The module is concerned with the linguistic analysis of literary texts, and particularly with the relationship between linguistic choices on the one hand and readers’ interpretations on the other. It deals with all three main literary genres: poetry, prose fiction and drama. Topics typically include:

• Foregrounding in language: deviation
• Foregrounding in language: parallelism
• Figurative language and thought
• Metaphor, metonymy and pain in verbal and visual art
• Narrative and point of view
• Fictional minds 1: point of view and mind style
• Speech and thought presentation
• Fictional conversations and characterisation
• Fictional minds 2: conversation and autistic characters
• Demonstration stylistic analysis: flash fiction

This year-long module enables you to explore both what literary criticism currently is and what it may yet become. You will have the opportunity to consider a whole range of major theoretical and philosophical concepts, such as the body, race, gender, violence, ecology, God, time, death, war, self, and the animal, etc. We currently look at a range of fascinating modern thinkers, ranging from Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, through to more recent figures such as Simone Weil, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Fred Moten, Cornel West, and Sara Ahmed. You will have the opportunity to write in both short and long form, to present orally alongside fellow students, and to explore, if you wish, radically experimental modes of theoretical writing.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

This short module provides support for students transitioning from year one to the more independent work expected in year two and beyond. It gives students the opportunity to reflect on the feedback from their coursework and exams in year one, as a foundation for developing the level of academic writing required in subsequent coursework. It also develops students’ awareness of the resources available from the library and how these may be accessed and used, particularly for independent research in coursework and the dissertation, and offers early alerts to the Careers service and planning for life after university. All majors and joint majors with either Linguistics or English Language must take this module in their second year.

This module explores American writing as part of a 'cultural declaration of independence' in the 19th century, with particular focus on literatures of dissidence and imaginative resistance including radical abolitionist writings.

What we call ‘American Literature’ and how we define America and ‘the American experience’ depends on who is writing and to whom. In this module we encounter many different voices, many conflicting and contrasting views, a diversity of complex experience, and a great range of writing in form and style. And we explore such as: What role do different literary forms play in narrating the self? How does American writing seek to establish a new way of looking at the world? And, how and why does literature help shape forms of protest and new critiques of modernity?

Key writers usually include Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Rebecca Harding Davis, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs.

This module examines explanations of how we acquire our first language. We bring psycholinguistics and theoretical linguistics together to describe and explain the processes a child goes through in learning their first language. We also look at some more advanced issues such as bilingualism, language impairments, and language development in deaf children. The module is an introduction to language acquisition studies, psycholinguistics and theories of mind and language – looking particularly at the wide spectrum of different explanations for language acquisition.

This module explores colonial writing at the end of empire, the explosion of new national literatures in the era of decolonisation in the middle of the twentieth century, and contemporary writing that draws on and reinvents these decolonising commitments. Our interest throughout will be in how literature reflects and critiques imperial impulses and anxieties, and how literature undertakes the work of cultural, political, and psychic decolonisation. We read both exciting major writers, key to the canon of colonial and postcolonial literature, and new voices that grapple with the ongoing powers of empire and racism.

Migration is arguably the defining characteristic of the post-WW2 world. This module explores contemporary creative representations of migration in multiple modes - considering exile, expatriation, travel, urbanisation, and statelessness in literary genres that include fiction, memoirs, poetry and travel writing, as well as some visual media and philosophy. In particular, we critically examine the voluntary nature of migration, emphasising different kinds of displacement. The module, taught in a City of Sanctuary, draws on histories that encompass transatlantic slavery, the Holocaust, postcolonial and climate displacement, travelling cultures, globalisation, and an ongoing ‘refugee crisis.’

The module aims to introduce students to the critical analysis of spoken and written discourse in contemporary social contexts. It provides a range of resources and techniques for analysing texts, and enables students to apply them in looking at use of language as one aspect of social processes and change in postmodern society. Methods include functional grammatical analysis of clauses and sentences, analysis of text cohesion and generic structure, conversational and pragmatic analysis of dialogue, and intertextual and interdiscursive analysis. With a focus on spoken data and conversation analysis, we will also address written texts and introduce Critical Discourse Analysis and provide a focus on institutional discourse.

If you follow this course you will:

• develop your capacity for language analysis;
• learn to apply academic knowledge and analysis to real world issues and problems;
• develop a critical stance towards your social environment in its language aspects;
• question and challenge social and intellectual authority and knowledge, including what is taught on the course.

This course explores how American Literature has evolved from its colonial origins, with particular emphasis on key writing from the seventeenth to the nineteenth-centuries. What we call ‘American Literature’ and how we define America and ‘the American experience’ depends on who is writing and to whom.

We shall encounter many different voices, many conflicting and contrasting views, a diversity of complex experience, and a great range of writing in form and style. We pay particular attention to colonialism and freedom in the literature of early modern America, including rival ideas of self, nation, race and religion. And we explore questions such as: Why does the idea of America as a 'city on a hill' become so vital? How is the 'frontier' imagined? What strategies do writers use to challenge the hegemony of colonialism? Key texts usually include Native American Oral Literature and the writings of De Las Casas, Bradstreet, Rowlandson, Wheatley, Jefferson, and Franklin.

