English Literary Studies with Creative Writing MA - 2020 Entry

Course Structure

You will study a range of modules as part of your course, some examples of which are listed below.

Core

• Research Methodology and Reflective Practice in English Literature I

  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.

• Research Methodology and Reflective Practice in English Literature II

  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.

Optional

• Affliction: Writing Illness and Disease in the Gothic Mode

  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.

• Approaching the Novel

  The aim of this module is to allow you to explore the practical demands of writing long fiction, to develop your writerly and critical skills, and to develop your insight into the writing process. It will provide you with the opportunity to consolidate your learning about narrative fiction through the practical application of that learning. It is expected that by the end of the module, you will have had the opportunity to gain substantial experience of the process of creative writing. The workshops will move between giving feedback on submitted work, discussing set texts and extracts and testing techniques through in-class writing prompts and tasks.

  Indicative study themes include:

  • Opening the novel, ‘setting out your stall’ and ‘contracting with the reader.’
  • Developing a world: setting, place, description and worldbuilding
  • A narrative strategy: experiments in point of view and focalisation
  • Structuring events: time and tense, flashbacks and non-chronological storytelling
  • Plot, Story and cause and effect: what happens next?
  • Genres: the ‘rules’ of genre and readerly expectation
  • Character and characterisation: flat and round characters, secondary characters, protoganists and antagonists and ‘the unrelatable’ character
  • Editing, rewriting, project-managing a longer piece of work, reflective practice and incorporating feedback.
• Contemporary American Fiction

  The module takes as its primary material three trilogies published in the last 15 years of the twentieth century: Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, Toni Morrison's trilogy comprising Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise, and Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy.

• Contemporary British Fiction

  This module examines the range and variety of contemporary British fiction. Discussion will focus on representations of c21st crises, such as the financial crash and Brexit; on competing views of the past; on the poetry of everyday life; and on the futuristic and dystopian qualities of speculative fiction.

• Contemporary Gothic: Text and Screen

  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.

• Emotional Geographies in Early Modern Literature

  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.

• Flash Fictions

  This module introduces you to flash fiction: a very short narrative form that works through compression, the use of imagery, and the omission of sequential narrative material. We will explore the form through exemplar texts from around the world and you will have the opportunity to develop the editorial skills necessary to capture flash fiction’s brevity and imaginative power in your own work.

  Typically taught via literature seminars and practitioner workshops, you will experience a range of techniques, including generative writing prompts. You will also gain experience of responding 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:

  • How narrative shapes experience and memory
  • Starting points and how to develop them
  • Positioning the reader - narrative modes
  • Voice and cultural context - who is talking and how?
  • Language, imagery and metaphor
  • Allusion and allegory
  • Editing and compression
  • Exploring genre in flash fiction?
  • Flash fiction or prose poems
  • The triptych
  • Making sequences
• Fusions

  This module is concerned with a range of texts from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century that together suggest a line of broadly modernistic writing that has a fascination both with the city (eg. Paris, Berlin, Oxford, London, Manchester) 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. Special attention will be paid to texts that blur the genre-boundary that, traditionally, separates critical writing from creative writing. You will be invited, if you wish, to submit such texts yourself.

• Literature and Location: Space and Place in Creative Non Fiction

  How do writers recreate place - real or imagined? How do readers imaginatively inhabit place? This module explores elements of place writing and New Nature Writing, looking at domestic space, urban space, the countryside and the ‘edgelands’ that lie inbetween.

  We will encourage you to develop your own creative work and reflect upon the different dimensions of place writing and ‘literature-as-place’. A critical interpretation of texts will allow you to reflect upon the authorial decisions made and the effects you seek in your own creative projects.

