Postgraduate English 2016-2017

The course engages students in a variety of activities designed to develop their creativity and originality, as well as in specific tasks to test and extend their skill in the writing of poetry. Students will attempt imitations of a variety of different poetic styles, will be provided with a number of specific 'stimulus' exercises and will develop and revise their poems both independently and in regular workshop sessions.

Novel Ideas: Reading Prose Fiction explores the many different voices of the novel from the eighteenth century to the present day, and considers how these voices are assimilated by readers and reading communities. It looks at how this literary form, sometimes regarded as trivial entertainment, has developed into a powerful and highly theorised literary genre, capable of handling complex cultural and psychological material, and of effecting profound social impact. 

This course examines some of the main critical approaches and theories that have shaped modern literary inquiry. An organising theme of the course is different notions of ‘text’, ranging from historicist definitions of the ‘material text’ to poststructuralist theories of intertextuality and the practice of modern textual editing. The relevance to literature of different types of context is also explored, as are the interpretative possibilities of various forms of ideological critique, including feminism and post-colonialism. Throughout the course students are exposed to a wide variety of primary and secondary texts from a range of historical periods and geographical locations. 

This course is devoted to the development of non-fiction creative prose. Among the themes and genres engaged with will be: travel writing, psychogeography, non-academic critical writing, prose poetry, diary, memoir, and the fragment. Students will study examples across the genre and build up a portfolio of work, discussion of which will form the basis of weekly workshops.  

​​This course will explore the modes of narration developed by Irish and Scottish novelists from 1800 to 1830, a period which saw the rise of the national tale and the historical novel. How was the nation imagined and represented in early nineteenth-century Ireland and Scotland in the wake of revolution and historical trauma? Authors to be discussed will include Sydney Owenson [Lady Morgan], Maria Edgeworth, Walter Scott, James Hogg, and Charles Maturin. A number of theoretical texts on the history of the novel, nationalism, memory, history and trauma will be studied in relation to Romantic fiction.

Interactions between literature and science, medicine and technology take place on many different levels. Poets allude to scientific theories; scientists use narrative to explain the natural world or the human body and mind; novelists experiment on their readers’ nerves; science writers present natural history as a poetic pursuit or earth history as a drama. Different scholarly approaches, both literary and historical, are required to understand these diverse forms of engagement. This course will introduce students to a wide range of scholarly approaches to these interactions, within literary studies, medical humanities and the history of science.

This course option is designed to allow the creation of a programme of individual study where other appropriate course options at masters level are not available. It will run at the discretion of the programme co-ordinator. In discussion with a designated supervisor students will be able to identify and design a programme of research and study, which may include the completion of an undergraduate course, with assessments appropriate to masters-level work, or which may be consist of a short programme of research conducted over one semester.

This course option is designed to allow the creation of a programme of individual study where other appropriate course options at masters level are not available. It will run at the discretion of the programme co-ordinator. In discussion with a designated supervisor students will be able to identify and design a programme of research and study, which may include the completion of an undergraduate course, with assessments appropriate to masters-level work, or which may be consist of a short programme of research conducted over one semester.

The ‘discovery’ of the Americas is an on-going process involving narratives, as well as exploration, colonisation and scientific discovery. This course will look at this process through fiction, visual media and scientific and travel narratives, in order to explore the invention and re-invention of North and South America as a cultural idea. Processes to be considered will include the pioneer experience, the impact of new technologies, collecting and categorising the natural world and human cultures, amongst others. Amongst the authors to be discussed may be Charles Darwin, Willa Cather, Alexander von Humboldt, Christopher Columbus, William and Henry James.

Taught by experienced, award-winning writers, this course will engage students in a variety of activities designed to develop their creativity and originality, as well as in specific tasks to test and extend their technical skill in the writing of prose fiction. Students will be encouraged to develop an awareness of the centrality of narrative voice, to experiment with a variety of different narrative styles and to develop and revise their work in the context of workshop discussion and individually targeted feedback from course tutors.

