What are the major US texts since 1850? And what problems are connected to them? Study a varied spectrum of US literature, looking at issues such as the relationship between American writing and history, American “difference” and differences within American society, nationalism and regionalism, and conflicts of race and gender. This module has been designed to enable students to integrate their subject knowledge with an understanding of sustainable development, acquiring the skills and competencies essential for addressing the urgent sustainability challenges of the 21st century.

How can texts be read and interpreted using the thinking of Marx? What about Freud or de Saussure? Or Derrida and Said? Study literature, theatre, and film using these key thinkers. Analyse their approaches both historically and institutionally, and understand the importance of theoretical and methodological material to your studies.

How can texts be read and interpreted using the thinking of Marx? What about Freud or de Saussure? Or Derrida and Said? Study literature, theatre, and film using these key thinkers. Analyse their approaches both historically and institutionally, and understand the importance of theoretical and methodological material to your studies.

Get yourself out there. Digital and social media provide invaluable platforms for showcasing your creative work, creating new and innovative content, and connecting with future employers, agents, and collaborators. In this module, you investigate the potential of both existing and emerging social and multi-media channels, getting hands-on in practical sessions, and gaining key knowledge of the legal aspects of web-based media.

How do films tell their story? What narrative conventions do genre films utilise? How do filmmakers adapt original literature to create new stories? Explore meanings in different film narrative using classic, modernist and postmodern examples. Understand narrative conventions in genre films. Study screen adaptation, the cinematic remake and transmedia storytelling.

A century of religious, philosophical and political turmoil, the Renaissance was also the age of the great flourishing of the English stage and English verse. In this module you will study Renaissance love poetry and learn about the sonnet, court literature, and the circulation of manuscripts. You will learn about the great writers of the canon, and some less familiar figures too, such as the female writers, who appropriated literary forms conventionally associated with men, and turned them to their own ends. Moving from the focus on “love”, to the darker theme of “death”, some of the most extraordinary literature of this time is engaged with the religious turmoil and culture of martyrdom associated with the Reformation. Finally, bringing these themes together, this module also explores Renaissance innovation in the theatre, and the revenge play, in which love, desire and death are intermingled and intertwined to horrifying effect.

This module introduces the history of children's adventure stories, and explores the emergence of the multi-novel "Young Adult" genre that dominates bookshelves and literary conventions today. The module begins with the 18th century morality tale, and moves through the Victorian period of classic Children's literature, to culminate in a study of Lewis and Tolkien as founders of the modern form. The module will explore how young readerships are constructed over time, and examine trends in adventure writing for young readers. The questions "what is an adventure?" And "what is special about young audiences?" will be addressed throughout the term. In addition to thinking about the emergence of young adult literature as a genre in its own right, this module will examine the construction of narrative and voice in each text, as a means of examining the process of world-building in literary fiction.

Romantic writers valued feeling, freedom of expression and the power of the imagination. Writers we now consider establishment figures, such as William Wordsworth, John Keats and Samuel Taylor Coleridge rebelled against conventionality, both in their writing and their personal lives. Women writers pursued liberation through literature – on this module you will read works by Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, and others. Your study of poetry, prose and drama produced around the turn of the 19th century will provide you with an understanding of a relatively brief, although turbulent and complex period in our literary history. Established and new critical approaches and theories will provide a framework for your enquiries.

The representation of black lives in writing, art, politics and society bears a legacy of erasure, suppression and denial, a practice sometimes referred to by critics as "whitewashing". This legacy, undoubtedly linked to the growth of modern European imperialism in the wake of Columbus's American encounters, can often obscure the history of black people and their cultural output in different periods. From the "whitening" of Ancient Egypt--whereby it was situated within a European Mediterranean world, as opposed to an African one--to quiescence about the presence of black people in Britain prior to the Second World War, black representation in world history often featured as a kind of absence prior to the 1960s. This module aims to examine representations of black lives and cultural output over a broad range of fields, including the visual arts, literature, history and politics, and in different historical periods. It investigates what it means to be black--generally understood as a social category or construct relating to Africans and their descendants, whether Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latin, African American or Black British--in relation to critical discourses of ethnicity, race and postcolonialism. This module has been designed to enable students to integrate their subject knowledge with an understanding of sustainable development, acquiring the skills and competencies essential for addressing the urgent sustainability challenges of the 21st century.

What are the practical aspects of screenwriting? And the theoretical? Explore the construction of a range of screenplays, investigating their shared structural elements. Write your own short films. Produce reports reflecting your understanding of screen writing. Participate in the creative pitching of ideas.

