The portfolio module is your opportunity to develop an individual project that will lead to a fully-realised piece of creative work. Typically, you will be supervised by a specialist in your chosen area of interest.

The creative work may be several pieces of short fiction, a radio play, a coherent collection of flash fiction, prose poetry, poetry, an extended personal essay/memoir/autofiction, or a continuous extract from a proposed novel or other book-length work.

You will:

• Generate the idea for a piece of creative work in your chosen form
• Propose an independent reading plan
• Draft no more than 5,000 words for initial tutor review
• Develop and edit your creative project and present the finished work to a high standard - as appropriate for your chosen form (eg correctly formatted script)
• Demonstrate your knowledge of relevant form, technique, and process by writing a 3,000 word reflective essay, including a full bibliography

You will receive informal, verbal feedback during regular dissertation meetings with your supervisor. This will include suggestions for reading and research as well as feedback on the development of your creative project. When the portfolio is graded, it will be returned to you with detailed written feedback.

This module prepares you for your dissertation project and supports the development of the research, scholarly and critical skills that it will require. You will be introduced to the idea of ethical practice and any students working on memoirs or verbatim work will be offered specific guidance. You’ll also explore the ideas, concepts and issues around reflective practice and the vital role of research within creative writing.

We’ll study in a cohesive group, bringing students on combined courses and those following different pathways together to create a wider forum; our discussions will focus on professional practice and research issues.

This module aims to enhance your knowledge of library, archival and online research and develop your understanding of the creative process - taking you from first draft to final submission, including problem-solving strategies for creative blocks or obstacles. The module also places your creative work in the context of a professional literary world.

Indicative study themes:

• Understanding the Research Context
• Library, Online and Archival Research
• Scholarly Conventions
• Creative and Professional Presentation
• Research and Reflective Practice
• The Ethical Researcher

This module will explore Gothic representations of, for example: pain and illness experience, chronic illness, psychiatric confinement, eating disorders, organ harvest and transplantation, genetic testing, and epidemic or disease emergence. Traditional Gothic tropes find ready echoes in illness. Subjects may experience their bodies as uncanny, once familiar but now strange; they may feel helpless and physically vulnerable; they strive to decipher the cryptic signs of the medical record and the body’s symptoms; they endure strange temporalities and carceral hospital sites; they are subjected to rituals of medical monitoring; and they become supplicants to powerful figures with mysterious knowledge. The Gothic mode can be part of a critique of the complex biopolitics of medicine and illness. Yet at the same time, representing illness and pain through a Gothic mode can carry ideological risks, reinforcing problematic cultural assumptions about which human lives are of value. You will explore the promise and perils of the Gothic mode in the arena of health humanities and critical medical humanities.

This module will allow you to develop an idea for a novel, select techniques appropriate to your genre, theme and style and prepare you to complete an extract or series of extracts from a novel in progress. Through reflective exploration of several contemporary novelists, targeted writing exercises and workshops, you will explore character, voice, point of view, genre, form, setting and place.

The module will be taught by a combination of interactive lectures on the set texts, plus workshops and individual feedback on work in progress from your tutors.

You will be assessed on the submission of a portfolio and a reflective essay.

This module addresses the ways that contemporary literature, film and television engage with the Gothic literary tradition. Focusing specifically on texts produced since 2000, it explores the continuing relevance of Gothic in contemporary culture. The module aims to demonstrate the diversity and increasing hybridity of contemporary Gothic and with this in mind, enquires what happens when Gothic cross-fertilises a range of other modes and genres including musical, soap opera, noir, documentary, comedy, science fiction and the historical novel. Indicative themes include: how traditional Gothic personae from vampires and ghosts to guilty fathers and disturbed children may find new life in the twenty-first century; how traditional Gothic spaces from the haunted house to the fairground may be refigured in postmodern British and American culture; what critics mean when they talk about Gothic and the ways in which the term is put to work in both popular media and in academic criticism.

