We welcome applications from the United States of America
We've put together information and resources to guide your application journey as a student from the United States of America.
Overview
Top reasons to study with us
2
2nd for Film (Communication and Media Studies)
The Complete University Guide (2025)
6
6th for Creative Writing
The Complete University Guide (2025)
7
7th for English
The Guardian University Guide (2025)
Taking Film and English Literature at Lancaster gives you the opportunity to study for a stimulating degree scheme based jointly at the Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts (LICA) and the Department of English and Creative Writing.
Your Film degree examines cinema’s aesthetic importance in the context of an increasingly visual and media-oriented culture, while investigating the connections between contemporary art, theatre, music and film. Lancaster’s course is academic rather than vocational, but you will have the opportunity at each year of the programme to make your own digital films using the University’s state-of-the-art equipment.
In English Literature, you’ll explore texts of different periods and genres, develop a deeper understanding of literature’s role in society, and discover new approaches. The department has an established interest in intersections between literature and film.
Discover a wide expanse of genres and time periods, right up to newly published literature. Our students explain what it’s like to study English Literature at Lancaster University, from our close-knit community and small-group teaching, to the accessibility of our friendly teaching staff.
Being so close to the spectacular Lake District, home of the Romantic poets, the Department has world-class strengths in Romanticism. Our partnership with the Wordsworth Trust, at Grasmere, is long-established, and has a number of new benefits for all our students.
The Castle Quarter is both a wonderful place to enjoy, with many excellent places to eat and drink, and a wonderful resource for literary studies here at Lancaster. Our students in the Department of English Literature & Creative Writing have many opportunities to make the most of this resource.
Film Studies at Lancaster University
Cutting-edge production facilities, a strong theoretical grounding, and a global perspective on film. Hear what Film Studies at Lancaster University could offer to you.
Students at work
You’ll be developing your practical skills in our film production modules by experimenting with narrative films or documentaries. We provide top-of-the-line production equipment so you can create your own original content.
Interesting surroundings
Make use of Lancaster’s stunning surroundings for the perfect film setting – cityscape, rural backdrop or coastal charm.
Film production
Gain practical film-making skills and an understanding of film production.
Production equipment
We provide top-of-the-line production equipment so you can create your own original content. Enjoy 24/7 access to our editing suites and specialist equipment, including cinema-ready digital cameras.
Showcase your films
Every year our final year students showcase their films in a major degree show exhibition, that is open to the public.
Practical experience
You will have the opportunity to produce short films in all three years of your study.
Interesting surroundings
Make use of Lancaster’s stunning surroundings for the perfect film setting – cityscape, rural backdrop or coastal charm.
Film production
Gain practical film-making skills and an understanding of film production.
Production equipment
We provide top-of-the-line production equipment so you can create your own original content. Enjoy 24/7 access to our editing suites and specialist equipment, including cinema-ready digital cameras.
Showcase your films
Every year our final year students showcase their films in a major degree show exhibition, that is open to the public.
Practical experience
You will have the opportunity to produce short films in all three years of your study.
Interesting surroundings
Make use of Lancaster’s stunning surroundings for the perfect film setting – cityscape, rural backdrop or coastal charm.
Film production
Gain practical film-making skills and an understanding of film production.
Production equipment
We provide top-of-the-line production equipment so you can create your own original content. Enjoy 24/7 access to our editing suites and specialist equipment, including cinema-ready digital cameras.
Showcase your films
Every year our final year students showcase their films in a major degree show exhibition, that is open to the public.
Practical experience
You will have the opportunity to produce short films in all three years of your study.
Interesting surroundings
Make use of Lancaster’s stunning surroundings for the perfect film setting – cityscape, rural backdrop or coastal charm.
Film production
Gain practical film-making skills and an understanding of film production.
Production equipment
We provide top-of-the-line production equipment so you can create your own original content. Enjoy 24/7 access to our editing suites and specialist equipment, including cinema-ready digital cameras.
Showcase your films
Every year our final year students showcase their films in a major degree show exhibition, that is open to the public.
Your Placement Year
Sometimes known as a year in industry, your placement year will take place between your second and final year of study and this will extend your degree to four years.
A placement year is an excellent way to...
try out a role that you may be interested in as a career path
start to build your professional network (some placement students are offered permanent roles to return to after they graduate)
develop skills, knowledge and experience to put you ahead of the field when you graduate
You'll spend your third year...
in a graduate-level position, where you’ll work for between nine and twelve months in the type of role that you might be considering for after you graduate. A very wide range of companies and organisations offer placements across all sectors.
As a full-time employee, you’ll have a job description with specific responsibilities and opportunities to access training and development, the same as other employees.
