BA (Hons) English

Year 1

Core modules

We’ll introduce you to a range of different texts and critical approaches in your first year to lay the foundation for your degree. Through a carefully designed curriculum, you will be introduced to the historical and theoretical study of literature. This will be supplemented by additional skills-based and topic-based modules.

Approaches to Literature

Get a feel for the shape of literary history by studying works from the medieval, early modern, eighteenth-century and Romantic, and modern periods.

• Approaches to Literature I: Writing Modernity

• Approaches to Literature II: Other Worlds

A World of Literature

Explore a range of responses to ancient literary texts and literature from around the world.

• A World of Literature I: Classics and Cultural Translations

• A World of Literature II: Empire and Aftermaths

Key Concepts

Establish important critical and methodological contexts for the study of literature. You will develop strategies for essay writing, engaging with criticism and critical theory, and revising work to improve its fluency and persuasiveness, as part of the Department’s innovative Writing at York provision.

• Key Concepts: An Introduction to Genre, Theory, and Writing

Option modules

The core modules will be supplemented by additional skills-based and topic-based modules:

• Topic modules

These exciting, hands-on, tightly focused modules act as an important pivot point between the research skills developed throughout the year and practical skills that will make you more employable after your degree.

Options may cover topics such as:

• The Big Book

• Bodies and Minds

• Ecomedieval

• The Global Eighteenth Century

• Literature and the City

• Now: Intersectional Feminisms from the 1960s to the Present

• Myth

• 5 Things about Poetry

Year 2

In the second year of your degree, you will further your understanding of literature’s rich heritage, taking an array of modules that invite you to think historically and globally. Our innovative core modules will help you to continue to develop your critical inquiry and writing skills. 

Core modules

• Writing Now

• Research Now

Writing Now expands the possibilities for writing about literature, exploring contemporary forms that emphasise a more fluid relationship between critical and creative practices. Research Now propels you toward advanced literary research, helping you to develop your own critical interventions as you hone ideas for your final-year dissertation.

Option modules

Our Intermediate Option Modules allow you to deepen your understanding of the relationship between literary works and the cultural, historical, and political contexts in which they were produced. These cover topics such as:

• The Shock of the New: Medieval Literature

• The Renaissance

• Inventing Britain, 1700-1830

• Victorians: British Literature, 1832-1901

• Age of Extremes: Twentieth-Century British and Irish Literature

• American Literature: From the First World War to the End of Empire

You will also choose from subjects included in our World Literature modules, which invite you to engage with questions of language, translation, and cultural difference in ways that equip you with important skills in linguistic analysis and description. Some are taught partly in the original language and partly in translation, others entirely in translation - the choice is yours. Recent offerings have included:

• An Introduction to Greek and Latin Literatures

• European New Cinema

• French Poetry 1844-1898

• The Literature of Hispanic America

• Medieval Arabic and Persian Global Literature

• Muslim Translations of Britain

• Old Norse Literature

• The World of Beowulf

Year 3

You’ll have the opportunity to explore further the areas you’ve developed an interest in over the course of your studies through the diverse range of module choices available to our third-year students. In addition, the subject of your English dissertation is entirely up to you, which means that there is an exciting opportunity for you to shape the trajectory of your final year.

Option modules

Our Advanced Option Modules reflect the wide-ranging and cutting-edge research expertise of the Department and cover literature from the classical period to the twenty-first century, as well as film and creative writing. Students can typically choose from around 25 options. Recent offerings include:

• American Independent Film

• The Body in Modern American Literature and Culture

• Charles Dickens

• Fashion in the 18th Century

• Found in Translation

• From Tennyson to Tolkien: The Middle Ages & Modern Literature from 1843 - 1940

• Green Romanticism: Nature, Ecology, Calamity

• Modernism's Queer Spaces

• Poetry Boot Camp

• Pulp Fictions of Medieval England: Romance and Popular Fiction

• Researching the Renaissance

• So Funny it Hurts: Irish Comic Fiction

• Villains of the Romantic Gothic

• The Writer's Notebook: A Prose Fiction Workshop