English BA (Hons)

Core Modules:

Literary Practices: Writing, Editing, Publishing

Working collaboratively in project teams, you will write, edit, and publish a special issue of NTU’s Open Access English student journal, Literary Cultures, and develop and publicise events including conferences, journal launch events, and author events to a public audience. Operating like a workplace, on this work-like experience module you will have the opportunity to pursue a professional role (such as Editor in Chief, Marketing Manager, or Conference Special Guest Host). Industry experts will support you with advice on careers in publishing, editing, marketing, events management, and publishing-adjacent work, such as developing book launches and author events.

Rebel Literatures

Inspired by Nottingham’s status as a UNESCO City of Literature renowned for its ‘rebel writers’ (including D.H. Lawrence, Allan Sillitoe and Panya Banjoko), this second-year core module explores the many ways in which a spirit of rebellion has animated literary creativity over the past 150 years. From the fights for educational rights advanced by the bold New Woman authors of the late C19th to the explosions of literary form performed by Modernist writers, and from the countercultural voices of writers speaking up from the margins in the 1980s and 90s to the voices of early C21st activist poets, you will explore how ‘rebel writers’ - including Nottingham's own -  have reshaped the course of literary and cultural history leading up to the present day. The module includes the opportunity to visit some of the rich collections of radical literature held in archives across Nottingham.

Digital Story Telling

This 20 credit module will enable you to become confident in devising and presenting your own material online through hypertext, audio and visual means. Through weekly workshops you will learn the techniques of multi-layered online publication and the challenges to produce a ‘digital story’.

This module aims to provide you with opportunities to explore how digital technologies can be used within your creative practice and act as a digital portfolio to show future employers. Through analysing case studies, digital platforms, and your own work, you will be able to critically reflect on the most appropriate medium for your creative practice.

Optional modules typically include:

Pathway 1: Extended work-like experience

Get the experience you need for after you graduate, and really understand how the things you study translate into the world of work with a work placement. Your highly experienced Employability Team will help you find a placement to suit your career goals from our huge network of companies, charities, institutions, and beyond.

Pathway 2: An international exchange

Travel the world, meet new friends, and have experiences you will remember for the rest of your life.

Our flexible curriculum has been designed to allow some amazing opportunities for you. Your second year of study is divided into two semesters, giving you the opportunity to take part in an international exchange. You could study with one of international exchange partners in Australia, Europe, USA, Canada, Thailand and many, many more.

Our dedicated team will support you in finding and arranging a suitable exchange. And don't worry about the cost, they will help you apply for any grants or loans you may need, as no one should miss out on the chance to broaden their horizons.

Pathway 3: Taught pathway choosing three optional modules from:

Imagining the Sustainable World

We live in an era of significant challenges to the wellbeing of the planet and its inhabitants – from global warming, water pollution and energy shortages, to poverty, gender inequality and conflict. In this moment of crisis, this module will examine how writing from a range of eras and genres might offer insights, warnings, possibilities, sources of hope, and solutions to contemporary problems.

Women's Writing and the Literary Marketplace

On this module you will read a variety of literary works by British women writers of the 1920s and 1930s, a period of significant historical changes affecting the lives of women including the passage of the Equal Franchise Act (1928) which for the first time gave women the vote on the same terms as men. With an emphasis on reading literature in relation to its historical context the module investigates a range of topics including: education and professions for women; romance, marriage and motherhood; the home and domesticity; queer sexuality and the single woman; class inequality, and interwar anti-fascist and anti-racist movements.

Your understanding of these topics will be enriched through guided exploration of a new digital resource containing magazines and periodicals published during the interwar period, from fashion and domestic magazines to leading literary magazines such as The Strand. The module is also centrally concerned with the ways in which the work of women writers has been historically marginalised through the processes of canon formation, raising questions about the ways in which gender continues to operate within the literary marketplace today, and about how we measure literary value.

Shakespeare and Co: the Early Modern Drama

An introduction to the literature of the early modern period.  It allows you to develop an understanding of the cultural interactions between literature  and drama and the other cultural forms of a period marked by rapid social change and uncertainty.  Topics covered will include colonialism, religious difference, sex and gender, nation and ethnicity, selfhood.

Ethnicity and Belonging in American Writing

Racial Identity and ethnic diversity have been central to the American experience since the nation’s founding. In this module you will examine literary interactions between people of different ethnic backgrounds and see how writers use ethnicity as a tool of resistance.