Our Careers and Placements Team...
will help you to search and compete for a suitable placement with expert advice and resources, such as creating an effective CV, and tips for applications and interviews.
You will still be a Lancaster University student during your placement and we’ll keep in touch to check how you are getting on.
The university will...
use all reasonable effort to support you to find a suitable placement for your studies. While a placement role may not be available in a field or organisation that is directly related to your academic studies or career aspirations, all offer valuable experience of working at a graduate level and gaining a range of professional skills.
If you are unsuccessful in securing a suitable placement for your third year, you will be able to transfer to the equivalent non-placement degree scheme and continue with your studies at Lancaster, finishing your degree after your third year.
Placements and Internships
Hear from students and employers on how Lancaster University could support you to gain real-world experience and bolster your CV with a placement or internship as part of your degree.
A placement year is an excellent way to...
try out a role that you may be interested in as a career path
start to build your professional network (some placement students are offered permanent roles to return to after they graduate)
develop skills, knowledge and experience to put you ahead of the field when you graduate
You'll spend your third year...
in a graduate-level position, where you’ll work for between nine and twelve months in the type of role that you might be considering for after you graduate. A very wide range of companies and organisations offer placements across all sectors.
As a full-time employee, you’ll have a job description with specific responsibilities and opportunities to access training and development, the same as other employees.
Our Careers and Placements Team...
will help you to search and compete for a suitable placement with expert advice and resources, such as creating an effective CV, and tips for applications and interviews.
You will still be a Lancaster University student during your placement and we’ll keep in touch to check how you are getting on.
The university will...
use all reasonable effort to support you to find a suitable placement for your studies. While a placement role may not be available in a field or organisation that is directly related to your academic studies or career aspirations, all offer valuable experience of working at a graduate level and gaining a range of professional skills.
If you are unsuccessful in securing a suitable placement for your third year, you will be able to transfer to the equivalent non-placement degree scheme and continue with your studies at Lancaster, finishing your degree after your third year.
Placements and Internships
Hear from students and employers on how Lancaster University could support you to gain real-world experience and bolster your CV with a placement or internship as part of your degree.
A placement year is an excellent way to...
try out a role that you may be interested in as a career path
start to build your professional network (some placement students are offered permanent roles to return to after they graduate)
develop skills, knowledge and experience to put you ahead of the field when you graduate
You'll spend your third year...
in a graduate-level position, where you’ll work for between nine and twelve months in the type of role that you might be considering for after you graduate. A very wide range of companies and organisations offer placements across all sectors.
As a full-time employee, you’ll have a job description with specific responsibilities and opportunities to access training and development, the same as other employees.
Our Careers and Placements Team...
will help you to search and compete for a suitable placement with expert advice and resources, such as creating an effective CV, and tips for applications and interviews.
You will still be a Lancaster University student during your placement and we’ll keep in touch to check how you are getting on.
The university will...
use all reasonable effort to support you to find a suitable placement for your studies. While a placement role may not be available in a field or organisation that is directly related to your academic studies or career aspirations, all offer valuable experience of working at a graduate level and gaining a range of professional skills.
If you are unsuccessful in securing a suitable placement for your third year, you will be able to transfer to the equivalent non-placement degree scheme and continue with your studies at Lancaster, finishing your degree after your third year.
Placements and Internships
Hear from students and employers on how Lancaster University could support you to gain real-world experience and bolster your CV with a placement or internship as part of your degree.
A placement year is an excellent way to...
try out a role that you may be interested in as a career path
start to build your professional network (some placement students are offered permanent roles to return to after they graduate)
develop skills, knowledge and experience to put you ahead of the field when you graduate
You'll spend your third year...
in a graduate-level position, where you’ll work for between nine and twelve months in the type of role that you might be considering for after you graduate. A very wide range of companies and organisations offer placements across all sectors.
As a full-time employee, you’ll have a job description with specific responsibilities and opportunities to access training and development, the same as other employees.
Our Careers and Placements Team...
will help you to search and compete for a suitable placement with expert advice and resources, such as creating an effective CV, and tips for applications and interviews.
You will still be a Lancaster University student during your placement and we’ll keep in touch to check how you are getting on.
The university will...
use all reasonable effort to support you to find a suitable placement for your studies. While a placement role may not be available in a field or organisation that is directly related to your academic studies or career aspirations, all offer valuable experience of working at a graduate level and gaining a range of professional skills.
If you are unsuccessful in securing a suitable placement for your third year, you will be able to transfer to the equivalent non-placement degree scheme and continue with your studies at Lancaster, finishing your degree after your third year.