Each seminar will be based around two parallel strands, covering literature and television/film from 2000 to the present day. Typically, screenings of the relevant films/programmes will be timetabled during the week preceding the seminar. You may find it useful to have some prior knowledge of Gothic literature and/or film, but this is not essential.

This module uses contemporary theoretical models to explore the relationship between emotions and place in examples of early modern English literature. It begins by looking at the ways space is mapped in written and pictorial records, with an introduction to items in the Rare Book Archive in the Library and the electronic archive Early English Books Online. Site specific studies of texts (e.g. in Lancaster Castle and Penshurst Place) combine with study of fantasy sites like More’s Utopia (no-place) and early science fiction and travel writing. The course can be taken as part of the early modern pathway or as a stand alone module for those interested in developing transhistorical understandings of politics and place.

This module will enable you to develop your understanding of prose writing for young people, with a focus on Children’s Fiction (8-12 years) and Young Adult Fiction (11+ and 14+). During the module, you will develop an idea for a manuscript suitable for one of these audiences. The manuscript will be informed by the critical discussion of the set texts, targeted writing exercises and participation in workshops. Together, we will explore voice, point of view, story structure, setting and place, as well as formulate conceptions of the role of gatekeeping, reader expectations, and current movements and trends in the children’s publishing landscape. You may come prepared with a manuscript idea you wish to work on, or you might build on an idea generated in class. Towards the end of the course, you will also be asked to write reflectively on your creative process.

Everyone in western culture wears clothes, that necessarily have been designed and manufactured by someone, and therefore no one can be exempt from the fashion industry. In the twenty-first century, however, this industry has reached a point of crisis as increasing attention to sweated labour, environmental sustainability, cultural appropriation, prescriptive body images and diversity of representation have challenged conventional ways of designing, manufacturing, marketing and consuming fashion. Since 2000, this has led to a growing number of films that directly address the fashion industry. These are underpinned by the often-overlooked art of costume design, which makes film a particularly vivid medium for the depiction of fashion.

By focusing on film, this module offers an accessible entry point to the social and economic issues affecting the fashion industry today as well as to fashion history and theory. The module begins by introducing other forms of fashion media that play an important role in the dissemination of fashion as well as becoming intertextual modes of representation within the films themselves. It then examines two films that summarise many of the themes of the course as a whole by reflecting on the representation of the fashion industry through magazine publishing. Finally, it works through the processes of the fashion industry – designing, manufacturing, marketing and consuming – typically exploring a film, two critical essays and selected examples of fashion media each week. It pays attention to three key themes: the way fashion narrative deploys the genre conventions of documentary, comedy, crime and Gothic/horror; the analysis of costume on screen; and the politics of and responses to crisis within the industry itself.

This module examines a range of British and Irish fiction that appeared against the revolutionary backdrop of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It considers the ways in which novelists engaged with and/or resisted the political and intellectual upheavals of the period -- the French revolution, the spread of political radicalism, abolitionism, the rise of feminism -- and shows how novels of the time can be read both as trailblazers for democratic modernity and as gestures of counter-revolutionary consolidation. Focusing on a range of writers that includes Jane Austen, Walter Scott and Mary Shelley, the course explores tensions between past and present; between Englishness and otherness; between dangerous experimentation and steadfast loyalty to tradition. Emphasis will also be placed on the formal upheavals that literary fiction underwent in this period, not least the conflicts between realism and rival modes such as Gothic, melodrama, historical saga and science fiction.

This module is concerned with a range of wonderful texts from c.1919 to c.1980 that together suggest a line of broadly modernistic writing that has a fascination both with the city (primarily Paris, but also Berlin, Oxford, London, Zurich, and even that city of death which is the death camp) and with the mixing of genres - in particular, such genres as critical essay, philosophical treatise, poetry, comic dialogue, fragment, novel, anecdote, manifesto, autobiography, history, textual commentary, and travelogue. Featured authors currently include Walter Benjamin, Virginia Woolf, Hope Mirrlees, Mina Loy, Samuel Beckett, Paul Celan, and Jacques Derrida. Special attention will be paid to texts that blur the genre-boundary that, traditionally, separates critical writing from creative writing, and students will be invited, if they wish, to submit such texts themselves.

