BA, DipHE and CertHE in English

This course introduces a wide range of works from the literary canon, from ancient Greek texts in translation to the contemporary, covering the major genres, and embodying significant interventions or influences in literary history. The emphasis is on reading primary texts voraciously and discovering—or rediscovering—diverse writers and cultures, so that students can make informed choices from more specialized courses later in their programme. Not being limited to a period, genre or single approach, the course cultivates difference and chronological sweep; it aims to challenge and surprise, as rewarding ‘exploration’ should.              

By the end of the course you should:

• have read a number of works that have been influential in the literary ‘canon’
• be aware of the cultural diversity that has informed and continues to inform ‘English’ literature
• understand how literary genres and forms yield experimentation as well as continuities
• recognize the historicity as well as continuing accessibility of texts from diverse backgrounds
• have improved your historical overview of literature by study of primary texts in ways that will help orientate you in relation to other more specialized courses in the programme
• have improved basic skills in written expression and critical analysis
• be able to reflect on 'exploration' of and within texts

Main texts (all prescribed)

• Homer The Odyssey
• Sophocles Antigone
• Ovid Metamorphoses
• Dante The Inferno
• Geoffrey Chaucer The Canterbury Tales: The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
• William Shakespeare Hamlet
• Metaphysical Poetry: John Donne, Andrew Marvell, Thomas Carew
• John Milton Paradise Lost Books 1 and 2
• Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock
• Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
• Jane Austen Emma
• Charles Dickens Great Expectations
• August Strindberg, Miss Julie
• Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
• James Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• T.S. Eliot Prufrock and Other Observations
• Samuel Beckett Waiting for Godot
• Leonora Carrington The Hearing Trumpet
• Margaret Atwood The Penelopiad
• Virginia Woolf Mrs Dalloway

This course introduces you to essential concepts in modern literary study, enabling you to become a more observant, perceptive and analytical reader and critic in your own right.  You are introduced to the history and nature of literary studies, and to contemporary critical debates.  You learn a vocabulary in which to discuss literary language, ideas of literary convention and genre, poetic rhythm and form, and the nature of narrative voice and narrative structures.  You are introduced to debates about the relation of texts on the page to texts in performance, and to wider questions about the interpretation of texts.

By the end of the course you should:

• be able to apply accurately the basic terms and concepts of literary critical and cultural analysis to a range of literary and non-literary texts
• be able to discuss and evaluate contemporary debates about the nature of literary studies
• be able to understand the interpretative issues raised by modern literary theory, and their relevance to the reading of a range of literary and non-literary texts
• be able to identify and productively explore some of the most significant technical means by which texts produce meaning

Main texts

Students may draw on reading completed for Explorations in Literature answers to questions, but must not present substantially the same material in more than one answer in this or in any other part of the Level 4 course examinations. In addition, students are required to read the following:

• M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, (Heinle Languages, 2008), ninth (International) edition
• Peter Barry, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), third edition
• Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), new edition
• Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss and Sara Mills, Ways of Reading: Advanced Reading Skills for Students of English Literature, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2006), third edition
• D. Walder (ed.) Literature in the Modern World, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), second revised edition

This course provides students with an introduction to the works of Shakespeare and Jonson within the genre of ‘comedy’, and seeks to draw attention to the principles of classification which enable these plays to be seen as forming a group. Starting with the hypothesis that the plays themselves may problematize such formulations, the course will examine the cultural specificity of the term ‘comedy’, and the extent to which these plays are part of a process which redefined the role of drama in Elizabethan/Jacobean society. The plays will be treated primarily as literary texts but students will be encouraged to consider the possibilities for interpretation which a ‘stage-centred’ critical approach produces. The plays will be placed in the context of a new dramatic practice which arose within a London of competing commercial and political interests, and students will be required to grasp an overview of the forces shaping the creative production of Shakespeare and Jonson. The demands of the market for which the dramatists were producing, the operation of patronage, the expectations of theatre audiences, and the role of censorship will be considered, and the course will attempt to read through the plays to find the ‘marks’ of these influences.

