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Both in workshops and through independent study, you will explore a wide range of short-form writing, including a variety of modes: international strict form poetry (e.g., sonnet, rondeau, terza rima, ghazal, villanelle, sestina), free verse, flash fiction, and historical flash fiction. Ethical questions about combining fact and fiction are addressed in an introduction to historical fiction. You may also explore review writing in real-world contexts and digital short-form writing on social media platforms, enhancing your transferable employability skills.

The focus on short-form writing across various genres enables you to develop clarity of expression and conciseness while practising redrafting and editing, building your confidence as a writer. A range of exercises will generate new writing. You will give one another formative feedback, and evaluate the responses your work receives, providing structured opportunities to consolidate writing skills for your final submissions.

Assessment: Collaborative Writing (20%) and Short Form Portfolio (80%)

This module focuses on journeys and places, offering the chance to explore key concepts underpinning your studies. You will take a post-disciplinary approach, using techniques from diverse areas to address questions related to journeys and places.

Interactive lectures with students from across the School of Humanities and Performing Arts provide opportunities to apply these concepts in subject-specific workshops and assessments.

Themes may include journeys, spaces, and the concept of welcome; (im)mobilities and journeys through time and space; representation and imaginative geographies; gender and placemaking; belonging and place attachment; and sustainability and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Assessment: Subject-specific Coursework 1 (30%) and Coursework 2 (70%)

This module explores how traditional texts and digital innovations can improve your writing practice. Through core readings, including work from global majority writers and translations, you will develop craft skills in voice, form, structure, and genre. A key aim of the module is to help you optimise your growth as a writer in the digital sphere.

In addition to producing creative work, you will work individually or collaboratively in a ‘writers’ salon’. You will lead discussions, select material, and devise writing activities, consolidating your learning and employability skills, particularly in educational settings.

Assessment: Writers' Salon (20%) and Portfolio (80%)

Through this module you will develop your understanding of poetic form and genre and consolidate your close-reading skills by scrutinising a range of poems and poets from different historical periods. You will explore the historical origins and development of specific poetic genres such as epic and pastoral and learn the conceptual tools and technical vocabulary needed for critical analysis of poetry at undergraduate level.

Assessment: Essay 1 (40%) and Essay 2 (60%)

This module looks at the birth of English literature, offering you an introduction to literature written between the medieval era and the early modern period. Texts will be considered in their national, cultural, and historical contexts. You will explore examples of poetry, drama and prose organised around key themes such as power, faith, love and sexuality. You will also be invited to compare early examples of English literature with some key works of European literature from this time.

Assessment: Commentary (30%) and Comparative Essay (70%)

This module prepares you for post-degree pathways by focusing on the skills, capabilities, and knowledge needed to thrive in professional environments. Emphasis is placed on core attributes and transferable skills while developing familiarity with the world of work.

You will critically engage with themes such as race, gender, identity, and geopolitical issues in relation to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, conceptualizing a more equitable and sustainable society.

Through subject-specific workshops, lectures, seminars, and independent learning, you will explore work environments related to your discipline. Activities may include responding to real-world briefs, placements, community projects, and creating project proposals tailored to your programme.

Assessment: Written Portfolio or Recorded Presentation (100%)

This module’s focus is story in the broadest sense - a subject with relevance in forms as diverse as poetry, hypertext, and all scripted work. Narrative remains a tremendously powerful tool in all aspects of media, in marketing, advertising, gaming, as well as all aspects of fiction. Main themes may include narrative arcs and structures, characterisation, pace, event, story-world, dialogue, clue-laying, revelation, and concealment, and means of involving the reader.

Initially, the module will focus on storytelling and prose, looking at story structure, narrative structure, and drive, and how writers compel us to turn the pages. It will consider how the art of storytelling has adapted to its contemporary setting and the relationship between form and content. You will gain skills and craft techniques to use in your wider creative practice.

On occasions, additional specialist study may include an exploration of story craft in other forms, genres, and cultures, for example, writing for stage and screen, both TV and film, but with a particular focus on structure and narrative.

You may use storyboarding and electronic forms of presentation (e.g., Padlet, Pecha Kucha) as learning tools. You will be expected to undertake analytical reading and practical creative tasks.

Assessment: Story Craft Proposal (40%) and Story Craft Creative Work (60%)

This module introduces you to the exciting and significant range of literature from the Romantic and Victorian periods between 1780 and 1901. You will explore texts by writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen and Byron in relation to the huge social upheavals of the time (including the impact of the French Revolution) and the new and radical ideas about childhood, the rights of man, and of woman, the natural world and the imagination emerging at the time. We then examine how Romantic ideas mutate in the literature of the Victorian period (1837-1901). The primary focus in this part of the course is on the novel, the dominant literary genre of the period, and you will study writers like Dickens, Charlotte Bronte and Thomas Hardy, and examine the ways in which they represent issues such as class-conflict, urban poverty, faith, national identity and changing gender-roles. You will also look at the changing forms of Victorian poetry and the emergence of a distinctively female poetic tradition during the period.