The module will cover important aspects of English grammar, stressing the sense in which grammar (in English and in general) is not an abstract system of arbitrary rules but is motivated by meaning and shaped by usage. We will apply this so-called functionalist perspective not only to present-day English but also to the way in which certain grammatical constructions have developed over time. Topics typically include:

• The purpose of (studying) grammar
• Simple sentences
• Word classes
• Grammatical functions
• Sentence structures and functions
• Types and structure of phrases
• Complex sentences
• The passive: form(s) and function(s)
• The grammar of spoken English

This course will provide students with an introduction to the phonetics of English. We will embark on a detailed examination of speech production, including the anatomy and physiology of the tongue, lips and larynx. In addition to this, we will cover different ways of representing speech, including transcribing phonetic variation using the International Phonetic Alphabet, and acoustic phonetics – the analysis of the physics of sound. Along the way, we will apply some of the above concepts to understanding phonetic variation in English, including various kinds of social and geographical variation.

This module introduces students to a range of technologies that require specialist treatment of linguistic data to function. Students will engage with technologies that require text databases (such as text categorisation technologies), as well as technologies that make use of the human speech signal (such as speech recognition and speaker recognition technologies). Students will not only learn about how these systems work, but they will also start to develop the coding skills required to build them. The module will be assessed by two reports that evaluate the performance of language technologies under different data conditions, reflecting the kind of development tasks undertaken in the technology industry.

In this module you will examine the language of ‘legacy’ as well as ‘newer’ media and how it interacts with other modes (for example, images). In the first half of the module, you will typically explore topics relating to ‘legacy’ media including but not limited to the structure of news, news values, broadcast talk, patterns in news discourse. In the second half of the module, you will typically examine topics relating to ‘newer’ media including but not limited to the ethics of social media data collection, hate speech, mis-/dis-information, social media advocacy and activism. You will learn how a range of approaches from linguistics - for example, discursive news values analysis, corpus linguistics, corpus-assisted discourse analysis, multimodal discourse analysis, (digital) conversation analysis, digitally mediated discourse analysis - can be applied to study topics relating to ‘legacy’ and ‘newer’ media.

This module provides an opportunity for students to explore language, learning and teaching. A particular focus is on classroom language, including whole class, paired and group work situations. This includes consideration of the role of technologies. We will look at a wide span of educational contexts, as we examine language and learning from the early years of schooling to looking at talk in tertiary education. We will see that language varies greatly in character and purpose according to who is involved and for what purpose. We will compare the language and learning opportunities that arise in whole class situations with pair and group work. What do students gain when they work collaboratively to help one another? What kind of teacher questions and responses promote greater learning opportunities? Do some kinds of interaction limit the potential for learning?

Using data from actual primary, secondary and/or post-secondary classrooms, students will develop their ability to analyse classroom language to explore how language fosters and/or sometimes hinders learning. This course will be of particular interest to those students who are curious about language and education, or who are considering working in educational contexts.

This course is complemented by LING209 Literacy and Education. The two modules alternate, so LING209 runs one year and then LING218 runs the following year. Most students therefore have the chance to take both modules, one in their second year and the other in their third year.

This module examines explanations of how language evolved in humans. We explore the evolution of the human language capacity drawing on evidence from linguistics, evolutionary theory, primatology and (paleo)anthropology. We consider language as a cognitive adaptation and ask what it is an adaptation for, e.g. instruction in tool making, as a form of social bonding, or as a means of winning a potential mate. We consider the phylogenetic development of language within the species as well as what cognitive and communicative abilities in non-human primates might reveal about the origins and functions of human language.

This year-long module explores the adaption of literature to film and other media. We currently focus on how Austen’s so-called ‘classic’ Pride and Prejudice is adapted to classical Hollywood cinema, and how Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet has been adapted to both postmodern Hollywood and Bollywood cinema. We also explore the trajectories between Carroll’s Alice books and film animation, and how Dante’s Inferno has been adapted to a videogame. We study a range of other literary texts and media, ranging from children’s fiction to horror, social realism to science fiction, poetry to graphic novels, and reverential adaptations to outright parodies. The module includes a creative project that enables you to produce your own work of adaptation. This may take many forms – written, (audio)visual, digital, or three-dimensional -- and/or take the form of a game, or production, or performance, etc.

The details of this module (for example, the materials studied) vary from year to year.

This module focuses on the ways in which early modern English literature understood and represented love, sex and death and the connections between them. Reading texts from the late medieval period through to late seventeenth century, we explore how ideas about love, sex and death were shaped by discourses of religion, science, gender, marriage and the body, and how these changed over time.

