Theatre and English Literature (Study Abroad)

What is literature? Who decides? How should we read literary texts? To what extent is the meaning of a text decided by the author, the reader, history or culture? Why does literary criticism still have value? To address these fundamental questions, ENGL 201 introduces students to a range of key concepts in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. The module will ask us to re-think familiar concepts such as writing and history, and will extend literary criticism beyond its traditional limits to encompass concepts such as animals, biopolitics and neoliberalism. The module will enable students to deploy theoretical terms and concepts in their own acts of reading, and its overall aim is to make students more rigorous, sophisticated and inventive in their responses to literary and cultural texts.

This course explores how American Literature has evolved from its colonial origins, with particular emphasis on key figures of the nineteenth century. What we call ‘American Literature’ and how we define America and ‘the American experience’ depends on who is writing and to whom. We shall encounter many different voices, many conflicting and contrasting views, a diversity of complex experience and a great range of writing in form and style (don’t expect the poetic and novelistic forms you are used to in British literature). The course will be broadly thematic in its approach, aiming to build up through recurring themes, images, questions and stylistic features, an increasingly complex picture of the literature created mostly by English-speaking Americans.

This module is divided into key areas across the two terms: Revolution; The Self; Politics and Poetics; and the Gothic.

We will begin by examining revolutionary writing of the Romantic period, including the poetry of such writers as Anna Barbauld, William Blake, and William Wordsworth, and the prose of such writers as Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and Mary Wollstonecraft. We will then consider ideas of the self in the poetry of such writers as Charlotte Smith and Letitia Landon, Lord Byron’s Manfred, and the labouring-class writing of John Clare.

We also examine the relationship between politics and poetics for the second-generation poets such as John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and then, the slave narratives of Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, and the orientalism of S. T. Coleridge and Thomas de Quincey. Finally, the module will turn its attention to the popular literary movement of ‘Gothic’ which emerges during the Romantic period, exploring its manifestation in a range of texts that may include Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Joanna Baillie’s play De Montfort, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

The module aims to give students a sense of the diverse range of writers in this period. We will use the close knowledge of key texts to tackle some of the wider, more abstract ideas such as: nature, the imagination, and the sublime. We will also consider literary ideas within a broader social, historical and philosophical context.

Critical Reflections explores a number of key interdisciplinary philosophical and cultural concepts which will enable you to analyse, engage with, and reflect upon artworks in your own discipline. It also allows you to establish a common set of concepts which can be shared by students from all LICA subjects. The structure of the module consists of six three-week blocks: (1) Aesthetics, Formalism and Beyond, (2) Phenomenology, (3) Semiotics, Structuralism and Deconstruction, (4) Class and Society, (5) Feminism, Queer Theory and Gender, and (6) On Difference.Weekly plenary lectures make connections across the arts, and are supplemented by weekly, two hour seminars/workshops which allow students to work in their subject groups (art, film, theatre, design) on ideas and examples specifically tailored towards these disciplines.

This module combines theoretical and practical approaches to provide an introduction to American and German modern dance pioneers of the twentieth century. It compares their systems of technical training, choreographic methods, signature dance works, and considers the relationship of those systems, methods and works to the social context and philosophical ideas of their time. Assessment is through the choreography and performance of a short trio, and an essay. The module prepares students for more advanced dance and physical theatre projects in later modules.

This practical module provides a comprehensive understanding of compositional strategies and methodologies used in making theatre and performance, whether as a performer or as a director, writer or designer. Particular emphasis will be placed on investigating notions of form and structure and on how performance material can be generated through creative strategies of sourcing, developing and editing material towards a completed work. Assessment is through the production of a performance score and a group practical project.

This module will equip students with a critical understanding of twentieth and twenty-first century performance practices that respond to anthropogenic climate change. Students will explore a range of theories and practices relating to ecocriticism and environmentalism.