Careers
Lancaster’s Film and English Literature graduates have strong research, analytical and communication skills, which open doors in many sectors. Being able to combine this joint degree with foundation-level study in subjects like creative writing, cultural studies and criminology gives our graduates a wide knowledge base with strong job prospects.
Many of our alumni have gone straight into jobs in advertising, marketing , media production and arts administration while others go on to pursue postgraduate degrees at Lancaster or vocational postgraduate training in media-related careers, such as broadcast and print journalism.
Lancaster University is dedicated to ensuring you not only gain a highly reputable degree, but that you also graduate with relevant life and work based skills. We are unique in that every student is eligible to participate in The Lancaster Award which offers you the opportunity to complete key activities such as work experience, employability/career development, campus community and social development. Visit our Employability section for full details.
Explore Student Futures
Our graduates go on to a diverse range of careers from academics to celebrated poets, screen-writers and novelists. Others go into a host of other careers closely related to literary study, such as teaching, publishing, copywriting and advertising. A degree in literary studies can, though, lead to other, less obvious futures, such as psychotherapy, emerging markets consultancy, data analysis and finance.
These are the typical grades that you will need to study this course. You may need to have qualifications in relevant subjects. In some cases we may also ask you to attend an interview or submit a portfolio. You must also meet our English language requirements.
AAB. Film, Media or one other humanities subject would be considered desirable but not essential.
36 Level 3 credits at Distinction plus 9 Level 3 credits at Merit
We accept the Advanced Skills Baccalaureate Wales in place of one A level, or equivalent qualification, as long as any subject requirements are met.
DDD, ideally in a relevant subject
A level at grade B plus BTEC(s) at DD, or A levels at grade AB plus BTEC at D
35 points overall with 16 points from the best 3 HL subjects
We are happy to admit applicants on the basis of five Highers, but where we require a specific subject at A level, we will typically require an Advanced Higher in that subject. If you do not meet the grade requirement through Highers alone, we will consider a combination of Highers and Advanced Highers in separate subjects. Please contact the Admissions team for more information.
Distinction overall
Contact Admissions
If you are thinking of applying to Lancaster and you would like to ask us a question, please complete our enquiry form and one of our team will get back to you.
International foundation programmes
Delivered in partnership with INTO Lancaster University, our one-year tailored foundation pathways are designed to improve your subject knowledge and English language skills to the level required by a range of Lancaster University degrees. Visit the INTO Lancaster University website for more details and a list of eligible degrees you can progress onto.
Contextual admissions
Contextual admissions could help you gain a place at university if you have faced additional challenges during your education which might have impacted your results. Visit our contextual admissions page to find out about how this works and whether you could be eligible.
Course structure
Lancaster University offers a range of programmes, some of which follow a structured study programme, and some which offer the chance for you to devise a more flexible programme to complement your main specialism.
Information contained on the website with respect to modules is correct at the time of publication, and the University will make every reasonable effort to offer modules as advertised. In some cases changes may be necessary and may result in some combinations being unavailable, for example as a result of student feedback, timetabling, Professional Statutory and Regulatory Bodies' (PSRB) requirements, staff changes and new research. Not all optional modules are available every year.
This module is intended to provide you with the essential knowledge and competencies to undertake the academic study of film at university level. The first term provides you with an understanding of the formal and technical composition of films to allow you to undertake detailed analysis of films, from the level of close scrutiny of individual images, and their interrelation with the soundtrack, to the narrative assembly of shots and scenes.
Through the analysis of a range of examples, you will be given the opportunity to become familiar with the key formal and semantic conventions of cinema. The second term aims to provide you with a framework knowledge of world film history. By focusing on a selection of key films and filmmakers, this section of the module will explore historically significant movements and themes within international cinema from the 1960s to the present day.
This term is thematically organized around issues of ideology and realism, and explores the shifting social and political status of cinema during the last century. In the third term you will undertake a practical project, working with a small group to produce a short film.
In this year-long module you will encounter a broad range of literature -- from the Middle Ages to the 21st century, moving from Chaucer, through Shakespeare and Milton, to Virginia Woolf, Alison Bechdel, Paul Muldoon, and many others.
You will also encounter a whole range of literary genres including plays, films, short stories, novels, poetry, essays, and the graphic novel. The module is currently focused around themes related to: Englishness and Empire; Authority and Revolution; Gender, Body, and Voice; and Adaptation and Queering.
The module concludes with a range of mini-modules relating literary research to real-world scenarios; recent options have included:
Mediaeval Manuscripts in the Digital Age
Creating a Literary Podcast
Building Minecraft Worlds for the Teaching of Literature
Creating a Literary Tour
Reading Lancaster Priory
Re-writing Waiting for Godot.
The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.
