Reflect on what it means to do criticism in a post-theoretical age. This module asks what happens to literary interpretation after all its many theoretical upheavals – from Marxism and feminism to postcolonialism and queer theory. Is it time to get back to the close reading of literature? Is there still room for pleasure, appreciation and creativity in the practice of criticism? We might question whether literature, in the traditional sense, even exists anymore.

You will pose these questions in relation to a range of traditional and non-traditional texts.

Explore literary criticism as it is now and what it may yet become. You will have the opportunity to consider a whole range of major theoretical and philosophical concepts, such as:

• The body
• Race
• Gender
• Violence
• Ecology
• God
• Time
• Death
• War
• Self
• The animal

You will study a range of fascinating modern thinkers, ranging from Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, through to more recent figures such as Simone Weil, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Fred Moten, Cornel West and Sara Ahmed.

Advance your performance-making skills in this year-long module. Through project-based explorations of how theatre can inspire audiences and the wider society, you will learn to think beyond the stage.

To begin this module, you will undertake skills-based workshops on aspects of socially engaged theatre making, resulting in a group practical ‘pitch’ for a proposed performance project. As you progress, you will be allocated to a project group based on shared interests, working together to engage with specific demographic groups in the local area and produce a piece of theatre that showcases the viewpoints of an under-represented community.

Collaborating to devise an original performance in a style and genre of your choosing, you could create a staged theatre production or an alternative form of performance such as site-specific theatre, audio performance or an applied theatre workshop.

What we call ‘American Literature’ and how we define America and ‘the American experience’ depends on who is writing and to whom. In this module you will encounter many different voices, many conflicting and contrasting views, a diversity of complex experience and a great range of writing in form and style.

You will explore such questions as: What role do different literary forms play in narrating the self? How does American writing seek to establish a new way of looking at the world? And how and why does literature help shape forms of protest and new critiques of modernity?

Exploring the adaption of literature to film and other media, this module focuses on the adaptation of literary texts to such forms as theatre, graphic novel, film, television, song, and game.

You will be invited to reflect on adaptation as a powerful and complex cultural process, one that interprets literature as well as adapts it.

Throughout the module you will normally complete either a critical essay on adaptation OR a creative project (plus short essay) that enables you to produce your own work of adaptation. This may take many forms -- written, (audio) visual, musical, digital, or three-dimensional and/or take the form of a game, production or performance, etc.

Explore a wide range of literature and drama from the medieval and early modern periods. The module situates medieval and early modern literature in its relevant historical and cultural contexts.

You will develop skills in the close reading of medieval and early modern texts.

Authors studied may include Chaucer, the Gawain poet, Margery Kempe, Mary Wroth, Sir Philip Sidney and Christopher Marlowe.

Explore postcolonial literature across a wide historical span. Your study will move from the explosion of new national literatures in the era of decolonisation through to contemporary writing that interrogates the legacies of racism and imperialism in our globalised world.

You’ll read exciting major writers who defined the emergence of African, South Asian and Caribbean literature in English in the middle of the twentieth century. You’ll also encounter today’s new voices, grappling with the afterlives of empire.

Cutting through all our thinking will be the question of how literature serves, in Ngugi wa Thiongo’s phrase, as a means of 'decolonising the mind'.

Explore how ideas can be developed into real-world projects with lasting value. Through hands-on collaboration and problem-solving, you will develop innovative projects, learn how to bring ideas to life and explore ways to sustain them.

Whether you are working in a team or individually, you will be encouraged to experiment with different approaches to making a difference in artistic, cultural, social and community spaces.

Take the opportunity to explore a specific area of theatre practice from both practical and theoretical perspectives as you dive into this exciting module.

In part 2 of this module, you will select one of two specialist topics to study. Topics will vary each year; however, these might be:

• Text-based acting
• Playwriting
• Applied theatre
• Underrepresented theatre histories
• Political theatre

Beginning with a series of practical workshops and the development of small group performance projects, you will go on to share your practical work with other groups and critically reflect on your projects in theoretically informed lectures and seminar discussions.

By the end of this module (part 1 and part 2) you will have studied two specialist topics across the year.

The years of Queen Victoria’s reign (1837-1901) saw great social, political and cultural transformation. Changing social conditions, extraordinary scientific breakthroughs and the emergence of new technologies all altered the ways in which Victorians thought about themselves and their environment. The literature of the period responded resourcefully to the turbulent circumstances from which it emerged.

In this module, you will examine a wide range of Victorian writing, including novels, short fiction, poetry, drama and non-fictional prose and will explore and interrogate all the complexities of the Victorian age.

In your third year you will study at one of our international partner universities. This will help you to expand your global outlook and professional network, as well as developing your cultural and personal skills. It is also an opportunity to gain a different perspective on your subject through studying it in another country.