This course examines the social, political and cultural construction of place in literary texts. The imaginative co-ordinates of places such as ‘Scotland’, or ‘England’ exist in a constant state of flux, refusing to yield an essential, authentic image. Using core texts from the early modern period paired with more recent literary responses we explore the idea of place in its various forms. Key themes and issues to be discussed will include the rural and urban divide; literature and nationhood; the nature of community; the significance of emigration, and displacement; walking texts, metropolitan literature, and ideas of the “new world” 

​The course examines the rich poetic literatures of Ireland and Scotland from earliest times to the present. It includes works from the medieval Gaelic culture shared by both countries and from their very different literatures in modern Irish and Scottish Gaelic and in Teutonic languages (English and Scots in Scotland, English and Ulster Scots in Ireland). The course reveals the fascinating back story to the achievement of world famous writers such as Robert Burns and W. B. Yeats and explores how two small neighbouring countries sustained diverse, inter-involved and still evolving poetic traditions over a period of fifteen hundred years.

This course will look at a wide range of recent women’s writing to consider interconnected questions of national, individual, and gendered identity.  It will examine how contemporary authors renegotiate ideas of self and nation, and even challenge any concept of stable identity.  Authors to be studied may include A.L. Kennedy, Emma Donoghue, Ali Smith, Deirdre Madden, and Eimear McBride.

This course will look at a wide range of  science fiction writing, beginning from the ‘fantasy science’ of Tait and Balfour’s The Unseen Universe, through early science fiction in the works of Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle to the science fiction of major modern Scottish writers such as Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Naomi Mitchison. On the Irish side, the course will explore how the fantasy science of the Celtic Twilight (W.B.Yeats’s ‘experiments’ in occultism) lead on the modernist science fantasies of Flann O’Brien and Francis Stuart.

This course option is designed to allow the creation of a programme of individual study where other appropriate course options at masters level are not available. It will run at the discretion of the programme co-ordinator. In discussion with a designated supervisor students will be able to identify and design a programme of research and study, which may include the completion of an undergraduate course, with assessments appropriate to masters-level work, or which may be consist of a short programme of research conducted over one semester.

This course option is designed to allow the creation of a programme of individual study where other appropriate course options at masters level are not available. It will run at the discretion of the programme co-ordinator. In discussion with a designated supervisor students will be able to identify and design a programme of research and study, which may include the completion of an undergraduate course, with assessments appropriate to masters-level work, or which may be consist of a short programme of research conducted over one semester.

Walter Scott’s first novel Waverley (1814) sold more copies than all other novels published in that year put together. As a result he has become Scotland’s most significant writer of fiction and has played a pivotal role in the development of the novel both in English and internationally. This course will consider Scott in all his contexts; as editor, poet, collector and writer of fiction and within the wider sphere of literature in the Romantic period. While Scott will be the main focus, his work will be considered alongside authors such as James Hogg, John Galt, Jane Austen and Byron.

This course offers students the opportunity to develop their understanding of, and practical skills in, the writing of prose fiction. This skills-based course is structured around six wide-ranging and overlapping discussion areas: character; setting and the senses; point of view (voice, perspective and degrees of knowing); showing/telling; plot and structure; fact and fiction (life-writing, memory, and the use of scientific/medical/psychological detail).

Renaissance literature is full of temptress and enchantress figures from classical epic and medieval romance, refashioned to reflect the desires and anxieties of the early modern world. The course explores the development of this archetype, showing the psychological, religious and political concerns it encodes, and its power as an artistic motif in works by Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton and others. You will study a mixture of poetry and prose and examine works by three great early modern writers, in light of renaissance poetics, 'psychology' and politics, and the theories of language and the imagination which they encapsulate and transform.

Candidates will be required to research and write a 15,000 dissertation on a subject and in an area approved by the supervisor and the Head of School.

This course will provide students with the opportunity to write an extended folio of creative work in either poetry or prose. It will provide students with the opportunity to explore and extend their creative ambitions in writing and, through the reflective commentary element, enable them to contextualise their own creative achievements in relation to works by established writers. Throughout the evolution of the folio, the student will develop a thorough practical awareness of some of the key stylistic, formal and expressive possibilities available to the skilled creative writer.

Independent research with the support of individual supervision, in an area of literary studies chosen in consultation with staff. Students will further develop skills acquired over the programme, formulating a distinctive research question and producing a sustained piece of scholarly argument (15,000 words).

Under individual supervision, students will write a 15,000-word dissertation on a topic relating to the relationship between literature and science/medicine/technology, as agreed with the Dissertation Coordinator and an appropriate supervisor.

Under individual supervision, students will write a 15,000-word dissertation on a novel-related topic to be approved by the Programme Co-ordinator.