English: Single Honours
Level 1
Compulsory modules:
You MUST take the following modules:
Module Code
Module Name
Pre-requisites
UPGPFV-60-1
Writing about Reading/Reading
about Writing
Beyond The Horizon: Spaces
and Places in Literature
Once Upon a Time: Stories,
Children, and Literature
None
Excluded
Combinations
None
None
None
None
None
Excluded
Combinations
None
UPGPPF-30-1
UPGPPG-30-1
Option modules:
There are no option modules for single honours.
Level 2
Compulsory modules:
You MUST take the following module:
Module Code
Module Name
Pre-requisites
UPGPPH-30-2
Reading Forms/Forms of
Reading
UPGPDC-60-1 or
UPGPFV-60-1
UPGPPF-30-1 or
UPGPPG-30-1
Core modules:
Select a total of three modules with at least one from List A. (You may select all three modules from List
A if you wish; otherwise, the balance of your modules should come from List B.).
List A:
Module Code
Module Name
Pre-requisites
UPGPPM-30-2
Shakespeare’s World of Words
UPGPPK-30-2
Romanticism Unbound
UPGPTA-30-2
Exploring the 18th Century
UPGPDC-60-1 or
UPGPFV-60-1
UPGPPF-30-1 or
UPGPPG-30-1
UPGPDC-60-1 or
UPGPFV-60-1
UPGPPF-30-1 or
UPGPPG-30-1
UPGPDC-60-1 or
UPGPFV-60-1
UPGPPF-30-1 or
UPGPPG-30-1
Excluded
Combinations
UPGPDM-30-2
UPGPDL-30-2
UPGPPJ -30-2
UPGPTG-30-3
None
List B:
Module Code
Module Name
Pre-requisites
UPGPTB-30-2
British Writing: 1900-1950
UPGPTL-30-2
The Culture of Dissent:
Nineteenth Century American
Literature
UPGPPL-30-2
Victorian Frictions
UPGPDC-60-1 or
UPGPFV-60-1
UPGPPF-30-1 or
UPGPPG-30-1
UPGPDC-60-1 or
UPGPFV-60-1
UPGPPF-30-1 or
UPGPPG-30-1
UPGPDC-60-1 or
UPGPFV-60-1
UPGPPF-30-1 or
UPGPPG-30-1
Excluded
Combinations
None
None
UPGPPB-30-2;
UPGPTC-30-2
Level 3
Compulsory modules:
You MUST take the following module:
Module Code
Module Name
Pre-requisites
UPGPPD-30-3
English Independent Project
UPGPDC-60-1 or
UPGPFV-60-1
UPGPPF-30-1 or
UPGPPG-30-1
Excluded
Combinations
None
Option modules:
You must select three modules from the following list
Module Code
Module Name
Pre-requisites
UPGPTD-30-3
Children’s Fantasy Fiction since
1900
UPGPTF-30-3
Fiction in Britain since 1970
UPGPEG-30-3
Gender, Sexuality, and Writing
UPGPFH-30-3
Literature and Culture in Britain,
1885-1915
UPGPDC-60-1 or
UPGPFV-60-1
UPGPPF-30-1 or
UPGPPG-30-1
UPGPDC-60-1 or
UPGPFV-60-1
UPGPPF-30-1 or
UPGPPG-30-1
UPGPDC-60-1 or
UPGPFV-60-1
UPGPPF-30-1 or
UPGPPG-30-1
UPGPDC-60-1 or
UPGPFV-60-1
UPGPPF-30-1 or
UPGPPG-30-1
Excluded
Combinations
None
None
None
None
UPGPPA-30-3
Contemporary American
Narrative
UPGPFS-30-3
Gothic Literature
UPGPPP-30-3
Moving Words; Travel Writing
and Modernity
UPGPDC-60-1 or
UPGPFV-60-1
UPGPPF-30-1 or
UPGPPG-30-1
UPGPDC-60-1 or
UPGPFV-60-1
UPGPPF-30-1 or
UPGPPG-30-1
UPGPDC-60-1 or
UPGPFV-60-1
UPGPPF-30-1 or
UPGPPG-30-1
None
Excluded
Combinations
None
None
None
English: Half Award
Level 1
Compulsory module:
Module Code
Module Name
Pre-requisites
UPGPFV-60-1
Writing about Reading/Reading
about Writing
None
Level 2
Compulsory modules:
You MUST take the following module:
Module Code
Module Name
Pre-requisites
UPGPPH-30-2
Reading Forms/Forms of
Reading
UPGPDC-60-1 or
UPGPFV-60-1
UPGPPF-30-1 or
UPGPPG-30-1
Excluded
Combinations
None
Core modules:
You must take one module from the following:
Module Code
Module Name
Pre-requisites
UPGPPM-30-2
Shakespeare’s World of Words
UPGPPK-30-2
Romanticism Unbound
UPGPDC-60-1 or
UPGPFV-60-1
UPGPPF-30-1 or
UPGPPG-30-1
UPGPDC-60-1 or
UPGPFV-60-1
UPGPPF-30-1 or
Excluded
Combinations
UPGPDM-30-2
UPGPDL-30-2