By the end of the course you should:

• have read the comic dramatic writings of Shakespeare and Jonson
•   have an understanding of the creative context in which the texts have their origin, namely the world of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, and the social context in which it operated
•   have some understanding of critical developments in the field
•   know and be able to apply the terminology associated with the period
•   be able to develop your own critical approaches to the plays

Main texts

Shakespeare

• Much Ado About Nothing
• As You Like It
• The Merchant of Venice
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• The Taming of the Shrew
• Twelfth Night

Jonson

• Bartholomew Fair
• Volpone
• The Alchemist
• Every Man in his Humour
• Eastward Ho!
• Epicoene; or The Silent Woman. 

This course introduces students to some of the key concepts involved in Creative Writing, especially for those beginning to write.  Students are introduced to a writing practice in three different styles of writing (writing fiction; writing poetry and writing for the stage), and will explore how to differentiate between the approaches needed for each style.    The course will help students to develop an awareness of not only of the contexts into which they write, but some of the different techniques that can be used to grow their writing.  The course further aims to develop understanding of Creative Writing in its literary contexts, using texts students may study elsewhere on their programme as examples. As such, this course ties students’ writing practice very closely to their reading practice, which they may find helpful in subsequent study in the wider field of English.  

By the end of the course you should:

• understand some of the skills and techniques required when  beginning to write creatively
• understand  three different kinds of writing (fiction, prose, and writing for the stage), and some of their literary contexts
• be able to practise writing a short piece of fiction, poetry, and a piece for the stage
• be able to develop an extended writing project in one of these three kinds of writing
• be able to make connections between the literary texts studied on their programme and the writing they undertake
• be able to reflect critically on their own writing practice
• understand more fully the kind of writing they wish to undertake in the future, their writing life might be developed further

Essential literary texts

• Samuel Beckett, Collected Shorter Plays, (London: Faber and Faber, 2006)
• Seamus Heaney, North, (London: Faber and Faber, 2001)
• Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, (1925). Numerous editions, any will suffice.

Essential critical texts

• J. Bell and P. Magrs. The Creative Writing Coursebook: Forty Authors Share Advice and Exercises for Fiction and Poetry, (London: Macmillan, 2001)
• L. Anderson and D. Neale, Writing Fiction, (London: Routledge, 2008)
• M. Strand and E. Boland, The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, (New York: Norton, 2001)
• V. Taylor, Stage Writing: A Practical Guide, (Marlborough: Crowood Press, 2002)

This course introduces students to basic terminology and concepts in the study of the English language. Students get a general introduction to English linguistics, including phonetics and phonology (the study of speech sounds), morphology (the study of words), syntax (the structure of sentences), and semantics (the study of word and sentence meaning). The aim of the course is to give students a basic critical understanding of the theoretical notions used in these disciplines, as well as of the range and variety of approaches to them. The terms and concepts introduced in this course are of relevance to the study of literary texts in any of the English Literature units. Students who complete this course may also wish to take Varieties of English at Level 5, Language and Gender and/or Language and Media at Level 6.

By the end of the course you should:

• have good knowledge of the basic structure of the English language
• have sound understanding of the basic terminology and concepts relevant to the study of languages
• have developed a basic critical understanding of the range and variety of traditions and approaches to the study of languages
• have improved basic skills in written expression and critical analysis

Main texts (all prescribed)

• D. Crystal, (2003). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2nd edition
• K. Börjars, and K. Burridge, K. (2010). Introducing English Grammar. Hodder Education, London, 2nd edition.
• R. Huddleston, and G.K. Pullum,. (2005). A Student’s Introduction to English
• Grammar. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
• I. Plag, M. Braun, S. Lappe, and M. Schramm, (2007). Introduction to English
• Linguistics. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin and New York.
• G. Yule, (2010). The Study of Language. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 4th edition.

Sample materials

You can get a taste of what it will be like to study this Creative Writing course through completing this sample exercise.

This course offers an introduction to English literature of the later Middle Ages, placed within a broad historical and cultural context. A diversity of genres, styles, dialects and literary traditions may be explored. Among topics which students may study are: social satire; the Arthurian tradition and uses of the Arthurian myth; shifts in literary technique, genre and attitudes toward women; myths of social and literary decadence; ideas of society and the individual; high and low culture, spirituality and secularity; chivalry and the figure of the knight; literacy and education; art and architecture; magic and the supernatural; medieval Scotland and the Scottish Chaucerians.

