BA (Hons) English Literature 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.

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.

Study literature through the frame of space, exploring a wide range of major ancient, modern and contemporary texts, all of which relate to particular places. These places may include: Archives Museums Castles The stage Mountains The sea Borders Plantations Glaciers The womb Some of the spaces may relate directly to the historic city of Lancaster itself and to its wonderful location near to both the Lake District and the coast, and some of the spaces will relate to places far away. Texts studied may include Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure, Derek Walcott’s Omeros and Ali Smith’s How to Be Both.

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

The medieval and early modern periods witnessed immense change. This module will introduce you to the key themes, sources, and methods you need to understand the patterns of change and continuity around the world over a period of more than a thousand years. The shift from a warm climate in the medieval period to a colder one in the early modern period may help us explain patterns of life in a world where most people depended on subsistence agriculture. Huge transformations were also wrought by the movement of people, diseases, animals, and goods, with events such as the Black Death in Europe and smallpox epidemics in the Americas decisively changing how people lived, and how they related to

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,

From questions about truth, justice, and knowledge to debates over freedom, power, and human purpose - how has philosophical inquiry shaped cultural, political, and scientific life across centuries? In this module you will explore the major ideas and traditions that have guided the development of Western thought. Specific thinkers examined will vary from year to year, but they will include philosophers whose ideas have helped shape philosophical viewpoints, categories and boundaries in the western philosophical tradition. You will be encouraged to think about the problems and limitations of different thinkers’ approaches, and their impact on the way we practice and understand the boundaries

Every piece of performance, big or small, uses the same foundational ‘raw materials’. Explore these and more as you develop your critical, aesthetic and theatrical vocabulary by examining the formal building blocks of performance, such as the body, space, time, text and media. Through a combination of practical workshops and seminars, you will learn how these building blocks are used to construct a variety of performance forms including: Traditional stage plays Live art Performance art Physical theatre Site-specific or immersive theatre By analysing specific examples of these performance forms, your studies in this module will complement the projects undertaken in Making Theatre I, helping y

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

Examining the evolution of film genres in a global context, this module focuses on the ways contemporary filmmakers innovate within established and classic genre traditions. You will analyse key genres (which may include Science Fiction, Horror and Comic Book films), considering their artistic, industrial and technological developments across different cinematic traditions. Through case studies, you will explore how genre conventions adapt to national and transnational influences, addressing topics such as digital effects and world-building, genre hybridity and the role of franchises in global media. The module also considers how streaming platforms, audience reception and fan cultures shape

Why does History matter? What does it contribute to our world? Challenge yourself to consider how our discipline is applied. Beyond working in universities, historians are active in public debate and influence the policies of institutions and governments on matters from the memorialisation of historic figures and institutional links with the Transatlantic Slave Trade to geopolitical threats to UK security. They collaborate with museums, helping visitors engage with material remains of the past, and write books for a wide public readership. You’ll develop a critical awareness of your discipline and gain confidence in articulating its significance in our world. You’ll also contend with the sub

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

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.

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.