UPGPTG-30-3
UPGPTA-30-2
Exploring the 18th Century
UPGPTB-30-2
British Writing: 1900-1950
UPGPTL-30-2
The Culture of Dissent:
Nineteenth Century American
Literature
UPGPPL-30-2
Victorian Frictions
UPGPPG-30-1
UPGPDC-60-1 or
UPGPFV-60-1
UPGPPF-30-1 or
UPGPPG-30-1
UPGPDC-60-1 or
UPGPFV-60-1
UPGPPF-30-1 or
UPGPPG-30-1
UPGPDC-60-1 or
UPGPFV-60-1
UPGPPF-30-1 or
UPGPPG-30-1
UPGPDC-60-1 or
UPGPFV-60-1
UPGPPF-30-1 or
UPGPPG-30-1
None
None
None
UPGPPB-30-2;
UPGPTC-30-2
Level 3
Compulsory modules:
There are no compulsory or core modules at this stage.
Option modules:
You must select two modules from the following list.
If you choose the English Independent Project, you cannot choose a dissertation module in the other
half of your award.
Module Code
Module Name
Pre-requisites
UPGPTD-30-3
Children’s Fantasy Fiction since
1900
UPGPTF-30-3
Fiction in Britain since 1970
UPGPEG-30-3
Gender, Sexuality, and Writing
UPGPFH-30-3
Literature and Culture in Britain,
1885-1915
UPGPPA-30-3
Contemporary American
Narrative
UPGPDC-60-1 or
UPGPFV-60-1
UPGPPF-30-1 or
UPGPPG-30-1
UPGPDC-60-1 or
UPGPFV-60-1
UPGPPF-30-1 or
UPGPPG-30-1
UPGPDC-60-1 or
UPGPFV-60-1
UPGPPF-30-1 or
UPGPPG-30-1
UPGPDC-60-1 or
UPGPFV-60-1
UPGPPF-30-1 or
UPGPPG-30-1
UPGPDC-60-1 or
UPGPFV-60-1
UPGPPF-30-1 or
UPGPPG-30-1
Excluded
Combinations
None
None
None
None
None
UPGPFS-30-3
Gothic Literature
UPGPPP-30-3
Moving Words; Travel Writing
and Modernity
UPGPPD-30-3
English Independent Project
UPGPDC-60-1 or
UPGPFV-60-1
UPGPPF-30-1 o r
UPGPPG-30-1
UPGPDC-60-1 or
UPGPFV-60-1
UPGPPF-30-1 or
UPGPPG-30-1
UPGPDC-60-1 or
UPGPFV-60-1
UPGPPF-30-1 or
UPGPPG-30-1
None
None
None
English Module Outlines
LEVEL 2
UPGPPH-30-2 Forms of Reading/Reading Forms: Core module
Module leader: Dr Kerry Sinanan
“For we all of us, grave or light,” the sagacious narrator of George Eliot’s Middlemarch observes, “get our
thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.” The perils and rewards of
“entanglement,” nonetheless, are at the core of the degree-level study of English. In particular, not just
reading, but self-conscious, theorized, reading at the textual, intertextual, and contextual levels are the
distinguishing features of our discipline. This module consolidates and extends work on the theory and
practice of reading different genres introduced at level 1 and prepares the way for level 3. Among the
questions addressed are: Isn’t reading analytically (to paraphrase Wordsworth) a process by which we
murder to dissect? To what extent and how do we read different genres differently? What is the difference
between “form” and “content” (or as Seymour Chatman has it, between “discourse” and “story”) and what
is the impact of that difference on our reading? Isn’t one interpretation just as good as another? Why
should we bother with testing and contesting what literary critics have to say about texts? What kinds of
relationships are there between text and context? Don’t reading, analysis, interpretation, criticism, and
evaluating amount to much the same thing? What prevents us, if anything does, from crow-barring into
texts any amount of biography, history, politics, ideas, and the like? The module consists of twenty-four
interlocking lectures on three texts selected partly because of their monumental position in our global
culture: Hamlet, Paradise Lost, and Middlemarch. Against the frustrations and delights of moving quickly
over a wide range of texts in “Approaches to Literature and Criticism,” this module offers the opportunity
