Applied English Programme (distance learning) MA

This pod explores some of the many ways insects, birds, apes, and other animals communicate, and compare these to human language. In doing so, they will examine what makes human language so unique, considering how language exists in the mind, how we recognise it, and how we process it.

In exploring the relationship between narrative, language and cognition, this pod investigates a range of approaches to the study of worldmaking, fictional minds, perspective, and intertextuality. It engages with theories of cognitive reception, and examines emotion, ethics and empathy in relation to literary reading.

This pod explores the diverse field of discourse analysis, which focuses on the (co)-construction of meaning, identity, ideology, and power in spoken and written communication.

You will:

• grapple with the concept of ‘discourse’ from a theoretical standpoint
• consider the distinction between spoken and written discourse
• learn how to apply discourse analytical tools such as conversation analysis and critical discourse analysis
• develop your awareness of the role and implications of ethical considerations in data collection for discourse analysis.

By the end of this pod, you will have gained the knowledge and skills to conduct your own empirical research in the field of discourse analysis.

This pod introduces a range of skills and approaches in linguistics, working from the smallest components of language to the largest. We will work with practical examples of phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics, enabling you to apply relevant skills to whichever areas of linguistics you wish to explore.

This pod explores the role of communication in the workplace, explaining how to linguistically examine spoken and written interaction in a range of professional contexts.

You will:

• examine key issues such as identity construction, workplace culture, and rapport at work
• identify different types of talk at work (e.g. small talk, humour), exploring the various functions of each
• analyse professional computer-mediated communication e.g. email, social networking sites, online reputation management
• apply multimodal critical discourse analysis to analyse professional promotional materials e.g. advertisments, websites.

By the end of this pod, you will have gained the knowledge and skills to critically evaluate the role played by language in the context of work.

Second Language Acquisition (SLA) examines the ways in which second languages are learned. The pod explores a number of key aspects of this multifaceted phenomenon and introduces the main terms and theories that have been proposed to describe and understand the process of developing second language (L2) knowledge and skills.

This pod introduces cutting-edge theory and research from the area of vocabulary studies. We explore the nature of lexical knowledge in a second language, and address the key question of what is involved in knowing a word in relation to its form, meaning and use.

This pod introduces a particular application of corpus linguistics which focuses on issues of style, especially in literature. We examine the main principles that underlie corpus design and compilation, and investigate the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of corpus-stylistic analysis, considering the implications of corpus linguistics for literary-linguistic and literary-critical research.

This pod presents the key relevant theoretical and historical developments in the field of intercultural communication, exploring the concept of culture and how it manifests itself in interaction through verbal and nonverbal communication. We explore theoretical frameworks and analytical tools to examine and describe communication across cultures, including intercultural pragmatics and Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory.

This pod explores the role of digital technology in the professional sphere, introducing key concepts in and approaches to digital professional communication by drawing on research based on real-life communication as observed in the professional sphere of public life.

This pod explores English language teaching methodology for a wide range of learners and contexts, which could also be applied to the teaching of other languages. You will gain an understanding of the theoretical rationales and principles of syllabus design, as well as various teaching methods and methodological approaches including the communicative, humanist, and lexical approaches.

This pod presents the wide range of factors which impact on second language acquisition (SLA). Biological, cognitive and affective factors are discussed together with characteristics of SLA environments such as the nature of input, interaction, instruction and the role of culture. Case studies and research papers are used to examine how these factors interact to accelerate or impede SLA.

Historical pragmatics is the study of language usage patterns in the past, combining both language-internal as well as language-external factors to understand how forms of discourse have changed throughout history. As a particular case-study, the pod explores the histories of medical and scientific writing.

In this pod, the importance of Intercultural Competence (IC) in today’s globalised world is considered in diverse contexts such as business, the language classroom, healthcare, and media. We discuss how IC can be enhanced in professional and educational contexts, and you will gain an understanding of key issues in the design and implementation of IC development programmes.