Designed to take up and develop Part One’s engagement with pre-1700 texts, this course will take us from the late medieval period’s interest in spiritual and earthly travel to the episodes of power, revolution and restitution that characterised Stuart rule (1603-1688). During this time, English culture saw upheavals in religion that were accompanied by shifts in discourses of (among others) politics, sex, science and education. Late Medieval to Early Modern Literature will examine the literature of change from the late fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, from John Mandeville’s and Margery Kempe’s marvellous journeys through Europe, Northern Africa, Asia and the Holy Land, to the brilliant and edgy theatre of Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, and the writings of revolutionaries such as John Milton and monarchist libertines like Aphra Behn.

Our readings will mainly be focused on topics designed to provide us with ingress into the literature, culture and historical vitality of the period. To this end, the texts are gathered under four headings: ‘Love, Sex and Death’, ‘Court, Country, City’, ‘Power and Politics’ and ‘Heaven and Hell’. We will be reading cross-sections from works by many authors to explore these themes from as many angles as possible. We will consider the continuities across a range of different primary texts, but we will also be keen to observe and analyse differences.

This course surveys formal, generic, historical, cultural, narrative, and theoretical relationships between literature and film across a range of periods, genres, and cultures, paying particular attention to the practice and analysis of literary film adaptation.

This module develops analytical and practical skills in performing texts, particularly in dramaturgy and composition and vocal and physical performance techniques. Taking into account the respective political, social and aesthetic contexts from which the works emerged, it focuses on modern and contemporary European play texts that are marked by their formal experimentations associated with two major theoretical paradigms: The Theatre of the Absurd and Postdramatic Theatre.

The module explores the playwrights’ formal experimentations with time and space; plot, story and narration; character, persona and ‘text bearer’; language and breakdown of language; rhythm and musicality; as well as the relationship between performer and audience.

Assessment is by group practical project and an essay.

This module introduces you to community and applied theatre practices that seek to create social, cultural, or political change. You will have the opportunity to explore key theoretical concepts alongside practical skills in facilitation, appropriate to a variety of contexts. You will study examples of applied theatre practice, with an emphasis on techniques that seek to empower marginalised communities and increase political and social dialogue. The syllabus will cover influential practices from around the globe, taking heed of the diversity of approaches and their applicability to contemporary contexts. Core topics may include theatre in education, theatre for development and disability theatre. Assessment is by group practical work and essay.

This practical module is designed to allow you to work collectively to produce an original performance piece informed by material studied in the second year as a whole. Students are supported by a supervisor who will provide feedback on progress throughout the module.

The years of Queen Victoria’s reign (1837-1901) saw great social, political and cultural change. New technologies and scientific developments altered the ways in which Victorians thought about themselves and their environment, and the literature of the period responded to these changes in all sorts of ways. Examining a wide range of Victorian literature, including novels, short stories, poetry, drama and non-fiction prose, the course is structured around four major themes: ‘Socio-Political Change,’ ‘Realism, Idealism and Fantasy,’ ‘Falls and Losses,’ and ‘Personal Experience and Perspective.’ The aim of the course is to explore and interrogate the complexity of 'Victorian' attitudes within and across these areas.

This module introduces practical approaches in visual and image-based theatre and methods of analysing visual theatre and investigating its key histories and models of practice. The module focuses on key approaches to image-based theatre that are central to understanding contemporary visual performance. Each approach interrogates the work of an existing company, which in turn is related to historically important practice from twentieth-century dramatic and/or postdramatic theatre.

The module will practically explore key skills in lighting, sound, digital technologies and scenography with reference to specific practitioners and companies. Assessment of skills and knowledge acquired will be a by practical group project and an essay.

Drawing on tendencies from both visual art and theatrical fields, contemporary performance has generated multiple approaches to the dynamic relation between text, language and performance. Eschewing the conventional dramaturgical structures of literary theatre, ‘text’ in this parallel history is an unruly, generative force – a writing for performance (and writing as performance) that is by turns highly performative, precise, nonsensical, philosophical and playful.

The module aims to explore a variety of contemporary and historical approaches to writing and performance through both key readings and workshop/seminars as well as practical tasks for you as creative writers and performance makers, establishing a conceptual ground, highlighting and developing strategies for your own work.

In your third year you will study at one of our international partner universities. This will help you to develop your global outlook, expand your professional network, and gain cultural and personal skills. You will choose specialist modules relating to your degree as well as other modules from across the host university.