to read more deliberately. As the module proceeds you will be on the road to becoming sharper and more
knowing and confident readers: ultimately this module will empower you to understand your own reading
practice and to feel confident about knowing what it is you do as an English student and why that matters
to you. You will also have some sense of why the American psychologist and philosopher William James
(1842-1910) should have stayed around for this module: reading literature, he lamented, “is as hard to me
as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance to celebrate!”
Assessment
Close reading; Creative writing or Critical review; Synoptic essay; Exam
UPGPPK-30-2 Romanticism Unbound
Module leader: Professor Robin Jarvis
Why was there such an explosion of reading and writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries? Why were the years 1780-1830 a period of such “unbounded” literary creativity? How did the
French Revolution of 1789-1799, and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars of 1793-1815, impact on
the literature produced by British writers? How did poets jettison the neoclassical ideals of order and
moderation and start thinking the unthinkable? What effect did the early Industrial Revolution, and
changes in the countryside, have on the mentalities of writers? How did the Romantics develop new
concepts of the self? How did Britain’s expanding geographical and imperial horizons open up new
imaginative spaces? How did women authors start to reshape the literary market at this time? These are
just a few of the questions that preoccupy students on this module, which features some of the greatest
poets Britain has produced, such as Blake, Wordsworth, and Shelley, and some of its finest prose stylists,
like Jane Austen, William Hazlitt, and Thomas De Quincey.
Assessment
Reading log; Long Essay; Exam
UPGPTA-30-2 Exploring the Eighteenth Century
Module leader: Dr Kerry Sinanan
In this module we shall explore the long eighteenth century, understood to extend from the Restoration of
Charles II (1660) to the end of Romanticism. Often this period of literary production is not one we feel we
know well and, yet, we have much in common with this time. Just as new forms of writing, such as email
and blogging, are the product of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, so, in the eighteenth century,
many new forms of writing were born and developed. You will, therefore, have the opportunity to study a
range of different genres from the period, including periodical essays, travel writing, letters, satiric and
comic poetry, and, the most innovative form of all, the novel, which really comes into being in the
eighteenth century. In reading these multiple forms, we will focus on representations of the body (some of
them shockingly bawdy and others rigidly polite!), constructions of gender and explorations of sensibility
and the nature of man. The dilemma of whether or not mankind is inherently good, or fatally selfish,
informs many of the debates contested within the literature of the period and we shall encounter a range
of characters from the dissipated libertines of Rochester’s poems, to the virtuous Pamela who stands up
for her rights. We will meet rakes, such as Mr B. who finally discovers that goodness is rewarding, and
unreformable villains, such as Roxana, who perhaps even murders her own daughter in pursuit of riches .
