BA (Hons) English Literature and Creative Writing Bachelor's degree at Lancaster University

Tracing the evolution of literature over time and in time, you will engage with an array of literary genres including plays, films, short stories, novels, poetry, essays and the graphic novel. You will encounter a wide range of literature - from the Middle Ages to the 21st Century, moving from Chaucer, through Shakespeare and Milton, to Virginia Woolf. You’ll also study contemporary writers such as Alison Bechdel and Paul Muldoon, and many others.

This is a multi-genre workshop that introduces you to the art of creative writing at university level. It is taught through a mix of lectures and tutor-led workshops with the focus ultimately on the development of your own portfolio. This portfolio could take any form and be devoted to any genre (poetry, prose, drama, screenplay etc). You’ll be encouraged to experiment with various forms and genres, to explore new approaches in drafting and editing your own work, and to practise the gentle art of responding to the work of fellow students. The module will introduce you to a range of exciting texts and helpful terminology, and offer insight from published authors. It will allow you to practise

Look beyond the boundaries of traditional courses in English Literature and explore a wide and exciting range of literatures in English and translation from antiquity to the present day. Discover texts that have influenced the development of literary English, from the Bible and classical figures such as Ovid and Homer, through Medieval and Early Modern authors such as Dante and Rabelais to contemporary world authors in translation such as Kafka and Rushdie.

Develop your critical reading skills, become a more reflective writer and work on being an effective communicator. We'll journey through genres (such as fantasy, tragedy and life writing), explore the social, cultural, aesthetic, political and economic importance of each one, and discuss the possibilities offered by different approaches. The focus here is on reflective work, while you will produce more creative work in your other modules. You will build your confidence and critical vocabulary, as you experiment with a range of genres, forms and methodologies.

This module explores the role of the arts in building community, identity and confidence. You will engage with a variety of different art forms (such as painting, theatre, fiction, designed artefacts and film) and develop your own voice via collaborative projects such as a podcasts, video essay or presentation. You will also engage in individual critical reflection for example via a blog, journal or research project. This module fosters co-operation, intellectual experimentation and self-assurance.

Britain is one of the most successful and influential film industries in world cinema. In this module you will explore the key films, filmmakers and traditions that have shaped British cinema over the past century. Through a study of major genres, styles, filmmakers and themes, you will consider how British cinema has evolved and reflect on historical cinema-going habits. Alongside this historical overview, you will engage with critical debates. You’ll examine the relationship between national identity and cinema, the role of realism and recurring preoccupations with emotional repression, race, gender and social class. You will also explore how British cinema captures and shapes ideas of ‘’B

What does it mean to study media today? In this module, you’ll be introduced to major debates, theories and thinkers in studying media and culture. You will encounter a diverse range of material from different media, including: television, film, news, advertisements, social media, video games and more. You will explore the intersections between our cultural environment and our identities, aspirations, beliefs and value systems, to develop essential skills in critical thinking and analysis.

In order to ask questions about the way language works in society, how it connects with the mind/brain or how it is acquired by computers, you first need to know something about the foundational elements of language. This module will introduce you to the building blocks of human language. You will learn about sounds in language, how they are pronounced and how they can be combined to form words. We will teach you about the way words themselves are structured. You’ll also explore how language puts words together to build sentences of different types and how sentences express meaning, in isolation and in context. By the end of the module, you will be familiar with the essentials of phonetics,

Explore literary criticism as it is now and what it may yet become. You will have the opportunity to consider a whole range of major theoretical and philosophical concepts, such as: The body Race Gender Violence Ecology God Time Death War Self The animal You will study a range of fascinating modern thinkers, ranging from Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, through to more recent figures such as Simone Weil, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Fred Moten, Cornel West and Sara Ahmed.

On this module you will expand your professional skills. Through iterative activities, conducted with the support of both tutor and peers, you will advance a piece of writing through sequential editing stages. You'll develop practical and emotional strategies for managing revision. There will be a strong emphasis on the development of collaborative and project management skills. The work will be underpinned and contextualized by both theoretical discussions of the art of writing and by exploring examples from the publishing industry.

Develop key techniques for writing fiction and hone the skills you need to write short stories and/or novels. Through workshops, discussions, set reading from a range of contemporary writers and generative writing prompts, you’ll develop confidence in creating character, worldbuilding, establishing narrative voice, experimenting with point of view and constructing engaging structures and plot. You will draw on a range of techniques according to your own interests. In your reflective essay you will consider the various ways short fiction and the novel uniquely deploy these techniques.

Reflect on what it means to do criticism in a post-theoretical age. This module asks what happens to literary interpretation after all its many theoretical upheavals – from Marxism and feminism to postcolonialism and queer theory. Is it time to get back to the close reading of literature? Is there still room for pleasure, appreciation and creativity in the practice of criticism? We might question whether literature, in the traditional sense, even exists anymore. You will pose these questions in relation to a range of traditional and non-traditional texts.

