BA Art and English Literature

Compulsory modules

Art Studio 

Art Studio 1 will introduce you to contemporary art and its global histories, models of practices and practical and professional skills. You will learn the codes of good practice, health and safety, and sustainability in the studio while being given the opportunity to produce and present artworks that help develop your critically reflective and analytics skills. 

Drawing

Expand your drawing competence as you are introduced to a range of different methods, techniques, materials and tools. You will equip a growing range of drawing skills as you develop your ability to choose between them to apply your enhanced proficiency to different contexts and subject specialisms. You will also research diverse practices and theories that constitute the field of global art and its histories. Through visual analysis, you will produce a journal reflecting on the themes covered each week. 

Theory and Practice of Writing 

Discover the key concepts that shape our understanding of literature from the perspective of composition and of critical work. You will consider how writers are connected to other authors, editors and publishers as you articulate your own and others ideas in a portfolio of written work. 

Poetry in English

From the Renaissance to the present, you will uncover the history of poetry as you explore key genres related to love, politics, pastoral, elegy, satire, the sonnet, the ode, and the dramatic monologue. You will study poems drawn from the wider English-speaking world including Ireland, the Caribbean and North America as you encounter the diversity of voices found in gender and sexuality. 

Optional modules

Introduction to Drama

Discover the genre of drama as you explore a historical range of texts from the early modern periods. You will focus on four plays as you explore comedy, tragedy, form, structure and the elements of change and continuity found within the genre. 

Modern American Culture and Counterculture

Discover American countercultures in work from Beat poetry of the 1950s to fiction responding to the Black Lives Matter movement. You will study the perspectives of African-American, Native American and white American creatives in a variety of genres: poetry, short stories, YA fiction, science fiction, drama, songs, films, war reportage and the graphic novel.  

Shelf Life

Become acquainted with English literature’s material dimension and how writers, both past and present, have depicted the library as a symbol. As you study, you will interpret poems, novels and plays as you investigate books and other archival documents as physical objects. 

What is Comparative Literature?  

Learn about the major critical and theoretical issues in the study of Comparative Literature, as well as the important methodologies for studying literature in a comparative context. Approach a cluster of texts from different cultural and historical traditions, you'll be be encouraged to reflect on the practices and consequences of reading transnationally.

Thinking Translation: History and Theory 

Learn about the current thinking on translation by exploring some specific case studies. The historical approach to translation will allow you to develop a critical awareness of the role played by: genres, readership, institutional influences, market constraints, gender attitudes and discourses, purpose. In seminars, you will explore the challenges facing translators when dealing with literary, scientific, philosophical and political texts

These are the modules we currently offer for 2024/25 entry. They may be subject to change as we regularly review our module offerings to ensure they're informed by the latest teaching and research methods.

Please note that the University cannot guarantee that all optional modules will be available to all students who may wish to take them.

You can also register your details with us to receive information about your course of interest and study and life at the University of Reading.

Compulsory modules

Art Studio 2

Learn how to identify and investigate your own interests and concerns through practical engagement in the studio. You will develop your capacity for self-criticism through informed debate alongside your confidence and the ability to present exhibitions. 

Optional modules

History of Art 3

Explore different forms of art writing from criticism and visual analysis to interpretation to digital culture. You will consider how Art History shapes and is shaped as you develop your research and communication skills and reflect critically on the different purposes of art writing. 

Victorian Literature

Victorian literature consists of a period where authors began to consider people’s place in the world with God, the workings of the mind, and the role of class and gender in the construction of identity. You’ll engage with these ideas as you consider some of the greatest works of the period – from Dickens and Hardy to Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.  

International Study 

Embark on a supervised study visit to a major European art centre where you will encounter and experience contemporary art and art history first hand. You will visit major museums, galleries, and collections as you enhance your understanding of art history beyond an academic context. Recent visits have included Madrid, Berlin, Paris and Venice.  