Our readings are mainly be focused on topics designed to provide us with ingress into the literature, culture and historical vitality of the period. Poetry, prose and drama will be explored, and readings will range from the earthy late-medieval play Mankind to Milton’s capacious epic, Paradise Lost, and from the love sonnets of Philip Sidney, Mary Wroth, and John Donne to the dark and disturbing theatre of John Ford.

This module will allow students to undertake a short period of work experience with an employer in the North-West. Students spend forty hours working for an organisation which employs graduates in English Language and Linguistics, or a charity relevant to speech and language therapy. Placements are sourced by the Faculty Careers Team and include positions in areas such as publishing, marketing, social media, advertising, and speech and language therapy. Workshops prepare students for their chosen placement and training is provided. The module aims to give students a flavour of what it might be like to work in their chosen industry, in addition to developing graduate skills such as teamwork, taking direction from managers, confidence and independent working.

This module examines early modern literary representations of power, politics and place. We consider a broad range of genres (prose, poetry and drama), moving from the late medieval period’s interest in spiritual and earthly travel to the episodes of power, revolution and restitution that characterised Stuart rule (1603-1688). The module examines the literatures of political influence and change from the late fourteenth through to the seventeenth centuries, from John Mandeville’s marvellous journeys through Europe, Northern Africa, Asia and the Holy Land to the fantastical romances of Margaret Cavendish, and the brilliant and edgy theatre of Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson to the writings of revolutionaries such as John Milton and Margaret Fell and monarchist libertines like Aphra Behn.

This module provides the students with theoretical and methodological insights into the field of Pragmatics, which is the discipline of language use in context. We will examine linguistic phenomena such as speech acts, (im-)politeness, the (c-)overt expression of intentions and the ways in which empathy is communicated.

We will consider how human beings progressively acquired the ability to express increasingly complex social meanings (e.g. referring to common sense knowledge when they make a statement) out of comparatively more basic ones (such as merely giving orders or asking questions).

This module provides students with knowledge about how speakers from different cultures and sociocultural backgrounds use language in different ways.

We begin by understanding the full historical context of the French Revolution and the extraordinary impact this had on all areas of literature and thought. We examine revolutionary writing of the Romantic period, including the poetry of Anna Barbauld, William Blake, and William Wordsworth, and the prose of Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Later we turn our attention to the emergence of the Gothic in the 1790s, and dives into this popular and lasting form.

The course aims to give students a sense of the diverse range of writers in this period. We use close knowledge of key texts to tackle broader, more abstract ideas such as: nature, the imagination, and the sublime. We will also consider literary ideas within a broader social, historical and philosophical context.

On this course we examine the relationship between politics and poetics for second-generation poets Anna Barbauld and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and then the remarkable and shocking slave narratives of Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, and the orientalism of S. T. Coleridge and Thomas de Quincey. Finally, the course moves inward to explore the core theme of subjectivity and the self, a theme that finds expression in both positive and negative ways in Byron, Keats, Clare, and Smith.

In this module you will learn to produce, describe, and transcribe all the sounds in the World's languages. We will describe the physiology of how different sounds are produced and will look at the acoustic characteristics of particular sounds. You will practise transcribing all sounds within the International Phonetic Alphabet, and will learn examples of where sounds are used. For example, we spend time looking at the occurrence of click sounds in South African languages and at how pitch variation is used in tone languages. Seminars will cover the practical aspects to sound production, and we will also spend some time learning how to use computers for speech analysis.

This module will cover central concepts around word order, case marking, agreement, alignment, animacy, definiteness and valency changes and teach you to analyse new data from the world’s languages in terms of these topics. You will learn to critically evaluate the extent to which the structures of the world’s languages are shaped by cognition and communication. You will also learn how linguists provide explanations for why languages are structured the way they are, given the functions they serve. It is expected that you will acquire a better understanding of the structure of English as a result of seeing how English differs from other languages.

We all know when an ad has caught our attention, and whether it works for us or not, but what precisely is responsible for these effects? In this module, we will learn how to take ads apart using tools taken from linguistics, rhetoric, and semiotics. We will explore how ad writers make use of the different levels of language: for instance, how they exploit sounds and spellings; how they toy with word meanings and word associations; how they manipulate, and sometimes break, the rules of standard grammar. We will also explore how ads interact with other texts and consider the relationship between words and pictures. As well as analysing ads themselves, we will also learn how to test out our intuitions about them, by investigating how the words, structures and visuals used in the ads are employed in other kinds of texts.

Given the extensive transformations experienced in the nineteenth century, it is no surprise that Victorian writers and thinkers reflected at length on matters of belief. These beliefs ranged from the public to the private, the collective to the individual, and included issues relating to politics, religion, economics, society, Empire, and so on.

In this module we explore: what people believed, why communities held those beliefs, and the experience of changing one’s beliefs and/or seeing those around you change their beliefs. We will think about such questions by looking at a range of material from the period, including fiction, poetry, and drama.

The authors we study will change from year to year but might include figures such as Oscar Wilde, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Christina Rossetti.