This MA course takes the relatively new and still developing field of Literary Mapping and explores its potential for students in relation to texts and authors across the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries. The course has a strong theoretical element derived from Critical Cartography and based on the work of Franco Moretti but also applies these theories to texts. Acts of mapping and maps as a means of understanding and moving through literary worlds, will be explored and critiqued as they evolve over time and in relation to changing cultures.

This module examines manhunt narratives -- stories about the systematic pursuit of people who don't want to be found - in British and American writing from the early nineteenth century to the present day. It will address questions of space, power, violence, mobility and surveillance as they are raised by a range of set reading that covers classic thrillers (Buchan, Orczy), proto-feminist stories of female runaways (Gaskell, Wollstonecraft), narratives of escape from slavery (the Crafts, Whitehead), SF stories of hi-tech pursuit and evasion (Dick, Wells), and uncanny experiences of self-hunting (Conrad, Stevenson). The module asks how manhunt narratives work, what fears, desires and fantasies they cater for, and why they are such a prevalent feature of both highbrow and popular literature.

Primary Texts:

• John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps
• Joseph Conrad, 'The Secret Sharer'
• Ellen Craft and William Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom
• Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
• Elizabeth Gaskell, 'The Grey Woman'
• Emmuska Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel
• Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
• H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man
• Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
• Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria; Or, the Wrongs of Woman

How did people in the late Middle Ages conceive of the relationships between themselves and the natural world? How did early English literature react to and characterise the environment that seems an increasingly pressing concern for our own modern context? This module will explore the many roles that early literature played not just in reflecting the environment, but also in constructing and shaping human interactions with the natural world. The module examines a type of literary environment each week and investigates the kinds of relationships the texts posit between the human and non-human to address the above questions. We will work with theoretical approaches such as ecocriticism and encounter a wide range of primary source material that imagines early human interactions with the environment.

‘Enclosure’ is defined most simply as the process of turning common land into private property, and usually refers to the transformation of the English countryside since the early modern period. This module examines enclosure in a global frame and from the perspective of the new epoch of the Anthropocene, defined by the irreversible impacts of human activity upon the planet. We will explore the ‘new enclosures’ that seem to be emerging today. Our aim will be to use the concept of enclosure to connect our supposedly new epoch to slower histories of imperialist violence against peoples and places. This module will appeal to students interested in postcolonial/world literatures, land and landscape, environmental and ecocritical thought, the Anthropocene, and climate justice. No prior knowledge is necessary.

This module offers an introduction to understanding and exploring ideas of space, movement and identity in relation to major writers and texts across the nineteenth century with a particular interest in reading and mapping. What can and cannot be mapped? What resists or exceeds acts of mapping? We will read key writers of place alongside a range of relevant spatial and philosophical texts and extracts for each of the thematic themes that are addressed across the module. As the title suggests the course is particularly interested in the challenges involved in moving across and between direct physical and embodied experiences and the representation of place in different literary forms.

The module focuses on three themes: walking and writing; mapping literary place and space; and interior and exterior spaces. We will use these themes to think about how place and space are constructed through movement, action and reaction, as well as to consider how the visual representation of place through literary maps bears upon verbal description within a text.

This module is about reading poetry and some other representative texts in relation to place. It focuses mainly on Wordsworth, both in himself and as a representative figure, but includes other writers and theorists.

We will be combining close study of texts and ideas of how landscape was (and is) viewed, with use of actual locations and a strong sense of place on the summer term field trip. The course aims to provide participants with a strong sense of Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century perceptions of place, through close study of key concepts such as the Picturesque and the Sublime and travel writings about the Lake District. It will then go on to focus on a range of Romantic authors looking at poetic and other texts in relation to issues of place and space. In particular we will dwell upon Wordsworth as the pre-eminent poet of place in relation to the Lakes, but the course will also study other Romantic and Victorian writing.

