Liverpool Hope University

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LIVERPOOL HOPE UNIVERSITY

FACULTY OF ARTS AND HUMANITIES

ENGLISH LITERATURE

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English Literature Fact File030217

Faculty:Arts and Humanities

Department:English

Campus Location:Hope Park

Entry Requirements:The standard offer level is between 104 - 128 new UCAS points, including a minimum of two A2 levels or equivalent. In addition, applicants require an A2 level (or equivalent) in English Language, English Literature or Literature/Language. Applicants with other humanities subjects may also be considered.

Single Honours applicants should have A2 level (or equivalent) in English at Grade B or above.

UCAS Code: Q320

Duration:Three years

Year of Entry: 2017

Contact Hours: For details about time spent in lectures, seminars, tutorials, fieldwork, placement and self-study, please visit the Unistats website: http://unistats.direct.gov.uk/

Fees: The current tuition fees (2016/17) for Liverpool Hope are £9,000 per year. Information about fees for 2017/18 will be posted on our website: www.hope.ac.uk.

Additional Costs: Combined Honours: £300-£400 approximately for books and fieldtrips for the whole degree Single Honours: £500-£600 approximately for books and fieldtrips for the whole degree

Degree:BA Single and Combined Honours

You may also be interested in...• Drama and Theatre Studies

• English Language

• Media & Communication

Contact Details:Student Recruitment +44 (0) 151 291 3111 enquiry@hope.ac.uk

Course Combinations:

English Literature & Christian Theology UCAS code VQ36

English Literature & Creative Writing UCAS code 2B42

English Literature & Drama and Theatre Studies UCAS code WQ43

English Literature & Education UCAS code XQJ3

English Literature & Early Childhood UCAS code QX33

English Literature & English Language UCAS code Q301

English Literature & Film & Visual Culture UCAS code F167

English Literature & International Relations UCAS code QL32

English Literature & Media and Communication UCAS code QP33

English Literature & Music UCAS code QW33

English Literature & Philosophy and Ethics UCAS code QV3M

English Literature & Politics UCAS code QL3F

English Literature & Social Policy UCAS code QL3K

All combined honours result in a BA Degree.

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The degree in English Literature at Liverpool Hope enables you to explore a wide range of canonical and popular texts from the Middle Ages to the present day. Throughout your three years of study you will be taught by staff with research expertise in a broad range of fields, from Chaucer to contemporary literature.

You will be taught in lectures, seminars, and small tutorial groups by teaching staff with a strong international research profile. We pride ourselves on offering a challenging and stimulating degree with a wide range of innovative teaching and assessment methods. Our distinctive commitment to small group teaching allows us to help each individual student to develop sophisticated analytical and communication skills through working both independently and in groups. Small group teaching helps you to gain confidence and to reach your full potential, developing skills that help

you both academically and in the world beyond University. A high proportion of our students attain a first class or a 2:1 degree; this achievement recognises that they have attained highly valued skills enabling them to pursue a wide range of careers after graduation.

We are committed to providing you with teaching that is informed by nationally and internationally recognised research. You are welcomed into a Department that promotes a warm, supportive and collegial environment.

The English Department at Liverpool Hope University values each student as an important member of our scholarly community. With a strong commitment to small-group teaching and the personal development of all of our students, we strive to support each individual student in the pursuit of academic excellence.

Course Introduction

Level C (Year One)

• In Year 1 you will follow a structured programme of lectures and seminars/ workshops giving you an overview of the genres of poetry, drama, and prose and introducing you to a range of critical approaches and to the terminology associated with these.

• You will examine a variety of texts across all literary genres and will be introduced to theoretical approaches that provide different perspectives on these texts. Small-group tutorials are devoted to enhancing your writing skills.

• There is a range of assessment methods, from the traditional (essay and examination) to the innovative (critical précis and writing portfolio), that help you to build skills incrementally.

During Year 1, all Literature students will study the following:

Analysing Prose, Poetry and Drama This is a lecture strand that focuses on a broad range of texts from different generic traditions, providing students with background information and historical context, suggesting ways that such information can be used to enrich the reading of a given text.

Critical Approaches to Prose, Poetry and Drama This lecture strand examines the same texts studied for Analysing Prose, Poetry and Drama through the lens of different critical perspectives, examining the implications that their application would have on the interpretation of the texts studied.

