English

BA (Hons) in English

Mode: full-time

The English degree at Queen Mary asks you to consider a series of challenging questions about what literature is (and why people write it), about how the processes of reading are shaped by factors within and beyond our individual control, and about how texts written in the past have meaning for us today. Courses are run by an experienced body of academic staff, which has an international reputation for its teaching and research.

Year One
During your first year you will take four specially formulated core courses, which will equip you with the foundational skills and key concepts necessary for studying English at degree level:

• Shakespeare
• Reading, Theory and Interpretation
• Poetry: a Basic Course
• Literatures in Time: Texts and Contexts from the eighth to the sixteenth century

These modules will introduce you to a variety of theoretical approaches to literary writing, as well as bringing you into contact with a broad spectrum of literature in English from different periods. You will investigate the historical origins of literary production in Britain, learn tools and techniques to help you analyse and enjoy poetry, and undertake a detailed exploration of the works of William Shakespeare.

Years Two and Three
Your second and third years will give you the chance to explore the aspects of literature that intrigue you most. As part of the second year curriculum, you take two compulsory modules, Fiction and Narrative, and Advanced Research Skills. What you study in the rest of your degree is up to you. After consultation with your advisor, you will design a programme for yourself by choosing from a list of around sixty options, typically including:

• Chaucer
• Representing London: the Eighteenth Century
• Modernism
• Postcolonial Literatures in English

These modules give you the chance to encounter a range of the prose, poetry, and plays that have been produced over the last three thousand years, and to engage with the key issues raised by these texts. In your third year you will also complete an English Dissertation, in which you will study and produce an extended analysis of a literary topic of your choice:

English Dissertation
For further details of second and third year course options, please see our list of modules in the following subject areas:

• Classical and Medieval
• Renaissance
• Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, and the Romantic Period
• Twentieth Century and Contemporary
• Colonial and Postcolonial
• Interdisciplinary