The module will consider key issues in relation to selected texts: the representation of real places and inhabitants in literature; different ways of “dwelling”; the value and importance of place names; imaginative appropriation of the actual. At the same time it will also place such ideas within a wider context in terms of current methodologies, particularly links between Romanticism and the conservation movement (“Romantic Ecology”), heritage and phenomenology of place as well as theories of representations which will be applied to literary texts, paintings, and buildings.

This module explores modern and contemporary literature from and/or about Palestine and Israel, from 1948 to the present. Literary writing is a space in which communities are imaginatively reinforced, sites of memory are contested, and political resistance is articulated. However, in rich and overlapping literary canons, writers also emphasise relational experience and potentially shared futures, nuancing our understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian situation. We will address the rhetorical function of different literary genres (notably novels, short stories, and life writing) and literary modes (for example: comedy, realism, autobiography, and speculative fiction). We will also consider audience(s) and the politics of writing/reading across contexts. No prior knowledge is required. The course will appeal to students interested in postcolonial, comparative, and world literature; history, trauma, and memory studies; and the relationship between nation and narration, or literature, politics, and place.

How are bodies configured in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts and how do we read them from a twenty-first century perspective? What cultural weight do bodies bear when represented as gendered; as icons of nationhood or mortality; as objects of desire - sometimes of violent desire - in literary texts? Is social identity inevitably shaped by corporeality or do the processes of bodily exposure and concealment offer ways of self-fashioning? This module addresses such questions by examining the ways in which embodied identities are contingently constructed in a period of religious and political and change.

'This module explores the evolution of prose fiction from the late Romantic era through the first two decades of Victoria’s reign. A defining focus of the course will be on the ways in which the Victorian novel negotiates with Romantic legacies: the primacy of self, the necessity of intellectual and personal liberty and an ambivalence towards the past are crucial to the development of the form. The historical frame of the course allows us to move from James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). We will consider the shaping presence of other genres in the development of nineteenth-century fiction, including spiritual autobiography, the Gothic and the long poem.

Historical contexts will also be emphasised with particular reference to the religious and political debates of the period. We will explore the emergence of the novelist as a major cultural figure and interrogate the ways in which the writers under review both internalise and contest the ethical, spiritual and economic forces of their historical moment.'

This module provides an exciting opportunity to study major texts of British Romanticism in the locations where they were written and that they describe, the English Lake District and the Alps. After introductory seminars taught at Lancaster, we will undertake two four-day field trips, one to the Lake District and one to the Alps. The first field trip will be based in Grasmere and will study the work of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, making use of the archives of the Wordsworth Trust's Jerwood Centre while also visiting key outdoor locations central to poems such as ‘Michael’, ‘Home at Grasmere’ and The Prelude. The second trip will be to the Alps and will focus on works by Lord Byron (e.g. Manfred), Percy Shelley (e.g. 'Mont Blanc') and Mary Shelley (e.g. Frankenstein). It will involve visits to the Alpine locations associated with these writers, such as Chamonix, the Mer de Glace, Lac Leman and Chillon Castle.

This module will focus on the interdisciplinary relationship between literature, science and medicine in the Romantic period and will examine the ways in which scientific thought is expressed in culture, history and politics.

You will have the opportunity to develop a range of interdisciplinary interpretive skills by guided reading of an eclectic range of texts, from scientific speculation, poetry, novels, lectures and periodical essays. The module seeks to identify and cross established discipline boundaries while developing an understanding of Romantic-period literature and culture.

This module aims to do two things: to encourage the student to think about contemporary poems in several different visual dimensions but always from the viewpoint of the practitioner; and it offers an opportunity for them to develop their own work in progress, while at the same time actively promoting their critical reflection upon the process of writing and the visual dynamics a poem can activate and contain. The module admits that the ‘how to’ approach might be of less use when it comes to writing poetry, and instead promotes and explores a wider sphere of influences, encouraging experiment and engagement. A critical exegesis allows the student to reflect upon the decisions made and the effects sought in their creative project. These aims will be achieved through a variety of methods:

This module examines the work of three of the great writers of the Romantic period, the poets Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, and the novelist, Mary Shelley. Famously, these three writers lived and worked together during the summer of 1816, an episode that produced two of the dominant myths of modern literature -- Frankenstein (in Mary Shelley's novel) and the Vampire (in a story based on Byron by another member of the group, John Polidori) - both of which we will examine. Throughout their careers these writers were engaged in a creative and critical conversation with each other that addressed major themes including: conceptions of the heroic; the possibilities of political change; literary, scientific, and biological creation; the East; transgressive love; gender roles; and the Gothic. The module will provide an opportunity to study in detail these writers' works and to consider them within their historical, cultural and intellectual contexts.

