History and English Literature BA (Hons)

This module will introduce you to studying English Literature at University, and allow you to develop skills such as reading critically and communicating clearly. In the first semester you'll get an overview of the degree structure and examine some key critical terms, problems and approaches for students of English. These include, for example: the literary canon and value; narrative theory; realism and representation; genre; the production of meaning; relationships between literature, history and the world; selected approaches to literature, (including formalist, new historicist, feminist, psychoanalytical and postcolonial criticism) and relationships between literature and identity. You'll explore these topics through a selection of critical texts and short extracts from plays, novels, short stories and poems (extracts provided). You'll attend a one-hour lecture and a two-hour seminar each week, including a library induction session.

On this module you'll reflect on the methods of the discipline of History and, in the Personal Development Plan element, on your own progress as a student. You'll also be instructed in Research Methods, in preparation for writing your dissertation in the final year. You'll discuss how to analyse historical sources and consider the merits of varied historical traditions, as well as reflecting on the nature and problems inherent in the process of constructing history. Your assessment will take the form of a set of exercises in which you will reflect on the nature of the discipline of History, show competence in the research skills taught on the module, and reflect on your progress as a student.

Conflict can be found in all literature. However, in the Romantic period it seems to have been the essence of the spirit of the age. Percy Shelley called the French Revolution of 1789 ‘the master theme of the epoch in which we live’, and indeed many critics and historians date the beginning of the Romantic period from then. In fact Britain was at war with France for most of this period (from 1793 to 1815) trying to undo the revolution, restore a king, and with him, the old aristocratic ruling class. Class conflict was in the air well before 1789 as William Hazlitt notes: ‘the French revolution might be described as a remote but inevitable result of the invention of the art of printing.’ What he means here is that an overwhelming public consensus had to be achieved before a revolution could occur and the only way to achieve this is through the mass dissemination of ideas – through literature. Conflict can occur in any arena: class, race, debates over animal welfare, the lecture theatre (for example the debates between Hazlitt and Coleridge) and of course in personal relationships. Therefore, the scope of this module is a large one. You will be invited to read as widely as possible in this period and not merely stick to the set texts or the subjects of lectures and seminars.

On this module, you'll study the development of the United States during the 20th century as it gained superpower status, investigating social and political change from the Progressive era through to Ronald Reagan's presidency. You'll consider such key figures as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Al Capone, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Richard Nixon, with topics including US foreign policy, imperialism, the New Deal, McCarthyism, the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War and Watergate. You'll evaluate themes such as the continuities and changes in foreign policy, the development of the reform tradition as well as the problems of race. You'll be assessed through an essay and exam respectively.

This module will allow you to interrogate a specialist area of contemporary research in the subject area, particularly those with ongoing research being produced by staff members in the Department. For History, this topic might be either ‘Twilight of the Raj’or ‘Bells to Boomboxes: Sound in Britain, Europe and America, 1500-1980.