What you will study

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Close Reading This is an interactive seminar strand that provides an overview of the development of the three traditional generic traditions: prose, poetry, and drama. The prose examined ranges from fairy tale/ fable to the essay, short story, and novel. The poetry selected for close reading introduces students to a range of poetic modes and forms: sonnets, lyrical poetry, narrative poetry, elegiac verse, dramatic monologues.

Text and Context Seminars on Text and Context examine the same texts studied in Close Reading seminars, placing them in relation to developing traditions, historical developments, and different critical perspectives.

Writing Workshop Through working with different types of writing, such as the essay, the glossary entry, and the critical synopsis, the Writing Workshop facilitates the development of increasingly sophisticated thinking and the nuances and fine distinctions necessary for effective academic writing. Students develop their academic writing in small tutorial groups with a personal tutor who is responsible for overseeing their pastoral care and successful academic transition.

During Year 1, Single Honours Literature students will also study the following:

Great Books, Great Ideas This lecture strand provides students with a framework that sets out, in general terms, the significance of particular texts within a developing discourse on a particular issue or theme.

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Legacies and Transformations This lecture strand examines a range of examples of the way particular themes examined in Great Books, Great Ideas lectures have been studied in a range of literary texts, providing examples and suggestions for further contextual and developmental reading.

Text and Idea This is an interactive seminar strand that investigates the development of particular ideas and themes in literature, such as the journey and the search, visions of Heaven and Hell, conceptions of power and utopia, the idea of originality and authorship, thoughts on self and society. Students examine works such as Homer’s The Odyssey (the journey) or Milton’s Paradise Lost (Heaven and Hell) with a view to understanding the nature of the dynamic elements that are continually referenced within literature and western thought.

Textual Legacies This seminar strand provides students with examples of the way elements of the core texts studied in Text and Idea seminars have been employed in subsequent literature. So, for example, a study of Plato’s The Republic might be followed by Thomas More’s Utopia, Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Huxley’s Brave New World.

Personal Development Workshop These tutorials ensure that students are made aware of the disciplinary and transferable skills that they are developing and helps students develop a secure foundation in the research and creative problem-solving skills necessary for Single Honours study. The classes also consider the history and role of English Literature as a university subject and consider the relationship between writers and their work.

Level I (Year Two)

• In Year 2 you will study particular historical periods in greater detail. At this level, the programme is designed to help you to discover the ways in which knowledge of the literary, cultural, and intellectual history of a period can enrich your understanding of particular authors and texts.

• Tasks and assessments are designed to help you develop the research and project-planning skills needed for longer and more complex academic projects.

• Assessments include a single-author study, a comparative essay, synoptic examination, and a problem-based learning exercise.

During Year 2, all Literature students will study the following:

English Literature from the Glorious Revolution to the Fin de Siècle This lecture strand will examine a broad range of literary texts from the seventeenth century to the early twentieth century, examining how literature engages with intellectual, social and political developments over the course of the era.

Restoration to Early Romantic Literature In the first term this seminar strand will trace significant aspects of the long eighteenth century, for example concerning the nature of reality and truth, the poetic imagination, the rise of the novel, and the diversity and complexity of poetic forms being used in the early years of Romanticism. The literary and philosophical ideas in evidence within the primary texts will be considered against the backdrop of changing social and political attitudes towards, for example, individual

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and national identity, and the nature of liberty.

Textual Analysis of Nineteenth-Century Literature In the second term the Textual Analysis of Nineteenth-Century Literature seminar strand will examine the development of English literature from the Romantic period, the Victorian era, and the writing of the fin de siècle. Emphasis will be placed on the effect of the French Revolution on English Literature, the development of feminist thinking in the Victorian era, the impact of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and cultural anxieties reflected in gothic literature and detective fiction of the fin de siècle.

Major Authors of Pre-Twentieth-Century Literature This tutorial strand focuses on the work of one or two writers within the context of the literature, ideas, and cultural history of their time. The authors examined will vary from year to year, but will include writers such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, Dickens, and Hardy.

During Year 2, Single Honours Literature students will also study the following:

Contextualising the Nineteenth Century This lecture strand will provide more detailed information on the intellectual history of the period (including scientific and social theories) and contemporaneous developments in the arts.

Medieval to Early Modern Literature In the first term this seminar strand examines the poetry, prose and drama of the late medieval and early modern periods. Close examination of authors such as Chaucer, the Gawain-poet, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson and Donne will underpin an interrogation of the traditional historiographical and critical divisions between medieval and Renaissance periodization.