This interdisciplinary field is primarily concerned with how the use of language by learners compares to native speakers, and how pragmatic competence develops in a second language (L2). You will consider how pragmatic competence is conceptualised in various communicative frameworks, and we also explore the relationship between L2 pragmatics and identity, viewing language learners as ‘social agents’.

This pod explores language and gender in a range of workplace settings.

You will:

• consider different perspectives from which to study language and gender
• learn how to apply theoretical concepts and analytical tools to analyse language and gender in professional contexts
• study gendered discourse in a range of professional contexts e.g. the media, politics, and healthcare
• examine research findings on the relation between language and gender in business meetings.

By the end of this pod, you will have gained the knowledge and skills to conduct a linguistic analysis of talk at work with a focus on issues related to gender.

This pod examines the relationship between power, leadership and language, paying close attention to how leadership is constructed and reproduced in a wide variety of texts and genres. We will examine how leadership is constructed in workplace communication, exploring ‘discursive leadership’, the enactment of leadership, the appraisal of work and the establishment of rapport.

This pod discusses key issues related to learning and teaching vocabulary in a second language (L2), with a particular focus on how research findings inform language pedagogy, materials development and English Language Teaching (ELT) methodology more broadly. You will be able to use current research to inform principled vocabulary teaching and language instruction.

This pod provides a linguistic overview of metaphor, with a particular emphasis on Conceptual Metaphor Theory. The pod examines how metaphors gain prominence, examining literary and political discourse in detail to highlight how salient metaphor is in a range of language settings, and how significant it is for understanding human thought.

In this pod, we will investigate how narratives are structured, presented, and conceptualised in the mind of the reader. We consider key topics which are fundamental to the creation of narrative, from the representation of point of view through to the articulation of time, reflecting critically on contemporary narratological theory and practice.

This pod will help you develop the necessary expertise and skills to plan, organise and evaluate the teaching process on courses and programmes aimed at second language (L2) learners. By discussing specific aspects and skills related to L2 competence, we review and analyse the latest thinking in language education.

Across this pod, we will explore the role, position and identity of the reader, thinking in detail about who we are referring to when we talk about ‘the reader’ in stylistics. We will investigate a range of experimental and naturalistic methods of gathering reader-response data, and examine the benefits and limitations of empirical approaches in stylistic analysis.

This pod explores the diverse field of discourse analysis, which focuses on the (co)-construction of meaning, identity, ideology, and power in spoken and written communication.

You will:

• grapple with the concept of ‘discourse’ from a theoretical standpoint
• consider the distinction between spoken and written discourse
• learn how to apply discourse analytical tools such as conversation analysis and critical discourse analysis
• develop your awareness of the role and implications of ethical considerations in data collection for discourse analysis.

By the end of this pod, you will have gained the knowledge and skills to conduct your own empirical research in the field of discourse analysis.

This pod introduces a range of skills and approaches in linguistics, working from the smallest components of language to the largest. We will work with practical examples of phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics, enabling you to apply relevant skills to whichever areas of linguistics you wish to explore.

Second Language Acquisition (SLA) examines the ways in which second languages are learned. The pod explores a number of key aspects of this multifaceted phenomenon and introduces the main terms and theories that have been proposed to describe and understand the process of developing second language (L2) knowledge and skills.

This pod introduces cutting-edge theory and research from the area of vocabulary studies. We explore the nature of lexical knowledge in a second language, and address the key question of what is involved in knowing a word in relation to its form, meaning and use.

This pod introduces a particular application of corpus linguistics which focuses on issues of style, especially in literature. We examine the main principles that underlie corpus design and compilation, and investigate the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of corpus-stylistic analysis, considering the implications of corpus linguistics for literary-linguistic and literary-critical research.

This pod explores the role of digital technology in the professional sphere, introducing key concepts in and approaches to digital professional communication by drawing on research based on real-life communication as observed in the professional sphere of public life.

This pod explores English language teaching methodology for a wide range of learners and contexts, which could also be applied to the teaching of other languages. You will gain an understanding of the theoretical rationales and principles of syllabus design, as well as various teaching methods and methodological approaches including the communicative, humanist, and lexical approaches.