In 21st Century Theory, we will build upon the general introduction to critical and cultural theory given on ENGL201 by focusing on one specific theme in contemporary theory: biopolitics. To explore biopolitics – or the politics of life itself – we will examine a selection of classic theoretical works by Michel Foucault, Georgio Agamben and others and then read them alongside some key literary and filmic texts from Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go to the Batman Trilogy. This course will seek to address the following questions. What exactly is biopolitics? How have theorists, novelists and film-makers imagined such concepts as sovereign power, bare life, the state of exception and so on? To what extent might it be possible to resist the biopolitical hold over our political imaginary?

In this practical module you will work in groups on an intensive practical project that will lead to public performances. Groups work is supported by the module convener and with a supervisor.

The course will begin with writing that looks back to the First World War and end with writing that anticipates the Second World War. In between the students will explore and interrogate the inter-war ‘moment’ through close attention to a number of other texts. The course will focus on many of the great themes of the period such as exile, unemployment, Englishness, eugenics, militarisation, and political commitment, as well as many of the great cultural motifs of the period such as borders, radios, planes, cars, trains, cameras and telephones. Close attention will also be paid to many of the great intellectual debates of the period such as the nature of history, the role of the State in everyday life, and the place of literary experimentation in time of war. The course will not, though, be limited to what these texts are ‘about’ but will also attend to what these texts ‘do.’ In other words, we shall explore how inter-war writing both reflects the period and indeed participates in the period. The students will, then, be expected to understand the ways in which the texts under consideration exist not only ‘between the acts’ but are themselves acts - acts not only of mourning and warning but also agitation, provocation, resistance, despair, and even (therefore) hope.

In this module we will look at a selection of biblical texts alongside literary works that appropriate, rewrite and subvert them. We will be thinking about the Bible as literature; the reciprocal relationship between the Bible and literature; and what the Bible does to a literary text. By the end of the course you should be more familiar and knowledgeable about the Bible, its genres, ideas and narratives, and be able to appreciate its literary qualities. You will develop skills of exploring the relation between a literary text and the biblical text it invokes: in what ways does awareness of the Bible provoke more profound readings of a literary text? Does rewriting refine or subvert the Bible? Throughout the course we will also have in focus issues related to reading, interpretation and adaptation that will be relevant to your wider studies.

Course Outline: This module will focus upon the motif of ‘the child’ within 20th and 21st century horror fiction and film. Students will expand upon key critical and theoretical skills and apply these skills to popular fiction and film adaptation, using the motif of the child as a focus for this. The module will also encourage students to interrogate texts from a range of theoretical perspectives such as cultural materialism, psychoanalysis, and feminism in order to reveal how and why representations of the child in the horror genre supply an important cultural, psychological, and political point of reference for literary studies.

More specifically, the module aims to explore the cultural significance of the motif of the child in horror fiction and film through analysis of themes such as innocence and evil, psychic powers, child abuse, parenting, technology and grief. We will analyse the process of adaptation from novel to film and examine how issues relating to gender are crucial to the horror genre. The module will develop in students a sophisticated ability to think critically and analytically about how an exploration of popular fiction and film can reveal deep cultural anxieties and fixations at a historical and psychological level.

This module addresses applied performance projects that are co-created in collaboration with community groups. This may include people living within specific geographic areas, but it might also encompass shared identity traits, experiences, or interests. Students will explore a range of practices that facilitate collaboratively-designed theatre as a means of bringing about positive changes within these communities, and their broader social and cultural settings. Through a consideration of contemporary practitioners from a range of global contexts, students will learn techniques to develop effective community-based projects and to ensure equitable participation and accessibility. Practices studied might cover topics such as intergenerational theatre, street theatre, staged readings, puppetry, participatory arts, storytelling, environmental performance and more. Students will engage with the theories and practices of the module through a combination of lectures, seminar discussions and workshops, culminating in a short community performance project.

Students will be assessed by a combination of essay (50%) and group practical project (50%).