. . . In the same way that we can see ‘good’ and ‘bad’ characters, we shall also note the opposition
between the positive elements of eighteenth-century culture, that tended to improve and reform society,
and the flourishing of social evils, such as the slave trade and enforced prostitution. Throughout the
module we chart the shift from a Neo-Classical and Augustan culture that prized order and harmony, to a
pre-Romantic context in which this order was challenged and the rational strand of the Enlightenment was
questioned. In all the pieces that we read, the comic side of eighteenth-century literature will be
emphasised, its wit and satire, as well as its more philosophic concerns with society and civility.
Assessment
Portfolio of work: letter, review essay, creative writing; Synoptic Essay
UPGPPM-30-2 Shakespeare’s World of Words
Module Leader: TBA
On this module we harness the energies of Shakespeare’s world of words to enable you to read the texts
forged at the heart of explosion of the English language. A sense of revelling in the boundless nature of
Shakespeare’s creations, linguistic, imaginative, dramatic and textual, is core to how we will read his
works. We will begin with the Sonnets and move to a selection of plays including the Histories, Comedies
and Tragedies. You will study other Renaissance works that are chosen carefully to reflect specific
themes. Part of your reading and writing practice will involve bringing forward critical and theoretical
approaches to texts garnered in level 1 and so you will situate these texts within the frames of power,
history and context and structuralism/post-structuralism. The assessment on this module will emphasise
your own response to the plays and your close reading skills
Assessment
Portfolio of work
UPGPTB-30-2 British Writing: 1900-1950
Module leader: Dr Mariadele Boccardi
This module will guide you through one of the most exciting and varied periods in British literature, where
new narrative and poetic forms attempted to displace their more traditional predecessors and where
fundamental questions of individual and national identity were first challenged and then reshaped by
historical events, not least the two world wars. The module will explore the key literary movements of the
periods as well as the emergence of middlebrow and popular genre fiction. Among the core themes of the
module are gender, Englishness, modernity, the city and the country, childhood and nostalgia, the country
house and traditional values. The texts studied, including E.M. Forster’s Howards End, Virginia Woolf’s
Mrs Dalloway, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca engage with these
themes in different yet related ways, so that the module will give you a sound overview of the period and
more specific insights into some of the central preoccupations of its literature.
Assessment
Close Reading Exercise; Literary-critical Essay; Final Exam.
UPGPTL-30-2 The Culture of Dissent: Nineteenth Century American Literature
Module leader: Dr David Greenham
This module explores the way that nineteenth century American writers took their young country (born in
1776) to task time and again for its political failings, creating a culture of dissent upon which America’s
counter-cultural and liberal artists have fed ever since. Among the themes to be explored in the module
are: America’s search for cultural independence; the critical role of fiction in nation-building; the South,
race, slavery and the Civil War; the West and Native American experience; the development of the novel
and new forms of poetry. Principal texts include Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Ralph Waldo
Emerson’s Essays, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, poetry by Walt Whitman and Emily
Dickinson, Henry James’s Daisy Miller and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Assessment
Essay; Close Reading Presentation; Exam
UPGPPL-30-2 Victorian Frictions
Module leader: Dr Britta Martens
The Victorian period is often dismissed as stuffy, prudish and conservative. Such descriptions do not give
us a full picture of this eventful period, which saw radical changes in economic and social conditions as
well as in ideas that have a lasting impact on us today. Literature is at the forefront of these changes,
reflecting and participating in public debates. This module examines some major novels and poems which
articulate central conflicts of the period, reads them in their cultural and social context, and examines how
these genres find different, innovative ways of commenting on the Victorian world. Authors studied may
typically include Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Thomas Hardy, Oscar
Wilde, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, George Meredith, Dante
Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, William Morris and Augusta Webster. We study texts about
industrialisation and the suffering of the urban working class, including Oliver Twist, North and South,
popular poems and influential essays. We consider the rising interest in psychology, crime and detection
that is reflected in the new genres of the dramatic monologue and the sensation novel, represented by
Braddon’s best-seller Lady Audley’s Secret. Another focus is the Victorian woman question. We explore a
variety of perspectives on the relations between men and women, which interrogate and challenge
preconceptions about marriage, domesticity, and the Victorian divide between public and private life. We
discuss the exciting new ways in which novels and poems approach the conventional subject of
courtships and their controversial representations of the taboo subjects of unhappy marriages and various
kinds of ‘fallen’ women such as seduced girls like the heroine of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, prostitutes,
adulteresses and painter’s models. We see how the crisis of faith which was brought about by discoveries
in geology, evolutionary biology and biblical criticism leads to powerful poems about religious doubt such
as Tennyson’s In Memoriam but also Hardy’s pessimism and the decadence of Wilde’s The Picture of
Dorian Gray. The module combines an appreciation of the fascinating variety of Victorian literature within
its contexts with a thorough grounding in key literary genres, including the social problem novel, the
Newgate novel, sensation fiction, the dramatic monologue and the Victorian revision of the sonnet.
Assessment
Seen Examination, Synopsis and Evaluation of an Academic Journal Article (oral presentation and written
submission), Long Essay
LEVEL 3
UPGPTD-30-3 Children’s Fantasy Fiction since 1900
Module leader: Dr Charles Butler
In this module we shall study a range of children’s fantasy novels (predominantly British), including books
written for younger (8-12 year old) children, as well as the more recent genre of the Young Adult novel. In
doing so we shall be reading some of the most interesting and influential literature of the twentieth
century, but we shall also take the opportunity to explore the definition and appeal of fantasy, and to ask
what distinguishes children’s literature from other kinds of writing, whether it be style and subject matter,
the relationship of the author to the implied child audience, or the attitudes of adults. The module will be
divided into various sub-genres of children’s fantasy, allowing us to consider the development of themes
and conventions over time. Possible sub-genres include: Time Slips and Ghosts (e.g. Edith Nesbit, The
Story of the Amulet (1906), Philippa Pearce, Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958), Penelope Lively, The Ghost
of Thomas Kempe (1973); Initiations into Magic (e.g. T.H. White, The Sword in the Stone (1938),
Margaret Mahy, The Changeover (1984), J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997);
Of Other Worlds (e.g. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (1937), Ursula Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968),
Philip Pullman, Northern Lights (1995).
Assessment
Examination; Report; Essay; Long Essay
UPGPTF-30-3 Fiction in Britain since 1970
Module leader: Dr Mariadele Boccardi
In the 1960s the novel as a form was declared dead – unable to represent the reality of post-war Britain in
any meaningful way. And yet, from the early 1970s, the genre appeared reborn, tackling new subjects
and reinventing its form in theoretical, challenging ways, and enjoying an unprecedented popularity that
persists today. What happened at the turn of the decade to cause such dramatic shift? This module tries
to answer the question in contextually and theoretically informed ways. The module looks at a range of
novels published in the last 40 years, representative of the form’s variety in terms of genre, narrative
techniques, thematic concerns and theoretical influences. Among the authors studied are Iris Murdoch,
Ian McEwan, Hanif Kureishi, Jonathan Coe and Zadie Smith. The reading is organised around the broad
themes of history, identity, and the nation: we will consider how fiction has responded to key historical
moments such as the loss of empire, the politics of Mrs Thatcher’s government, and the decline in
industrial employment and relate these to how contemporary fiction engages with the post-imperial
representation of the colonial experience; the redefinition of Englishness in terms of class and race; the
intersection of memory, history and narrative in the recovery of the past. The aim is to further your
understanding of the cultural, ideological and literary concerns of contemporary British fiction.