This pod presents the wide range of factors which impact on second language acquisition (SLA). Biological, cognitive and affective factors are discussed together with characteristics of SLA environments such as the nature of input, interaction, instruction and the role of culture. Case studies and research papers are used to examine how these factors interact to accelerate or impede SLA.

Historical pragmatics is the study of language usage patterns in the past, combining both language-internal as well as language-external factors to understand how forms of discourse have changed throughout history. As a particular case-study, the pod explores the histories of medical and scientific writing.

In this pod, the importance of Intercultural Competence (IC) in today’s globalised world is considered in diverse contexts such as business, the language classroom, healthcare, and media. We discuss how IC can be enhanced in professional and educational contexts, and you will gain an understanding of key issues in the design and implementation of IC development programmes.

This interdisciplinary field is primarily concerned with how the use of language by learners compares to native speakers, and how pragmatic competence develops in a second language (L2). You will consider how pragmatic competence is conceptualised in various communicative frameworks, and we also explore the relationship between L2 pragmatics and identity, viewing language learners as ‘social agents’.

This pod examines the relationship between power, leadership and language, paying close attention to how leadership is constructed and reproduced in a wide variety of texts and genres. We will examine how leadership is constructed in workplace communication, exploring ‘discursive leadership’, the enactment of leadership, the appraisal of work and the establishment of rapport.

This pod discusses key issues related to learning and teaching vocabulary in a second language (L2), with a particular focus on how research findings inform language pedagogy, materials development and English Language Teaching (ELT) methodology more broadly. You will be able to use current research to inform principled vocabulary teaching and language instruction.

This pod provides a linguistic overview of metaphor, with a particular emphasis on Conceptual Metaphor Theory. The pod examines how metaphors gain prominence, examining literary and political discourse in detail to highlight how salient metaphor is in a range of language settings, and how significant it is for understanding human thought.

This pod will help you develop the necessary expertise and skills to plan, organise and evaluate the teaching process on courses and programmes aimed at second language (L2) learners. By discussing specific aspects and skills related to L2 competence, we review and analyse the latest thinking in language education.

This pod introduces a range of skills and approaches in linguistics, working from the smallest components of language to the largest. We will work with practical examples of phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics, enabling you to apply relevant skills to whichever areas of linguistics you wish to explore.

In exploring the relationship between narrative, language and cognition, this pod investigates a range of approaches to the study of worldmaking, fictional minds, perspective, and intertextuality. It engages with theories of cognitive reception, and examines emotion, ethics and empathy in relation to literary reading.

This pod investigates the processes of creativity, interpretation, imagination, emotional involvement, aesthetic experience, and literary texture, applying current understanding of language and mind (as drawn from research in cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology) to questions of literary reading.

This pod introduces a particular application of corpus linguistics which focuses on issues of style, especially in literature. We examine the main principles that underlie corpus design and compilation, and investigate the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of corpus-stylistic analysis, considering the implications of corpus linguistics for literary-linguistic and literary-critical research.

Historical pragmatics is the study of language usage patterns in the past, combining both language-internal as well as language-external factors to understand how forms of discourse have changed throughout history. As a particular case-study, the pod explores the histories of medical and scientific writing.

All literature is written in language, so understanding how language and the mind work will make us better readers and critics of literary works.

This module brings together the literary and linguistic parts of your degree. It gives you the power to explore any text from any period by any author.

You will study how:

• Literature can feel rich, or pacy, or suspenseful, or beautiful
• Texts can make you laugh, cry, feel afraid, excited, or nostalgic
• Fictional people like characters can be imagined
• We can get inside the thoughts, feelings, and hear the speech of characters, narrators and authors
• Imagined worlds are built, and how their atmosphere is brought to life
• You as a reader are manipulated or connect actively with literary worlds and people

This module is worth 20 credits.

This pod provides a linguistic overview of metaphor, with a particular emphasis on Conceptual Metaphor Theory. The pod examines how metaphors gain prominence, examining literary and political discourse in detail to highlight how salient metaphor is in a range of language settings, and how significant it is for understanding human thought.