The module has two aims. Firstly, it aims to explore methods of improvising or choreographing movement from the practice and study of drawing, and, reciprocally, approaches to drawing that emerge from the experience of movement and the analysis of motion. This is assessed through either a staff-supervised, student-led group choreographic project with documentation or, alternatively, a portfolio of drawings presented at the end of the module. Secondly, the module examines twentieth and twenty-first century works in which choreographers have collaborated with visual artists. This part of the module is assessed through an essay. Teaching is through lecture, seminar and practical compositional exercises in movement and drawing.

This module combines theoretical and practical approaches to explore important European writers, directors and companies by studying their innovative dramaturgies, scenographies, uses of ‘no longer dramatic’ text, and new acting/performing styles. These aesthetic forms are also discussed in relation to the performances’ thematic and political concerns with developments such as globalization and late capitalism, increasing mediatisation, (anti-)immigration, terrorism and the war on terror and ecological concerns, as well as with the enduring memories of the Second World War and a European history of colonialism. Teaching is through lecture, seminar and practical workshop and assessment is by practical presentation and by seen examination.

ENGL 308 Contemporary Literatures focuses on different kinds of (postmodern, postcolonial/world, Gothic, post-9/11, feminist/queer, experimental) contemporary literature. The course consolidates student knowledge of ways in which writers redress notions of ‘English literature’, including ways in which they both respond to and stimulate critical theory. Beginning in the 1950s, we consider the explosion of new literatures from the decolonising/newly postcolonial world and the rise of new literary forms in the post-war period. The course also emphasises work from the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries, foregrounding, at all stages, English literature in its international dimensions: we read texts from Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean and Australasia, as well as from multicultural and devolved Britain. Recurrent themes include borders, margins, haunting, apocalypse, rewriting, migration and metamorphosis; these terms also reflect formal qualities of the texts studied (i.e. aspects of genre, structure and style). The course considers inter-generic forms (e.g. the graphic novel) as well as a range of more standard literary genres (novels; short stories; poetry), highlighting literary experimentation and critically reflecting on notions of ‘the contemporary’.

The twenty-first century has seen the emergence of Middle Eastern literature in English and translation as one of the most exciting new areas of world literature. The region has experienced, so far this century, the ‘war on terror’, revolutions and wintery aftermaths, civil wars, sectarian violence, the rise and fall of ‘Islamic State’, and an ongoing refugee crisis. On this course, we will explore some of the shapes and styles of contemporary Middle Eastern literature, the concerns and aspirations that drive it, and its growing international visibility. We will study novels, short stories, and new genres from the region, in English and in translation. No prior knowledge is needed.

This module provides an opportunity for students to develop an understanding of the ways in which creative practitioners produce and deliver their work. It will provide an overview of the challenges faced by freelance practitioners, producers and small cultural companies within the creative industries. You will also develop a working understanding of the key management and enterprise skills involved in delivering creative projects. Working in groups you will put your learning into practice through the delivery of your own live creative arts project. This will enable you to understand the skills, knowledge, attributes and behaviours relevant for employment in the arts and creative industries.

This module is run by the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing, with the support of the FASS Engagement team and central Careers. It aims to enhance students’ employability by providing an assessed work placement opportunity as an option on the curriculum. It will also encourage students actively to think about the transferability of skills gained through the study of English and/or Creative Writing. The Department, via the FASS Engagement team, will set up a number of work placements in the (broadly defined) culture, heritage and creative sectors: with, for example, publishers, museums, newspapers, heritage sites, and arts venues. Students may alternatively source their own work placements, subject to prior discussion with the FASS Placements provider. Information on how to source a placement will be circulated to all enrolled students during summer.

Students must be prepared to pay their own transport/accommodation costs, though a small Departmental contribution toward travel can be applied for. It is expected that placements will be either close to Lancaster University or to the student’s home; many placements occur remotely. Students typically work for 30-40 hours with their host organization (not all of which will necessarily be on-site) in the Lent term. They maintain contact with the convenor and FAS placements team throughout the placement period. Placement providers are required to complete risk assessment and health and safety forms and to ensure an induction process. Both students and placement providers are required to sign a Learning Agreement.

Please note that you cannot take both this module and ENGL 376 Schools Volunteering.