This module provides an opportunity to learn about the nineteenth-century precursors in social reform of the more recent campaigns concerning rights and ethical matters (such as animal rights, class politics, feminism, vegetarianism, green issues, alcohol abuse, pacifism). The literary engagement with explicitly political issues - the literary forms, images and rhetorical strategies employed and the demands on the reader - will be analysed, with reference to theoretical debates on the possible relationships between the aesthetic and the political and to archival research.

A utopia is an imagined social order in which human flourishing has either been perfected or realised to an exceptionally high degree. A dystopia, by contrast, is a radically dysfunctional society in which the lives of the inhabitants are significantly impaired, damaged, or otherwise undesirable. In this module, we will study nine landmarks from the history of dystopian fiction, beginning in the early twentieth century and ending in the early twenty-first. Topics and issues addressed on the module include, but are not limited to, authoritarianism, surveillance, censorship, consumerism, the culture industry, feminism, Afrofuturism, genetic engineering, cloning, artificial intelligence, and global warming.

Columbus’ gateway to the Americas, the Caribbean has experienced a phenomenal mix of indigenous, African and European traditions, giving rise to an exceptionally vibrant and diversified culture. By focusing on twentieth and twenty-first century texts, you gain a deep understanding of the literatures and cultures of the Americas and of recent transatlantic exchanges, whilst reviewing some of the key texts and themes of postcolonial studies and Caribbean literature.

The Enlightenment has often been considered the age of reason, or a period in which thought overcomes earlier forms of superstition or mysticism and develops empirical, scientific modes of seeking out truth. Juxtaposed against the Dark Ages, the Enlightenment would shine a new, penetrating light over all domains of concern. While certainly a time of radical change and rigorous re-examination, this simplified picture obscures a more complicated reality. For in the effort to relegate all forms of unreason to the past, the period witnesses an intense compression of the appetites that generate something of a counter-enlightenment--something like reason's own shadow. This module focuses on how those aspects of human experience resistant to rationalization and economization and calculation emerge in and through a range of artworks in the period after the Restoration (1660) and up to and including first-generation Romanticism (1789-1800). It also puts an emphasis on works by a segment of the population not well represented in the texts typically associated with the Enlightenment: women. Thematically, we concentrate on how desire--visceral, unruly, conflicted--takes aesthetic form. We will analyse artworks in their historical context, which means against the backdrop of scientific, political, and philosophical works central to the Enlightenment.

What compels De Monfort's murderous hate? What tragedy has broken Martha Ray? Why does the Ancient Mariner kill the albatross? At the heart of Gothic literature lies a mystery--one that often remains inexplicable; one that harries, harasses, and haunts characters; and one that drives them, often, to acts of horrible violence. And yet, there is something perversely attractive about this compulsion that licenses desires normally repressed or curbed, desires the existence of which we may not wish even to acknowledge. As a window into the gory crypt of the soul, Gothic literature invades our privacy and makes us squirm in light of what it discovers. To this end, the artworks studied in this module touch on such topics as sexuality, deviancy, monstrosity, madness, and the supernatural. The Gothic revival in England is a late eighteenth-century phenomenon, hence the focus on this time period. We will, however, also reach forward into the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries to explore some of the Gothic's hideous progeny.

This module focuses on three plays and enables a deep understanding of each and the different challenges they offer the actor and the director. Students are asked to negotiate their own creative voices in relation to plays and roles written centuries ago, investigating what it means to perform these plays today.

This module will explore the essential collaborative nature central to the creation and design of technical theatre arts and theatre. You will examine the design principle, its concept, interpretation and application through the forms and disciplines of lighting, sound, set and stage management technical practice. The module will give you an appreciation for design by exploring the principles and aesthetics and broaden your perspective through an exploration of the historical and modern context of technical theatre in the UK.

How are Aristotle’s theories about tragedy still useful? How have they been modified or rejected by playwrights since? And can you write a short tragedy? Examine tragedy in theatre, from classic Greek tragedy to now. Understand how playwrights adapt tragic forms and structures to speak more powerfully to their audience.

Can theatre make a significant contribution to shifting and impassioned debates about gender, feminism and identity? This module examines how the theatre, from Shakespeare's times to the present day, has explored our inherited scripts of gender, and has challenged how we perform these scripts in life and art. Here we apply gender theory and feminist criticism to examine an exciting range of plays and performance styles, and ask students to make their own piece of theatre in response. This is a module that examines gender from many intersectional perspectives, for anyone curious to understand the many ways perceptions of gender influence identity, image, expression and power.