American Literature In the second term, seminars on American Literature trace the impact of Romantic writers and theorists on the writers and literary productions of the American Renaissance. As American literature begins self-consciously to differentiate itself from English literature while influenced heavily by it, the resulting borrowings of literary forms such as the historical novel, the sentimental novel, and the gothic tradition will be traced; and the transformations that occur as these are used to treat native subjects will be examined. The rise of realism will also be examined in relation to the development of social novels in England.

Archival Research and Publishing History: Problem Based Learning This tutorial strand is designed to provide Single Honours students with training on the use of archival resources and exposure to issues related to the production, publication, and reception of a particular text. This tutorial strand will examine, as appropriate, manuscript variations, serialisation, illustrations, the production of different editions, the marketing of the text, contemporary reviews and subsequent re-evaluations, reader responses, and literary responses to selected literary texts.

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Level H (Year Three)

• In Year 3, you will engage with current critical issues, theories, and methodologies through a structured programme of study that aims to develop your skills as a researcher and writer. The Core and Single Honours strands of the course focus primarily on twentieth-century and contemporary literature, with a significant element of choice to allow students to develop their own interests.

• Assessments include essays, an annotated bibliography intended to support the development of advanced research skills, a synoptic examination, and an Honours Conference at which all students present the research from their dissertations or projects.

During Year 3, all Literature students will study the following:

Modernism and Literature This lectures strand will help to contextualise Modernist literature through an interdisciplinary approach, positioning it in relation to the intellectual history of the period (including scientific and social theories), contemporaneous developments in the arts, and reflections from the period of the role and nature of art/literature and the artist/writer in society.

Modernism In seminars on Modernism students examine and analyse a range of texts from England, Ireland, and the United States written during the Modernist period such as work by James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Nella Larsen, and Ernest Hemingway. These texts will be examined through close readings that will enable students to develop their

own understanding of the textual strategies, stylistic innovations, and thematic concerns of the literature of this period.

Honours Seminar In the second term, students participate in an Honours Seminar which is led by a member of staff with particular research expertise in the topic. Students will choose from options that focus either on contemporary issues in criticism or historicizing literature. In past years, Honours Seminar options have included the following:

• Reading the Enlightenment

• Experimental Fiction

• World War and Social Conflict

• Literature and Place

• Fiction After Modernism

Theoretical Models and Research Methods A tutorial strand on Theoretical Models in the first term enables students to examine some of the formative theories that informed Modernist thinking and practice, such as those of Marx, Freud and Bergson. In the second term, the tutorial strand focuses on Research.

Methods, helping students to develop and implement their research and project planning skills as they pursue their extended research project or dissertation.

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During Year 3, Single Honours Literature students also study the following:

Writing Home: World War and Class Conflict, 1900-1945 In the first term, a seminar series and associated lecture series on Writing Home: World War and Class Conflict, 1900-1945 looks at English poetry and prose during the age of Modernism, with an emphasis on Englishness, war and social inequality – topics that were closely related during the first half of the twentieth century. The set texts include The Wind in the Willows, Howards End, Brideshead Revisited and Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Contemporary Issues and Critical Practice This lecture series on Contemporary Issues and Critical Practice allows students to examine recent theoretical approaches such as trauma theory, the maturing of postcolonial perspectives and the examination of intersectionality in relation to the construction of identity, the contribution of disability studies to the understanding of literature, and the now common awareness of the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of literature. The Problem of Popular Literature In the first term the seminar series on Popular Literature interrogates ideas of cultural hierarchy and generic fixity. These seminars focus on a particular popular genre, such as the detective story, examining the dynamics of textual practice in relation to the conventions of the genre studied. A central element of this seminar strand involves critiquing the possibilities and limitations of readings of the texts and genres by particular critics.

Contemporary Issues and Critical Practice This lecture and seminar series, which runs in the second term, is designed to introduce students to literary theory. Students will read theoretical work and explore the history of ideas including psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, postcolonial, queer and New Historicist theories. The seminar strand uses student-led tasks to make students more self-conscious of their own research and critical practice as they pursue their dissertations.