In this pod, we will investigate how narratives are structured, presented, and conceptualised in the mind of the reader. We consider key topics which are fundamental to the creation of narrative, from the representation of point of view through to the articulation of time, reflecting critically on contemporary narratological theory and practice.

This pod explores stylistic, cognitive and narratological approaches to digital fiction, examining literary texts which are designed to be read and engaged with on a screen. Particular focus is given to hypertext fiction, ludic narratives, interactive film and app-based fiction, as we investigate the experience of reading and engaging with digital texts. 

This pod offers a comprehensive overview of the literary-linguistic framework ‘Text World Theory’. Through a focus on scholarship from the last twenty years, you will apply, augment, and critically evaluate the framework, explore a range of Text-World-Theory applications to discourse, both literary and otherwise, and consider the future potential of text-world scholarship.

Taking a stylistic perspective, this pod examines the features of language that characterise dystopian narratives, analysing a range of textual examples from across time periods, and investigating the evolution and hybridity of contemporary dystopia. We will explore the construal of dystopian worlds, the conceptualisation of dystopian minds, and the experience of dystopian reading.

Moving beyond traditional presentations of the written word, multimodal texts experiment with more than one semiotic mode, for instance incorporating graphics, creatively employing typeface, or featuring tactile elements. Taking a mixed stylistic, cognitive and narratological perspective, this pod will analyse a range of literary texts which manipulate and experiment with narrative across modes.

This pod explores the artistic movement of surrealism, with emphasis on the form and technique of literary surrealist writing in English. Surrealist output is considered from a literary-linguistic and cognitive poetic perspective in order to explore a view of surrealism and surrealist activity from the vantage point of current understanding of language and linguistics.

Across this pod, we will explore the role, position and identity of the reader, thinking in detail about who we are referring to when we talk about ‘the reader’ in stylistics. We will investigate a range of experimental and naturalistic methods of gathering reader-response data, and examine the benefits and limitations of empirical approaches in stylistic analysis.

This pod explores the diverse field of discourse analysis, which focuses on the (co)-construction of meaning, identity, ideology, and power in spoken and written communication.

You will:

• grapple with the concept of ‘discourse’ from a theoretical standpoint
• consider the distinction between spoken and written discourse
• learn how to apply discourse analytical tools such as conversation analysis and critical discourse analysis
• develop your awareness of the role and implications of ethical considerations in data collection for discourse analysis.

By the end of this pod, you will have gained the knowledge and skills to conduct your own empirical research in the field of discourse analysis.

This pod explores the role of communication in the workplace, explaining how to linguistically examine spoken and written interaction in a range of professional contexts.

You will:

• examine key issues such as identity construction, workplace culture, and rapport at work
• identify different types of talk at work (e.g. small talk, humour), exploring the various functions of each
• analyse professional computer-mediated communication e.g. email, social networking sites, online reputation management
• apply multimodal critical discourse analysis to analyse professional promotional materials e.g. advertisments, websites.

By the end of this pod, you will have gained the knowledge and skills to critically evaluate the role played by language in the context of work.

This pod presents the key relevant theoretical and historical developments in the field of intercultural communication, exploring the concept of culture and how it manifests itself in interaction through verbal and nonverbal communication. We explore theoretical frameworks and analytical tools to examine and describe communication across cultures, including intercultural pragmatics and Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory.

This pod explores the role of digital technology in the professional sphere, introducing key concepts in and approaches to digital professional communication by drawing on research based on real-life communication as observed in the professional sphere of public life.

In this pod, the importance of Intercultural Competence (IC) in today’s globalised world is considered in diverse contexts such as business, the language classroom, healthcare, and media. We discuss how IC can be enhanced in professional and educational contexts, and you will gain an understanding of key issues in the design and implementation of IC development programmes.

This pod explores language and gender in a range of workplace settings.

You will:

• consider different perspectives from which to study language and gender
• learn how to apply theoretical concepts and analytical tools to analyse language and gender in professional contexts
• study gendered discourse in a range of professional contexts e.g. the media, politics, and healthcare
• examine research findings on the relation between language and gender in business meetings.

