English Literature (Joint Honours) BA (Hons) Year two modules

The English Literature (Joint Honours) BA (Hons) modules listed below are just to give you a flavour of what might be available in your second year and are subject to change.

Year two (Level 5)

The second year broadens your understanding of the development of English literature through time, with options to extend your study of literary adaptations or immerse yourself in literary theory. You will study ‘Exploration and Innovation’ and select three further options from the list below:


Core modules:

Exploration and Innovation: 14th to 18th Century Literature 

This module looks at the birth of English literature, offering an introduction to literature written between the medieval era and the mid-eighteenth century in England and Europe. It includes examples of poetry, drama and prose organised around key themes such as power, faith, love and sexuality.


Optional modules:

Text Technologies 

This module draws on the expertise of DMU’s Centre for Textual Studies to expand your understanding of the history of textual production from manuscript, to print, to digital text. You will make and write with a quill pen, print a poem using moveable type and a hand-operated printing press, and learn to create a scholarly digital text online.  

Ways of Reading 

This module questions the value of literature to society and equips you with a critical ‘toolkit’ through study of the influential theoretical approaches that have shaped the past and present of literary studies, such as post-structuralism, feminism and Marxism. 

Screen and Literary Adaptations of the Classics 

This module explores what happens to classic English literature when it is adapted into other media, including film, television and new literary novels. You will explore the adaptation of iconic literary texts such as William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. 

Sex and Death in Romantic Writing, 1780-1830 

We shall examine manuscripts and different editions in order to study how texts were revised during a period of sexual, political and social revolution that was also a period of death and disease produced by colonial and European war. Subjects for discussion will include: sexual taboos - opium - slavery - war - genius -exploration; interest in the supernatural and Gothic; imaging the afterlife; the quest for identity. Writers studied may include Coleridge, Southey, Blake, Mary Robinson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth and DeQuincey, Clare, Mary Shelley, Stedman. 

Victorian Literature 

This module examines the literature and culture of the Victorian period (defined for this purpose as 1830-1900). Reflecting a period of rapid and sometimes disorientating social and cultural transformation, Victorian literature is particularly concerned with the writer’s responsibilities towards society, and addresses questions of class, gender, sexuality and identity. Writers to be studied on the course will include Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Anne Bronte, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson and Oscar Wilde. 

Twentieth Century Literature 

How did literature in English evolve during the twentieth century? How did it respond to major historical events and social and cultural changes such as World War I and II, the decline of the British Empire, and shifting gender, class and race relations? This term-long module offers students the opportunity to examine the diverse and experimental twentieth-century literature of writers such as E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Poets of World War I and II, Samuel Beckett, Kurt Vonnegut, Derek Walcott, Louise Bennett, Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, or Margaret Atwood. 

Millennial World Fiction

Following a broadly chronological structure, this module covers a diverse range of twenty-first-century fiction from several continents. This enables an international, contemporary perspective on a range of concepts, including memory, nationality, class, ethnicity, and gender, made cohesive by the novels’ common interest in identity. While the texts will be updated regularly, genres covered may include dystopian science fiction, the coming-of-age novel, historical fiction and/or the counterfactual. Issues addressed may include Americanisation, migration, the human/post-human and social justice. 

Writing Place 

This module will enable students to explore, through creative practice, the role place has as a major stimulant in writing. Students will write fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction in a variety of forms in order to explore the creative resources offered by local history, regional myths, environmental issues and hidden histories. There will be a keen focus upon ‘world building’, and emphasis upon the importance of research to writers. 

English Language in UK Schools 

An introduction to the issues and debates surrounding English Language as a subject in the UK system, of particular interest to those considering a career in teaching. 

Introducing English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) 

This module provides an overview of both the teaching of English to speakers of other languages and also how English is taught in UK schools.

Note: All modules are subject to change in order to keep content current.

  

English workshop