English Literature

This module is organised around key frameworks for the understanding of human and cultural identity; likely to include gender, sexuality, nationality, ethnicity, subculture and social class. The exploration of such frameworks is supported by theoretical materials designed to introduce students to key literary and cultural concepts (such as ideology, patriarchy, heteronormativity, performativity, otherness, diaspora, and hybridity). Literary texts will be drawn from a variety of genres, periods, and cultures, and students will be required to identify, and reflect upon, the correlations between identity and its literary and/or aesthetic expression. Through both seminar discussion and the assignment tasks, students will be encouraged to adopt a pluralistic and comparative approach to the topic, crossing textual and discipline boundaries in their exploration of the interlaced operations of cultural classification and individual self-definition.

This module is organised around key frameworks for the understanding of human and cultural identity; likely to include gender, sexuality, nationality, ethnicity, subculture and social class. The exploration of such frameworks is supported by theoretical materials designed to introduce students to key literary and cultural concepts (such as ideology, patriarchy, heteronormativity, performativity, otherness, diaspora, and hybridity). Literary texts will be drawn from a variety of genres, periods, and cultures, and students will be required to identify, and reflect upon, the correlations between identity and its literary and/or aesthetic expression. Through both seminar discussion and the assignment tasks, students will be encouraged to adopt a pluralistic and comparative approach to the topic, crossing textual and discipline boundaries in their exploration of the interlaced operations of cultural classification and individual self-definition.

This module offers you the opportunity to study popular literature as a specific field of literary and cultural production. It examines key concepts and theoretical issues relating to the popular, including its definition and relationship to genre writing, and the significance of production and distribution practices. The module addresses a sample of illustrative texts drawn from popular literary genres such as action-adventure, travel and life writing, romance, crime, sensation and historical fiction, fantasy, horror, and fan fiction. In addition to analysing the distinctive features of selected popular genres, you will examine the social and cultural contexts informing illustrative texts and evaluate their connections to, and articulations of, relevant cultural issues and debates.

This module examines literature written for children and young adults. It engages you with its history and recent successes and transformations and explores its diverse range of genres, such as fairy tales, fables, picture books, poetry, fantasy, and non-fiction. It provides knowledge and understanding of cultural and social contexts, origins of literary form as well as constructions and representations of childhood and youth. 

Teaching will pay particular attention to themes, such as suitability and creativity, gender and sexuality, childhood and adolescence, as well as a range of different theoretical approaches that deepens the study of literature written for children and young adults and about childhood and youth.

In recent years, women’s writing has emerged as a major influence on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature. This module examines the impact of women in literature through a variety of literary forms and transnational parallels and contrasts. It highlights identity politics and the ways in which women have fought to change discriminations based on race, gender, class, age, and sexuality. By bringing together several themes other modules have introduced, this module strengthens your confidence in undertaking independent research. It equips you with increased research skills and resourcefulness in choosing their areas of specialist literary knowledge by exploring women’s writing by weaving a thread of critical enquiry determined by the significance of women’s contributions to literature. In doing so, it follows a chronologic trajectory, which acknowledges the origins of feminism, and an international perspective that encompasses a variety of diverse authors. It tests your knowledge through coursework that facilitates students’ choice and independent research skills.

This module offers a survey of the development of western drama from the late 19th century to the present day. You will be introduced to dramatists such as Ibsen, Brecht, Williams and Beckett, alongside key developments and debates in dramaturgical theory and practice. You will be required to think comparatively about theatrical style and ideological expression, relating approaches such as realism, expressionism and absurdism to thematic structures of cultural dissidence, moral subversion and political engagement. Individual plays will be considered as theatrical events as well as written texts so attention will also be paid to the specific theatrical and institutional contexts of individual works, and you will be examine visual and video materials relating to staged performances. Specialist workshop sessions will be scheduled to introduce and enhance the digital literacies required for the practical assessment.