Optional
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This year long module organises your study of literature through the frame of space, exploring a wide range of major ancient, modern, and contemporary texts, all of which relate to such particular places as archive, museum, castle, stage, mountain, sea, border, plantation, stage, glacier, womb etc. Some of the spaces we will have in mind relate directly to the historic city of Lancaster itself and to its wonderful location near to both the Lakes and the coast, and some of the spaces will relate most directly to places far away. You will study texts such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure, Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Derek Walcott’s Omeros, and Ali Smith’s How to Be Both.
The module concludes with a range of "mini-modules", each one focusing on a very specific place, or kind of place. Options may include: the North, the map, the church, the digital, the desert.
The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.
This year-long module seeks to look beyond the boundaries of traditional courses in English Literature by enabling you to explore a wide and exciting range of literatures in English and in translation. These include texts that have influenced the development of literary English, from the Bible and classical figures such as Ovid and Homer, through to Medieval and Early Modern authors such as Dante and Rabelais. It also considers modern and contemporary world authors in translation (such as Kafka, Borges, Salih and Murukami), as well as new-media writing and the graphic novel. The module concludes with a creative-critical project which introduces students to the possibilities afforded here by creative modes of literary criticism.
The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year
Core
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This core module has two main objectives. Firstly, it is designed to develop further your analytical skills in order to examine individual films in greater detail. Secondly, it is intended to encourage you to understand world cinema in relation to a variety of social, cultural, political and industrial contexts.
The module will explore such issues as the relationship between film form and modes of production (from industrial film-making through to low-budget art film), theories of film style and aesthetics, and the political function of cinema.
The module consists of two interwoven strands, one strand focusing on various modes of American film production, the other exploring films from a number of different national traditions. Across the whole module, you will gain a thorough grasp not only of the historical factors shaping various national and international cinemas, but also of some key critical and theoretical concepts within the field of film studies.
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.
Optional
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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 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.’
Critical Reflections explores a number of key interdisciplinary philosophical and cultural concepts which will enable you to analyse, engage with, and reflect upon artworks in your own discipline. It also allows you to establish a common set of concepts which can be shared by students from all LICA subjects.
The structure of the module consists of six three-week blocks as follows:
Aesthetics
Experience
Post-structuralism
Marx and Post-Marx
Waves of Feminism
Thinking with the Earth (new materialism)
Regular plenary lectures make connections across the arts, and are supplemented by seminars/workshops which allow students to work in their subject groups (art, film, theatre, design) on ideas and examples specifically tailored towards these disciplines.
Documentary Film Practice is a practice-based module. You’ll work in small groups to make a short documentary film. In order to take this module you must have taken Documentary Cultures in your first year. The module builds on knowledge acquired.
By undertaking a practical project in Documentary Film Practice, students are expected to apply theoretical knowledge gained in the Documentary Cultures module to a practical project. As well as applying theory to practice, the module aims to enhance your filmmaking skills, with training provided for camera operation, sound recording and editing skills. You will also have the opportunity to develop skills in group work.
This module explores different approaches to both the analysis and the production of documentary film. As well as considering a range of styles of documentary film, typically including expository, poetic, observational, reflexive, political, and personal modes of documentary film, you will also examine key debates concerning the ethics of documentary filmmaking. An indicative list of film screenings includes Nanook of the North, Grey Gardens, Dont Look Back [sic], The Arbor, Sans Soleil, Fahrenheit 9/11, The Gleaners and I, and The Act of Killing.
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 aims to develop an understanding of historically important European films from the 1950s to the 1980s and the stylistic and historical significance of these films. It will explore the thematic importance of these films and consider the critical debates relating to this period of filmmaking enabling students to develop a critical understanding of the conditions of production, reception and distribution of these films.
This module examines a historical genre that now occupies the economic centre of Hollywood film production. The module focuses centrally on film and comic book aesthetics; on questions of narration and visual depiction in these two related media; on the shifting norms of this film genre in relation to technological change across history; and on the significance and uses of the comic-book film in society. The module develops ideas and skills introduced in the core Film Studies modules taken as part of the film studies and combined degrees.
This third-year course will add to the theoretical, historical and cultural aspects of film investigated in Years 1 and 2, while focusing more closely on the challenging aesthetic and critical debates surrounding the concept of modernity. It will look at films made in the silent era, in post-war Europe and in Britain and the US. Writings on film will be considered in conjunction with viewings of particular films, close analysis of specific filmic techniques and methods, and historical and theoretical approaches to film. The course will also pay attention to the debates of classical and contemporary film theory, feminist approaches and other critical traditions (semiotics, structuralism, formalism, cognitivism). Students will be introduced to key debates in classical and contemporary film theory, with topics exploring the relations between film and art, cinema and politics, cinema and psychoanalysis, and, above all, the question of how films produce meaning(s).