Please also note that the maximum number of students on this course is fixed, and that in fairness to students, and in dialogue with the FASS Placements Officer, we have chosen to set up a selection process. If you choose this course, you will be sent an online form to complete as an application. The criteria will be enthusiasm, commitment, and having aspirations which can be realistically met on this module. You do not have to have prior placement experience, but it is fine if you do. Places will be allocated by the FASS Placements Officer, who sources the placements, and by the Course Convenor. If more students successfully pass the application stage than there are places, then we will use a random selection process as a final stage. If you are unsuccessful in obtaining one of the places on this module, you will need to choose from the remaining pool of options at that time; this may mean having a reduced pool of choice, so there is of necessity a degree of risk with selecting this module option. However, if any student is unsuccessful in obtaining a place on the course will still be provided a handbook that is helpful for sourcing any placements of their own in the future.

This core module is directed towards completion of an independent research project on a topic of your choice, presented in the form of a dissertation. The course is taught through lectures focused on research skills and one-to-one supervision. Students of Film can choose to make a short film as part of their project, and students of Design are encouraged to do a practical design project.

This unit, taken in the final year, is compulsory for all English Literature Single Honours students, and optional for combined honours students. The unit is intended to give students the opportunity to pursue a topic of their choice in intensive detail, developing research skills in a programme of directed independent study. Students will complete a dissertation of 9600-10,000 words (excluding notes and bibliography), which must be word-processed, properly annotated, and have a substantial and appropriate bibliography. The final assessment will take into account presentation as well as content.

The introductory lecture in the second year advises students on their choice of dissertation topic. Proposals are submitted to the Undergraduate Office on Friday, Week 29, Term 3 of the Second Year. The proposal must be submitted in the form outlined in the lecture and ENGL 301 Handbook, and be presented in conformity to the Departmental Style Sheet. We assign students to supervisors on the basis of their proposals.

You are broadly free to write on any literary or theoretical/critical topic, so long as we feel that it is appropriate, the library has adequate resources, you have had appropriate training to tackle the material, and we can supervise it. The dissertation should be an opportunity to build on the skills you have acquired in your second year with the Department, and we expect you to pursue your research with proper regard to modern critical methods and cultural debates. You may choose a topic arising out of one of the courses taught on our programmes, or you may choose to do something entirely different. The material you use in your dissertation must not duplicate material for which you will be assessed in other courses.

The dissertation represents a whole unit’s work, and will require substantial reading, planning and drafting. It is fundamentally your project and responsibility. The supervisor’s role involves guidance, not the detailed and regular teaching you get on other courses, but there will be other forms of support provided by the course. We hope you will see this as an exciting opportunity to construct your own research project and work it through to a successful conclusion. All students will have four meetings with their supervisors. The first of these will be a group seminar (of 45 minutes) and the remaining three will be individual meetings (of 45 minutes). The course also has two lectures (1 per term) and four research skills seminars throughout the year (2 per term).

From Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow (2003-) to Taron Egerton’s Robin Hood (2010), notions of outlawry haunt twenty-first century popular culture and recent academic debate (see Phillips (ed.) 2005 and Jowitt, 2010). A fascination with renegade figures is also found in the early modern period. Developing first and second-year work on critical and theoretical approaches to literature, the course examines representations of Robin Hood (weeks 2-5) and pirates (weeks 7-10) in a range of generically distinct sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts.

This module will give students the opportunity to study all the major works of one of the most celebrated novelists in English literary history. It will combine close attention to the stylistic textures and narrative strategies of Jane Austen’s fiction with broader consideration of key themes and preoccupations such as friendship, desire, matchmaking, snobbery, illness, resistance, transgression and secrecy.

Course Aims and Objectives

Film historians consider 1939 to be ‘the greatest year in the history of Hollywood’: in that year, 365 films were released and 80 million tickets sold. This module considers how literature and film interact and conflict in that year to construct mythologies of the American past and present in the context of the Great Depression and on the eve of the Second World War. The module also considers the context of Hollywood, the functions of motion picture palaces, American film’s relationship to British literature, and more.