The short story is a complex and malleable form. This module considers the multiple forms and styles of contemporary short fiction from a range of cultural backgrounds and nationalities.

You will have the chance to develop your understanding of short fiction by drawing upon contemporary writers as well as secondary and critical reading - which will also help you to build a critical and theoretical framework around your own writing.

Peer and tutor review, both oral and written, will encourage you to work reflectively as a creative practitioner. And you’ll be encouraged to demonstrate your knowledge of the forms and genres used in contemporary short story writing by incorporating them in your own short story portfolio.

Indicative study themes:

• The longer short story of Alice Munro
• The historical short story (eg ‘The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher’)
• Myth and fairy tale in the short story
• Magical realism and the fantastic
• Formal experimentation
• Hypertext
• Science and the short story (the Comma Press 'Science into Fiction' Series)
• Politics and the short story

This module explores the relation between the novel and neoliberal politics, economics and philosophy from 1979 to the present. It introduces you to the philosophy of neoliberalism by examining key theoretical texts by, for example, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Michel Foucault, David Harvey and Wendy Brown and tracks how the modern novel historically reflects, reinforces and questions the rise (and fall?) of neoliberalism. This module seeks to map the contours of what Walter Ben Michaels has famously called the Neoliberal Novel by examining its defining genres, tropes, subjectivities, imaginaries, affects and ideologies. We will seek to address the following indicative questions. To what extent is it possible to speak of a Neoliberal Novel? How far do novels from 1979 to the present reflect, anticipate and contest the history of neoliberalism from the collapse of Keynesianism in the mid-1970s, through the monetarist experiments of the Thatcher and Reagan governments in the 1980s, up to the financial crash of 2008 and the rise of 'post-liberal' populists like Trump? To what extent is it possible for the contemporary novel to think with, through and even beyond the neoliberal order?

This module introduces you to the personal essay: a flexible, hybrid form incorporating elements of cultural and literary criticism, memoir, journalism, fiction and auto fiction. We will explore a number of modes of personal writing, assisting you in the development of a form that best serves your creative intentions.

Taught via literature seminars and creative workshops, you will experience a range of literary techniques, including generative writing prompts and exemplar texts. You will also learn how to respond reflectively and creatively to feedback - to this end, one seminar each term will be replaced by a one-to-one personal tutorial.

Indicative study themes:

• The Writing 'I': developing a voice, the strategic ‘I’, literary personae, authority and double perspective.
• Mode and register: memoir, documentary, reflection and commentary.
• Scene setting and dramatisation: applying creative technique to 'real life' material.
• Finding a subject; the writing self and the world.
• Autofiction, truth and artifice.
• Developing a form: the list essay, the braided essay, collages, fragments and mockuments. Rereading, rewriting, reconsidering: reflective editing and responding to feedback.

Taking our cue from Haruko Maeda’s remarkable twenty-first century painting Heartbeat of the Death, Queen Elizabeth I (2013), Tudor Gothic critically considers the relationships between traces of Tudor history and culture in four gothic novels (Deborah Harkness’s Shadow of Night (2012), Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (c.1803), Sophia Lee’s The Recess, or a Tale of Other Times (1784) and Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764)) and proto-gothic tropes (such as wonder, terror, strange places, clashing time frames) in select poetry, prose and drama produced in the Tudor period (1485-1603) itself. Rather than viewing the Tudor Gothic as an anachronistic term, the module suggests that Tudor Gothic informs and shapes literary gothic’s social, political and imaginary landscapes.