Explore a wide range of literature and drama from the medieval and early modern periods. The module situates medieval and early modern literature in its relevant historical and cultural contexts. You will develop skills in the close reading of medieval and early modern texts. Authors studied may include Chaucer, the Gawain poet, Margery Kempe, Mary Wroth, Sir Philip Sidney and Christopher Marlowe.

The years of Queen Victoria’s reign (1837-1901) saw great social, political and cultural transformation. Changing social conditions, extraordinary scientific breakthroughs and the emergence of new technologies all altered the ways in which Victorians thought about themselves and their environment. The literature of the period responded resourcefully to the turbulent circumstances from which it emerged. In this module, you will examine a wide range of Victorian writing, including novels, short fiction, poetry, drama and non-fictional prose and will explore and interrogate all the complexities of the Victorian age.

What we call ‘American Literature’ and how we define America and ‘the American experience’ depends on who is writing and to whom. In this module you will encounter many different voices, many conflicting and contrasting views, a diversity of complex experience and a great range of writing in form and style. You will explore such questions as: What role do different literary forms play in narrating the self? How does American writing seek to establish a new way of looking at the world? And how and why does literature help shape forms of protest and new critiques of modernity?

Explore postcolonial literature across a wide historical span. Your study will move from the explosion of new national literatures in the era of decolonisation through to contemporary writing that interrogates the legacies of racism and imperialism in our globalised world. You’ll read exciting major writers who defined the emergence of African, South Asian and Caribbean literature in English in the middle of the twentieth century. You’ll also encounter today’s new voices, grappling with the afterlives of empire. Cutting through all our thinking will be the question of how literature serves, in Ngugi wa Thiongo’s phrase, as a means of 'decolonising the mind'.

Exploring the adaption of literature to film and other media, this module focuses on the adaptation of literary texts to such forms as theatre, graphic novel, film, television, song, and game. You will be invited to reflect on adaptation as a powerful and complex cultural process, one that interprets literature as well as adapts it. Throughout the module you will normally complete either a critical essay on adaptation OR a creative project (plus short essay) that enables you to produce your own work of adaptation. This may take many forms -- written, (audio) visual, musical, digital, or three-dimensional and/or take the form of a game, production or performance, etc.

How does our lived experience translate into poetry? And how does poetry crystallize or transform experience through language and form? These and many other questions are explored in this module as you will read as well as write poetry; for the writing of poetry is dependent not only your experience but also your abilities as a reader and interpreter of poems. You will study the base structures of poetry – from the line-ending to more complex forms like sonnets and sestinas; and you will be encouraged to seek out new reading as a result of class discussion.

Learn to write drama for the theatre and audio, and develop your awareness of the processes by which a written script makes its way to live performance and recorded production. You will be taught through weekly seminars/workshops in which you will explore the effects that different staging/recording approaches and performance strategies have on your scripts. Over the course of the module, you will develop your own writing styles and gain an awareness of the professional requirements of playwriting for the stage and for radio and podcasts. Part of this course will be taught in situ at The Dukes Theatre in the city centre.

Explore how ideas can be developed into real-world projects with lasting value. Through hands-on collaboration and problem-solving, you will develop innovative projects, learn how to bring ideas to life and explore ways to sustain them. Whether you are working in a team or individually, you will be encouraged to experiment with different approaches to making a difference in artistic, cultural, social and community spaces.

In this multi-genre writing workshop you will develop your writing toward professional levels. Taught through a mix of lectures and tutor-led workshops, the focus is on the development of your own portfolio. This portfolio could take any form and be devoted to any genre (poetry, prose, drama, screenplay etc). The lectures will include expert guidance from our author-tutors on how to develop your writing professionally and towards publication.

Ben Jonson claimed of Shakespeare ‘he was not of an age but for all time.’ This module, however, examines Shakespearean drama and poetry in its own time and as a platform in which early modern debates about agency and government, family and national identity, were put into play. The stage was and is a place in which questions of gender, class and race, gain immediacy through the bodies and voices of actors. By examining texts from across Shakespeare’s career, you will explore their power to shape thoughts and feelings in both their own age and in ours. You will consider how, in the past and in the present, Shakespeare’s texts exploit the emotional and political possibilities of poetry and dr

Study key texts and contexts from a short but remarkably intense period of literary history. Encompassing the work of writers such as Wordsworth, Blake, Keats and Shelley, you will explore the role of nature, the imagination and the sublime. You will also consider the emergence of the Gothic tradition and examine the interactions between literary and politics in a turbulent era of revolution and change.

Study the work of four giants of nineteenth-century British fiction: Jane Austen, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë and Emily Brontë. Focusing on questions of class, gender, power, environment and artistic technique, you will explore the tensions between Austen and the Brontes (south vs north, Regency vs Victorian, realism vs Gothic) and trace the imaginative continuities between them.