  Indicative study themes:

  • What is place, or ‘place writing’? Who invented it? How does that relate to ideas of space? Recent ideas of wilderness, the old emphasis on walking, the New Nature Writing.
  • The archive, the curatorial and the imaginary museum. Key text: Jonathan Meades Museum Without Walls
  • The city, the countryside, and the spaces in between. Key texts: Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts Edgelands, Jean Sprackland Strands
  • Deep place – the natural world in our midst, and the nonhuman viewpoint. Key text: Charles Foster Being a Beast
  • Occupying imaginary worlds: cinema’s parallel universe, and the journey through landscape. Key text: Geoff Dyer Zona
• Literature and the Environment in Early Modern England

  How did people in the early modern period conceive of the relationships between themselves and the natural world? During a period characterised by extreme weather variation, a rapidly increasing population, the rise of industry, widespread food shortages and plague, how did early modern society react to and characterise environmental problems that seem particularly familiar to our own modern context? This module will explore the many roles that literature played not just in reflecting these environmental problems, but also in constructing and shaping human interactions with the natural world. The module examines a major environmental problem of the early modern period each week as represented in the literature of the period and investigates the kinds of social unrest they triggered in order to address the above questions. We will work with theoretical approaches such as ecocriticism and encounter a wide range of primary source material that documents early modern human interaction with the environment.

• Modernisms

  This module will explore literary modernism as a multiple, or plural movement that, in truly modernist spirit, refuses any single definition of itself, just as one might expect of a movement that really is a movement, something that moves, and still moves and thus exceeds even itself, in particular the periodised, rationalised and generically limited version of itself, as institutionalised by the academy. The module will, then, explore a host of ‘other’ modernisms that might include: manifesto modernism, political modernism, trench-war modernism, surrealist modernism, philosophical modernism, Holocaust modernism, theatrical modernism, comic modernism, and even a modernism-for-now that incorporates a literary-critical modernism -- a modernism within literary criticism that might yet challenge the realist and, as it were, ‘Victorian’ conventions of conventional academic scholarship. You may, if you wish, submit just such experimental or, critical-creative work instead of a conventional essay for the module assignment.

• New Media and Experimental Writing

  Exploring experimental modes of writing, this module focuses on form and mode whilst placing new media writings in a longer tradition of experimental writing. This gives you the opportunity to critically explore your own writing practice in relation to literary texts, new media texts, and experimental and collaborative practices.

  We will have the opportunity to engage with and develop writing practices which correspond to a range of forms and media: the codex (book), e-lit or digital literature, games, visual media. And we will evaluate the range of critical responses to experimental literature, digital literature, remix culture and games narrative.

  Indicative study themes:

  • Experiments (1): Constraint and cut up
  • Experiments (2): word, vision, sound and text in media
  • Form and mode (1): from page to media
  • Form and mode (2): Geoff Ryman’s 253 as hypertext and print remix
  • Narrative and game dynamics (1): ergodic literature and writing machines
  • Narrative and game dynamics (2): Dear Esther
  • Remixing the book (1): Cortazar, Johnson, Danielewski
  • Remixing the book (2): glitches, codes and uncreative writing
• Nineteenth Century Literature: Place - Space - Text

  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. 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. The module focuses on three themes: walking and writing; mapping literary place and space; and interior and exterior. We 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 via maps can transform the ways we understand the world around us. We consider multiple types of place, including rural farmland, mountains and lakes, islands, cities and the home. We will place these themes in the context of twentieth-century thinking on place and space.

• On Location in the Lakes

  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.

• Postcolonial Women's Writing

  This module – distinctive in its focus on the wider Middle East – explores twentieth and twenty-first century narrative texts by women writers, examining creative literary engagements with (post)colonial histories, societies and politics. Novels and memoirs are read alongside theory drawn from disciplines that might include literary criticism, history, geography, sociology and anthropology. The texts represent a range of responses to colonialism, national identity, patriarchy, Islam, migration and transnationalism. Indicative themes are: revolution; the female body in private and public space; violence; education; modes of resistance; memory; testimony; and the politics of representation.

• Premodern Bodies

  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.

• Psychogeographical Investigations: Myth and Place

  'Psychogeographical' practices encourage the overlaying of history, story and myth and a deep engagement with urban and natural environments. This module provides a means for you to investigate space, place and narrative through such practices.

  We will draw out experimental approaches to the literary representation of place through practices of walking, inhabitation, site-specific practices, visual and textual materials. We will also study key critical and fictional texts.

  You will undertake writing tasks via creative workshops and benefit from the opportunity to further develop your research skills. You’ll also be encouraged to critically explore the interface between creative and critical modes of writing.

