LT145
Creative Writing: Tradition and Innovation
Rationale
To expand current first year provision on the BA Creative Writing so as to provide a
more thorough grounding in creative practice, while encouraging students to engage
creatively with primary texts from other first year literature courses, especially
LT111.
Syllabus
This course will explore creative writing practice in seminars, workshops, and writing
exercises, using literary traditions as a springboard for writing. Texts to be explored
will in part be drawn from LT111, Introduction to Literature, but will also include
additional material, such as ballads and stories, sonnets and sestinas, and alliterative
verse. The aim is to work synergistically with LT111, exploring seminal literary
themes and genres such as epic and literary underworlds to reveal and re-examine
some of the roots of literature, and how these can inform contemporary practice.
Translations and updatings of older material will be explored, as well as works that
explore dialogic approaches to writing, such as the mock epic. Typical writing
exercises will engage with forms and tradition and will explore ways of adapting
traditional approaches to a contemporary audience.
Topics will vary from year to year but would be drawn from: theories and methods of
translation and adaptation; Ovid and reworkings of Ovid; fairytales and contemporary
revisionings; Homer and Joyce; Genesis and creation myths; versions of Utopia and
Dystopia; writing and the environment ( Gilgamesh and flood stories); Dante and
imaginings of Hell; hero and antihero in the Epic tradition; tragedy and tragic
structures; comedic transgressions; Dante, Petrarch and poetic form; ballads and
alliterative verse; folksong from Shakespeare to the present.
Assessment
Five thousand word portfolio of developed class exercises, to cover at least two, and
no more than three, topics, with a critical commentary reflecting on the writing
process, including development and revision, and the relationship between the
creative writing and the literary tradition.
Indicative Bibliography
Aeschylus, The Oresteia, trans. Tony Harrison (London: Rex Collings, 1981)
Apuleius, The Golden Ass, trans. Robert Graves (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950)
Aristophanes, The Birds, trans. David Barratt (London: Penguin, 2003).
Aristotle, Poetics. Available on-line.
Auden, WH, and Garrett, John. The Poet’s Tongue (London: Bell, 1935).
The Bible (King James version).
Briggs, Katharine M. A Dictionary of British Folk Tales (London: Routledge, 1970).
Carey, John. The Faber Book of Utopias (London: Faber, 1999).
Crossley-Holland, Kevin. The Anglo-Saxon World (Oxford: University Press, 1982).
Dante, La Vita Nuova, trans. Barbara Reynolds (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969); The
Divine Comedy, trans. Rev. Carey (Ware: Wordsworth, 2001).
The Epic of Gilgamesh, trans. N.K. Sandars (London: Penguin, 1973)
Euripides. The Bacchae, trans. Philip Vellacott (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954).
Faulkner, William. ‘A Rose for Emily’. Available on-line.
Fo, Dario. The Accidental Death of an Anarchist, trans. Joseph Farrell (London:
Methuen, 2003).
Gawain poet. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, ed.
Cawley, Anderson (London: Everyman, 1976).
Genesis, in The Bible (King James version).
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. Available on-line.
Grant, Michael. Myths of the Greeks and Romans (London: Phoenix, 2001).
Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Available on-line.
Heaney, Seamus and Hughes, Ted, eds. The Rattle Bag (London: Faber, 1982).
Homer, The Odyssey. Trans. Richard Lattimore. 1965; (New York: Harper Collins,
1991).
Horace, Poems, Ars Poetica. Available on-line.
Jacobs, Joseph. English Fairy Tales. Available on-line.
Joyce, James. Ulysses, 1922 (Oxford: University Press, 1993).
Logue, Christopher. War Music, translations of The Illiad (Harmondsworth: Penguin
1984).
McCullers, Carson. The Ballad of the Sad Café (London: Penguin, 1999).
Milton, John. Paradise Lost; Sonnets. Available on-line.
Molière, Tartuffe [1664], trans. Richard Wilbur (New York: Harcourt, 1968)
Oliver, Douglas. ‘The Infant and the Pearl’, in Three Variations on the Theme of
Harm (London: Paladin, 1990).
Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A.D. Melville. (Oxford: University Press, 1992).
The Oxford Book of Ballads (Oxford: University Press, 1989).
Penguin Book of English Folksongs (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959).
Petrarch’s Lyric Poems (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976).
Pope, Alexander. The Rape of the Lock. Available on-line.
Self, Will The Book of Dave (London: Vintage, 2005).
Shakespeare, Hamlet; A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Sonnets; songs.
Sophocles. The Theban Plays, trans. EF Watling (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1947)
Steiner, George, ed. Homer in English (London: Penguin, 1996).
Stoker, Bram. Dracula, ed. By AN Wilson (Oxford: OUP, 1984).
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. Available on-line.
Tartt, Donna. The Secret History (London: Penguin, 1993).
Tatar, Maria. The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales (London: Norton, 2003).
Terry, Philip, ed. Ovid Metamorphosed (London: Vintage, 2001)
Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. C. Day Lewis (Oxford: University Press, 1986).
Walcott, Derek. The Odyssey: A Stage Version (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux,
1993).
Wordsworth, Sonnets. Available on-line.
Young, Dudley. Origins of the Sacred (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1991).