BA (Hons) English Literature Bachelor's degree at Westminster

A module where the bulk of teaching and learning takes place in small groups, combined with regular meetings with your academic tutor. The module introduces and develops academic skills for literary studies and covers what is meant by literature or the literary, and why particular forms are chosen in literary works. Texts are chosen from various periods and particularly stress recent debates over the canon's diversity and inclusivity and decolonizing the dominant literary tradition.

This module introduces a series of 'keywords' that have been historically central to the study of literature, and explores these in relation to specific critical approaches to, and theoretical understandings of, literary works.

This module introduces developments in poetry over the last 200 years. It examines how poetry intervenes in the modern world, exploring the role poetic form plays in the poet's critique of key social and political issues. It spans work from William Wordsworth to Frank O'Hara, Emily Dickinson to Nat Raha, and considers issues such as the role of poetry and the poet, the politics of form, poetry's engagement with political resistance, social reform, gender, the body, sexuality, class and cultural

This module samples a generic mix of Shakespeare's plays and provides a broad introduction to contemporary Shakespeare study. The specific forms of Shakespearean drama are explored not only in their early modern contexts, including the performance practices of the time, but also in terms of other key approaches and topics in current Shakespeare performance, criticism and theory.

In this module you will look at children's literature from the early eighteenth century to the present day, examining the various cultural contexts which have given rise to this rich and varied field. Genres you will consider include the time-slip narrative, the adventure story, the school story, the picture book, children's poetry, fantasy and dystopian fiction.

This module insists on the pleasure of reading and explores the idea of finding pleasure in our reading activities. Students direct their own reading, and record passages that are pleasurable. The module also encounters theoretical approaches to literature that try to account for the pleasure of reading.

Level 5 tutorials follow on from the Level 4 tutorials, providing weekly tutorials working in small groups with an Academic Tutor. The tutorials are divided between time spent developing practical academic skills, and structured 'employability' sessions designed specifically to support and guide you in your preparation for employment.

This module examines the literary, social and political concerns of Romanticism and its legacies across the period c.1790-1865. Centring on the idea of 'revolution', the module considers how a range of texts engage with issues as diverse as the natural world, political upheaval, liberty and the rise of the individual, 'Englishness' and the nation, gender and sexuality, the role of the artist, and the idea of modernity.

This module examines the literature, society and politics of the Victorian period, an age of considerable change and upheaval. Through close consideration of a range of texts – including poems, novels and visual material – you'll consider responses to pressing social and political issues such as industrialisation and the 'Condition of England', scientific developments, faith and doubt, psychology and the mind, gender, sexuality, imperialism and the empire, and decadence and the fin de siècle.

This module introduces you to the key debates and concepts that have been central to the formation of current understandings of memory, and its relationship to culture, history, and representation. Sample topics include slavery and its contemporary legacies; the Holocaust; and 9/11.

This module offers a critical investigation of the figure of the monster and the metaphors of monstrosity across a wide historical range of fictional, film, and non-fictional texts. The various ways in which textual and visual representations of monsters have been used in political, economic and social contexts will be considered, as will continuities and discontinuities in the conventions of these representations.

This module explores literature's claims to 'represent' reality. It focuses on the emergence, development and contestation of realist aesthetics in literature from the rise of the English novel in the 18th century to the present. It investigates how these aesthetics have been challenged and consolidated, and on the many forms of realism that now constitute literature as a result.

This module examines the literary innovations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, relating these developments to the period's central religious, social, and political upheavals. The module examines an array of literary and theatrical experimentation, emphasising works of the late Elizabethan period through to the English Revolution. It is organised in three thematic groups: religion, the social individual, and power and politics.

This module offers you the opportunity to undertake an extended piece of independent research and writing on a topic of your choosing, undertaken with individual supervision. The dissertation's research questions and approach are developed and refined in consultation with your supervisor and you'll receive feedback on a draft chapter.

This module interrogates cultural constructions of the present by putting the contemporary into conversation with the past. The module will historicise current social concerns and aesthetic forms to question how and why particular cultural flashpoints have become so important. In so doing, this module asks students to question the value of literature today.

This is a work experience placement associated with employment with an appropriate employer that you as a graduate might eventually join, such as a small or large business, an arts organisation or a subject-based placement in a school. You'll need to source your own placement. Support is provided via three face-to-face teaching sessions: one introductory session, one session focused on the assessment, and one drop-in session to discuss work towards the assessment.

Assessment: Portfolio

In this module, you'll explore the English novel after 1950 through the lens of temporality. You'll examine how the legacy of modernism and the events of the Second World War challenged ideas about the relationship between past, present, and future. The module will guide you through the conceptual debates these challenges provoked and show how they influenced the shape and form of the novel.

In the first part of this module, you'll explore a range of contemporary socio-cultural issues through readings by key theorists and commentators. Indicative topics include mass culture, privilege and intersectionality, cultural appropriation, public culture, bodies in public space, digital culture and surveillance, national culture, citizenship and immigration.