The two core modules, Research Methodology and Reflective Practice in English Literature I and II, are compulsory for all MA English/English with Creative Writing students and for new first year PhD English students who have not taken an MA at Lancaster. They are designed in accordance with UK research councils training guidance. Seminars will run across terms 1 and 2, and dissertation supervision and a conference will take place in term 3. The two modules together aim to equip you with a range of skills, approaches and competences to draw on as early career researchers in the field of English Literary Studies and/or Creative Writing. Even if you are not considering a research career, we will cover skills that are valuable for any postgraduate student of literature.

The two core modules are designed to complement the more specialist topics covered on MA English programmes through specific module seminars and dissertation supervisions. These core modules typically include sessions on research and writing skills, working with archives, and working with theory, and will encourage reflection on the practice and utility of literary research. The modules will be assessed by an ongoing portfolio of tasks. In the summer term, the module will conclude with a conference – organised by the students themselves – at which each of you will give a paper relating to your research.

The two core modules, Research Methodology and Reflective Practice in English Literature I and II, are compulsory for all MA English/English with Creative Writing students and for new first year PhD English students who have not taken an MA at Lancaster. They are designed in accordance with UK research councils training guidance. Seminars will run across terms 1 and 2, and dissertation supervision and a conference will take place in term 3. The two modules together aim to equip you with a range of skills, approaches and competences to draw on as early career researchers in the field of English Literary Studies and/or Creative Writing. Even if you are not considering a research career, we will cover skills that are valuable for any postgraduate student of literature.

The two core modules are designed to complement the more specialist topics covered on MA English programmes through specific module seminars and dissertation supervisions. These core modules include sessions on research and writing skills, working with archives, and working with theory, and will encourage reflection on the practice and utility of literary research. The modules will be assessed by an ongoing portfolio of tasks, the final two of which are a dissertation proposal and a conference abstract. This prepares you for the summer term, which involves a conference – organised by the students themselves – at which each of you will give a paper relating to your research, and dissertation writing with allocated supervisors.

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 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.

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 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.

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?

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 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.