Bodies and Minds: Literature, Medicine and Psychoanalysis

Consider the ways that literature enriches our understanding of health and illness by exploring historical narratives about bodies, minds, psychoanalysis and medicine in a global context.

Contemporary Working-Class Writing

What characterises ‘working-class writing’? How has the working class in Britain been represented in literature since 1950? Is there still a class structure in Britain and have circumstances been changing for the better? Unfolding chronologically, the set texts on this module consider a variety of forms including novels, plays, short stories, poetry and non-fiction to develop an informed understanding of the intersections between social class and gender, sexuality, ethnicity and place. The module explores aspects of the following: concepts of ‘Britishness’, culture clash and class structures, social (im)mobility, poverty, home and family, immigration, economic depression, strikes, regional writing (including dialect), intimacy and leisure and radical print and publishing culture. Students gain an understanding of modern and contemporary social and cultural history and heritage and develop the ability to critically analyse topical debates about class in Britain.

Romantic Revolutions

This module explores Romantic literature from 1780-1840, one of the most dynamic periods in British history. The era of the French revolution and Napoleonic wars, this was also a period of great social change and development in Britain. You will have the opportunity to study poetry, fiction, and other forms of writing from this era, exploring work by well-known writers such as Wordsworth and Shelley, as well as women’s writing, working-class writing and regional writing. The module will help you to develop your research skills and to engage in creative project ideas focusing on Romantic era writing and thought. The module will explore how far revolutionary political and social change is reflected in the experimental themes and forms of Romantic writing, as well as considering the role of literature in encouraging activism and social change, and its continued relevance today.

Black Writing in Britain

You will become familiar with many black writers writing in or about Britain from the 1950s until the present day, reading novels, essays, poetry, short stories, and plays. We will discuss the scope and function of the academic field named Black Writing in Britain or Black British Writing, and consider the limitations and opportunities presented by the idea of a Black British literary canon or tradition, by examining the texts in the contexts of consciousness, resistance, and activism, publishing and the literary marketplace, black identity, diaspora and migration, and ideas of national identity. The module encourages debate over the impact of political, social, historical, and cultural contexts on literary texts, and the impact of literary texts on political, social, historical, and cultural contexts.

Writing Works: Experiments with Genre

Develop independent learning strategies in relation to researching and drafting. Learn how to apply your editing and creative skills to commercial work, developing contacts and making use of links to local media.

Working with Scripts

Develop your scriptwriting skills, whether writing for screen, stage, or radio/podcast. Learn about the working environment in which scripts are commissioned, written and produced, and  develop hands-on skills and experience.

Writing Refugees: The Politics of Representation

Core Modules

English Major Project

You have the choice of writing a Critical Dissertation, a Creative Writing Dissertation, or Staff-Student Research Project Pathway:

The Dissertation

The Critical Dissertation represents a unique opportunity in your degree to explore a subject over a sustained period of time and in depth. You will be able to choose a topic in which you have a special interest, whether or not it is covered by other modules on offer, to get to grips with it, to read around it and to produce an argument of your own. You will also have the chance to discuss your ideas with your dissertation supervisor, perhaps in a more systematic and specialised way than in the seminar and tutorial discussions you have already experienced.

The Creative Writing Dissertation

As an alternative to the critical dissertation, you may wish to do a creative writing dissertation. This alternative will enable you to study and participate in the practice of writing, with particular focus on the production of a long piece of individual creative work.

Staff-Student Research Project Pathway

Staff-Student Research Project Pathway: this alternative major project assigns the student to a member of staff's research project, providing them with research aims and questions. The student works with the staff member to produce original research on the topic, culminating in a written project detailing findings and analysis.

The English Graduate Portfolio

Get ready for life after graduation with this practical, professional module. You have the option to take a work placement, or produce a creative solution to a professional commission from one our our cultural partners. Whether you are building your creative portfolio, or boosting your CV, this module will give you the evidence you need to achieve your career goals.

