BA (Hons) English and Creative Writing with Foundation Year Bachelor's degree at Keele University

How do you craft a compelling university essay, analyse a literary text, and put criticism to use? How can you interpret a work within its historical context, or apply literary theory to it? Through studying a wide range of texts, you'll develop essential skills for academic reading and writing. This module will enhance your appreciation of literature and prepare you for advanced study throughout your degree. Indicative texts might include: novels such as Wuthering Heights, Renaissance tragedy,

This module prepares you for studying creative writing at university, introducing you to all the 'writing selves' needed when seeking publication and building an authorial profile. You will explore how self-narratives, new journalism, guerrilla-writing, and broadcasting platforms foster ways to extend and complement your practice outside traditional routes; how to deliver manuscripts to publishers, agents, and competitions, including how to respond to commissions via authentic briefs. You will a

This module introduces you to the many ways that your literary knowledge and communication skills will be useful in future employment. Studying a range of poems, speeches, and plays, you will learn how to employ effective rhetorical strategies to communicate professionally with different audiences, enabling you to give speeches, design lesson plans or exhibitions, or run social media campaigns. The module includes masterclasses from professionals working in, for example, museums, theatres, and s

The module starts at a surprise location. You receive a blank book and start to write. It's a journal: you submit it later, alongside your creative or critical piece. Back in Keele you look at children's writing from different periods and cultures. You consider imagination and myth, the politics of representation, the construction and subversion of gender roles. You think about voice and vision. Your expressive skills flower as you explore storytelling techniques and the transformative power of

This module introduces you to key characteristics of fiction. You will gain an understanding of how these can be employed to explore the meaning of a text. Engaging with fiction by writers from all over the world, you will learn how to analyse core elements such as narrative voice, structure and the evocation of place, and develop your own ability to write short, creative prose pieces. Guided by Keele's award-winning novelists, you will attain a solid foundation for writing longer prose pieces i

This module introduces you to the characteristics and structure of poems, through an examination of 5 key 'modes' of poetry, looking closely at how these achieve their ends. You will learn how to identify these characteristics and structural elements through lecture input, discussion and consideration of example poems by a range of authors. You will also learn how to deploy this understanding into the writing of your own poetry, and share/discuss your own creative work with your fellow writers.

This module will introduce you to the key dramatic principles required to write scripts for stage and screen. Drawing on texts from contemporary theatre, film and television, you will learn a series of fundamental skills, developing your understanding of character, dialogue, and structure. You will engage in a combination of lectures, seminar groups, and practical writing workshops, and guided by feedback from peers and tutors alike, you will work towards writing your own original script.

What makes a work of literature 'classic'? What do we mean when we call something an example of 'popular culture'? This module invites you to compare 'classic' texts with adaptations that share their themes or challenge their values. You'll learn new ways to think about why some texts are called 'classics' and some are not, and enrich your understanding of the way that texts interact with one another across genres. Indicative texts might include Hamlet, The Great Gatsby, The Color Purple.

Gothic Nightmares introduces you to the representation of spooks, automatons, monsters and supernatural horrors in literature, film, and TV from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Each week you will read a short story and a critical text, and watch an example of the gothic genre from film or TV. Why has the gothic persisted as it has? Why do we need (or want) to be scared? What are we afraid of anyway?

This module will develop and deepen your understanding of how narrative forms, genres and modes are used in creative writing. It introduces you to forms of creative prose besides fiction. It asks questions about how genre writing and creative nonfiction are formed, how writers read other literary texts – not as critics, and not necessarily as fans, but as practitioners – and aims to equip your own texts with the structures and techniques which are necessary to develop your own writing.

This module expands your understanding of literature's relation to history. You will study novels, poems, and plays from the Victorian period to the present, relating them to social, political and cultural contexts including class, race, gender and sexuality. You will be exposed to a range of literary styles and genres including realism, modernism, postmodernism and the postcolonial, extending your knowledge of different types of literature in preparation for the final year of your degree.

This module broadens your knowledge of the variety of career pathways open to you, enabling you to identify, analyse, and showcase your degree skills and experiences effectively. Through completing and reflecting on problem-based tasks relating to different sectors, such as telling the story of a business, or writing a funding proposal to support a literary festival, you will build your creative and collaborative skills and learn how to articulate them in ways that will be attractive to employer

This module offers you the chance to contribute to the world outside the University through completing a work placement, a project for a client (or a series of projects for different clients), or working as a team to deliver a successful festival or event. You will be trained to showcase your creative and collaborative skills and abilities effectively before applying for an opportunity advertised through the module (or you can source your own, subject to it meeting the module's requirements).

The 1500s to the 1830s was a period of rapid historical change, including shifts in cultural norms, new debates about gender, class, empire, and race, and the questioning of traditional religious beliefs. You will explore how English poetry, drama, and fiction responded to these transformations, and develop your understanding of how texts relate to their wider social and cultural contexts. You will acquire the advanced critical skills you will need to draw on in the final year of your degree.

This module builds on L4 introductions to cultural platforms/industries and to adaptation/script-writing, enabling a focused study of how the New Vic Theatre