Dissertation

All students receive one-to-one tutorials during Year 3 as they conduct sustained, supervised independent study in the form of a dissertation or research project. Dissertations and projects offer the opportunity for students to develop and pursue their own interests and lines of inquiry, under the supervision of an expert in their area. Dissertations and projects completed in recent years include:

• ‘The Destructive Force of Leisure in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is The Night’

• ‘Reading the Graphic Surface: Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves’

• ‘Personal versus Public Engagement with Politics in Thomas Wyatt’s ‘V Innocentia’

• ‘The Musical Evolution of the Prose of James Joyce’

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Field Trips

One of the key missions of Liverpool Hope University is to provide opportunities for the personal development of students as we support them in the pursuit of academic excellence. The English Department have been commended by external examiners for the use staff make of the Liverpool Hope University’s Special Collections in the Sheppard-Worlock Library to enhance students’ knowledge of the production of literary texts. We are also committed to supplementing and enhancing teaching by offering our students research trips to museums, libraries, archives, sites of literary and historical interest, and to Plas Caerdeon Outdoor Education Centre in North Wales.

In 2014-2015 we brought Year One Literature students to Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage. Year Three students taking the ‘Reading the Enlightenment’ Honours Seminar viewed manuscripts and annotated primary texts in the Royal Society, scientific instruments from the 17th and 18th century in the Science Museum (including air pumps,

early microscopes and telescopes) and examples of cabinets of curiosity in the British Museum. All Year Three students were given the opportunity to visit the University’s unique facilities at Plas Caerdeon for a two-day focused writing retreat and outdoor activities as they completed their dissertations and research projects with the supervision and support of lecturers in English Literature.

“The trip to Dove Cottage in the Lake District was extremely interesting. To see William Wordsworth’s home and its surrounding areas was great; you could really get an insight into why certain poems were written. The tour and workshop with one of the Wordsworth experts was very thought-provoking and provided interesting biographical information which will help greatly in our studies.”

Gemma Daniels, Level C, November 2014

Dove Cottage, home of William Wordsworth

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Employability and Career OpportunitiesA degree in English Literature opens many doors. English graduates can enter a wide range of careers and many of our graduates go on to employment in fields such as publishing, education, journalism, broadcasting, marketing and public relations. The programme will help you to develop communication skills, research skills, and project planning skills that will be useful whatever career you choose. Group work in tutorials and seminars will enable you to work fruitfully as part of a group and will help you to develop leadership skills; these are valued by employers.

In the English Department at Liverpool Hope we pride ourselves on supporting students throughout their personal as well as academic development. You will

discuss and explore career options and investigate opportunities for further study. Your CV will be enhanced by the skills you develop: a sophisticated level of analytical thinking, highly developed communication skills, excellent organisational skills and advanced writing skills. An English Literature degree also provides an excellent basis for postgraduate study, and many of our students choose to pursue our constantly expanding range of MA programmes at Liverpool Hope, such as the MA English Literature and MA Popular Literatures.

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• The Research Excellence Framework (REF) assesses the quality of research in the UK’s universities, and new results were published at the end of 2014. The results of REF 2014 showed that the English Department is a leading department for research, with 32.3% of our publications achieving the top grade and being recognized as ‘world-leading’. Nationally, the department came 29th out of 89 for quality of research outputs and 26th for world-leading research

• English Literature staff have significant international research publications in specialist areas such as Chaucer, Victorian literature, narrative theory, popular literatures, travel writing, war poetry and prose, and American literature

• Your tutors sit on the Boards for a range of research networks such as the Collegium for African American Research, the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, and the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. They play leading roles in the Liverpool Travel Writing Seminar and the General Council for the Renaissance Society of America

• 100 per cent of students were satisfied overall with the BA English Literature according to the 2015 National Student

Why study this subject at Liverpool Hope?

Survey, and in the 2014 National Student Survey, 100 per cent of English students said that staff have made the subject interesting, staff are good at explaining things and that staff are enthusiastic about what they are teaching

• Liverpool Hope regularly hosts extra-curricular activities, including conferences, lectures by visiting speakers, visits to local art galleries, a reading group, creative writing workshops and events hosted by the English Society - all of which foster a lively research community where students can share their literary interests. The Department also hosts a prestigious annual lecture, the Hopkins Lecture, and in 2015 this was given by the American novelist Marilynne Robinson

• In 2015, the external examiner praised the fact that teaching is ‘very visibly research-led by literary critical practitioners who excel in their field’. He also praised the students, commenting that ‘student work, especially at the higher end, was on a par with high-quality work that I have seen from students in Cambridge, Salford and Durham’.