Assessment: Coursework (40%) and Essay (60%)

The unifying theme of this module is writing for screens and with screens. In this module, you will develop skills in writing for a range of screen genres and platforms with a focus on optimising your writing practice in the 21st century writing and publishing context. Writing for and with screens provides the contemporary writer with an opportunity to revitalise creative processes, such as drafting, editing, publishing, reading and researching. Screen genres considered may include podcast, poetry films, TV and/or film scripts; web novels; flash fiction forms attached to different social media platforms; games.

You will also engage in collaborative work that replicates real-world writing contexts, for example an episode for TV sitcom, a collaboratively written web novel, or flash fiction collection for online publication.

Assessment: Screentime Reflection (30%) and Screentime Project (70%)

This module explores the Gutenberg and Digital revolutions, focusing on how printing and computing have influenced writing. You will create your own texts using historical and digital technologies.

Assessment: Test (30%) and Report 1 (35%) and Report 2 (35%)

This module examines ‘World Englishes’ from a global perspective, focusing on literature from postcolonial nations. You will explore themes like memory, class, and ethnicity in both written and oral traditions.

Assessment: Blog/Vlog (40%) and Research Essay (60%)

The final-year dissertation module provides you with an opportunity to work at length in a single form or genre of your choice. The aim is to produce professionally presented independent creative work. The precise composition of the dissertation will be negotiated with your tutor in accordance with departmental guidelines and must include written creative work accompanied by a critical reflective essay. You are expected to consider your own work in relation to current published work in the same and related genres.

You will be supported to learn from feedback, to edit, redraft and rethink your work. Working with a supervisor and response group, you will respond to feedback and provide feedback constructively over a longer period, mirroring more closely a real-world writing context. Working with others to manage your response groups and keeping your own records of supervision meetings will help you to develop skills which are of value in the workplace.

You will be managing a professional writing project from conception to completion; thus, the module also supports you to develop specific skills, capabilities and knowledge to adapt in different professional environments and contexts.

Assessment: Concept Testing (20%) and Dissertation (80%)

During Year Three, you will propose, refine, develop, research and write a dissertation on a topic supervised by a member of the English Literary team. We will support you throughout the year with skills-oriented workshops on devising and planning a project, engaging with scholarship, writing, editing and referencing. This will be complemented by a series of workshops in Block 1 on key theoretical approaches, such as structuralism and poststructuralism, Marxism, feminism, ecocriticism, queer theory or critical race theory. You will also work collaboratively to organise and then present your research topic at a student-led conference in Block 1.

Assessment: Research Portfolio (20%) and Dissertation (80%)

This module provides you with a range of appropriate professional skills and knowledge of the writing industry in its global context. Although some will be specific to the needs of creative writing practitioners, the knowledge and employability skills you gain will also be an advantage in a range of career options. Thus, it encompasses enterprise and entrepreneurship education by enabling you to develop the specific skills, capabilities and knowledge needed to adapt and flourish in different professional environments and contexts.

Topics may include discussions of international publishing trends, copyright, digital marketing, the selling of translation rights, developments in e-publishing, the global phenomenon of print-on-demand, and self-publishing. Provision may include contributions from industry professionals with a range of international links, for example, talks from visiting professors, independent publishers, or industry professionals.

This is a highly complex and successful module, that is annually singled out for praise from the external examiner.

Assessment: Marketing Plan (30%) and Publication Project (70%)

This module encourages you to rethink the premise of ‘Creative Writing’ as self-expression. It will heighten your attention to the language that surrounds them in everyday life and involve an element of self-transformation in your attitudes towards relations between art and life.

Creative Writing is founded upon notions of ‘original’ composition, and the quest to find a ‘unique’ voice. The ability to generate new writing that expresses creative thought and reflects upon experiences is one of the enduring definitions of what it means to be human. But there is an alternative, playful, history of ‘Uncreative Writing’ that challenges these ideas and welcomes kinds of writing practice open to celebrating the ‘materiality’ of language, chance procedures, collage, ‘conceptual writing’, ‘found’ and ‘appropriated’ texts, and experiments with artificial constraints.

This alternate history is multi-disciplinary, and this module brings you into dialogue with a range of ideas, attitudes and practices that have been central to visual art, musical composition, mathematics, and Zen.

Key to the module is a celebration of the importance of play and experimentation as central tenets of creativity. You will be supported to develop a receptivity towards the creative resources of everyday life, and a willingness to transform everyday materials.

Assessment: Uncreative Portfolio (100%)

This module investigates Anglo-American modernism and its publication in 'little magazines.' You will study modernist texts by authors like T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf and explore how these works responded to modernity.

Assessment: Essay (40%) and Research Portfolio (60%)