Myth, Legend and Romance: Medieval Storytelling

Explore storytelling in medieval England as you take in the fantastical tales of ancient heroes, drama that blends comedy and religious devotion and magic and supernatural beings. You will consider the stark contrast of narrative structure, character development and language use by medieval writers in contrast to our own.  

Modernism in Poetry and Fiction 

Examine the concepts of modernity and modernism and the history of early twentieth-century poetry and fiction. You will explore experimentation and innovation in poetic and narrative form and their relation to wider social upheaval and cultural movements in the period.

Contemporary Fiction 

Study a selection of fiction from the 1980s to the present day as you explore the formal, thematic and cultural diversity of Anglophone fiction produced in this period. You will consider these texts against a number of social, political and historical contexts such as multiculturalism, feminism and globalisation. 

Writing America: Perspectives on the Nation

Examine the construction of American national identity in American literature from a range of different perspectives. You’ll study a diversity of American voices and central themes including myths of the frontier, Manifest Destiny, personal and political liberty, and the construction of race, gender and sexuality.

Critical Thinking

Approach familiar ideas and issues from unfamiliar angles that prompt you to re-examine the unspoken grounds on which common-sense ways of thinking are based. You’ll take part in exciting and rewarding discussions on issues of language, power, and identity, ideology, gender, and race.

Early Modern Literature

Discover the rich and fascinating literary culture of the early modern or Renaissance period. You'll explore the ways that English literature was shaped by, and helped to re-shape, English culture in the years between the Reformation and the Civil Wars.

The Business of Books 

You'll cover the history and development of modern trade publishing and have focused sessions on some of its key players, including publishers and literary agents. Through a combination of theoretical, methodological, and hands-on teaching sessions and workshops, you'll study the role and function of books in historical and institutional contexts including libraries, bookshops, publishing houses, and board rooms. 

Writing in the Public Sphere

Study literature designed to prompt social and political change as you examine speeches, pamphlets, tracts and political posters from the early modern period to the present. Consider how such literature shapes debates on race, class, religion, nationality and women’s rights across Britain and Ireland.  

Enlightenment Revolution and Romanticism

Study the political revolutions that shook British society to its core during Age of Enlightenment (c.1680-1790): England’s bloodless ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688; the colonial revolution of American independence; and the French Revolution of 1789.

These are the modules we currently offer for 2024/25 entry. They may be subject to change as we regularly review our module offerings to ensure they're informed by the latest teaching and research methods.

Please note that the University cannot guarantee that all optional modules will be available to all students who may wish to take them.

You can also register your details with us to receive information about your course of interest and study and life at the University of Reading.

Compulsory modules

Art Studio 2b

Learn how to identify and investigate your own interests and concerns through practical engagement in the studio. You will develop your capacity for self-criticism through informed debate alongside your confidence and the ability to present exhibitions. 

Situated Art Practice

Shape your understanding of the global and historical diversity of models in artistic. As you work, you will realise your active role as an artist in shaping and being shaped by the world as you effectively apply research methods to your material and present in an appropriate format.  

Optional modules

British Black and Asian Voices: 1948 to the Present

Examine a range of British texts (poetry, drama, novels, short stories, films) by writers of Black and Asian descent. You’ll read theoretical and historical material as you examine issues of cultural capital, national identity, and minority communities.   

Virginia Woolf

Discover the works of the ‘founding mother’ of classic literary feminism and connect her writing with our own era’s struggles, controversies and debates. You’ll explore how contemporary Woolf’s stance is within the women’s autonomy debate, while also examining the controversial aspects of her writing.

Medieval Otherworlds

Learn how magic and the supernatural play an important role in medieval English literature. You’ll explore romances where questing knights arrive in uncanny fairy kingdoms or where King Arthur travels to Avalon. You’ll discover the ways authors use other worlds to explore serious themes such as desire, death, gender and political authority.

Children's Literature

Explore issues surrounding children’s literature and its criticism. Questions and analyse critical assumptions and formulations around authorship, memory, observation, readership, and identity.