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Graduate Profiles

Hayley Flynn

I originally chose to study literature at Liverpool Hope because of its incredibly friendly atmosphere, an aspect which makes Hope truly unique. Although the enthusiasm of the tutors made all of the modules enjoyable, the thing I enjoyed most about the course was the chance to choose my own specific area of research in the optional final year dissertation. As I was particularly interested in the Victorian period this gave me the opportunity to fully explore resources such as nineteenth-century newspapers, which was really exciting. My experience at Hope, and the wonderful support and encouragement of the staff in the English Department, gave me the confidence to pursue the subject further than I thought I could. Because of this I am now studying for a Masters by Research in English Literature at University of Birmingham, which I hope to extend into a PhD.

Bethany North

There are many reasons why I chose Hope, including the beautiful grounds and fantastic facilities but the most important reason was the supportive and stimulating academic environment! Hope gave me the building blocks for a firm foundation in my teaching career. From a pastoral point of view, I was given opportunities to develop my confidence and have amazing times. Academically, I had the chance to flourish! From delivering presentations to being president of the English Society, I thoroughly enjoyed my time at Hope.

Dr Alice Bennett, Senior Lecturer

Dr Alice Bennett works on contemporary literature and narrative experimentation. She is the author of Afterlife and Narrative in

Contemporary Fiction (2012), has published articles in Textual Practice and The Oxford Literary Review, and has contributed to a volume on Twenty-First Century Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). She has degrees from Durham University, UCL and the University of Warwick and taught at Durham for four years before joining the department at Hope. She teaches 20th century and contemporary literature courses at undergraduate level and Science Fiction and the Graphic Novel on MA courses in the English Department.

Dr William Blazek, Associate Professor

Dr William Blazek teaches 19th century American literature, modernism, and First World War literature.

He is also a senior supervisor for PhD students. A member of the executive board of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, he is also a founding co-editor of The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review (2002-present) and publishes chiefly in 19th and 20th century Anglo-American literature.

Dr Guy Cuthbertson, Associate Professor and Head of Department

Dr Guy Cuthbertson was educated at St Andrews and Oxford, and held academic

posts at Oxford, Swansea, Brighton, London and St Andrews. His research focuses on the Edwardian age and the First World War. He is a General Editor of the Oxford University Press edition of Edward Thomas’s prose, editing the first two volumes, Autobiographies and (with Lucy Newlyn) England and Wales. He also co-edited the anthology Branch-Lines, and has written a biography of war poet Wilfred Owen, published by Yale University Press in 2014 (and in paperback in 2015).

Dr Trish Ferguson, Senior Lecturer

Dr Trish Ferguson is the author of Thomas Hardy’s Legal Fictions (Edinburgh University Press, 2013) and the editor of Victorian

Time: Technologies, Standardizations, Catastrophes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), which explores how Victorian literature engages with the onset of ‘industrial time’ and the birth of a modern time-consciousness. She is currently editing a collection of essays that examines influences and connections between physicists, philosophers and canonical texts from the 1890s to the 1930s. Other research interests include Victorian print culture and the ideological dynamics of canon formation.

Academic Staff Profiles

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Dr Zoë Kinsley, Senior Lecturer

Dr Zoë Kinsley is Senior Lecturer in English Literature. Her research focuses upon 18th century literature, particularly home

tour travel writing from that period, and she is the author of Women Writing the Home Tour, 1682-1812 (Ashgate, 2008). Other areas of interest are the representations of landscape and space in literature and 18th century descriptive poetry.

Dr Lisa Walters, Lecturer

Dr Lisa Walters is author of Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

She is the President of the International Margaret Cavendish Society, is a member of the Editorial Board of ANQ and she serves on the General Council for the Renaissance Society of America. She has taught at Ghent University, Belgium, Saint Joseph’s University, USA, St. Andrews and Newcastle. Her research explores Renaissance literature in relation to science, philosophy, politics, folklore and gender.

Dr Louise Wilson, Lecturer

Dr Louise Wilson’s research focuses on the publishing and reading of popular fiction in the sixteenth century. She is working on a monograph

on reading for pleasure in early modern England, as well as publications on the writer and translator, Anthony Munday, and reading and health. She co-edited Renaissance Paratexts (Cambridge UP, 2011) and English Renaissance Translation Theory (MHRA, 2013), and is Associate Editor of the MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translations series. She has degrees from Oxford and York and previously held academic posts at St Andrews and Geneva.

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