Friedrich Nietzsche was far from alone in suggesting that God had died by the end of the nineteenth century, but the literature of the fin de siècle (c. 1880-1914) paints a very different picture from the one offered by those who suggest that religion simply disappeared. A number of prominent writers in the period converted to Catholicism; others explored the permeable boundaries between orthodox belief and esoteric spirituality. Those who turned to literature to think about religion did so in a wide variety of ways: experimenting with form, narrating religious experience, exploring the relationship between spirit and matter, thinking about religious practice in ways both conventional and bizarre, and revealing the plurality of belief that Charles Taylor sees as a key feature of our secular age. Looking to a range of writers from the period, this module will explore the capacity of literature to challenge and deepen our understanding of religion.

Is it possible to ‘read’ a painting? Can an artist interpret a poem in paint? This module addresses the complex relationship between literature and the visual arts, tracing key debates in aesthetic theory from Romanticism to the twenty-first century. Literature and the Visual Arts will begin with an introduction to key critical terms and an examination of the painting-inspired poetry of, for example, John Keats and W. H. Auden. Subsequent seminars will explore the work of figures such as William Blake, John Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites who blur the distinction between literature and art; the revival of the Pop Art tradition and postmodern narrative practices; the advent of photography; and, finally, the fusion of word and image in graphic novels including texts such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. The module will draw on the unique resources of the University’s Ruskin Library and rare book archive.

At a time when life was viewed as a constant struggle between good and evil within the human soul, how was the inner self conceived? Furthermore, when public life was a type of performance in itself, how did people publicly enact their identities? And how did those private and public identities function in such a rigidly hierarchical society? With an emphasis on close critical readings, this course aims to explore medieval identities by looking at manifestations of self in literature and drama; it will examine and challenge distinctions between public and private, questioning the concept of subjectivity in this period, and consider moments of personal crisis. As well as looking at the role of performance in everyday life and organised drama, we will study the creation of narrative voices and personas in literary texts, and interrogate the interrelationship of text, ‘voice’ and performance. The course also sets aside seminar time to develop close reading skills and build familiarity with Middle English language.

This course will trace the evolution of English (including American) literature in a period of social and political change stretching from the Boer War to the Cold War, from the Edwardian era to the Space Age. It will explore the dynamics of literary history, focusing on the strain of radical experimentation that characterizes so much twentieth-century writing. We will examine the ways in which modernist writers from Eliot to Woolf renewed and re-shaped the language of literature; we shall consider how some representative post-modernist writers (Beckett and Pynchon) addressed the problem of how to follow their formidable literary predecessors. The first term’s work considers writers working in, and sometimes against, the British context (including New Zealand and Ireland); the second term considers those working in, and sometimes against, the American context. Given the transnational nature of Modernism, this in turn begs the question of whether primary allegiance was owed to nation, or to art.

Using a range of texts and genres from 1790s to the 1820s this module will consider the importance of the physical human body, in health and sickness. Examining the historical context in which these texts were written, we will look at such topics as illness, death, doctors, medical treatments, recreational drug use, pregnancy, disability, physical strength, sexuality, sensuality, health, race, gender, physiognomy and phrenology. How did Romantic poets and prose writers imagine the body? What did they think of the distinction between the mind and body or between the body and soul? How was the body understood medically? How are people made ‘monsters’ in the period and for what political purpose? The module will explore how bodies are not to be thought of as neutral or ahistorical but instead as historically-contingent sites of dismodule.

This module combines theoretical and practical approaches to explore new scenographic approaches to contemporary performance. The module is structured to introduce you to the theories and histories of scenography and then progresses to locate scenography through the theatre, through technology and finally in relation to site. The module is focused around four cutting edge contemporary theatre companies (previous examples include The Wooster Group, Need Company, Imitating the Dog) used as paradigms to introduce you to the ways in which text, the body, light, visual/spatial organization, technology and choreography are used as scenographic tools to create specific and unique instances of contemporary performance. Teaching is through lecture, seminar and practical workshop and assessment is by practical workshop and seen exam.