Assessment
Literary-critical Essay; Book Review; Final Exam
UPGPEG-30-3 Gender, Sexuality and Writing
Module leader: Dr Zoe Brennan
The aim of the module is to explore late nineteenth- and twentieth-century debates on the social ordering
of gender and sexuality through studying a range of fiction and drama by both male and female writers,
complemented by one of Freud’s case studies, ‘Dora’s Case’, and Foucault’s The History of Sexuality.
Starting with the construction of gender and heterosexuality through romance, we will go on to examine
fin de siècle representations of gender and sexuality, the influence of sexologists in the early part of the
twentieth century, and more recent theories on alternative sexualities and gender as performance. Among
literary texts we shall be reading are: Jane Eyre, Oscar Wilde’s Salome, D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Fox’,
Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion, and Angela Carter’s The
Passion of New Eve.
Assessment
Examination; Annotated Bibliography; Extended Study
UPGPFH-30-3 Literature and Culture in Britain, 1885-1915
Module leader: Dr William Greenslade
Once regarded as a transitional period in literary history, the years from the 1880s to the first world war
are now intensively studied as a phase of critical importance to the understanding of British literary and
cultural history, and in particular to the shaping of new subjectivities in a fast-changing, mass society. The
exciting cultural and intellectual climate of these years will be examined in relation to a wide range of
topics including the impact of naturalism, aestheticism and modernist experiment in literature, theatre and
related arts, debates about politics art and culture, taste and censorship, the impact of mass culture and
consumerism, the representation of debates about the nature of decadence and degeneration,
Englishness, metropolis and empire, concern over poverty and the urban question (with a focus on writing
about London), the performance of gender and sexuality (including a focus on new Woman and revised
forms of masculinity), the exploration of anxieties about empire, war and the destruction of the nation and
‘race’ and the possibilities of utopia and cultural renewal. We will study significant texts by authors which
will include Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, William Morris, Oscar Wilde, Henrik Ibsen, George Egerton,
H.G.Wells, E.M.Forster, Ford Madox Ford and D.H.Lawrence.
Assessment
Examination; Essay; Contextual Analysis; Long Essay
UPGPPA-30-3 Contemporary American Narrative
Module leader: Dr Sarah Robertson
Martin Amis claims that “you can approach America only if you come at her from at least a dozen different
directions.” Many of those directions became apparent during the 1960s and 1970s when the United
States was politically and socially torn apart by the war in Vietnam and by the call for equality by ethnic
and women’s rights movements. In the wake of a period in which America was forced to become selfreflexive, contemporary American authors deal with the complex issues that arose out of that period.
What became ever more apparent from the 1970s onwards were the divergent aspects of American life.
A fuller understanding of what it means to be American in the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries can only be reached by engaging with those multiple discourses. From texts that deal with the
fallout of the Vietnam War, to novels that explore the difficulties of being ethnically or economically
“other”, contemporary American literature explores the nation from a host of different perspectives that
provide an image of many Americas, rather than one stable United States. As the course progresses you
will move from Tim O’Brien’s account of Vietnam in The Things They Carried through to the consumerism
and violence of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho and finally onto a range of texts by Black- and
Native-American authors, and to Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. The module is designed to
introduce you to both canonical authors, such as Toni Morrison, and writers who continue to exist on the
literary margins. In exploring these texts you will be introduced to a range of theories, particularly trauma
theory. This is a varied and challenging module that provides a unique insight into contemporary
American life.
Assessment
Seminar Presentation/written account of presentation; Essay; Long Essay
UPGPFS-30-3 Gothic Literature
Module leader: Dr Marie Mulvey-Roberts
What makes us afraid? This module will chart the progress of Gothic writing from the eighteenth-century
novel up to Patrick Süskind’s Perfume which was published in 1985, as well as with reference to the short
story by various writers including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe and Angela Carter. Prescribed
novels will include: H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau; Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House;
Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black and Stephen King’s Carrie. We will look at the gendered divide between
terror and horror and representations of monstrosity through the werewolf, the vampire and the ghost.