This module examines the emerging ‘super-genre’ of speculative fiction: a classification that encompasses a range of sub-genres that employ speculative non-realist devices to explore and express contemporary fears and cultural anxieties. It explores the inherently metaphoric nature of the works, foregrounding their capacity to promote political critique and ethical reflection through the imaginative construction of alternative pasts, presents and futures. The illustrative reading will embrace the fluidity and hybridity of the genre by drawing examples from a diverse range of short stories and novels tat display the characteristics of sub-genres such as utopian fiction, dystopian fiction, science-fiction, post-apocalytic projection, the fantastic and alternative history fiction. Individual writers may include, for example, H.G.Wells, Aldous Huxley, Philip K. Dick, Marge Piercy, Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood and Emily St. John Mandel. Through a comparative examination of common characteristics and conceptual frames, you will be encouraged to move beyond the limitations of traditional classification and recognise the increasing sophistication of non-mimetic genres as a literary form.

This module allows you to develop writing skills in a number of genres and understand and apply a range of techniques required for diverse crafts of writing. It explores several genres and styles and the teaching considers planning and execution, audience and the opportunities literature presents for creative interventions in contemporary or historical issues or debates. The module encourages you to consider the wider social, cultural and thetical implications of literary praxis, and to assume agency through your creative contributions to important cultural conversations. 

This module provides you with opportunities to apply subject-specific and skills and knowledge, being developed throughout the programme, in a transferable manner. To facilitate this, you will develop an enhanced awareness of the transferability of those skills through project-based learning. Suggested projects could take the form of a publication project (print or web), targeted writing project (such as brochure, newsletter or resource pack), or a project relating to a particular industry (such as arts, heritage, education, journalism, etc.), although this is not proscriptive. Guidance will be provided on identifying a suitable project, research methodology, writing to a specific brief, and writing reflectively. You could choose to develop a project in partnership with a local organisation: the English department has a track record of working with community partners, recent examples of which Lincoln Book Festival, a local HR company, and The Lincoln Teenage Market.

This module embeds your understanding of your transferable communication skills (oral, written, and digital) and information literacies in specific, employability contexts. It will, furthermore, allow you to reflect on the reciprocity of creative and entrepreneurial skills. The module is project-based, in that you identify and develop your own project in which to apply your skills and may use it to explore a specific professional area. It encourages you to explore and reflect the relationship between their academic skills and employability.

Britain’s literature is as diverse as its people, shaped by centuries of empire, migration and resistance. This module dives into the writers and works that have reshaped British identity, exploring how literature reflects shifting cultural and political landscapes. It offers a selective survey of multicultural British literature considered in the context of empire and its demise, the migration of people to Britain from the colonised and formerly colonised world, the racist nationalism of the decades following WWII, and the more contemporary phenomena of asylum-seeking and terror. 

We will consider in detail the stylistic and formal properties of a diverse range of texts, from realist novels to performance poetry and visual media. We’ll be asking: How does history shape identity? How have writers responded to racism and nationalism, and staked their claim to belong? What does it mean to write about home when home is complex, contested or far away? Following a broad timeline, we’ll explore themes like migration, asylum-seeking and global connections. 

Along the way, we’ll engage with key ideas from postcolonial, feminist and cultural theory to deepen our understanding of as well as connecting to wider artistic and political debates. Ultimately, this module is about the voices that challenge, inspire and re-write Britain’s story.

This module requires you to devise and undertake a dissertation on a subject of interest and to prepare, in written form, a substantial literary critical essay, including a proposal and reference list. It draws on research skills imparted on earlier, research-led modules, but requires you to impart these in a more independent and critically advanced manner. This module will deepen and refine your knowledge of your chosen specialist area and offers insights into the construction of longer pieces of analytical written work and the ways in which arguments are honed across them. The teaching pays particular attention to supporting you in your research and writing processes. This support includes taught whole-group sessions at the beginning, midpoint and end of the module, feedback sessions, and tutorial provision delivered by individual tutors.