By the end of this pod, you will have gained the knowledge and skills to conduct a linguistic analysis of talk at work with a focus on issues related to gender.

This pod examines the relationship between power, leadership and language, paying close attention to how leadership is constructed and reproduced in a wide variety of texts and genres. We will examine how leadership is constructed in workplace communication, exploring ‘discursive leadership’, the enactment of leadership, the appraisal of work and the establishment of rapport.

This pod explores Pope’s poetry in a range of forms and genres including epistles, essays, mock-classics, pastorals, translations, imitations, satires, and literary commentaries. We analyse Pope’s contribution to the development of those literary forms, and reflect on early eighteenth-century literary culture.

This pod provides research tools and concepts to enable advanced level research in Victorian literature, from contexts to aesthetics. We cover the different theorizations of literary value associated with Romanticism, Realism, Aestheticism and Decadence.

In exploring the relationship between narrative, language and cognition, this pod investigates a range of approaches to the study of worldmaking, fictional minds, perspective, and intertextuality. It engages with theories of cognitive reception, and examines emotion, ethics and empathy in relation to literary reading.

This pod investigates the processes of creativity, interpretation, imagination, emotional involvement, aesthetic experience, and literary texture, applying current understanding of language and mind (as drawn from research in cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology) to questions of literary reading.

This pod presents students with an introduction to the study of comics and graphic novels, exploring a range of work in the medium, from single issue comics to full-length graphic novels, and from independent to mainstream. We also consider the relationships between comics and adaptation, with opportunities for comparative work across countries and traditions.

This pod introduces the ways in which popular constructs of ‘madness’ are represented in literature and theatre from the nineteenth century to the present day. In tracing how these popular representations of ‘madness’ have developed over time, you will critique the relevant medical, political and social discourses with which they engage.

Through your analysis of this interplay between public discourse and private experience you will draw on debates surrounding patriarchal authority and female agency, individual and collective responsibility and the role of culture in determining what it means to be ‘mad’.

You will have the opportunity to apply these theoretical frameworks through close analysis of significant literary works by writers such as Willkie Collins and Sarah Waters, and of high-profile theatrical productions which include Nell Leyshon’s Beldam and Peter Brook’s Marat/Sade.

This pod is concerned with literary retellings of traditional fairy tales, taking a global approach to the choice of fairy tale traditions as well as literary adaptations. We study historical and political contexts behind the late-twentieth-century resurgence of fairy tale literature, with gender and feminist theory providing the major theoretical framework of the pod.

This pod introduces a particular application of corpus linguistics which focuses on issues of style, especially in literature. We examine the main principles that underlie corpus design and compilation, and investigate the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of corpus-stylistic analysis, considering the implications of corpus linguistics for literary-linguistic and literary-critical research.

Correspondence was the most important and necessary form of written communication in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this pod we examine the function of correspondence in both literary spaces as well as the everyday, and learn how to use correspondence as a primary resource, as well as how to transcribe manuscript letters.

Fear of death and what would come afterwards haunted writers throughout the Middle Ages. Covering a range of late medieval literature, this pod explores the idea of a ‘good death’, and the influence of this on conceptions of identity, illness, faith, memory and emotion.

From patronage and composition to book ownership and reading, women contributed to all stages of production and circulation of literature in the Middle Ages. This pod focuses on the early medieval period, tracing the role of women as teachers, authors, narrators, scribes, and readers in texts from England and Continental Europe.

This pod presents a theoretical and critical introduction to ecocriticism and to environmental writing. It takes in broad chronological and generic perspectives, introducing the ways in which environmental ideas manifest themselves in poetry, fiction and the ‘new nature writing’, taking in not only anglophone writing from the UK, the United States, Australia and India, but also writing in translation.

This pod provides an overview of Ethical Criticism, with its blend of moral philosophy, politics, and literary analysis, through the lens of two twentieth-century writers: Henry James and Samuel Beckett. You will analyse literary texts with the theoretical frames supplied by practising ethical and cultural critics.