The building blocks of the module will include: the bloody chamber, poisonous flowers, the mad scientist
and premature burial. Among the theoretical perspectives which we will consider are Freud’s “The
Uncanny”, Hurley’s abhuman, Kristeva’s abjection, and Lacan’s The Mirror Stage. The characteristics and
conventions of Gothic writing will be explored and will include the supernatural, transgression and taboo.
Assessment
Examination; Long Essay; Seminar Presentation
UPGPPP-30-3 Moving Words: Travel Writing & Modernity
Module Leader: Professor Robin Jarvis
We are a society of travellers: it has been estimated that 80% of Britons have travelled abroad, whether
for work or pleasure, at some point in their lives. Mobility, more generally, is a pervasive feature of our
modern existence: few of us are born, grow up, study, work, marry, and die in the same town or city, and
travel provides the metaphors by which we make sense of our jumbled lives (how many of you have
thought of your degree course as a “journey”?). Yet travel is not a new human experience. Mobility – in
the varied shapes of nomads, migrants, refugees, pilgrims, explorers, members of the armed forces,
diplomats, commuters, tourists, and others – has been the norm for millennia, while travel has defined
and transformed individuals, cultures, and economies to an incalculable extent. Writing and travelling
have always been closely connected, all the way from Homer’s Odyssey to today’s industrial production
of travel journalism. On this module you will have the opportunity to study some of the diverse forms of
travel experience and travel literature from the modern era, loosely defined. These might include
accounts of the Grand Tour in the early days of tourism, journeys undertaken for purposes of scientific
exploration or colonial expansion, narratives of voluntary or involuntary migration, as well as some of the
most innovative and compelling examples of the travel genre from recent times. The module will be
organised around certain key themes expressive of the historical varieties of travel experience:
Exploration, Emigration, Excursion, Empire, Exile. Individual seminar groups will select texts and readings
under each heading by agreement with their tutor, based on a core anthology, digital materials, and a
limited number of individual book purchases.
Assessment
Assessment will comprise a portfolio of written pieces – which might include essays, book reviews,
personal travelogues, creative interventions – tailored to the interests of the individual student. This is a
module for students interested in going places.
UPGPPD-30-3 English Independent Project
Module leader: Dr Sarah Robertson
Undertaking a project at Level 3 is an important step in your final development as an undergraduate
student. This module allows you to choose from a variety of options: Dissertation; Research-Based
Creative Writing; Module Design; Criticism and Review, Editing and Anthologising or English in
the Workplace.
The Dissertation allows you to investigate a topic of your choice. You will develop your own title and
research questions as you create a sustained and critically rigorous piece of work.
The Research-based Creative Writing option allows you to develop creatively as well as critically. From
selecting a genre to reflecting on the writing process, you will be developing and refining key skills.
Module Design: By now, you have successfully completed a number of undergraduate modules. This
option allows you to devise your own module and to challenge your critical and decision making skills.
Those of you considering a career in teaching may find this option of particular interest.
Criticism and Review: Throughout the degree you have encountered literary criticism and reviews. This
is your opportunity to review a body of writing of your choice, and to critically assess the reviewing
process.
Editing and Anthologising: Anthologies have played a crucial role in your reading throughout your
degree. Here you get the opportunity to create your own anthology based around a topic/genre of your
choice.
English in the Workplace: This option allows you the opportunity to reflect and write about relevant work
experience that you have undertaken. This reflection on how English helped you in the workplace and
how the workplace has helped you in the degree is one part of this option. The main element of the option
will allow you to choose and work on one of the other options above, one that perhaps most fully links to
your work placement.
Each option tests a range of key skills including: your ability to undertake research, to critical engage with
primary and secondary material, to sustain an extended argument and to think and work independently.
The options allow you to fully explore a topic of your choice in consultation with a Project Tutor, and the
module will include seminars and one-to-one tutorials.
Assessment
Project Proposal; English Independent Option