The nineteenth century saw widespread and rapid change across Britain. Responses to these changes varied enormously but looking back on the period it is noticeable how the Victorians were willing to experiment and test the boundaries of what was known.

In this module we explore that interest in experimentation by looking at a range of literature of the period, including novels, short fiction, and poetry. We think about experimentation thematically (e.g., science, spiritualism, vivisection) and formally (e.g., narrative perspective, fantasy, dramatic monologues, and sprung rhythm).

The authors we study change from year to year but might include figures such as George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, H.G. Wells, Charles Kingsley, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Browning, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Vernon Lee.

You will spend this year working in a graduate-level placement role. This is an opportunity to gain experience in an industry or sector that you might be considering working in once you graduate.

Our Careers and Placements Team will support you during your placement with online contact and learning resources.

You will undertake a work-based learning module during your placement year which will enable you to reflect on the value of the placement experience and to consider what impact it has on your future career plans.

In 21st Century Theory, we will build upon the general introduction to critical and cultural theory given on ENGL201 by focusing on one specific theme in contemporary theory: biopolitics. To explore biopolitics – or the politics of life itself – we will examine a selection of classic theoretical works by Michel Foucault, Georgio Agamben and others and then read them alongside some key literary and filmic texts from Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go to the Batman Trilogy. This course will seek to address the following questions. What exactly is biopolitics? How have theorists, novelists and film-makers imagined such concepts as sovereign power, bare life, the state of exception and so on? To what extent might it be possible to resist the biopolitical hold over our political imaginary?

The course will begin with writing that looks back to the First World War, and end with writing that anticipates the Second World War. In between, you will explore and interrogate the inter-war ‘moment’ through close attention to texts by such as D.H. Lawrence,Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and W H Auden. The course will focus on many of the great themes of the period such as exile, unemployment, Englishness, eugenics, militarisation, and political commitment, as well as many of the great cultural motifs of the period such as borders, radios, planes, cars, trains, cameras, and telephones. Close attention will also be paid to many of the great intellectual debates of the period such as the nature of history, the role of the State in everyday life, and the place of literary experimentation in time of war.

The details of this module (for example the texts or authors studied) may vary from year to year.

In this module we will look at a selection of biblical texts alongside literary works that appropriate, rewrite, and subvert them. We will be thinking about the Bible as literature; the reciprocal relationship between the Bible and literature; what the Bible does to a literary text. We will explore questions such as: in what ways does awareness of the Bible provoke more profound readings of a literary text? and does rewriting refine or subvert the Bible? We currently study work by such as Margaret Attwood, William Blake, Thomas Hardy, Angela Carter, John Donne, and Sylvia Plath, as well as Terence Mallick’s film The Tree of Life.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

This module will focus upon the motif of ‘the child’ within 20th and 21st century horror fiction and film, and aims to explore the cultural significance of this motif through analysis of themes such as innocence and evil, psychic powers, child abuse, parenting, technology and grief. The module will develop in students a sophisticated ability to think critically and analytically about how an exploration of popular fiction and film can reveal deep cultural anxieties and fixations at both historical and psychological levels. We currently explore literary texts such as Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (1898), Daphne du Maurier, Don’t Look Now (1973), and Stephen King, The Shining (1977), and films such as The Bad Seed (1956), director Mervyn LeRoy, The Exorcist (1973), director William Friedkin, and Hereditary (2018), director Ari Aster.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

The module seeks to provide a closer look at selected aspects of language structure and how they are analysed within various theoretical frameworks. It aims to develop a critical awareness of theoretical constructs and the extent to which they influence not only analyses but also the choice of data to be analysed. Students will also be taught to evaluate the appropriateness of specific analyses for individual languages or facets of language. By the end of the module, you should have a good knowledge of the basic principles, notions and structures of Cognitive Linguistics, particularly of Cognitive Grammar.

In addition, you should develop:

• the competence to analyse linguistic (corpus) data in terms of these theoretical constructs;
• an appreciation of the sense in which Cognitive Linguistics is grounded in cognitive psychology, and how this is different from formalist frameworks such as Generative Grammar and its derivatives.

The twenty-first century has seen the emergence of Middle Eastern literature in English and translation as one of the most exciting new areas of world literature. The region has experienced, so far this century, the ‘war on terror’, revolutions and wintery aftermaths, civil wars, sectarian violence, the rise and fall of ‘Islamic State’, and an ongoing refugee crisis. On this course, we will explore some of the shapes and styles of contemporary Middle Eastern literature, the concerns and aspirations that drive it, and its growing international visibility. We will study novels, short stories, and new genres from the region, in English and in translation. No prior knowledge is needed.

This module focuses on the contemporary field of English Language Studies. In particular, it will look at corpus linguistics - a research specialism at Lancaster University - and its application to areas such as the description of English grammar.

The module's programme of lectures will begin with a detailed introduction to the method before moving on, later in the term, to discuss the applications and implications of the method. Meanwhile, lab-based seminars will allow students to acquire and exercise practical skills with the computational tools (such as concordance software) required by the area of study.

