English Literature 1500-1900 – (M.A.)

The programme comprises 100 credits of compulsory modules and 20 credits of optional modules. You will also complete a 15,000-18,000 word dissertation (60 credits) on a subject of your choice emerging from the programme.

Compulsory modules include two complementary modules that provide the conceptual framework to the programme: reading the past - 1 and 2 (40 credits in total). The first of these engages with texts that comment on their own historical moment by themselves reading the past (looking at fields such as eighteenth-century appropriations of Shakespeare, Victorian medievalism, and reworkings of Classical and Biblical texts); the second invites readings that go against the grain of periodization, opening up the ways in which we interpret literary history by interrogating texts produced in culturally transitional decades such as the 1660s, 1790s and the 1890s.

Another compulsory module - manuscript, print, digital (10 credits) will introduce you to the principles and practice of manuscript study, printed book history and textual editing, giving you the opportunity to work with new digital technologies.
Authors typically studied include Sidney, Shakespeare, Milton, Behn, Blake, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Austen, Gaskell, Rossetti and Wilde. A reading form module (10 credits) is also taken which will enable you to develop advanced skills in critically evaluating the formal aspects of literary texts.

Compulsory modules in research methods (40 credits) combine theory and practice, providing essential postgraduate research skills while developing your ability to disseminate your research through oral and written presentation.

The team-taught optional modules (20 credits), which closely reflect the specific research interests of staff teaching on the MA, offer a more sustained, specialised study of literary and cultural texts in terms of genres, fields or periods. They also maintain a balance between engaging with familiar canonical texts, and works that have challenged and expanded the canon. Modules typically include: cultures of collecting; place and pilgrimage, republicanism and memory; and literary lifecycles - birth to death in children’s literature.

The Special Collections of the University’s Robinson Library and other major archives in the region provide an exciting resource to support the teaching on the programme.