This pod explores the Gothic as a literary mode, analysing a range of texts from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Emphasis will be placed not only on understanding the cultural contexts out of which texts emerged, but also on tracing lines of intellectual inheritance and cultural legacies.

This pod explores a range of Anglophone literature from the Indian sub-continent written during the period spanning the last decades of the British Empire and the growth of post-independence India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The pod focuses in particular on the intersection between literary texts and wider political debates around nationalism, caste, sex and gender.

All literature is written in language, so understanding how language and the mind work will make us better readers and critics of literary works.

This module brings together the literary and linguistic parts of your degree. It gives you the power to explore any text from any period by any author.

You will study how:

• Literature can feel rich, or pacy, or suspenseful, or beautiful
• Texts can make you laugh, cry, feel afraid, excited, or nostalgic
• Fictional people like characters can be imagined
• We can get inside the thoughts, feelings, and hear the speech of characters, narrators and authors
• Imagined worlds are built, and how their atmosphere is brought to life
• You as a reader are manipulated or connect actively with literary worlds and people

This module is worth 20 credits.

This pod explores representations of space and place in medieval literature and culture. Through literature, graphic maps, written descriptions, and artefacts, we will consider the local and the global; history and geography; and the ways cosmology and mythology shape conceptions of the world. We will also reflect on current critical debates about the 'Global Middle Ages'.

This pod provides a linguistic overview of metaphor, with a particular emphasis on Conceptual Metaphor Theory. The pod examines how metaphors gain prominence, examining literary and political discourse in detail to highlight how salient metaphor is in a range of language settings, and how significant it is for understanding human thought.

This pod explores the relationship between the works of D.H. Lawrence and the contemporary artistic and intellectual climate of modernism. You will study a range of Lawrence’s writings and reflect on their relationship to trends and events in social and intellectual history, to specific modernist literary and artistic movements, and to the broader ambitions of modernist experimentation.

In this pod, we will investigate how narratives are structured, presented, and conceptualised in the mind of the reader. We consider key topics which are fundamental to the creation of narrative, from the representation of point of view through to the articulation of time, reflecting critically on contemporary narratological theory and practice.

In this pod we consider how theatre and performance engage with concepts of place, space and spatiality. In doing so, you will draw on theoretical, practical and personal paradigms to understand how notions of place, space and site are represented, read, received and practised within the context of theatre and performance.

Before the advent of the printing press, texts circulated in hand-written copies. Each manuscript was therefore unique and tells us about the tastes and habits of medieval readers. Through a case study, you will develop and apply skills in transcription (palaeography), examine editorial choices, learn how to compile a glossary and provide an explanatory commentary.

This pod investigates the relationships between religion (specifically Christianity) and fantasy literatures. The pod centres on the works of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, exploring the ways Narnia and Middle Earth present different religious visions. It sets these authors in their historical and intellectual contexts, and discusses the historical roots of fantasy tropes.

This pod introduces Old English heroic poetry in its cultural and historical context. Through a selection of poems studied in both their original language and in translation, we approach the form, themes, and stylistic features of heroic poetry, and explore the way religious and cultural values are represented through this genre.

This pod explores the material forms that Shakespeare’s plays took in their earliest printed versions, and the processes that turn them into today’s modern texts. Drawing on twenty-first century developments in textual studies and editorial practice, the pod uses case studies of specific plays to engage with some of the most crucial debates in contemporary Shakespeare studies.

Through the literatures and contexts of Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines, you will develop an understanding of how literary texts are imbricated with their national contexts and literary traditions. The pod compares different national and literary manifestations of colonialism and postcolonialism, multiculturalism and multilingualism, globalisation, climate catastrophe and political oppression.

This pod explores stylistic, cognitive and narratological approaches to digital fiction, examining literary texts which are designed to be read and engaged with on a screen. Particular focus is given to hypertext fiction, ludic narratives, interactive film and app-based fiction, as we investigate the experience of reading and engaging with digital texts. 