Course Outline:

This module is run by the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing, with the support of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Engagement team and the central Careers Team. It aims to enhance students’ employability by providing an assessed work placement opportunity as an optional module It will also encourage students actively to think about the transferability of skills gained through the study of English Literature and/or Creative Writing.

The Department, via the FASS Engagement team, will set up a number of work placements in the (broadly defined) culture, heritage and creative sectors: with, for example, publishers, museums, newspapers, heritage sites, and arts venues. Students may alternatively source their own work placements, subject to prior discussion with the FASS Placements provider. Information on how to source a placement will be circulated to all enrolled students during summer.

Recent placements include: Copywriter at Copify; Publishing and Editorial Intern at Saraband; Project Assistant at Lancaster City Council; Communications Assistant at Three Left Feet Theatre Company.

Students must be prepared to pay their own transport/accommodation costs, though a small Departmental contribution toward travel can be applied for. It is expected that placements will be either close to Lancaster University or to the student’s home; many placements occur remotely. Students typically work for 30-40 hours with their host organization (not all of which will necessarily be on-site) in the Lent term.

They maintain contact with both the departmental course convenor and FASS placements team throughout the placement period. Placement providers are required to complete risk assessment and health and safety forms and to ensure an induction process. Both students and placement providers are required to sign a Learning Agreement.

Please note that you cannot take both this module and ENGL 376 Schools Volunteering.

Please also note that the maximum number of students on this course is fixed, and that in fairness to students, and in dialogue with the FASS Placements Officer, we have chosen to set up a selection process. If you choose this course, you will be sent an online form to complete as an application. The criteria will be enthusiasm, commitment, and having aspirations which can be realistically met on this module. You do not have to have prior placement experience, but it is fine if you do.

We will start with taught sessions covering the planning and designing of research in Linguistics and English language. We will cover topics including identifying and accessing relevant literature; formulating answerable research questions; working with data; and ethics and responsibilities in research. This is assessed through a short dissertation proposal. You will then carry out the research project planned in your proposal, working independently but with guidance from a supervisor. This culminates in the second assessment which is your written dissertation.

Course Aims and Objectives:

The final-year Dissertation is your opportunity to devise, research, and explore a topic of your own choice through a programme of directed independent study. You will be helped to begin your thinking at the end of your second year and then, through your third year, you will develop your research, thinking, and writing, as you build toward a maximum of 10,000 words. You will be supported throughout by your appointed supervisor with whom you will have a series of one to one tutorials. In addition, there are two overview lectures (one in the Michaelmas Term and one in the Lent Term) as well as four research skills seminars.

Almost anything is possible: some students explore famous literary names or themes, whilst others explore obscure figures and unusual topics; some draw on the University Library’s special collections or those housed within The Ruskin Library, whilst others go way beyond Lancaster to develop their research; some are inspired by the medievalism of historic Lancaster or the Romanticism of nearby Lake District, whilst others are drawn to the far textual shores of the digital world; some build towards MA study, whilst others build toward the world of work; and, finally, some write in classic literary critical styles, whilst others push the boundaries of literary studies in all sorts of new and startling ways.

Recent topics have included:

• Living in Liminality, Finding Yourself: Muslim Women's Boundary Negotiation and Identity Formation
• How is the Value of Sacrifice Presented in Post-War Japanese Literature?
• A Storm in Five Acts: King Lear, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Walter Benjamin
• Academia and Ecclesia: Following the Academy After the Church
• Playing with Time: Queer Temporality in Video Games
• “Out of the ash / I rise” : An Exploration of the Editing of Sylvia Plath’s Posthumous Publications and Legacy
• A Divine Being and a Fallen World: Milton's Justification of God's Ways to 17th Century England
• Virginia Woolf’s Paintings: Visual Arts and the Figure of the Artist in the Writings of Virginia Woolf
• Understanding the Effects of War on Children through World War Two Literature
• Green Romanticism: An Ecocritical Reading of William Wordsworth and Mary Shelley
• Kaleidoscopic Epistemology in the world of Anna Kavan
• “You'll be hungry all the time”: Food and Hunger in Jim Crace and Samuel Beckett
• RS Thomas: Post-Romanticism and Spirituality

The details of this module may vary from year to year.

The module will cover the two main sub-areas of the field, i.e. forensic phonetics and forensic linguistics more generally. Following a general introduction on the nature and history of forensic linguistics, lectures will focus on the two main questions forensic linguists concern themselves with: what does a text say, and who is (are) its author(s)? The issues of trademarks and lie detection do not fit into either of these, but will be covered as well. All aspects of the field will be illustrated with reference to specific (court) cases, which will also help shed light on the evolving status of forensic linguistic evidence in courts of law.