By the end of the course you should:

• be able to describe a range of genres and conventions in medieval writing and deploy critical concepts appropriate to the period in response to such conventions
• be able to show some facility in reading texts in the original
• be able to recognize some ways in which the writings articulate the period’s social and cultural assumptions
• be able to discuss gender implications in the texts
• be able to reflect critically on how texts articulate relations between individual and society

Main texts

Among texts and authors which students may choose to study are:

• Chaucer
• The Gawain poet
• Malory
• Henryson,
• The Breton lai
• Selected lyrics

This course offers an overview of English literature and literary culture in the period from the reign of Henry VIII (the lyric poets Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey) to the satirists and dramatists of the Restoration. Among topics which students may study are: women and writing in the early modern period; Jacobean drama; the origins of Elizabethan tragedy; literature of the commonwealth; Restoration comedy; surveys of the period and other more specialist topics.

By the end of the course you should:

• have a detailed knowledge of a range of Renaissance and Restoration texts
• have acquired the knowledge and skills to identify the key formal and thematic   features of literature of the period
• demonstrate critical understanding of how this period and its genres are related to

relevant cultural and historical contexts

• be able to analyse and explain how rhetorical language contributes to the meaning in selected period texts
• be able to employ appropriate interpretative models and critical terms to read the different texts studied on the course

Main texts

Among topics and authors which students may choose to study are:

• Wyatt
• Surrey
• Castiglione
• Machiavelli
• Sidney
• Spenser
• Raleigh
• Kyd
• Marlowe
• Shakespeare
• Jacobean tragedy
• Jonson
• the Metaphysical poets
• Milton
• Dryden
• Rochester
• Restoration Comedy
• Bunyan
• Locke
• Hobbes
• Aphra Behn
• Lady Mary Wroth

This course draws together two periods of English literary history that have traditionally been seen in strong contrast; an antithesis which was frequently underscored by critical manifestoes issued during the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. The course  explores what appear to be the important distinctions, but also considers continuities that may exist between the two periods.

By the end of the course you should:

• have a detailed knowledge of a range of Augustan and Romantic texts
•   have acquired the knowledge and skills to identify the key formal and thematic of the literature of the period
•    be able to demonstrate critical understanding of how this period and its genres are related to relevant cultural and historical contexts
•   have a critical understanding of the historical development of a number of literary genres (including satire in prose and verse and the emergent novel)
•   be able to employ appropriate interpretative models and critical terms to read the different texts studied on the course

Main texts

Among topics which students may study are:

• prose and verse satires of the early eighteenth century
• the emergent novel
• attitudes towards the language of poetry
• Romantic poetry; author-based studies.

Among authors whose work students may choose to study are:

• Swift
• Defoe
• Gay
• Pope
• Thomson
• Richardson
• Fielding
• Sterne
• Gray
• Goldsmith
• Sheridan
• Blake
• Wordsworth
• Coleridge
• Keats
• Austen

This course considers a range of textual forms typical of the Victorian period, with reference to poetry, fiction and drama in the nineteenth century. The course will develop your understanding of change and continuity in the literary culture of the period, provide a context for the application of a wide range of critical approaches to the literature of the period, and enable you to handle with confidence a range of terms used in contermporary readings of Victorian literature such ‘realism’, ‘naturalism’, and ‘Darwinism’.

By the end of the course you should:

• have developed a working knowledge of the connections between literary practice in the Victorian period and the historical and cultural context of that practice
• have an enhanced ability to recognise the aesthetic principles underlying the use of genre, and the ethical and cultural weight of those principles
• be able to formulate critical arguments based on a range of Victorian texts and authors
• have improved skills of critical analysis that enable you to offer close readings of Victorian texts and to situate such texts historically by identifying and linking formal and thematic characteristics

Main texts

Among topics which students may study are:

• the narrative poem
• the social problem novel
• the literary avocation of the woman’s role
• Darwinism
• faith and doubt
• social unease
• Decadence
• author-based studies

Among authors whose work students may choose to study are:

• Thackeray
• Hopkins
• Mrs Gaskell
• Tennyson
• Dickens
• Christina Rossetti
• Hardy
• George Eliot
• Charlotte Brontë
• Emily Brontë
• Browning
• Elizabeth Barnett Browning

This course considers a range of textual forms typical of the modern and contemporary period, being concerned with poetry, fiction and drama in the 20th/21st centuries. The course will develop your understanding of change and continuity in the literary culture of the period, provide a context for the application of a wide range of critical approaches to the literature of the period, and enable you to handle with confidence a range of terms used in contemporary readings of 20th and 21st century literature (terms such as ‘modern’, ‘postmodern’, ‘postcolonial’ and so on).

