic resources relevant to English
After the degree
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You love literature so much that you go on to do an
M.A. here…?
e.g. ‘pathway’ from year 1 Shakespeare, through
year 2 ‘intensive Shakespeare’ to year 3
‘Shakespeare: the Problem Plays’ to the RHUL
Shakespeare M.A.
Similar pathways are possible to M.A. study in
Medieval Studies, Victorian Literature, Literatures of
Modernity
Or just do M.A. English Literature.
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http://www.rhul.ac.uk/careers/undergraduates/de
gree-specific-careers-tips.html