This year-long course offers an in-depth exploration of the Gothic mode from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century. It is split into five sections: Defining, Localising, Salvaging, Haunting and Transforming. These themes have been chosen to enable the combination of traditional Gothic concepts (ghosts, monsters) with new theoretical ideas addressing a range of topics including gender, sexuality, decolonisation, and environmental crisis. A small selection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts, incorporating both canonical and less familiar works, introduce key concepts and establish a foundation for approaching a diverse and challenging collection of contemporary works. These will cover anglophone writing in a variety of literary forms, including long and short-form fiction, drama, and the graphic novel. Asking the question of what Gothic *does*, rather than what Gothic *is*, the module aims to challenge preconceived opinions, boldly enter difficult territories, and show how Gothic may be used as a critical tool to address some of the most pressing questions facing contemporary Western culture.

This module will give students the opportunity to study all the major works of one of the most celebrated novelists in English literary history. It will combine close attention to the stylistic textures and narrative strategies of Jane Austen’s fiction with broader consideration of key themes and preoccupations such as friendship, desire, matchmaking, snobbery, illness, resistance, transgression and secrecy.

This module is about sociolinguistics, and in particular about how language relates to identities at different levels. This includes how individuals use language to signal their membership of particular social groups, and how different kinds of social groupings, such as peer groups, communities and nations, identify themselves through language.

The module will focus on three important areas of variation in language within society: gender, ethnicity and class. It will discuss the key research in each of these. Both theoretical and applied aspects of topics will be covered. The notion of ‘Identity’ provides the course with a unifying theme.

This module aims to broaden and deepen your capacity for language analysis applied to real social issues and problems and to encourage you to evaluate research critically and undertake your own data collection and analysis.

This module investigates how English varies at any given time and how it changes over time. It introduces you to the (socio)linguistic dimensions along which the language can vary and to the (extra)linguistic processes accounting for the ways in which it has changed. Attention is paid: to all domains of English, ranging from its sounds and structures to its usage; to the methods used by linguists to study variation and change in the language; and in particular to the close relationship between linguistic variation and change. The module covers key theoretical research in the field but also encourages you, especially in the seminars, to undertake your own data collection and to critically apply models and concepts presented in the lectures.

The module combines classic philosophical approaches with recent state-of-the-art experimental evidence to address a central topic in modern cognitive science: Does the language we speak affect the way we think? And as a result, do speakers with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds think differently? These questions form the core of the so-called linguistic relativity hypothesis, which will be the focus of this module. The module begins by laying down the foundation of the cognitive mechanisms underpinning the interaction between language and thought, such as working memory, semantic memory, and the structure and nature of meaning representations in the brain. The module then examines in detail the different ways in which language may affect thinking and give rise to cross-cultural and cross-linguistic differences between different populations, different individuals, and during first and second language development. Throughout, emphasis will be given to the different experimental methods used and the kinds of evidence that can inform our understanding of the linguistic relativity hypothesis.

Film historians consider 1939 to be ‘the greatest year in the history of Hollywood,’ a year in which 365 films were released and 80 million tickets sold. This module considers how literature and film interact and conflict in that year to construct mythologies of the American past and present in the context of the Great Depression and on the eve of the Second World War. The module also considers the context of Hollywood, the functions of motion picture palaces, American film’s relationship to British literature, and more. Texts currently studied include John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men (1937), Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1846), and Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), and films such as Mr Smith Goes to Washington, director Frank Capra, Gunga Din, director George Stevens, and Gone with the Wind, director Victor Fleming.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

Friedrich Nietzsche was far from alone in suggesting that God had died by the end of the nineteenth century; however, the literature of the fin de siècle (c. 1880-1914) paints a very different picture from the one offered by those who suggest that religion simply disappeared. A number of prominent writers in the period converted to Catholicism, whilst others explored the permeable boundaries between orthodox belief and esoteric spirituality. Those who turned to literature to think about religion did so in a wide variety of ways: experimenting with form, narrating religious experience, exploring the relationship between spirit and matter, and thinking about religious practice in ways both conventional and bizarre. Texts currently studied include: Oscar Wilde, Salome, G. K. Chesterton, The Innocence of Father Brown, and poetry produced by the Decadent movement.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

Is it possible to ‘read’ a painting? Can an artist interpret a poem in paint? This module addresses the complex relationship between literature and the visual arts, tracing key debates in aesthetic theory from Romanticism to the twenty-first century. Literature and the Visual Arts will begin with an introduction to key critical terms and an examination of the painting-inspired poetry of, for example, John Keats and W. H. Auden. Subsequent seminars will explore the work of figures such as William Blake, John Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites who blur the distinction between literature and art; the revival of the Pop Art tradition and postmodern narrative practices; the advent of photography; and, finally, the fusion of word and image in graphic novels including texts such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. The module will draw on the unique resources of the University’s Ruskin Library and rare book archive.

