English Literature

Course

In London

Price on request

Description

  • Type

    Course

  • Location

    London

London Metropolitan University exists to transforms lives. We take pride in helping students reach their goals and succeed in their future careers.Develop your critical and creative interests in prose, poetry and drama and gain an in-depth literary historical context. You will study mostly nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century literature but will be able to study literature written in the time of Shakespeare and in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Facilities

Location

Start date

London
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31 Jewry Street, EC3N 2EY

Start date

SeptemberEnrolment now closed

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Subjects

  • IT
  • English
  • Drama
  • University
  • Writing
  • IT Development
  • Poetry
  • Prose
  • Shakespeare
  • Skills and Training

Course programme

London Met invests in you: from our purpose-built newsroom to our state-of-the-art superlab, we aim to create a stimulating and unique learning environment for our students. Our courses have received top marks from the UK's Quality Assurance Agency and many are accredited by a wide range of professional bodies. Our lecturers are leaders in their field: in the latest Research Assessment Exercise, over two-thirds of the University’s research output was judged to be world-leading, internationally excellent or internationally recognised.

We go the extra mile with our investment. We do this through our five-star promise, our pledge to connect our students with opportunities to boost their career skills. We put employability at the heart of our curriculum through helping you find placements, work experience and voluntary opportunities across a wide variety of organisations.

Course overview

Your first year of study is a very wide-ranging and general introduction to the history of poetry, drama and prose and you will learn about the development of each form. By the end of the three years you will know about the development of English Literature from the eighteenth century to the present day, and will have considered, discussed and written about how changes in society and changes in literature intertwine. You will also learn about the historical origins of literature and study periods and cultures very different to our own, for example, Elizabethan England and Classical Greece. Your lecturers are specialists and published writers who will guide you through the cultural history of literature over the course of the degree.

In your second year of study you will begin to specialise and choose module options that suit your interests. You may want to study performance poetry or examine literature written for and about children, or concentrate on Shakespeare or the short story form. You will also begin to consider particular developments in the history of literature in greater depth, such as early twentieth century modernism. In addition, you will begin to develop your critical analytical skills and learn about how people have tried to analyse and criticise literature in the past. You will also be able to study popular commercial literary genres such as horror, crime, science fiction and romance.

In the third year you’ll be able to study in-depth research topics relating to your lecturers’ academic and professional specialisms. You can study how writing can be a form of political activism and discuss censorship, banned books, the imprisonment of writers by repressive regimes or writers that live in exile. You’ll study with lecturers who have worked as writers, campaigners and journalists overseas and whose work reflects this experience. You can also look at the way writing can be a profession of faith or gesture towards religious or spiritual experience, and again you’ll study with lecturers who have written literary and critical studies on these ideas. You might be interested in studying literature from a philosophical perspective and want to consider the problem of what we claim we’re talking about when we discuss fictional worlds. If so, you’ll work with Philosophy lecturers who make the study of literature their special interest. Alongside these varied and critical topics you will study the development of drama, poetry and prose from the post-war period to the present day.

The third year of the degree also allows you to work with a supervisor and develop your own specialised topic via a dissertation. Previous topics have included D.H. Lawrence in Italy and New Mexico, The Double in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry, Dreams of Technology in Science Fiction and the Literature of Early Eighteenth Century London. You will also be able to choose from various option modules such as Existentialism in Writing, Literary London, From Page to Performance, and Book, Print, Hypertext.

You won’t just study in class. You’ll travel all over London with your lecturers, to places such as Keats House, the Charles Dickens Museum and Shakespeare’s Globe. Novelists, writers, poets, performers, publishers and literary agents will also visit the university to give you the benefit of their experience. You’ll learn to work and study in external archives, libraries and museums so that you can benefit from the full range of research opportunities that London offers.

This course is a wide-ranging, stimulating and innovative degree for any student wishing to pursue their interest in literature and cultural history and acquire practical and critical skills for future careers in, for example, teaching, publishing, the cultural industries and the arts.

The course has a Facebook page with news and events from alumni, students and staff.

English Literature

Price on request