If you are thinking of a career in teaching, this voluntary placement offers the opportunity to work in a primary, secondary or special needs school. Working alongside a teacher, you will have the opportunity to gain valuable classroom experience. Normally, this would be through teaching a class or working with a designated group of pupils.
The module gives you the opportunity to understand how a work environment functions and how you can contribute to this. It will give you the chance to develop a range of transferable skills and apply your knowledge and understanding of your placement.
Places on this module are limited and there is an internal application process to secure your place.
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 explores the relationships between the arts and how we see and hear. Artists are aware, consciously or unconsciously, of the processes and limitations of perception. They often play with our perceptions in their works to make something which draws our attention, makes us see something in a different way, or gives us a kind of perceptual puzzle or challenge. The module also explores recent scientific research on perceiving art and how that relates to ordinary perception.
Assessment is by an essay and an exam.
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.
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.
This scriptwriting course is a dynamic and comprehensive exploration of the art and craft of writing for the screen. The module spans one term, delving into fundamental screenwriting skills, character development, effective storytelling, dialogue construction, and an understanding of the screenwriting industry.
Through a combination of theoretical lectures and practical workshops, students will develop original ideas and refine their scripts through a process of writing groups, "table reads," and peer feedback. By the end of the course each student will produce a short screenplay of 15-20 pages.
The course places a strong emphasis on industry awareness, offering insights into short film development funding opportunities, networking strategies, and the role of the screenwriter in film production. With a focus on continuous improvement, students not only hone their creative abilities but also cultivate professionalism in script submission, critical analysis, and effective verbal communication, preparing them for success in the ever-evolving landscape of the film industry.
In the Short Film Production module you will develop, produce and complete a short dramatic film. You will be taught and given the opportunity to follow industry standard practices throughout your project. You’ll participate in at least two class productions as both a key role member (roles like Writer/Director, Producer, Cinematographer, Art Director, and Sound Designer/Editor) and a minor role member (roles like Assistant Director, Script Supervisor, Assistant Camera, Gaffer, Grip, Sound Recordist, Boom Operator, and etc.). You’ll keep a production diary outlining your individual contributions, and be given the opportunity to gain real world experience of what working on a film production is like in the various roles. You’ll write up your experiences in an essay critically analysing the production process and outcomes.
You will need to have completed Introduction to Film Studies to take this module.
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.
This module aims to give students a grounding in “the contemporary” as a key critical concept used in artistic discourses, and provide a number of ways that students can explore and articulate their own contemporaneity. In conversation with cutting edge ideas from art, science, technology and popular culture, the module will enable participants to discuss and identify what they are contemporaries of, how they relate to their own time as artists, citizens and critical writers and what this necessitates in their own practices.
Students will engage in critical discussion of key terms used to define the current moment, such as Anthropocene, Singularity, Post-Truth, and Globalisation, as well as understanding how particular technologies and phenomena, such as distributed and decentralised networks, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and genetic engineering are reshaping the contexts in which the arts are made. These topics are explored through lectures and seminar discussions in which students are encouraged to produce and define their own position and modes for articulating what makes them contemporary.
The module is designed for creative students who wish to use writing and material practice to explore their own relationship to the ecologies, politics, trends, technologies, and aesthetics that typify our experience of the world today.
This module will explore the work of some of the most historically important female film-makers from the 1890s through to the present, considering films from around the globe. The module will examine the significant but often marginalized and obscured roles that women have played in industrial, experimental and avant-garde film production across a spectrum of roles from costume and production designers through to screen-writers, editors and directors. You will be invited to reflect upon the fact that, despite playing key roles in the development of the medium, women continue to be excluded at all levels of film production. The decision by Hollywood star and activist Geena Davis to establish a campaigning ‘Institute on Gender in Media’ is a measure of the urgency of this subject.
The module will engage with revisionist film histories concerned with interrogating the dominant bias of academic and popular histories of the medium; it will also draw on feminist film theory concerned both with a critical understanding of mainstream cinema and the development of politicized women’s cinemas. The module will examine a series of female directors and their work, and each week will be oriented around the screening of a case study film that will be the focus for the seminar. An example of directors included is Alice Guy-Blaché, Dorothy Arzner, Leni Riefenstahl, Ida Lupino, Laura Mulvey, Mira Nair, Kathryn Bigelow, Marziyeh Meshkini, Lynne Ramsay.
Assessment is by a combination of coursework essay and exam.
Core
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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.
Core
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This module allows you to undertake a major independent research project on a topic of your choice, presented in the form of a dissertation or a practice-based project and an essay. The module is taught through lectures focused on research skills and one-to-one supervision. Upon completion, you will be able to demonstrate your ability to undertake a major project that includes conducting research, engaging in a sustained critical analysis of relevant texts, building an argument and applying this to practice.