This pod offers a comprehensive overview of the literary-linguistic framework ‘Text World Theory’. Through a focus on scholarship from the last twenty years, you will apply, augment, and critically evaluate the framework, explore a range of Text-World-Theory applications to discourse, both literary and otherwise, and consider the future potential of text-world scholarship.

Taking a stylistic perspective, this pod examines the features of language that characterise dystopian narratives, analysing a range of textual examples from across time periods, and investigating the evolution and hybridity of contemporary dystopia. We will explore the construal of dystopian worlds, the conceptualisation of dystopian minds, and the experience of dystopian reading.

Moving beyond traditional presentations of the written word, multimodal texts experiment with more than one semiotic mode, for instance incorporating graphics, creatively employing typeface, or featuring tactile elements. Taking a mixed stylistic, cognitive and narratological perspective, this pod will analyse a range of literary texts which manipulate and experiment with narrative across modes.

This pod explores the artistic movement of surrealism, with emphasis on the form and technique of literary surrealist writing in English. Surrealist output is considered from a literary-linguistic and cognitive poetic perspective in order to explore a view of surrealism and surrealist activity from the vantage point of current understanding of language and linguistics.

This pod introduces you to Middle English language, poetics, and textual transmission through primary texts including lyrics on topics such as love, religion and politics. We will consider the ways lyric poetry was read in its manuscript context and how editorial practice shapes the experience of modern readers.

This pod explores the formal and thematic features of the modernist short story, identifying important nineteenth-century influences and showing how key practitioners innovated with interiorised narration, the presentation of character, form and chronology, and symbolism. You will gain an understanding of the modernist short story form and construct your own responses to modernist texts.

This pod explores the detective novels of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham. It opens up the social and cultural world of interwar detective fiction, examining how these books handle questions of gender, Empire and class whilst unravelling mysteries. We read critically, uncovering the ideologies encoded into famous characters and how those ideologies are transformed through adaptation.

Across this pod, we will explore the role, position and identity of the reader, thinking in detail about who we are referring to when we talk about ‘the reader’ in stylistics. We will investigate a range of experimental and naturalistic methods of gathering reader-response data, and examine the benefits and limitations of empirical approaches in stylistic analysis.

Through this pod, we will explore book production and publication in the Romantic period, including literary publication and commercialism, and evaluate concepts of popularity and quality in literary works. We will reflect on the role of the bookselling market in contemporary society, and consider how the selection of authors on academic curricula can (mis)represent literary history.

This pod presents key contexts and frameworks in order to enable a critical exploration of the changing relationships between the making and reception of drama, theatre and performance. The focus throughout is on the multiple potential relationships between text, stage, performance and audience in a variety of contexts, drawing upon your own encounters with performance.

This pod examines the origins of the vampire myth, and traces its evolution from the late eighteenth century to contemporary cultural productions. We explore early vampire texts and how they relate to modern representations of the vampire, using theories associated with the Gothic, adaptation, gender and sexuality in analysing vampire literature, cinema and television.

This pod provides a detailed study of world literatures in the twenty-first century. You will: 

• look at key developments and trends in the study and theory of world literatures 
• consider how these affect the ways in which we read contemporary literary texts from around the world 
• study the historical development of different global economic and political systems from colonialism to the present day

Focusing on the novel, we will look at texts with origins in Pakistan, Morocco and the UK - all of which have English as a common language.  

This pod explores the ways in which utopian studies and world-literature studies intersect. We interrogate three texts from the ‘superpowers’ of the early twentieth century: Russia, the UK and the USA. The pod considers the political and aesthetic qualities of utopia, and considers how literary forms cross and recross world borders.

In this pod we introduce a range of techniques and skills for writing poetry, and for reflecting on and developing you creative practice. You are guided through explorations of contemporary poetry, and supported to consider craft and style, while reflecting on the social context and the social function of poetry and creative production.

In exploring the relationship between narrative, language and cognition, this pod investigates a range of approaches to the study of worldmaking, fictional minds, perspective, and intertextuality. It engages with theories of cognitive reception, and examines emotion, ethics and empathy in relation to literary reading.