What did theatre look like before Shakespeare? How were devils and vices, divinity and virtue, coronations and carnivals staged during the Medieval period? This module will introduce you to a range of medieval drama, including mystery cycles, civic pageantry, morality plays and interludes, as we explore the weird and wonderful drama of towns, cities, and courts, and look at some of the earliest professional companies to identify the distinctive features of medieval English theatre. As well as reading texts, you will watch recordings of modern performances of medieval theatre. NB No prior knowledge of Middle English is required --the use of modern translations is encouraged to aid understanding.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

This course examines the early twentieth-century explosion of literary experimentation known as Modernism. Often this explosion is understood as a movement that ends around 1939; however, this course explores the ways in which Modernism continues, through and beyond the Second World War, as a restless spirit of experimentation. The course, then, has two parts. In the Michaelmas Term we explore ‘Modernisms Then’ (c1900 to c1939) where all students study major modernist texts – these usually include work by such as T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and authors involved in the Harlem Renaissance. In the Lent Term we explore ‘Modernisms Since’ (c1939 on) where each student chooses two 4-week min-modules from a range of options – these options usually include such options as: ‘British Migrant Modernisms;’ ‘The Woodcut Novel: Stories Without Words’; ‘Late American Modernisms’; and ‘Godot On – The Later Samuel Beckett.’

How are acts of desire, murder, fake and ‘real’ deaths represented on stage in early modern drama and how are these experiences gendered? This module will explore both the construction and deconstruction of death, desire, and genders, by focusing on performance. The performativity of gender, on stage and beyond, was materialised in the theatres of early modern England where boys played female roles, thus often representing both female desire and same-sex desire at the same time. We will study texts by Marlowe, Middleton, Heywood, Webster, Wroth as well as some contemporary productions and film adaptations. We will also engage in some short practical explorations -- such as getting the text ‘on its feet’; and the module will culminate in a series of short presentations and performances by the group. No previous experience of (or expertise in) acting is necessary.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

It’s an illuminating fact that the very phrase ‘climate change’ was first deployed by colonising thinkers who wanted to transform local environments to serve their purposes. Today, it is clearer than ever that the catastrophic effects of global climate change will be most keenly felt by the global poor, especially in colonised or postcolonial spaces. This module explores how postcolonial writing, from a variety of locations, grapples with environmental change, crisis and collapse, especially the looming spectres of the so-called ‘Anthropocene.’ We’ll read established and emerging voices from Africa, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. Texts currently studied include: Raja Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape, J M Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K, and V S Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

It has been argued that the Gothic, and the rise of the Gothic novel, is part of a history that goes back to long before the eighteenth century. This module therefore coins the term ‘Premodern Gothic’ to consider some of the ways in which a range of generically diverse texts produced in England between c.1450 and 1600 engage with Gothic tropes and sensibilities (ghosts, vampires, castles, darkness, magic, terror, and wonder etc.) long before the rise of the Gothic novel. Texts currently studied include: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and Thomas Nashe’s The Terrors of the Night.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

Psycholinguistics is the study of the psychology of language, which is one of the abilities that makes humans unique. It can cover topics in social psychology, developmental psychology, cognitive psychology and neuropsychology. The exact topics we cover vary each year depending on who is teaching on the module, but we aim to balance these areas and include topics on how children learn language and to read, how language is used in social interaction, how adults process sounds, words and sentences, and what happens when children fail to learn language normally or when adults suffer from brain damage.

This module will provide students with an opportunity to work as classroom volunteers in primary or secondary schools over the course of one term.

This module is run as a partnership between the Department of English Literature & Creative Writing and the University’s Schools Outreach Office, and normally involves a 10-week placement in a local school. This will usually include classroom observation, teacher assistance, and the opportunity to design and develop a teaching-related ‘special project’ to be conducted with a designated group of students or the class as a whole. This will enable you to develop confidence in communicating your subject, as well as an increased awareness of the roles of schools and universities in educational processes and structures.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

This module will trace the development of science fiction (or SF) in literature and film, providing an insight into the conventions of the genre and, in particular, how the key themes of the science fiction genre have been successfully adapted for the screen. It will encompass narratives of time travel, evolution, and temporal dislocation, and consider journeys, encounters, and species, as well as questions of human subjectivity, gender, race, transcendence, love, and loss. Work currently studied include texts such as: H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895), Octavia Butler, Kindred (1979), and Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War (2019); and films such as: La Jetée (1962) 2001, A Space Odyssey (1968), Star Trek: First Contact (1996), and Arrival (2016).

The details of this module (for example the texts or authors studied) may vary from year to year.

Ben Jonson claimed of Shakespeare ‘he was not of an age but for all time.’ This course examines Shakespearean drama and poetry in its own time: as a platform in which early modern debates about agency and government, family, national identity, were put into play, and in relation to how we perceive these issues now. The stage was and is a place in which questions of gender, class, race, gain immediacy through the bodies and voices of actors. By examining texts from across Shakespeare’s career, we will explore their power to shape thoughts and feelings in their own age and in ours. We will consider Shakespeare’s manipulation of genre (poetry, comedy, history, tragedy and romance) and the ways the texts make active use of language (verse, prose, rhyme, rhythm) and theatrical languages (costume, stage positions) to generate meaning. The course will consider how, in the past and in the present, Shakespeare’s texts exploit the emotional and political possibilities of poetry and drama.