This module promotes detailed knowledge of the major developments in English Literature occurring during the Romantic period. With its emphasis on the cultural contexts of literary, poetic and dramatic language this module enables you to discuss critically changing modes of expression in relation to political, philosophical, aesthetic and social contexts. It includes some consideration of visual art and print culture, building upon your exposure to other instances of this on other period or genre modules. The teaching pays particular attention to primary resources in terms of social, cultural and literary contexts, by examining texts written in response to idea championed by revolutionaries, reformers and Enlightenment thinkers. In view of the final assessment the module facilitates the building of research context and skills.

This module explores a range of literary and other texts associated with the cultural and artistic developments of Modernism during the early decades of the twentieth-century. It will introduce you to the diverse strands of Modernism, as exemplified by writers such as Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Ernst Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, Katherine Mansfield, Jean Rhys, and William Faulkner. In addition, it will contextualise these literary achievements amidst the cultural and historical contexts of modernity, examining areas such as colonialism, the artistic avant-garde, modern alienation & the metropolis, gender and sexuality, and the impact of the First World War. Workshops and seminars will pay particular attention to the relationship between cultural transition and aesthetic innovation, further enhancing your close reading skills and historicist methodologies. There will be specific sessions dedicated to the introduction and enhancement of digital literacies to help you prepare for the hypertext assessment.

At a time of climate emergency, this module asks how literature reimagines the environment and our relationship to it. You will begin by studying literatures produced in the early stages of the industrial revolution in order to understand some of the causes of our current environmental crisis, including fossil fuel production, major transport networks and other infrastructures, urbanisation, and global food supply chains. Literature not only represents these developments, but also imaginatively responds to the environmental changes that result from them. Poetry and fiction, in particular, call attention to alternative ways of conceiving of and responding to our surroundings, from evoking nostalgia for pastoral lands unaffected by industry to presenting utopian visions of environments for the future. This module will develop your understanding of the range of literary forms that imaginatively respond to environmental change. You will examine elegies that express despair at environmental change, creative essay prose that fosters environmentalist action, and speculative fiction that promotes ecological utopias. Teaching will focus on enhancing knowledge and understanding of key literary texts and environmental debates and issues from the eighteenth century until today. The assignment will ask you to develop critical arguments that bring your understanding of environmental literatures to bear on pressing ecological and environmental questions in the environmental humanities today.

This module offers a final opportunity for you to extend your critical engagement with modern writing through an examination of some of the most significant writers, movements, and innovations in literature since the end of the second world war. Through a variety of genres and literary forms, the module will examine divergent representations and responses to this unsettling period, from disillusioned expressions of national or political decline to progressive visions of renewal through cultural hybridity and reinvention. Central strands of investigation will likely include: challenges to realism and aesthetic experimentation; the rise of apocalyptic imaginaries and the arrival of the Anthropocene; multiculturalism and globalisation; and the deconstruction of self and subjectivity. Lectures and seminars will test and enhance the literary-critical skills acquired in your first and second through an engagement with relatively complex literary works, contexts and theoretical frameworks, paying particular attention to the development of independent critical argument in advance of the final assessment. The inclusion of different national literatures within the module acknowledges the significant impact of international exchanges during the period as well as providing a means of investigating the increasingly global contexts and concerns of late 20^th and 21^st century literature.

This module studies literature from the English medieval period, covering a range of genres and authors. In addition to analysing texts in their original languages and contexts, you are encouraged to recognise their impact and influence on contemporary literature and media. You will also consider the practical relevance of texts by exploring manuscripts and the ‘margins’ of medieval literature. The module is designed to develop your knowledge of pre-Early Modern literature obtained at previous levels. Teaching pays special attention to the particular requirements of studying medieval literature. You are provided with the skills necessary to reading primary sources in their original languages. The practical form of assessment allows you to explore an area of personal interest from the module while developing their research, oral, and presentation skills.