How are acts of desire, murder, fake and ‘real’ deaths represented on stage in early modern drama and how are these experiences gendered? The module will explore the construction and deconstruction of death, desire and genders by focusing on performance. The performativity of gender, on stage and beyond, was materialised in the theatres of early modern England where boys played female roles, representing female desire, and often same-sex desire, at the same time. Modern films and productions of early modern plays create similar (and different) gender-effects. We will study texts by Marlowe, Middleton, Heywood, Webster, Wroth using a mixture of discussion, analysis of films / productions and short practical explorations (such as getting the text ‘on its feet’). The module will ask when and how can death be comic in performance? Does outlawed desire always lead to tragedy? How did drama help to shape human experiences of desire and violence? No previous experience of (or expertise in) acting is necessary but you will be required to think in terms of performance because the module will culminate in a series of short presentations and performances by the group.

It’s an illuminating fact that the very phrase ‘climate change’ was first deployed by colonising thinkers who wanted to transform local environments to serve their purposes. Today, it is clearer than ever that the catastrophic effects of global climate change will be most keenly felt by the global poor, especially in colonised or postcolonial spaces. This module explores how postcolonial writing from a variety of locations grapples with environmental change, crisis and collapse, especially the looming spectres of the so-called ‘Anthropocene’ (a buzzword in contemporary theory that we’ll interrogate in our discussions). Our aim throughout will be to explore how postcolonial literature and film can enlarge or transform our environmental imaginaries, not only critiquing or mourning environmental destruction but also hatching alternatives to the destructive ontologies that have shaped our present. We’ll read established and emerging voices from Africa, the Caribbean, and elsewhere, and these primary readings will be supported by readings in postcolonial and environmental theory. Students taking this module will extend their knowledge of postcolonial and environmental literatures and participate in the debates informing the vibrant interdisciplinary field of the Environmental Humanities.

‘[T]he Gothic’, as Nick Groom argues, ‘was not simply a reaction to the Enlightenment, and the rise of the Gothic novel is part of a longer history’ (Groom, 2012, p.xiv). In coining the term Premodern Gothic, this innovative half-unit considers some of the ways in which a range of generically diverse texts produced in England between c.1450 and 1600 engage with Gothic tropes and sensibilities - e.g. ghosts, vampires, castles, darkness, magic, terror and wonder - before ‘the rise of the Gothic novel’.

Course Aims and Objectives: This module will be run as a partnership between the Department of English and Creative Writing and the Schools Outreach office. It will help to enhance students’ employability and will be based on the University’s Schools’ Partnership Scheme, which normally supports Lancaster students on 10-week placements in local schools.

The module normally involves classroom observation and assistance, teacher assistance, and the opportunity to design and develop a teaching-related ‘special project’ to be conducted with a designated group of students or the class as a whole. This enables students to develop confidence in communicating their subject, as well as an increased awareness of the roles of schools and universities in educational processes and structures. As well as providing students with practical and communication experience, this module is likely to help with career progression, in particular (though not exclusively) for those interested in pursuing a career in teaching.

Course Outline:

This course will trace the development of science fiction (SF) in literature and film, providing an insight into the conventions of the genre and, in particular, how the key themes of the science fiction genre have been successfully adapted for the screen. Texts have been chosen from a range of historical periods to enable a consideration of the cultural and historical contexts in which key science fiction texts were produced, and how this effects their development. The course will analyse in detail the formal and generic characteristics of the science fiction novel and short story, and will provide an introduction to the visual aspects of the science fiction film. The course will be organised through a thematic concentration on the themes of time and space travel. It will encompass narratives of time travel, evolution, temporal dislocation and also stories that formally incorporate atemporality. It will consider journeys, encounters, species and ontologies. It will offer discussions about questions of human subjectivity, gender, race, transcendence, love and loss. The module will also constitute an ongoing investigation of the relationship between science fiction film and ‘literary’ SF texts, considering both how the genre is represented through the cinematic form and what happens in terms of narrative structure, plot and characterisation when presented in an audiovisual format.

Course Outline:

Ben Jonson claimed of Shakespeare ‘he was not of an age but for all time.’ This course examines Shakespearean drama and poetry in its own time: as a platform in which early modern debates about agency and government, family, national identity, were put into play, and in relation to how we perceive these issues now. The stage was and is a place in which questions of gender, class, race, gain immediacy through the bodies and voices of actors. By examining texts from across Shakespeare’s career, we will explore their power to shape thoughts and feelings in their own age and in ours. We will consider Shakespeare’s manipulation of genre (poetry, comedy, history, tragedy and romance) and the ways the texts make active use of language (verse, prose, rhyme, rhythm) and theatrical languages (costume, stage positions) to generate meaning. The course will consider how, in the past and in the present, Shakespeare’s texts exploit the emotional and political possibilities of poetry and drama

This course 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; empire, slavery, and the East; transgressive love; gender roles; and the Gothic. This course will provide an opportunity to study in detail these writers’ works and to consider them within their historical, cultural and intellectual contexts.