As part of their assessment for this course, students may opt to take part in a full-scale public performance of one of the plays we have studied; this is usually staged at Lancaster Castle.

Working in a small group, you’ll select a written text, ancient or modern, obscure or well known, and together with other students work on converting the text into wholly new format. For example, this might be:

• A scholarly edition, a visual or digital adaptation
• An exhibition for a heritage space
• A podcast
• An art installation
• A fashion show

The brief will be to increase accessibility to, and awareness of, the selected text. In short, you will be taking the text “out of the box.”

Through a series of tutor-led workshops, you will be introduced to the processes and principles of adaptation.?

The module is designed to give you experience of the kind of work undertaken in industries such as heritage, journalism, and publishing.

This module examines the work of three of the great writers of the Romantic period: the poets Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, and the novelist Mary Shelley. Famously, these three writers lived and worked together during the summer of 1816, an episode that produced two of the dominant myths of modern literature – Frankenstein (in Mary Shelley’s novel) and the Vampire (in a story based on Byron by another member of the group, John Polidori) – both of which we will examine. Throughout their careers these writers were engaged in a creative and critical conversation with each other that addressed major themes including: conceptions of the heroic; the possibilities of political change; literary, scientific and biological creation; empire, slavery, and the East; transgressive love; gender roles; and the Gothic. The module will provide an opportunity to study in detail these writers’ works, and to consider them within their historical, cultural, and intellectual contexts.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

This module investigates some of the theoretical aspects to speech production and sound structure across the World's languages. We will spend time discussing and evaluating different frameworks for modelling phonetics and phonology, for example generative and usage-based approaches. Then, we will examine some case-study areas which challenge existing theories, for example intonational phonology and the study of historical sound change. This module aims to contribute to questions such as 'How are groups of sounds structured so that we can understand language?' or 'How are sounds stored and processed in the mind?'

This course explores twentieth and twenty-first century texts about the city that use Gothic generic conventions and modalities. The built environments of the Gothic are often plastic and mutable, the setting for animate, changeable, and malevolent forces. We will explore the ‘architectural uncanny’ and the ‘urban sublime,’ and consider how traditional elements of Gothic fiction are pressed to new ends in response to changing sensory, social and political contexts of urban space and place. While most sources will be textual (currently: Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor (1985), N. K. Jemisin, How Long ‘Til Black Future Month (2018), Caitlín R. Kiernan, 'Goggles (c.1910)' (2012), and Patrick McGrath, Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now (2005)) these will be complemented with reference to screen media, fine art, graphic novel and UrbEx photography.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

In the Victorian period, the decaying castles, corrupt priests and ancestral curses that were so prominent in the first phase of the Gothic novel gave way to an increased emphasis on spectral and monstrous others: ghosts, witches, werewolves, vampires, mummies and other creatures of the night. The module will explore these phenomena in their historical, cultural and literary contexts, with particular focus on emerging discourses of gender, sexuality, colonialism and class. The module will pay special attention to visual aspects of the Gothic, examining book illustration, painting and photography from the period and their relationship with Gothic texts. Students will be asked to consider the relationship between newly emergent forms of modernity (from medical discourses to photography) and the preoccupation with history and the past that is a generic feature of the Gothic. Texts will comprise a selection of novels and short fiction, with additional images and extracts from contextual works provided online and in class.

This module is centred upon three new genres which emerge in the mid-late Victorian period: Detective Fiction; The Adventure Story; and Children’s Fiction. Why do these new forms appear when they do? What determines them? We will spend three weeks on each, focussing on key texts and writers within the emerging genre, and looking at how certain conventions, principles, and core concerns develop for new genres as well as considering issues of literary status and canonicity. Within each session we will explore texts in terms of overlapping themes within a genre and the issues they raise for how we interpret the subject; these themes include: Colonialism, Imperialism, Gender, and Education. Texts currently studied include: R. L. Stevenson, Treasure Island, J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan, F.H. Burnett, The Secret Garden, and E.E. Nesbit, Five Children and It.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf famously asks, ‘what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister?’ This module follows Woolf’s lead by seeking to redress the historical marginalisation of women writers in the English literary canon through an exploration of: how women have come to writing at different historical moments; and what they have chosen to write, and how. A selection of texts from the 17th century through to the 21st, encompassing autobiographical forms, the novel, poetry, and drama, are used to examine relationships between gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, and literary production, and to explore continuities, connections, and disparities between different representations of female experience. Texts currently studied include: Pat Barker, Regeneration (1990), Jackie Kay, The Adoption Papers (1991), Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987), Sarah Waters, The Night Watch (2006), and Dorothy Wordsworth, Grasmere Journals (1800-3).

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.