The Bloody Stage

Explore the representation of revenge and death in revenge tragedies performed on the Renaissance stage. Analyse the staging of death scenes and whether there are differences in the ways that men and women die on stage. 

From Romance to Fantasy 

Explore the role played by fantastical or wondrous elements in English literature from the middle ages to the present day. Focus on a range of key narrative structures (such as the quest), persistent motifs such as magical objects, and influential modes, such as the gothic.

Lyric Voices, 1340-1650

Explore lyric poetry from the Middle Ages and the renaissance. You’ll look at the presentation of themes such as love and longing, grief, and the fear of death, and compare the ways in which authors make use of literary conventions to present such themes.   

James Joyce

Trace the literary development of one of the most important and influential writers of the twentieth century through an intensive study of Joyce's experimental and influential novel Ulysses, and get an introduction to what is arguably the most challenging and wonderful book of the Twentieth Century, Finnegans Wake. 

Placing Jane Austen

Examine the movements of Austen’s characters through rooms and houses, the patterns of their dances in assembly halls, the paths of their journeys through town and country. Investigate how these movements sometimes represent changes of heart or class, of mind or fortune and how they are always significant for the carefully drawn lines of her narratives.

Decadence and Degeneration: Literature of the 1890s

Engage with iconic texts in English literature, including Stoker's Dracula, Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde, and Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, while exploring what's meant by these terms 'decadence' and 'degeneration', calling, amongst many other things, on portrayals of 1890s' foppishness, Darwinian models of evolution, the emergent New Woman phenomenon, the Wilde trial, and the portrayal of prostitution.

Writing Women: Nineteenth Century Poetry

Explore writing primarily by (but also about) women in the nineteenth century, including Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh. Ask how women found a voice in a predominantly patriarchal society, what subjects were deemed suitable for female poets, and how such poets overcame the limitations of expectation.

Literature and Mental Health

Discover how literature engaged with mental health in the first half of the twentieth century, a crucial turning point in psychology. You’ll consider the de-stigmatisation of mental health in the wake of World War I, the disciplines of psychiatry and psychology that emerged from it, and how literature engages with trauma, anxiety and obsession.

Modern and Contemporary British Poetry

Study key trends in poetry's engagement with changing circumstances in England, Wales, and Scotland in the twentieth century and beyond. Consider issues including the aftermaths of modernism, gender and poetry, British poetry and post-war retrenchment, the 'poetry wars' of the 1970s and the perpetuation of 'Movement' ideals down to the present. 

Shakespeare on Film

Explore the ways that Shakespeare’s plays have been changed and developed in cinema, and the ways early modern drama has been interpreted and appropriated by filmmakers in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. You’ll learn the basics of film theory and gain an understanding of the cultural contexts which have led to these adaptations. 

These are the modules we currently offer for 2024/25 entry. They may be subject to change as we regularly review our module offerings to ensure they're informed by the latest teaching and research methods.

Please note that the University cannot guarantee that all optional modules will be available to all students who may wish to take them.

You can also register your details with us to receive information about your course of interest and study and life at the University of Reading.

Compulsory modules

Art Studio 3b

Challenge yourself by developing an independent, creative and critically informed art practice as you advance your own interests and concerns through practical engagement in the studio. Expand your research skills in relation to your individual art practice, and in the understanding of both historical and contemporary practices of art.

Dissertation for Art and English Literature

Complete a substantial work of literary-critical argument based on sustained independent research under the guidance of a supervisor. Engage in depth with a topic of particular interest as you develop the skillset accumulated during your first three years of study.

These are the modules we currently offer for 2024/25 entry. They may be subject to change as we regularly review our module offerings to ensure they're informed by the latest teaching and research methods.

Please note that the University cannot guarantee that all optional modules will be available to all students who may wish to take them.

You can also register your details with us to receive information about your course of interest and study and life at the University of Reading.