Optional
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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?
This module centres on the artistically and politically adventurous phase of American filmmaking circa 1967-1979. Typically topics studied include:
Introduction – Hollywood breakdown (Easy Rider, Medium Cool)
The future of allusion: New Hollywood’s nostalgic mode (The Godfather)
Popular feminism (Klute, Woman Under the Influence)
Politics and conspiracy (The Parallax View, All The President’s Men)
Exploitation cinema II: horror/body genres (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre)
Blockbuster cinema and the franchise film (Star Wars)
The end of the New (Apocalypse Now)
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.
This module is designed to provide you with a chance to explore one of America's significant cultural contributions to the twentieth century - the motion picture. You are introduced to the American cinema through a genre approach to a series of selected films. This entails that you frame the formal and aesthetic aspects of Hollywood filmmaking in an appropriate social, historical, cultural, and industrial context. In considering why certain popular narrative formulas (such as the Western and the Gangster) are so deeply associated with American commercial screen art, lectures and seminars will attend to movie production as a dynamic process of exchange between the film industry and its mass audience.
This module explores Hong Kong cinema from the mid-1980s up to the present – an era whose beginning witnesses the international breakthrough of a new wave of local filmmakers, and which goes on to encompass the early 1990s’ production surge, the 1997 handover to mainland China, the crippling economic crisis, and the outbreak of the SARS virus. The module will give you the opportunity to develop an understanding of a number of basic industrial, aesthetic, social and cultural trends marking Hong Kong films in the contemporary era. These include the emergence and impact of independent production; the rise of ‘high-concept’ filmmaking; the movement toward pan-Asian co-productions; the importance and cross-marketing of star performers and local musical traditions such as Cantopop; the popularity of genres like the swordplay film; and aesthetic tendencies such as episodic plotting and the narrative ‘thematisation’ of politics and identity. Emphasis will be placed not only on representative mainstream product, but also on the emergence of a distinct Hong Kong art cinema, whose presence and success on the international festival circuit has brought artistic credibility to a predominantly popular cinema, and which has heralded the arrival of a fresh wave of local ‘auteur’ filmmakers.
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 provides an opportunity for students to develop an understanding of the ways in which creative practitioners produce and deliver their work. It will provide an overview of the challenges faced by freelance practitioners, producers and small cultural companies within the creative industries. You will also develop a working understanding of the key management and enterprise skills involved in delivering creative projects. Working in groups you will put your learning into practice through the delivery of your own live creative arts project. This will enable you to understand the skills, knowledge, attributes and behaviours relevant for employment in the arts and creative industries.
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.
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 Experimental Cinema module introduces you to the non-mainstream, avant-garde, modes of production and the key movements and practices since the 1920s. You will be given the opportunity to study the theoretical concepts of historical and contemporary avant-garde movements and practices and witness the different ways artists and filmmakers have challenged the mainstream narrative and stylistic conventions. Throughout this module you will look at important figures in the development of experimental film aesthetics such as Man Ray, Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow, Chantal Akerman as well as some lesser known, emerging contemporary experimental filmmakers.
The first half of the module provides a conceptual and historical overview of avant-garde filmmaking and the second half will focus on contemporary debates and the institutional shift in experimental film production with the rise of digital technology. As well as having the opportunity to develop an understanding of experimental cinema through reading and writing research papers, you will have a chance to engage with the formal and technical aspects of making an experimental film through practice-based assignments.
You will need to have completed Short Film Production or Documentary Film Practice in order to take this module.
This module covers topics such as: the infrastructures and locations of cinema; the evolution of film exhibition and distribution; film festivals in a global context; the role of film archives and cinematheques; film criticism; digital film cultures and networks of informal distribution.
Students develop a comprehensive understanding of cinema as a socio-cultural institution, by considering film in terms of circulation, reception, and heritage. This approach entails a focus on the role of mediators (i.e. programmers, distributors, critics) and locations (i.e movie theatres, film festivals, archives) in shaping the consumption and preservation of film.
The module provides historical and analytical skills to understand the evolution of film cultures from modernity to the contemporary digital age. This holistic perspective is achieved by combining theoretical components with the discussion of case studies from a variety of cultural contexts and locations (e.g. the introduction of cinema theatres in colonial Nigeria, the multiplex in India, the birth of film festivals in Europe and their contemporary role in the promotion of Latin American and Middle Eastern cinema).
Students develop skills throughout the module by collectively managing and producing content for a blog expanding on the topics discussed in class. The weekly updates will be developed and discussed at seminars, and peer-assessed on a routine basis. In order to articulate their personal contribution to the blog, each student writes a short reflective piece on their experience, as well as an individual essay on a case study of their choice.