Course Outline:

This course explores twentieth and twenty-first century writing about the city that uses Gothic generic conventions and modalities. Cities are ostensibly places of shelter and refuge, but these sites have also always been ambiguous. Gothic is characterised by a concern with vulnerable bodies within confining environments, subjected to threatening forces both visible and intangible. The built environments of Gothic are often plastic and mutable, the setting an animate, changeable, and malevolent force. We will explore the ‘architectural uncanny’ and the ‘urban sublime’, and consider how traditional elements of Gothic fiction are pressed to new ends in response to changing sensory, social and political contexts of urban space and place. We will ask how these texts imagine sensory geographies of the city, how they unsettle the binary between urban and rural, how they represent assemblages of the human and non-human, posthuman biotechnological transformations of the body, and concerns over environmental catastrophe, structural inequality, histories of trauma and gendered dimensions of urban experience. We will work with a range of critical approaches to urban gothic, drawing from literary criticism, Gothic studies, cultural geography and sociology of urban space. While most sources will be textual, these will be complemented with reference to screen media, fine art, graphic novel and UrbEx photography.

In the Victorian period, the decaying castles, corrupt priests and ancestral curses that were so prominent in the first phase of the Gothic novel gave way to an increased emphasis on spectral and monstrous others: ghosts, witches, werewolves, vampires, mummies and other creatures of the night. The module will explore these phenomena in their historical, cultural and literary contexts, with particular focus on emerging discourses of gender, sexuality, colonialism and class. The module will pay special attention to visual aspects of the Gothic, examining book illustration, painting and photography from the period and their relationship with Gothic texts. Students will be asked to consider the relationship between newly emergent forms of modernity (from medical discourses to photography) and the preoccupation with history and the past that is a generic feature of the Gothic. Texts will comprise a selection of novels and short fiction, with additional images and extracts from contextual works provided online and in class.

Course Outline:

The module is centred upon three new genres which emerge in the mid-late Victorian period: Detective Fiction; The Adventure Story; Children’s Fiction. Why do these new forms appear when they do? What determines them? We will spend three weeks on each focussing on key texts and writers within the emerging genre and looking at how certain conventions, principles and core concerns develop for new genres as well as considering issues of literary status and canonicity. The course covers quite a lot of ground quite rapidly so each new block is introduced by a lecture providing a full context for analysis of the genre.

The course will be centred upon one key text each week but we will be making connections across and between texts and genres as well. (Is Treasure Island an adventure story or a work of children’s fiction?) Within each session we will explore texts in terms of overlapping themes within a genre and the issues they raise for how we interpret the subject (Colonialism/ Imperialism/ Gender/Education) as well as thinking about issues of narrative structure and voice and the involvement of the reader.

The module will also encourage students to consider the differences made by different forms of representation (e.g. serialisation for adventure stories; illustrations alongside the story for Holmes; initial dramatic representation of Peter Pan). It will be taught by an initial short presentation each week and then workshop type activities. Students may also be expected to contribute informal presentations.

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf famously asks, ‘what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister?’ and goes on to explore the obstacles to literary success that she might have encountered. This module follows Woolf’s lead by seeking to redress the historical marginalisation of women writers in the English literary canon through an exploration of how women have come to writing at different historical moments, what they have chosen to write, and how. A selection of texts from the 17th century through to the 21st, encompassing autobiographical forms, the novel, poetry and drama, are used to examine relationships between gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity and literary production, and to explore continuities, connections and disparities between representations of female experience. The module is historical in terms of both the range of primary texts it addresses, and in the history of feminist theoretical and critical approaches it provides. It is structured generically, in order to facilitate formal analysis of the texts under consideration.