BA English Literature

Compulsory modules

Theory and Practice of Writing

Discover the key concepts that shape our understanding of literature from the perspective of composition and of critical work. 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.  

Introduction to Drama

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

Poetry in English

From the Renaissance to the present, 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’ll study poems drawn from the wider English-speaking world including Ireland, the Caribbean and North America, encountering the diversity of voices found in gender and sexuality.  

Prose: Writing Identities

Explore a range of literary prose, both fiction and non-fiction, from the eighteenth-century to the present day. You’ll consider these texts from a variety of critical perspectives to understand how they respond to various cultures, socio-political issues and aesthetics, with particular attention to the construction of identities such as ‘race’, gender and class.   

Optional modules

Modern American Culture and Counterculture

Discover American countercultures in work, from 1950s Beat poetry to fiction responding to the Black Lives Matter movement. You’ll 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'll interpret poems, novels and plays, and 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. 

Optional modules 

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’ll consider the stark contrast of narrative structure, character development and language use by medieval writers in contrast to our own.  

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.   

Contemporary Fiction

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

Creative Writing: Creative Non-Fiction

Study memoirs, essays, blog posts, long-form journalism, biography and auto-fiction as you explore the exciting and ever-evolving contemporary genre. As you study these texts, you’ll write your own piece of creative non-fiction and support others with creative feedback.   

Modernism in Poetry and Fiction

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

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.  

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. 

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.

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.

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.

Compulsory modules

Dissertation

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 two years of study.  

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.   

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.   

Utopia and Dystopia in English and American Literature

Discover the idea of utopia in western literature from its philosophical, satirical origins in the 16th century to the ecological utopias of the twentieth century. As you study, you’ll consider the inter-relation between utopias and dystopias.  

The Writer’s Workshop: Studying Manuscripts

Gain a practical and theoretical introduction to modern literary manuscripts and textual scholarships. You’ll be given the unique opportunity of drawing on the resources of the extensive range of material held at the University’s Special Collections, including drafts, letters and notebooks.   

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.  

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.

Psychoanalysis and Text

Learn how psychoanalysis has been read as affecting ideas of authorship and biography, and of interpretation. You’ll reflect on critical language and practices, in order to understanding the complex relationships between ideas of psychoanalysis and literary criticism.

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.

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. 

Environment, Ecology and Literature

Investigate British writing about ecology, the environment, and rural life, from the Romantic Period (c.1800) to the present day. Study classic texts on the theory and science of climate change, sustainability, 'the wild', regenerative agriculture, and biodiversity. Hands-on work with The Museum of English Rural Life's object collections will help you consider the connections material culture provides with our receding rural heritage. 

Literature and Healing

Explore how storytelling is central to healing practices – both in terms of the narrative medicine produces, and also in the way we articulate wellness and illness through stories. You will read medical and nursing memoirs, illness narratives, plague fiction, and texts discussing writing as therapy.

Medieval Other worlds 

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.

Margaret Atwood

Discuss dystopia, speculative fiction, the uncanny, ideology, postmodernity and questions of language and narration, engaging with Margaret Atwood's novels The Edible Woman, The Handmaid's Tale, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin and The Testaments via close analysis and critical/theoretical readings of the texts.

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.

American Graphic Novels

Study a diverse selection of late twentieth-century and twenty-first-century American graphic novels, including texts that interrogate and complicate the relationship between autobiography, biography and fiction. From superhero narrative to Holocaust memoir, you’ll learn how these texts help to form identity, and examine politics, ethnicity and gender roles.

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.

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.

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.

The Bloody Stage: Revenge and Death in Renaissance Drama

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.

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.

Global Literatures: Translation as Theme and Theory

Study the literature of cross-cultural encounter. Examine the issues of translation and communication both within texts and as theoretical concepts. You’ll study texts from around the world, published between 1980 and the present day.

These are the modules that 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 research and teaching 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.