The portfolio module is your opportunity to develop an individual project that will lead to a fully-realised piece of creative work. Typically, you will be supervised by a specialist in your chosen area of interest.

The creative work may be several pieces of short fiction, a radio play, a coherent collection of flash fiction, prose poetry, poetry, an extended personal essay/memoir/autofiction, or a continuous extract from a proposed novel or other book-length work.

You will:

• Generate the idea for a piece of creative work in your chosen form
• Propose an independent reading plan
• Draft no more than 5,000 words for initial tutor review
• Develop and edit your creative project and present the finished work to a high standard - as appropriate for your chosen form (eg correctly formatted script)
• Demonstrate your knowledge of relevant form, technique, and process by writing a 3,000 word reflective essay, including a full bibliography

You will receive informal, verbal feedback during regular dissertation meetings with your supervisor. This will include suggestions for reading and research as well as feedback on the development of your creative project. When the portfolio is graded, it will be returned to you with detailed written feedback.

This module, Research Training and Professional Practice in Creative Writing is designed to help you develop your research, reading, thinking, writing, and presenting skills in ways that will enable to take your next step. You may be planning to study for a PhD, and if so be reassured that the modules align to UK research councils training guidance. Equally you’ll find these are valuable skills for many potential professional roles.

The module includes sessions on, for example, primary research, ethical use of sources, the creative process, critical reflection, and developing as a professional author. In addition, you will explore some of the many different ways in which both writing and writers contribute to fields such as publishing, archives, galleries, museums, film, journalism, new media, games, podcasting and more.

Workshops run across the academic year and prepare you for the Creative Writing Portfolio (with one-to-one supervision) that takes place in the summer. At the end of the course you will be invited to the Creative Writing Master’s Showcase Night, where you may choose to present your work.

This module will explore Gothic representations of, for example: pain and illness experience, chronic illness, psychiatric confinement, eating disorders, organ harvest and transplantation, genetic testing, and epidemic or disease emergence. Traditional Gothic tropes find ready echoes in illness.

Subjects may experience their bodies as uncanny, once familiar but now strange; they may feel helpless and physically vulnerable; they strive to decipher the cryptic signs of the medical record and the body’s symptoms; they endure strange temporalities and carceral hospital sites; they are subjected to rituals of medical monitoring; and they become supplicants to powerful figures with mysterious knowledge.

The Gothic mode can be part of a critique of the complex biopolitics of medicine and illness. Yet at the same time, representing illness and pain through a Gothic mode can carry ideological risks, reinforcing problematic cultural assumptions about which human lives are of value. You will explore the promise and perils of the Gothic mode in the arena of health humanities and critical medical humanities.

This module will allow you to develop an idea for a novel, select techniques appropriate to your genre, theme and style and prepare you to complete an extract or series of extracts from a novel in progress. Through reflective exploration of several contemporary novelists, targeted writing exercises and workshops, you will explore character, voice, point of view, genre, form, setting and place.

The module will be taught by a combination of interactive lectures on the set texts, plus workshops and individual feedback on work in progress from your tutors.

You will be assessed on the submission of a portfolio and a reflective essay.

This module is concerned with a range of wonderful texts from c.1919 to c.1980 that together suggest a line of broadly modernistic writing that has a fascination both with the city (primarily Paris, but also Berlin, Oxford, London, Zurich, and even that city of death which is the death camp) and with the mixing of genres - in particular, such genres as critical essay, philosophical treatise, poetry, comic dialogue, fragment, novel, anecdote, manifesto, autobiography, history, textual commentary, and travelogue. Featured authors currently include Walter Benjamin, Virginia Woolf, Hope Mirrlees, Mina Loy, Samuel Beckett, Paul Celan, and Jacques Derrida. Special attention will be paid to texts that blur the genre-boundary that, traditionally, separates critical writing from creative writing, and students will be invited, if they wish, to submit such texts themselves.

This module examines manhunt narratives -- stories about the systematic pursuit of people who don't want to be found - in British and American writing from the early nineteenth century to the present day. It will address questions of space, power, violence, mobility and surveillance as they are raised by a range of set reading that covers classic thrillers (Buchan, Orczy), proto-feminist stories of female runaways (Gaskell, Wollstonecraft), narratives of escape from slavery (the Crafts, Whitehead), SF stories of hi-tech pursuit and evasion (Dick, Wells), and uncanny experiences of self-hunting (Conrad, Stevenson). The module asks how manhunt narratives work, what fears, desires and fantasies they cater for, and why they are such a prevalent feature of both highbrow and popular literature.

Primary Texts:

• John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps
• Joseph Conrad, 'The Secret Sharer'
• Ellen Craft and William Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom
• Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
• Elizabeth Gaskell, 'The Grey Woman'
• Emmuska Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel
• Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
• H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man
• Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
• Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria; Or, the Wrongs of Woman

This module explores some of the ways in which literature has explored and expressed the complexity of belief and doubt, redemption and apocalypse, damnation and revelation, in the modern world.

We will consider the ways in which moments, motifs and ideas indebted to the sacred can be found within the traces, margins, narratives and echoes found in the literature of the modern world.

Although welcoming consideration of all three Abrahamic faiths, we will focus primarily on Christian traditions and their life, afterlives and influences in literature.

Authors studied vary from year to year and may include such as Toni Morrison, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Oscar Wilde, Douglas Coupland, Kamilla Shamsie, James Baldwin, Marilynne Robinson, Christina Rossetti, Samuel Beckett, Flannery O'Connor, Charles Dickens, Cormac McCarthy, G. K. Chesterton and the Brontës.

The exploration of literature will be complemented by philosophical writings on religion and may include writers such as J. Kameron Carter, Zhange Ni, Walter Benjamin, Ziad Elmsafy, Sarah Coakley, Michael D. Hurley and Friedrich Nietzsche.

