English and American Literature

To prepare students to undertake and communicate advanced literary research, we will practice using core methodological approaches. Students will explore current theoretical debates that place literary studies in dialogue with exciting interdisciplinary fields, from disability studies and the health humanities to animal studies and the environmental humanities. We will engage with a range of these theoretical interventions in the cultural and political context of the twenty-first century and use them to think about close reading of literary texts. At the same time, students will take part in workshops designed to provide guidance with practical research activities, such as accessing physical and digital archives or presenting research to academic and public audiences. Students will gain an understanding of the value of theoretical, archival, and literary research and the core skills needed to successfully complete the MA programme and beyond.

We will explore the interrelations and negotiations that take place between verbal and visual culture, in theory, literature, visual art, and film, covering a wide range of theorists, novelists, artists, and filmmakers. You will consider diverse theoretical approaches and their recent turns, including Feminism, Marxism, phenomenology, postcolonial theory, animal theory, illness studies, queer theory, and posthumanism, asking what were the moments that generated certain theoretical turns, and examining how theories intersect with verbal and visual culture. We will discuss social, cultural, and national contexts contributing to debates concerning aesthetics and literary history and explore how and where disciplines meet ideologically. The module is intended to be interdisciplinary and considers some or all of the following topics: philosophies of history; perception and embodiment; experience and expression; the politics of racial, differential, and queer space; looking as a political act; the ethics of storytelling; contemporary artists’ books; and the ecological dimensions of colonialism.

How did eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers imagine and represent the self? What models and metaphors of subjectivity have the literatures of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Victorian age bequeathed to us? This module enables you to explore the construction and representation of the self in a range of literary writings from Britain, Ireland, and the British Empire. We will think critically about how changes in the literary marketplace and society more broadly shaped how writers thought about their identities in relation to questions of gender, race, sexuality, and class across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We will examine a variety of literary forms, including epistolary fiction, diaries, autobiographies, short fiction, poetry, and novels, in order to consider the relationship between literary innovation and changing understandings of subjectivity.

We will engage with contemporary debates about the legacies of European colonialism in a variety of literary and non-literary texts from across the globe. We will examine how cultural forms offer a radical resistance to colonial worldviews that are still very much prevalent today, and expand your expertise about the relationship between politics, culture, and imperialism. You will study how late twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels, poetry, and films open up debate about issues relating to globalisation, migration and national belonging, the climate crisis, criminalisation, and class-related exclusion. Connecting each week will be an analysis of writing from formerly colonised and settler colonial regions since the era of decolonisation that requires an attentive and critical engagement with shifting geopolitical world orders. You will also explore the distinctiveness of theoretical and critical categories such as postcolonialism, Indigeneity, World literature, and global literature.

What does modernist literature look like in a global context? Informed by postcolonial, transnational and planetary approaches, we explore the idea of modernism as a network of artistic, cultural and intellectual exchange that crosses geographical and temporal boundaries. Students will learn about writing from all corners of the world that is both experimental in style and radical in content. Decentring and decolonising the canon of modernism so that it attends to texts from the Americas to Australasia, Africa to Asia, the module will also shed light on European modernism’s fraught relationship to Empire and histories of imperialism. A range of forms will be examined, including poetry, novels, short stories and essays, as well as the aesthetic, cultural and political contexts in which multiple modernisms emerged and grew in influence. In doing so, students will be introduced to the key critical debates on global modernisms, featuring discussion of topics as diverse as race, gender, class and the environment.

How does literature allow us to place a critical focus upon marginalised and under-represented voices from a range of periods and geographies? We will explore considers the ways through which literary adaptations speak to the questions of agency on which activism and rights depend. Does literature have the capacity to effect change in the political sphere?  How do literary and artistic engagements with rights in different spheres shape our understanding of historical and ongoing injustices and inequities? How do writers of colour ‘write back’ into canonical texts via adaptation, and why? These questions frame the enquiry into a body of literature that will focus on a combination of themes such as sovereignty, land/environment, racial politics, movement/mobility, property, civil rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and more (topics will vary from year to year). Students will emerge with an advanced understanding of how literature, adaptation and a focus on marginalised voices can deepen our engagement with politics both in the past and present, and become a catalyst for change and how contemporary political formations can be re-imagined.

What is distinctive about literature in the United States after 1945? How did literary texts articulate and shape the concerns of the Cold War? You will survey a range of key literary texts in their intellectual, historical and social contexts to provide a systematic understanding of the key issues in post-1945 American literature. You will study novels, poems, movies and polemical essays alongside influential interventions by US intellectuals in sociology, foreign policy and literary criticism. Topics will include the rise of anti-Communism in the Red Scare, consumer culture and shifting dynamics of class, gender and race after World War Two. You will read literature addressing the social upheavals of “the Sixties,” the sexual revolution, US imperialism and Cold War paranoia. Emphasis will be placed on historicist modes of reading and understanding literature and culture. By the end of the module, you will have developed an advanced understanding of the trajectory of American literature and culture in the period, the range of social questions it engaged and the spectrum of literary forms it employed.

Are novelists sociologists? Can a novel tell the truth about social reality? This module explores the history and theory of the English novel from the eighteenth century to the present. It focusses on what has been variously described as the ‘social novel’, the ‘condition-of-England’ or ‘state-of-the-nation’ novel: novels which attempt to provide a panorama of English society in the present or recent past. Such novels are often big, sprawling affairs which ‘aspire to portray a social whole’, in the words of the critic György Lukács. Yet they can also be more modest in scope and offer a ‘miniature delicacy in the painting’, as Charlotte Brontë wrote of Jane Austen. Reading major novels alongside a selection of literary theory, we will trace how writers have used the form to hold a mirror up to social reality and reckon with the upheavals of modernity. In the first half of the module, we will consider how the English social novel evolved from kindred genres (the picaresque novel and the comedy of manners) and examine some of the traditional themes of the form (marriage, money, social status). In the second half, we will consider the persistence of the social novel in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries and explore how the form adapted to accommodate new protagonists, new themes, and alternative visions of England and Englishness.