By the end of the course you should:

• have detailed knowledge of key moments in the development of literature in the 20th/21st centuries
• show critical understanding of how the literature of the 20th/21st centuries is connected to the historical, social and cultural contexts in which it was/is written
• have an enhanced ability to use and develop appropriate critical concepts
• have an enhanced ability to critically engage with specific texts

Main texts

Among topics which students may study are:

• the definition and function of terms such as ‘modern’, ‘modernism’, ‘postmodernism’
• the effects of war and technological change on literary production
• the link between art and politics
• the proletarian novel
• feminist drama
• regional literatures (such as Scottish poetry or Caribbean novels)
•  the fiction of empire
• poetry of the First World War
• postmodern fiction
• author-based studies

Among authors whose work students may choose to study are:

• Virginia Woolf
• Joseph Conrad
• James Joyce
• Ezra Pound
• TS Eliot
• WB Yeats
• WH Auden
• Aldous Huxley
• Evelyn Waugh
• Earl Lovelace
• George Barker
• Philip Larkin
• Sylvia Plath
• George Orwell
• Lewis Jones
• John Somerfield
• John Osborne
• Alan Sillitoe
• John Braine
• Muriel Spark
• Harold Pinter
• Kurt Vonnegut
• Vladimir Nabokov
• JG Farrell
• Jean Rhys
• Samuel Beckett
• Doris Lessing
• John Fowles
• Amos Tutuola
• Angela Carter

This course explores how and why language is used differently in a range of contexts. Students will examine the variation of spoken language in relation to region, gender, ethnicity, age and social class; students will see that individuals are able to shift their style of speaking from one situation to the next and we will explore the attitudes that people have towards different varieties of English. The course also examines a range of tools and methodological frameworks that linguists use to analyse both spontaneous spoken interaction, written media and advertisement texts/discourses. The questions that will be addressed may include the following: Do women and men speak differently? What is slang? How and why do adolescents speak differently from adults? What are the public stereotypes about speakers with “non-standard” accents? What is Standard English?  How do language choices influence the representation of social groups (e.g. women, asylum seekers) in the media? What are the language strategies employed by politicians? What is the difference between spontaneous talk and scripted drama/soap opera interaction?

The course builds on theoretical knowledge and analytical skills developed in ‘Introduction to English Language’ at Level 4.  Students who complete this course may also wish to take Language and Gender and/or Language and Media at Level 6.

By the end of the course you should:

• have become familiar with regional, socio-cultural and situational language variation
• have acquired a range of analytical frameworks and tools and empirical research from linguistics and discourse analysis
• be able to transcribe and analyse spontaneous spoken language
• have analysed spoken language as well as examples of media and political discourse
• have explored the representation of language variation in a range of texts
• have studied language variation in relation to social, political and philosophical issues
• have investigated the role language plays in constructing social identities and realities

Main texts

• Thomas, Wareing and Singh (eds.) (2003) Language, Society and Power. Second Edition. Taylor & Francis Books Ltd
• Janet Holmes. (2008) An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. 3^nd edition. Longman
• Deborah Cameron. (2001) Working with Spoken Discourse. London: Sage

This course introduces students to the diverse literatures and literary trends of the United States of America, from its early inception as a colonial project through to the present day, ranging across the 17^th/18^th/19^th/20^th and 21^st centuries, and exploring the main concepts and contestations which have underpinned the evolution - and various re-shapings - of what has come to be known as ‘American’ literature.  The main areas that will be covered in this course – which proceeds thematically rather than strictly chronologically – include:  colonial visions of America; postcolonial/revolutionary and republican inventions of the nation, including Transcendentalism; Native American literature, culture and identity;  the Frontier, the West and Manifest Destiny; regional literatures, including the Southern Gothic; constructions and treatments of race and ethnicity, including the literature of slavery, African-American writing, constructions of whiteness and white anxieties, Jewish-American writing; constructions of gender and sexuality, including writing by women, treatments of ‘masculinity,’ and queer texts;  and the impact of modernity and globalisation, especially within modernist/postmodernist American writing, including the ‘Lost’ and ‘Beat’ generations.  Students will consider a range of genres (prose fiction, short stories, poetry, plays), and their connections to other creative mediums (especially visual cultures and music), and will be encouraged to explore a host of literary modes (Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism, Modernism, Postmodernism) as they have been constituted and contested in various American contexts.