The short story is a complex and malleable form. This module considers the multiple forms and styles of contemporary short fiction from a range of cultural backgrounds and nationalities.

You will have the chance to develop your understanding of short fiction by drawing upon contemporary writers as well as secondary and critical reading - which will also help you to build a critical and theoretical framework around your own writing.

Peer and tutor review, both oral and written, will encourage you to work reflectively as a creative practitioner. And you’ll be encouraged to demonstrate your knowledge of the forms and genres used in contemporary short story writing by incorporating them in your own short story portfolio.

Indicative study themes:

• The longer short story of Alice Munro
• The historical short story (eg ‘The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher’)
• Myth and fairy tale in the short story
• Magical realism and the fantastic
• Formal experimentation
• Hypertext
• Science and the short story (the Comma Press 'Science into Fiction' Series)
• Politics and the short story

This module introduces you to the personal essay: a flexible, hybrid form incorporating elements of cultural and literary criticism, memoir, journalism, fiction and auto fiction. We will explore a number of modes of personal writing, assisting you in the development of a form that best serves your creative intentions.

Taught via literature seminars and creative workshops, you will experience a range of literary techniques, including generative writing prompts and exemplar texts. You will also learn how to respond reflectively and creatively to feedback - to this end, one seminar each term will be replaced by a one-to-one personal tutorial.

Indicative study themes:

• The Writing 'I': developing a voice, the strategic ‘I’, literary personae, authority and double perspective.
• Mode and register: memoir, documentary, reflection and commentary.
• Scene setting and dramatisation: applying creative technique to 'real life' material.
• Finding a subject; the writing self and the world.
• Autofiction, truth and artifice.
• Developing a form: the list essay, the braided essay, collages, fragments and mockuments. Rereading, rewriting, reconsidering: reflective editing and responding to feedback.

Taking our cue from Haruko Maeda’s remarkable twenty-first century painting Heartbeat of the Death, Queen Elizabeth I (2013), Tudor Gothic critically considers the relationships between traces of Tudor history and culture in four gothic novels (Deborah Harkness’s Shadow of Night (2012), Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (c.1803), Sophia Lee’s The Recess, or a Tale of Other Times (1784) and Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764)) and proto-gothic tropes (such as wonder, terror, strange places, clashing time frames) in select poetry, prose and drama produced in the Tudor period (1485-1603) itself. Rather than viewing the Tudor Gothic as an anachronistic term, the module suggests that Tudor Gothic informs and shapes literary gothic’s social, political and imaginary landscapes.

This module?investigates the various bodies at work in Victorian literary texts. You will explore not only?human?bodies, and how they relate to discourses of race, sex, class, and industrialization, but also such?nonhuman?bodies as animals, water or weather. You will also examine conceptual?bodies such as the body politic and the body of Christ.

Attention to the material dimensions of human existence – including affect, the senses, objects and things – has been the focus of much recent critical discussion. Drawing on this discussion, this module will enable you to explore both the operations of the nonhuman and the preconscious.

You will also examine how the Victorian literary text is a privileged site through which interhuman, intra-human and human-world relations can be considered.

?The texts we study vary from year to year, but previously examples include work by authors such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, John Ruskin, Mary Seacole, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christina Rossetti, Henry Mayhew, and M P Shield, and theoretical ideas from such as Friedrich Schiller. Gaston Bachelard, Jane Bennett, and Robert Esposito.

This module will introduce students to writing for games of all kinds, both digital and pen-and-paper. We will explore the basic principles of collaborative narrative experience as we seek to engage both critically and creatively with this new and extremely popular branch of contemporary writing. The weekly workshops are currently supplemented by a weekly, evening Games Study Night in the University Library to explore existing games, play-test your own, and enjoy the Library’s rich collection of board games.

This module looks at poetry culture in the UK and beyond, preparing you to enter the world of the publishing poet by closely examining the prize culture, some of the significant prize- winning collections by new poets over the last few years, and current poetry journals.

You will investigate current trends, having the chance to learn what it takes to get your work read - by editors, publishers and the poetry-consuming public. And you’ll put together a publication package with the aim of building your own portfolio in readiness for the vibrant and varied poetry marketplace - which continues to defy predictions of its demise.

Each seminar will typically be divided into reading and workshopping of your creative work in light of what we've read.

Indicative study texts:

• Seamus Heaney, Seeing Things (Faber, 1991)
• Sarah Howe, Loop of Jade (Chatto 2015)
• Kei Miller, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (Carcanet 2014)
• Sam Riviere, Kim Kardashian's Marriage (Faber 2015)
• Andrew McMillan, Physical (Cape 2015)
• Max Porter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers (Faber 2015)
• The Current Forward Anthology for that year
• A series of poetic journals (as chosen by your cohort)
• Michael Symmons Roberts, Drysalter (Cape 2013)
• Sinead Morrissey, Parallax (Carcanet 2013)

Science Fiction and Fantasy are two incredibly popular, historied genres. This module gives students the opportunity to study the particular techniques and processes employed by writers of SFF, and exposes them to a diverse selection of contemporary speculative texts. Students will be tasked with looking back over the rich history of both genres with a critical eye, tracing the sources of many of the genre traditions they will be familiar with, before recontextualising and interrogating those traditions in their own work, or working explicitly beyond them. This module explores forms commonly associated with Science Fiction and Fantasy, such as the trilogy and the series, but also looks at experimental and marginal forms, such as genre poetry. There are a tremendous amount of sub-genres, and ways of incorporating SFF into literature, and students will be encouraged to consider the broad spectrum of contemporary Science Fiction and Fantasy, and where their own work belongs in regard to it.