You will choose specialist modules relating to your degree and potentially modules from other subjects offered by the host university that are specific to that university and country.

The availability of places at overseas partners varies each year. In previous years destinations for students in the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences have included Australia, USA, Canada, Europe and Asia.

Develop a fully realised theatrical production in a style and genre of your choice, as your reach the pinnacle of your practical theatre making studies.

Guided by staff with professional theatre-making skills, your work will be supported by advanced skills-based workshops in the areas of theatre you choose to pursue (e.g., acting, directing, scenography, etc). Through engaging in exploratory studio-based work, you will collaborate in groups to develop a coherent and theatrically compelling production concept, with a staff mentor who will provide feedback and guidance on a weekly basis.

Supported by professional technicians and staff, you will undertake independent project development and rehearsal sessions in our dedicated studio spaces, as you produce a show to be performed as part of the end-of-year degree festival.

Study the work of four giants of nineteenth-century British fiction: Jane Austen, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë and Emily Brontë.

Focusing on questions of class, gender, power, environment and artistic technique, you will explore the tensions between Austen and the Brontes (south vs north, Regency vs Victorian, realism vs Gothic) and trace the imaginative continuities between them.

What is the contemporary? When did the present cultural moment start and how might it end. How do writers respond to the challenge, excitement, pressure and novelty of the ‘now’? And how is imaginative writing faring in the digital age?

You will consider these questions in relation to the work of such major authors as Ali Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Colson Whitehead

The final-year Dissertation is your opportunity to devise, research and explore a topic of your own choice through a programme of directed independent study. You will be helped to begin your thinking at the end of your second year and then, through your final year, you will develop your research, thinking and writing, as you build toward a substantial, self-directed project.

Almost anything is possible; for example, you could choose to explore famous literary names or themes, or research obscure figures and unusual topics. You might draw on the University Library’s special collections, or venture way beyond Lancaster to develop your research. Perhaps you will be inspired by the medievalism of historic Lancaster or the Romanticism of nearby Lake District or be drawn to the far textual shores of the digital world.

You can focus your work towards a professional career or build towards postgraduate study at master’s level. Finally, you can opt to write in classic literary critical styles or push the boundaries of literary study in new and startling ways.

Both the Gothic and science fiction emerged in response to the 18th century ‘age of reason’ and the Western world’s investment in logic and progress. The Gothic explores the terrors of the past and its return while science fiction imagines alternative futures; in doing so, both voice the concerns of the present.

You will study both classic literary texts and contemporary film and other media. Exploring what the Gothic and science fiction each do, rather than what they each are, you will consider how these genres address some of the most pressing questions facing contemporary Western culture.

Examining a wide range of texts and authors from early periods to the age of the climate crisis, this module will explore the many and various ways in which the non-human world is celebrated, championed and exploited by the literary imagination.

You will explore questions such as:

• What do we mean by the ‘the environment’?
• What experiences, meanings and values do we take from, or discover in our surroundings?
• How have writers characterised the environment and in what ways might the literary imagination be significant for contemporary environmental concerns?

The early 20th century explosion of literary experimentation known as Modernism was a movement informed by the catastrophe of the First World War, the convulsion that was the Russian Revolution and a host of dramatic developments in art, music, cinema, philosophy, theology, politics and science.

Alongside reading the literature of the time you will also consider various related artistic movements such as Dadaism, Surrealism and Vorticism. Authors covered typically include T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and W. B. Yeats.

Study key texts and contexts from a short but remarkably intense period of literary history. Encompassing the work of writers such as Wordsworth, Blake, Keats and Shelley, you will explore the role of nature, the imagination and the sublime. You will also consider the emergence of the Gothic tradition and examine the interactions between literary and politics in a turbulent era of revolution and change.

Ben Jonson claimed of Shakespeare ‘he was not of an age but for all time.’ This module, however, examines Shakespearean drama and poetry in its own time and as a platform in which early modern debates about agency and government, family and national identity, were put into play. The stage was and is a place in which questions of gender, class and race, gain immediacy through the bodies and voices of actors.

By examining texts from across Shakespeare’s career, you will explore their power to shape thoughts and feelings in both their own age and in ours. You will consider how, in the past and in the present, Shakespeare’s texts exploit the emotional and political possibilities of poetry and drama.

The assessment of this module normally concludes with either an essay OR a creative engagement (e.g. reading, performance, artwork) plus critical reflection.

What is critical theory? Why is it one of the most controversial areas of contemporary culture today? And to what extent do theoretical ideas about power, race, gender and identity change the way we think about the world?

On this module you will explore a range of classic and contemporary themes, trends and topics in critical theory from the 1960s to the present. You’ll take a deep dive into key thinkers like Foucault, Deleuze and Agamben and key concepts like biopolitics, globalisation and animal studies.