The module seeks to challenge the conventional tendency to think of the Victorian era as an age of moderation, as ‘a land / In which it seemed always the afternoon’ (to quote Tennyson). We shall, therefore, be paying close attention to the many extremes and extremities within Victorian literature and culture. These extremes can be found in some of the period’s formal experimentations, and cover subjects such as perception, experience, radicalism, imagination, secularism, and belief. Throughout the module, we shall be exploring the relation between these Victorian extremes and the coming of Modernity. This exploration will take us beyond the chronological limits of what we normally think of as the Victorian period, and we will be enlisting the help of several critical pieces to focus our seminar discussions.

This module explores modern/contemporary transnational literature in the Anglosphere, tracking relations between the local and the global, the domestic and the public sphere, the body and body politic, the concepts of ‘original’ and ‘translation’, and the human and the world. We privilege minority/decentring perspectives and consider how literature comes to us as Anglophone readers via the publishing industry, perceptions of translatability, and the literary prestige economy.

Key themes include: the body, space, mobility, modernity, relationality, marginality, agency, translatability, and environments. Key questions include: What makes a world literary writer? How are minority writers positioned within Anglophone publishing? (How) does a particular authorial signature impact upon the way a literary work circulates? What connections emerge across contexts?

All texts will be studied in English, though multilingual readers may also refer to originals.

This module looks at poetry culture in the UK and beyond, preparing you to enter the world of the publishing poet by closely examining the prize culture, some of the significant prize- winning collections by new poets over the last few years, and current poetry journals.

You will investigate current trends, having the chance to learn what it takes to get your work read - by editors, publishers and the poetry-consuming public. And you’ll put together a publication package with the aim of building your own portfolio in readiness for the vibrant and varied poetry marketplace - which continues to defy predictions of its demise.

Each seminar will typically be divided into reading and workshopping of your creative work in light of what we've read.

Indicative study texts:

• Seamus Heaney, Seeing Things (Faber, 1991)
• Sarah Howe, Loop of Jade (Chatto 2015)
• Kei Miller, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (Carcanet 2014)
• Sam Riviere, Kim Kardashian's Marriage (Faber 2015)
• Andrew McMillan, Physical (Cape 2015)
• Max Porter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers (Faber 2015)
• The Current Forward Anthology for that year
• A series of poetic journals (as chosen by your cohort)
• Michael Symmons Roberts, Drysalter (Cape 2013)
• Sinead Morrissey, Parallax (Carcanet 2013)

The aim of this module is to enable you to write drama for radio, developing your own scriptwriting style and gaining an awareness of the professional requirements of the genre. We will study exemplar radio dramas and use them to contextualise the creative choices in your own work whilst also exploring the effects of different structural and stylistic approaches.

Peer and tutor feedback will guide the development of your creative portfolio as you work towards a single radio drama script of 25 pages. Reflective practice will help you to develop the art of redrafting and editing and you will pen a 1,000-word essay placing your experience of this in the context of radio drama.

Taught through a combination of seminars and workshops, we will initially focus on the key elements of writing for radio, with weekly tasks corresponding to study themes. Latterly, we will move on to more intensive workshopping of your own work.

Indicative study themes:

• The radio landscape
• Narrators
• Navigating through and creating soundscapes
• Beginnings
• Character creation and character voice
• Story structure
• Status shifts
• Script format (and software resources)

This module explores textual constructions of nineteenth-century urban spaces and those who inhabit them. What does it mean to live in the city in the nineteenth century and what might the city mean to its inhabitants and to the English population at large? We will consider the ways in which different types of space – for example the street, the graveyard, the house – are meaningful as well as the different ways more general conceptions of ‘the city’ are articulated across the century. We will pay attention to issues such as mobility, transport, technology, Englishness, class, gender, ethnicity, and religion, and we will engage with different theories of space and place by authors such as Georg Simmel, Martin Heidegger, Gaston Bachelard and Doreen Massey. Throughout the course we will address the relationship between representation and place and how different types of imaginative literature present their urban spaces.