By the end of the course you should:

• know some of the key concepts and principles that are central to the formation of American/United States identities as expressed through American literature
• critically recognise important themes and debates within American literature and culture
• have a critical understanding of some of the linkages between American literary texts and discourses of nation, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class and religion
• be able to relate the texts studied in their context, identifying how they articulate and shape the intellectual and creative assumptions of that context
• be able to apply appropriate critical concepts and terminology in the formation of critical readings of the American literary texts studied

Main texts

Among authors whose work students may choose to study are:

• Anne Bradstreet
• Mary Rowlandson
• Phyllis Wheatley
• Louise May Alcott
• Emily Dickinson
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Washington Irving
• Henry James
• Sarah Orne Jewett
• Herman Melville
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Harriet Beecher Stowe
• Henry David Thoreau
• Mark Twain
• Walt Whitman
• Ralph Ellison
• William Faulkner
• Gertrude Stein
• Carson McCullers
• Toni Morrison
• Alice Walker
• Amy Lowell
• Marianne Moore
• Ezra Pound
• Allen Ginsberg
• Langston Hughes
• Sylvia Plath
• Arthur Miller
• Tennessee Williams
• Paul Auster

This course aims to provide students with historical and critical perspectives on the major thematic and stylistic developments in a selection of British, American and European drama between 1860 and the present day. The course encourages students to trace the relationship between the theory and practice of the dramatists listed and seeks to examine the way in which the choice of style or presentation, be it realism, expressionism or the avant-garde, might be seen to reflect the thematic concerns of their plays. The course will also encourage students to consider the relationship between the dramatic text on the page and play in performance, where appropriate.

By the end of the course you should:

• have a detailed knowledge of a range of dramatic texts studied on the course
•   have acquired the knowledge and skills to identify the key thematic and stylistic developments within British, American and European drama between 1860 and the present day
•    be able to demonstrate critical understanding of the relationship between theory and practice in the work of a range of dramatists
•   be able to evaluate precisely and resourcefully issues concerning the relation of written texts to texts in performance

Main texts

Among playwrights whose work students may choose to study are:

• Ibsen
• Strindberg
• Shaw
• Yeats
• Eliot
• Synge
• Wilde
• O’Casey
• Lorca
• Brecht
• Beckett
• O’Neill
• Williams
• Miller
• Pinter
• Osborne
• Delaney
• Hellman
• Wandor
• Gems
• Orton
• Churchill
• Friel
• Roche

This course aims to give a comprehensive introduction to the study of language and gender. We will examine how gender is reflected and constituted in language, that is, how women and men speak, how language is used to accomplish femininity and masculinity. Students will become familiar with a wide range of studies exploring the language used by women, men and children in a range of different contexts, including informal talk among friends and talk in work or public settings. The course encourages a critical engagement with past and present approaches to the study of language and gender and draws on a range of different theoretical and methodological frameworks to show how gender and identity can be analysed in language.

Questions which will be addressed on this course include: Do women and mean speak differently? How do men and women speak to their friends and to their colleagues at work? How does gender interact with other social variables such as ethnicity, class, and age? In what way does language constitute a resource for the construction of (gender) identity?

The course builds on theoretical knowledge and analytical skills developed in Varieties of English at Level 5.

By the end of the course you should:

• have become familiar with different theoretical and methodological frameworks used in the field of language and gender
• have developed a critical awareness of different conceptualisations of gender and identity
• be able to contrast folklinguistic and stereotypical notions of gender with empirical findings generated in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis
• be equipped to investigate the role that language plays in constructing gender and other identities
• have acquired the knowledge and skills to carry out independent empirical investigations in the field of language and gender

Main texts

• Jennifer Coates and Pia Pichler, (eds.) (2011) Language and Gender: A Reader. Second Edition. Oxford: Blackwell.
• Jennifer Coates (2004) Women, Men and Language. Third edition. Longman.