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.
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.’
This module offers a broad overview of the history of the musical genre in cinema. It begins by examining the use of sound in silent cinema before focusing on the original success of musicals with the arrival of synchronised sound in 1927. The module then tracks the success of movie musicals from the 1930s-1950s, with particular focus on Hollywood successes of MGM, Busby Berkeley, the Astaire-Rogers cycle and the emergence of the self-reflexive musical. Elements of the Hollywood musical in the 1960s and beyond are then studied, with a focus on the importance of the musical soundtrack in Saturday Night Fever (1977) and other films. The module will also examine other traditions where the Musical has been significant, such as India and France. In addition to this, aspects of race, gender and sexuality in the movie musical will be discussed. Some recent Hollywood successes (such as La La Land [2016] or The Greatest Showman [2017]) are studied towards the end of the module in the light of the Musical tradition
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.
This module enables you to explore both critically and/or creatively the relationship between literature, film, and music, both digital and analogue. The module is designed to be suitable for those with and those without musical expertise.
Focussing on a wide range of literary texts, films, and music, the module will develop both close-reading and close-listening and pay particular attention to the ways in which text and sound both interact and fuse.
Themes will vary and could include:
sonic cosmogonies
film score
improvisation
error
citation
jazz (re)production
lyricism
orality
the commons of hip-hop
sampling
both de- and re- territorialization
We employ diverse assessment methods designed to develop your skills further; so, for example, this could take the form of a project such as a sonic-textual response to a literary text and a related piece of music (you submit, that is, a song, session, remix, or playlist) or a critical text written in the style of an album review (you submit, that is, a poetical reflection, or listen-and-describe explication).
Texts, films and music studied will vary from year to year but may include C.S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew, H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, Saturday Night Fever (dir. John Badham), Amadeus (dir. Milos Forman), The Pianist (dir. Roman Polansky), Miles Davis, Birth of the Cool (dir. Stanley Nelson), Emese Kurti’s Screaming Whole, Rasheedah Phillips and Camae Ayewa’s Black Quantum Futurism Collective, Eknath Easwaran’s The Upanishads, and Across the Universe (dir. Julie Taymor).
This module explores both fictions and memoirs that feature encounters among plants and animals (including humans). We consider such questions as:
How might we understand, imagine or even re-imagine these encounters?
In what ways do the texts being studied challenge or replicate anthropocentric assumptions?
How do they explore disparities between plant and human time?
To what extent do they represent plants as agents?
To what extent do they engage with environmental inequality and/or explore hopeful, transformative visions?
Some of the texts studied are gothic fantasies of plant menace, some are writing of indigenous and traditional knowledge, some represent colonial-settler harming of ecologies, and some come out of SolarPunk and Afrofuturism.
You will study a range of texts which may include: Polly Atkin’s Some of Us Just Fall, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s The Grassling, Charles Darwin’s Insectivorous Plants, John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass.
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.
This module offers an introduction to the broad area of silent cinema and to a range of critical approaches to this rich area of study. You will have the opportunity to view and analyse a number of important films. We will also explore a number of critical questions raised by this material with regard to the writing and study of histories of cinema (and popular culture in general). We will examine the relationships between technology and form, the economics of film production, distribution and reception, the relationship between cinema and national identity, the social and cultural impact of new (entertainment) media and the study of cinema audiences.
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 is centred upon understanding Children’s Literature as a genre which evolves over time and doing so in the context of the places and spaces of fiction. Our two core themes are: first, the gradual move away from highly didactic reading that must teach children a clear moral lesson, towards reading for pleasure and enjoyment; and, second, the effect of this shift on spatial representation in the texts. We will compare the relationship between realist and fantastic spaces and consider the reason so many children's books are "bridge" texts that start and end in the real with the main narrative set in a fantasy world. Texts usually studied include: Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Robinson Crusoe (1719), The Water Babies (1852), Peter Pan (1901), The Hobbit, or There and Back Again (1937), and The Borrowers (1952).
‘Transgressive Cinema’ is a practice-based module that aims to broaden students’ understanding of film as a form of political enquiry. The module introduces students to critical practices in film, video and expanded cinema that favour process over the end-product. Among the key questions the module addresses are the following: How can film go beyond describing and critiquing the world “as is” and constitute the critique formally? What are the political implications of a film’s formal construction? How do we identify legacies of colonialism in filmic construction and how do we challenge them through creatives devices that transgressive cinema offers? How do we problematise the dominant forms of spectatorship in film practice?
