English Literary Studies with Creative Writing

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 will allow you to develop an idea for a novel, select appropriate techniques for developing this idea, 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 voice, point of view, genre, form, setting and place.

Note: this module addresses novels aimed at adults – it is not suitable for students wishing to work on a project for children or young adults. You should come prepared with an idea of what you want to work on from the start of the module.

Note on the reading: you should try to read all the set texts. However, page references for extracts that we will pay close attention to will be provided on the Moodle. You will also be directed towards the texts most relevant to your own project at the start of the course.

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.

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.

This module is designed to give you both the freedom to negotiate and agree, with an assigned tutor, your own area of study and/or writing within the perimeters of the particular MA pathway you have chosen. This study can be pursued either alone or with other students and takes the form of a structured series of tutorials with a member of the MA team. You will share, with the tutor, the responsibility for designing the course of study and/or writing.

The topic for study and/or writing is entirely open. If creative, it could take the form of a sequence of poems, short story, or the opening of a novel, along with a piece of reflective writing. If critical, it could, for example, take the form of a study of a single author (e.g. Emily Dickinson); a particular period, movement or moment (e.g. Decadence); the literature of a particular nation or region (e.g. North Africa); or a specific literary theme (e.g. revolutions). Alternatively, it could be linked to a Research Centre and/or special library collection and/or department reading group and/or conference hosted at Lancaster, and/or series of guest seminars given by a visiting scholar or writer. Recent examples include: the seminars given here by Terry Eagleton and the Ruskin Seminars.

You will meet your tutor for a series of tutorials and plan the work on a mutually agreed time-scale. Since this module is assessed in the same way as other MA modules the module will occupy one term.

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.

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.

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 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.

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:

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.

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.