  Indicative study themes:

  • Myth and Place (1): Sinclair’s London
  • Myth and Place (2): the folk horror revival
  • Practices of Walking (1): Solent’s Wanderlust
  • Practices of Walking (2): writing in the field
  • Hauntology (1): place as palimpsest
  • Hauntology (2): visual strategies
  • Landscape (1): hills, fields and coasts
  • Landscape (2): urban psychogeography
• Reading Adventure Stories

  This module will explore different forms of the adventure story as it emerges and develops across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We will consider themes such as the role of hero and antihero; adult/child readership; gender and imperialism; material factors such as serial publication and the presentation of images and maps alongside the text.

• Rethinking Religion in the Victorian Novel

  Religion was frequently absent from the critical accounts of the Victoran novel offered in the second half of the twentieth century. When religion was mentioned, it was usually positioned as the losing contestant in a battle with secularism. For the influential critic George Levine, the novel is an inherently secular form, with theological explanations supplanted by the material and everyday concerns of the modern world. Levine was far from alone in his view. But as we will see in this module, religion is not so easily removed from our critical histories. Drawing on theorists such as Charles Taylor and Talal Asad, who have helped us think about the relationship between the sacred and secular in a more sophisticated manner, and an array of twenty-first century literary critics, historians, theorists and theologians, the module will explore the different ways in which religion and modernity co-exist throughout the pages of the Victorian novel.

• Romance and Realism

  This module explores the evolution of prose fiction from the late Romantic era through the first two decades of Queen Victoria’s reign. A defining focus of the module 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 genre. The historical frame of the module allows us to move from James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), one of the first novels of the American ‘Renaissance’. Indicative themes include: the shaping presence of other genres in the development of nineteenth-century fiction, including spiritual autobiography and the long poem; historical contexts with particular reference to the religious and political debates of the period; the emergence of the novelist as a major cultural figure; ways in which the writers under review both internalise and contest the ethical, spiritual and economic forces of their historical moment.

• Romanticism on Location: Writing in the Lake District and the Alps

  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.

• Seeing Things: Visualising Poetry

  This module aims to do two things: to encourage you to think about contemporary poems in several different visual dimensions but always from the viewpoint of the practitioner; and it offers an opportunity for you to develop your own work in progress, while at the same time actively promoting your 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. This critical understanding will help you to reflect upon the decisions made and the effects sought in your creative project.

• The 21st Century Writer

  Led by your own interests, this module will give you the opportunity to enhance your knowledge of commercial and independent publishing, community writing and online publishing.

  You will contact and engage with an external organisation, person or literary context and then reflect on your creative writing in relation to this ‘world’ experience - you will be encouraged to expand your reflections to include wider social, cultural and economic issues.

  The module enables you to develop skills that include presenting yourself professionally in a literary, creative or cultural industry context and the means to assess the criteria for literary awards and competitions. You’ll also enhance your knowledge of community writing settings and the role of funding.

  Typically, there are fortnightly presentations on aspects of the writing industries and various ‘writing worlds’, which will be interspersed with seminar discussion of your projects or placements, including suggestions for further reading or background research.

  Indicative study themes:

  • Commercial publishing and the role of the agent
  • Live theatre and festivals
  • Writing in community settings
  • AHRC and funding
  • Independent and regional publishing
  • Competitions and journals
  • eBooks and online writing
• The Contemporary Short Story: Expanding the Form

  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
• The Neoliberal Novel: Fiction, Politics and Economics 1979-

  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?

• The Personal Essay

  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.
• Victorian Extremes: the Coming of Modernity

  This 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 culture: for example extreme faith, extreme doubt, extreme chauvinism, and extreme feminism, as well as margins, peripheries and minorities. Throughout we shall be exploring the relation between these Victorian extremes and the coming of Modernity. This exploration will include writings beyond the chronological extreme of what we normally think of as the Victorian period.

• Victorian Literature and Other Media

  This module examines the formal, historical, generic, cultural, intercultural, and interhistorical relationships between Victorian literature and other media, including painting, illustration, theatre, music, film, television, and new media.

• Writing Poetry Today

  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)
• Writing Radio Drama

  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)
• Writing the Nineteenth Century City

  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.

Information contained on the website with respect to modules is correct at the time of publication, but changes may be necessary, for example as a result of student feedback, Professional Statutory and Regulatory Bodies' (PSRB) requirements, staff changes, and new research.