This course offers an introduction to a number of approaches in the analysis of media texts, and to a multi-modal perspective in the analysis of communication. Students will compare and analyse media and literary texts and genres, engaging with a broad range of examples, for instance newspaper texts, advertising, the language of film, language of television, and others. The course develops critical awareness of a variety of linguistic techniques for analysing media discourse types, and engages with the relationship between text and context. 

The course builds on theoretical knowledge and analytical skills developed in Varieties of English at Level 5.

By the end of the course you should:

• have become familiar with a range of approaches to media analysis (for example semiotics, genre analysis, narrative analysis)
• be conversant with multi-modal analyses of communication
• have developed a critical awareness of a variety of media discourse types and genres
• understand the relationship between text and context in particular media discourses/genres
• be able to compare and analyse media and literary genres

Main texts

• R. Carter, M. Bowring, A. Goddard, D. Reah, K Sanger, N. Swift (2007). Working with Texts, 3^rd edition. London and New York: Routledge. Edited by A. Beard.

This course aims to provide students with some historical and critical perspectives on an evolving aesthetic form central to English Studies. Focusing on both works originally written in English and ones in translation, the course surveys selected novels in three broad chronological groupings: eighteenth and nineteenth-century realist novels; early 20th-century modernist novels; and finally a wide-ranging exploration of the major themes and characteristic narrative strategies associated with ‘anti-realist’ or ‘postmodern’ works of fiction in the later 20th/ early 21st centuries.  The course encourages students to consider some relevant theoretical questions on the nature of narrative and the role of the reader, together with critical writing on a variety of topics, ranging from mimesis to genre. Attention will also be given to narrative techniques, including characterisation, use of imagery, narrative voice, scene-making - the strategies of fiction whereby novelists develop individual structures that enable them to say something new in fictional terms.

By the end of the course you should:

• be able to discuss and critically evaluate debates about the development and nature of the novel from its beginnings to the present day
•   be able to recognise, understand and explain the complexity of the relationships between the formal and thematic concerns of particular novels and their historical, social and cultural contexts
•   be able to analyse and explain how individual novelists employ specific techniques in order to serve their particular narrative strategies
•   be able to compare how different novelists have used the novel to address recurrent thematic concerns and exploited the possibilities of the form in different ways

Among the texts which may be studied for this course (these are suggested texts, not prescribed texts) are:

• Defoe, Moll Flanders
• Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses
• Zola, Germinal
• Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
• Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
• James, The Turn of the Screw
• Woolf, To the Lighthouse
• Nabokov, Lolita
• Robbe-Grillet, In the Labyrinth
• Calvino, If, On a Winter’s Night, a Traveller
• Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

This course will primarily examine the range of literature produced since 1947 in the regions of the world formerly under British rule. Students may study literature from the former ‘white Dominions’ such as Australia and Canada, as well as literature from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean and work produced by the various diasporas of Commonwealth origin within contemporary western societies such as Britain.  Themes to be explored include:  representations of ‘the metropolitan centre’ and ‘the periphery’; postcolonial interactions with the metropolitan centre through British colonial novels; disillusion with independence; problems of identity and cultural identification; exile and diaspora; neo-colonialism; the role of the intellectual and the artist; the subversion of western literary form; the usages of the English language; problems and opportunities of the postcolonial woman.

By the end of the course you should:

• possess a coherent knowledge and a critical understanding of postcolonial literature and its key historical, cultural and theoretical developments
•   be able to compare, discuss and explain interconnections and functions of postcolonial literature and its contexts, including comparative and interdisciplinary issues
•   be able to critically evaluate arguments and assumptions about postcolonial literature, texts, and modes of interpretation
•   be able to communicate arguments effectively and show a degree of independent thinking in so doing

Main texts

Among authors whose work may be studied are:

• Achebe
• Ngugi
• Soyinka
• Narayan
• Desai
• Aidoo
• Harris
• Brathwaite
• Collins
• Philips
• Atwood
• Hulme
• Head
• Naipaul
• Mo
• Rushdie
• Lovelace
• Emecheta