Both the Gothic and science fiction emerged in response to the 18th century ‘age of reason’ and the Western world’s investment in logic and progress. The Gothic explores the terrors of the past and its return while science fiction imagines alternative futures; in doing so, both voice the concerns of the present. You will study both classic literary texts and contemporary film and other media. Exploring what the Gothic and science fiction each do, rather than what they each are, you will consider how these genres address some of the most pressing questions facing contemporary Western culture.

The early 20th century explosion of literary experimentation known as Modernism was a movement informed by the catastrophe of the First World War, the convulsion that was the Russian Revolution and a host of dramatic developments in art, music, cinema, philosophy, theology, politics and science. Alongside reading the literature of the time you will also consider various related artistic movements such as Dadaism, Surrealism and Vorticism. Authors covered typically include T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and W. B. Yeats.

What is the contemporary? When did the present cultural moment start and how might it end. How do writers respond to the challenge, excitement, pressure and novelty of the ‘now’? And how is imaginative writing faring in the digital age? You will consider these questions in relation to the work of such major authors as Ali Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Colson Whitehead

Examining a wide range of texts and authors from early periods to the age of the climate crisis, this module will explore the many and various ways in which the non-human world is celebrated, championed and exploited by the literary imagination. You will explore questions such as: What do we mean by the ‘the environment’? What experiences, meanings and values do we take from, or discover in our surroundings? How have writers characterised the environment and in what ways might the literary imagination be significant for contemporary environmental concerns?

What is critical theory? Why is it one of the most controversial areas of contemporary culture today? And to what extent do theoretical ideas about power, race, gender and identity change the way we think about the world? On this module you will explore a range of classic and contemporary themes, trends and topics in critical theory from the 1960s to the present. You’ll take a deep dive into key thinkers like Foucault, Deleuze and Agamben and key concepts like biopolitics, globalisation and animal studies.

The final-year Dissertation is your opportunity to devise, research and explore a topic of your own choice through a programme of directed independent study. You will be helped to begin your thinking at the end of your second year and then, through your final year, you will develop your research, thinking and writing, as you build toward a substantial, self-directed project. Almost anything is possible; for example, you could choose to explore famous literary names or themes, or research obscure figures and unusual topics. You might draw on the University Library’s special collections, or venture way beyond Lancaster to develop your research. Perhaps you will be inspired by the medievalism o

Many cutting-edge forms of creative writing work beyond written text. This module will develop your understanding of popular contemporary writing and writing industries with an advanced study of two key forms that incorporate visual elements and elements of narrative design – specifically: graphic novels and games. You will explore the possibilities of narrative design, including its visual and interactive elements, and this will allow you to engage both critically and creatively with a branch of writing largely associated with the digital domain. Working in small groups, you will develop your own ideas, and through workshopping and playtesting, reflect on the narrative and design decisions

As you enter level 6 with a grounded understanding of traditional and emerging forms of creative writing, this advanced module offers you the space to examine and practice experimental and radical contemporary forms that challenge what writing can mean, for the moment and beyond the moment it is written. Specifically, this module will be focusing on contemporary short forms – including (but not limited to) lyric poetry, the vignette and flash fiction. You will explore the way that form responds to the moment – both a moment in time and the moment we are living in – and how these forms respond to questions of identity, politics, the body, mental health, disability, the climate crisis and more

In this module you will work in a combination of prose and creative non-fiction to explore how personal experience can fuel both fiction and creative nonfiction and how authorial voice is created in dialogue with the self. You will learn to critically interrogate the ethics of speaking on behalf of ourselves and of others. The reading list is refreshed annually in response to developments in the field, as is appropriate for an advanced course. An indicative reading list might raise questions of consent in the personal essay, or questions of responsibility when writing for young people and how coming-of-age is handled by adult writers.

What happens when radically different forms of art meet? How do these fused forms change our understanding of the world? We will draw on material from different periods and continents, to explore works of art where, for example, film meets history, poetry meets philosophy, fine art meets sociology, religion meets fiction, and theatre meets politics.

What do we understand by queerness? Looking back at earlier interpretations, we imagine how queerness might evolve, how it might be lived, felt and understood in the future. You will explore queer futures from a range of perspectives and viewpoints, while examining both feminist and queer theory, as well as queer media and cultural texts and material relating to areas such as activism, politics and healthcare.

This module offers a unique opportunity to bring your critical, reflective skills to bear on live performance. Whether you would like to become an influential theatre critic or are simply interested in expanding your critical and analytical writing skills, this module will consolidate your ability to identify and reflect on the specific elements that shape audience responses. Throughout the term you will compose and revise a series of short reviews of live performances that you have personally attended – these can be selected from shows that you have seen independently, or from work seen on trips organised by Theatre staff throughout your course. You will learn through guided writing worksho