So, while these questions involve rigorous thinking, in practice the module offers a platform where playful experimentations are encouraged. Bringing critical thinking and making into focus, the module invites students to re-examine the dominant aesthetic and narrative conventions of the film/video medium and explore formal elements and their political implications in theory and by practice.
Over the course of this module, students will engage in topics such as: - What is "transgressive cinema" (historically and in recent practices) - Materialist film practices in Britain and the wider European context (1965-1985) - Challenging the perception of language: use of voice, narration, and text as image - Identity politics and video - Queer practices - Performing to camera - Camera-less films - Expanded Cinema - Multiple screens - Abstract film and video. These topics will be explored by students via watching the assigned films, discussing the relevant texts in relation to films and responding to series of practical briefs/tasks to experiment with those ideas.
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.
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.
Fees and funding
Our annual tuition fee is set for a 12-month session, starting in the October of your year of study.
You will be able to borrow many books free of charge from the university library, however most students prefer to buy their own copies of at least some of the texts. Costs vary depending on whether these are bought new or second hand.
There may be extra costs related to your course for items such as books, stationery, printing, photocopying, binding and general subsistence on trips and visits. Following graduation, you may need to pay a subscription to a professional body for some chosen careers.
Specific additional costs for studying at Lancaster are listed below.
College fees
Lancaster is proud to be one of only a handful of UK universities to have a collegiate system. Every student belongs to a college, and all students pay a small college membership fee which supports the running of college events and activities. Students on some distance-learning courses are not liable to pay a college fee.
For students starting in 2025, the fee is £40 for undergraduates and research students and £15 for students on one-year courses.
Computer equipment and internet access
To support your studies, you will also require access to a computer, along with reliable internet access. You will be able to access a range of software and services from a Windows, Mac, Chromebook or Linux device. For certain degree programmes, you may need a specific device, or we may provide you with a laptop and appropriate software - details of which will be available on relevant programme pages. A dedicated IT support helpdesk is available in the event of any problems.
The University provides limited financial support to assist students who do not have the required IT equipment or broadband support in place.
Study abroad courses
In addition to travel and accommodation costs, while you are studying abroad, you will need to have a passport and, depending on the country, there may be other costs such as travel documents (e.g. VISA or work permit) and any tests and vaccines that are required at the time of travel. Some countries may require proof of funds.
Placement and industry year courses
In addition to possible commuting costs during your placement, you may need to buy clothing that is suitable for your workplace and you may have accommodation costs. Depending on the employer and your job, you may have other costs such as copies of personal documents required by your employer for example.
The fee that you pay will depend on whether you are considered to be a home or international student. Read more about how we assign your fee status.
Home fees are subject to annual review, and may be liable to rise each year in line with UK government policy. International fees (including EU) are reviewed annually and are not fixed for the duration of your studies. Read more about fees in subsequent years.
We will charge tuition fees to Home undergraduate students on full-year study abroad/work placements in line with the maximum amounts permitted by the Department for Education. The current maximum levels are:
Students studying abroad for a year: 15% of the standard tuition fee
Students taking a work placement for a year: 20% of the standard tuition fee
International students on full-year study abroad/work placements will be charged the same percentages as the standard International fee.
Please note that the maximum levels chargeable in future years may be subject to changes in Government policy.
Scholarships and bursaries
You will be automatically considered for our main scholarships and bursaries when you apply, so there's nothing extra that you need to do.
You may be eligible for the following funding opportunities, depending on your fee status:
As a student within LICA, you will have access to a range of state-of-the-art facilities and equipment to catalyse your studies.
Download the course booklet to find out more about Lancaster University, how we teach English Literature and what you'll study as an English Literature student.
The information on this site relates primarily to 2025/2026 entry to the University and every effort has been taken to ensure the information is correct at the time of publication.
The University will use all reasonable effort to deliver the courses as described, but the University reserves the right to make changes to advertised courses. In exceptional circumstances that are beyond the University’s reasonable control (Force Majeure Events), we may need to amend the programmes and provision advertised. In this event, the University will take reasonable steps to minimise the disruption to your studies. If a course is withdrawn or if there are any fundamental changes to your course, we will give you reasonable notice and you will be entitled to request that you are considered for an alternative course or withdraw your application. You are advised to revisit our website for up-to-date course information before you submit your application.
More information on limits to the University’s liability can be found in our legal information.
Our Students’ Charter
We believe in the importance of a strong and productive partnership between our students and staff. In order to ensure your time at Lancaster is a positive experience we have worked with the Students’ Union to articulate this relationship and the standards to which the University and its students aspire. View our Charter and other policies.
Our historic city is student-friendly and home to a diverse and welcoming community. Beyond the city you'll find a stunning coastline and the picturesque Lake District.