Optional modules typically include - choose three from:

Contemporary Literature, Culture and Theory

Focusing on fiction and poetry published in the twenty-first century, this module will help you to develop an advanced understanding of some of the topics that define our contemporary period.  Both celebrated and less well-known writers are explored on the module, alongside wider cultural developments in recent years and key directions in contemporary criticism and theory. Reflecting on some of today’s most pressing social and cultural issues, as well your ideas about the world and your place in it, you will study approaches to national, transnational, and global identities, environmental change, technology and digital culture, and war in the twenty-first century. You will have an opportunity to extend your experience of working with digital technologies, as well as your critical skills and your ability to speak confidently about key debates in literary studies.

Poetry and the Planet

Examining the role that poetry plays in understanding our changing environment, this module considers how contemporary writers think through the relationship between the human and the more-than-human world. Students will discuss topics including climate change, environmental justice, species extinction and indigenous knowledge in order to understand how the arts and humanities can help us to engage with the challenges we are now facing on earth. Incorporating writing workshops and a field trip, students will have the opportunity to respond creatively and critically using a range of print-based and digital media.

Early Modern Poetry and Prose: Nation, Self, Other

This module studies poetry and prose from one of the most creative and turbulent periods of English history, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which laid many of the foundations for creative writing as we understand and study it today. Concepts of national identity, religious conflict, the role of the state, the status and function of English poetry, gender inequality, the place of humanity in nature, issues surrounding social class, and colonial expansion, all inform the writing of this period, and all are concepts we still interrogate. The texts on this module exemplify (and in some cases define) a variety of genres: the sonnet, the epic poem, the epyllia, ‘metaphysical’ poetry, satire, political allegory, pastoral, radical writing and political polemic. Students will gain an understanding of the importance of this period in both literary and cultural terms, of cultural history and heritage, and develop analytical and discursive skills to enhance their understanding of ongoing debates.

Gothic Rebels and Reactionaries

Investigate the rise of the Gothic Romance in the late 18th Century and its development into the 19th Century by exploring key literary texts from the period. The supernatural turn in fiction during this era marked a different way of exploring questions about the human. Gothic writing examines individual and cultural identities, deconstructing oppositions between human/monster, self/other, male/female, nature/culture. The module explores Gothic as an expression of cultural concerns and anxieties, as well as an experimental genre in form and style. You will have the opportunity to explore novels, short stories and other works from this era to examine how writers engaged with the issues of their time and how their work remains relevant today. Gothic studies is a dynamic area of research, and we will investigate new ways of engaging with research communities, including digital research methods, in order to explore the interdisciplinary aspects of gothic writing, and the literary history of the genre itself.

Modernist Writing

Concentrate in detail on some of the major modernist writers and texts of the twentieth century including, James Joyce, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer and Virginia Woolf.

Nuclear Literature: Culture in the Atomic Age

This module gives you an exciting opportunity to study the profound cultural and social impact of nuclear technologies since the invention and use of the atomic bomb toward the end of the Second World War in 1945. Studying nuclear literature from a wide range of genres – literary fiction, science fiction, the short story, feature journalism and poetry, amongst others – we discuss the strange mix of dystopian and utopian energies released by the nuclear age.

We will see how nuclear literature – and some film – imagined apocalyptic futures or explored people’s fears of nuclear war, but we’ll also address more everyday ways in which living in a nuclear age became part of people’s ordinary lives, shaping society and culture. Writers often use nuclear themes and images to explore the complex relationship between humans, their technologies and the planet. By studying nuclear literature, you will engage with pressing twenty-first century issues of the environment and security.

Writing Justice: Changing Worlds

This module focuses on decolonial texts (fiction, poetry and film) and explores the relationship between acts of representation and the politics of anti-colonialism and decoloniality. It introduces students to the historical, political and cultural contexts of marginalised literary traditions that seek radical equality and justice and challenge the dominance of coloniality. A central objective is to familiarise students with decolonial and postcolonial theory and to develop the ability to work across theoretical and literary texts in innovative and decolonial ways.

Attention will be given to the diversity of aesthetic forms and the aim is to develop close reading skills and the ability to relate textual readings to wider questions concerning literary activism and intersectionality.

Nineteenth Century American Literature and the Civil War

The American Civil War (1861-1865): how did writers respond to and participate in abolitionism, the military conflict, Reconstruction, and national reconciliation? You will read familiar voices like Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson as well as new voices like Frances Harper, Harriet Wilson, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Charles Chesnutt, or Albion Tourgée and consider what new insights they bring to bear on the conflict that still roils the American nation.