What You Will Study

This course will allow you to explore an exciting variety of literary texts from the seventeenth century to present day. By reading a wide range of poems, novels and plays, you will learn the skills of close textual analysis, how to use evidence to support and develop arguments, and how to express ideas clearly and accurately.

You will undertake two examined units with each exam worth 40% of the final mark. The first, Drama and Poetry Pre-1900, involves the study of a Shakespeare play and a comparison of some poetry and a play. For Shakespeare, you will study King Lear. Perhaps his bleakest play, it deals with the catastrophic fallout from an unexpected regime change, which leads to extremes of violence, suffering and cruelty. 'Humanity must perforce prey on itself,' says one character, 'like monsters of the deep.'

For the comparison task, you wilk work on the Victorian poet, Christina Rossetti, whose writing is strange, beautiful and deeply surprising. You will focus on 15 of her poems, including the erotic and highly enigmatic 'Goblin Market', the only Victorian poem to have been published in Playboy. You will look at these alongside John Webster’s macabre tragedy The Duchess of Malfi (1614), a terrifying piece of writing about the consequences for a woman who tries to make her own romantic choices.

For the second unit, you will consider the way the immigrant experience has been represented in prose fiction, focusing on Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a disturbing and provocative post 9/11 thriller, and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, a family saga looking at the effect of immigration on two generations of an Indian family transplanted to America. You will also undertake a coursework unit worth 20% of your final mark, where you will write two essays on literature post-1900. Recent students have written about the poetry of Eavan Boland, plays by Caryl Churchill and Shelagh Delaney, and prose fiction by Sally Rooney and Bernadine Evaristo.