This pod investigates the processes of creativity, interpretation, imagination, emotional involvement, aesthetic experience, and literary texture, applying current understanding of language and mind (as drawn from research in cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology) to questions of literary reading.

This pod presents students with an introduction to the study of comics and graphic novels, exploring a range of work in the medium, from single issue comics to full-length graphic novels, and from independent to mainstream. We also consider the relationships between comics and adaptation, with opportunities for comparative work across countries and traditions.

This pod introduces the ways in which popular constructs of ‘madness’ are represented in literature and theatre from the nineteenth century to the present day. In tracing how these popular representations of ‘madness’ have developed over time, you will critique the relevant medical, political and social discourses with which they engage.

Through your analysis of this interplay between public discourse and private experience you will draw on debates surrounding patriarchal authority and female agency, individual and collective responsibility and the role of culture in determining what it means to be ‘mad’.

You will have the opportunity to apply these theoretical frameworks through close analysis of significant literary works by writers such as Willkie Collins and Sarah Waters, and of high-profile theatrical productions which include Nell Leyshon’s Beldam and Peter Brook’s Marat/Sade.

This pod is concerned with literary retellings of traditional fairy tales, taking a global approach to the choice of fairy tale traditions as well as literary adaptations. We study historical and political contexts behind the late-twentieth-century resurgence of fairy tale literature, with gender and feminist theory providing the major theoretical framework of the pod.

This pod introduces a particular application of corpus linguistics which focuses on issues of style, especially in literature. We examine the main principles that underlie corpus design and compilation, and investigate the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of corpus-stylistic analysis, considering the implications of corpus linguistics for literary-linguistic and literary-critical research.

This pod presents a theoretical and critical introduction to ecocriticism and to environmental writing. It takes in broad chronological and generic perspectives, introducing the ways in which environmental ideas manifest themselves in poetry, fiction and the ‘new nature writing’, taking in not only anglophone writing from the UK, the United States, Australia and India, but also writing in translation.

This pod provides an overview of Ethical Criticism, with its blend of moral philosophy, politics, and literary analysis, through the lens of two twentieth-century writers: Henry James and Samuel Beckett. You will analyse literary texts with the theoretical frames supplied by practising ethical and cultural critics.

This pod explores a range of Anglophone literature from the Indian sub-continent written during the period spanning the last decades of the British Empire and the growth of post-independence India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The pod focuses in particular on the intersection between literary texts and wider political debates around nationalism, caste, sex and gender.

All literature is written in language, so understanding how language and the mind work will make us better readers and critics of literary works.

This module brings together the literary and linguistic parts of your degree. It gives you the power to explore any text from any period by any author.

You will study how:

• Literature can feel rich, or pacy, or suspenseful, or beautiful
• Texts can make you laugh, cry, feel afraid, excited, or nostalgic
• Fictional people like characters can be imagined
• We can get inside the thoughts, feelings, and hear the speech of characters, narrators and authors
• Imagined worlds are built, and how their atmosphere is brought to life
• You as a reader are manipulated or connect actively with literary worlds and people

This module is worth 20 credits.

This pod explores the relationship between the works of D.H. Lawrence and the contemporary artistic and intellectual climate of modernism. You will study a range of Lawrence’s writings and reflect on their relationship to trends and events in social and intellectual history, to specific modernist literary and artistic movements, and to the broader ambitions of modernist experimentation.

In this pod, we will investigate how narratives are structured, presented, and conceptualised in the mind of the reader. We consider key topics which are fundamental to the creation of narrative, from the representation of point of view through to the articulation of time, reflecting critically on contemporary narratological theory and practice.

In this pod we consider how theatre and performance engage with concepts of place, space and spatiality. In doing so, you will draw on theoretical, practical and personal paradigms to understand how notions of place, space and site are represented, read, received and practised within the context of theatre and performance.

This pod investigates the relationships between religion (specifically Christianity) and fantasy literatures. The pod centres on the works of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, exploring the ways Narnia and Middle Earth present different religious visions. It sets these authors in their historical and intellectual contexts, and discusses the historical roots of fantasy tropes.

Through the literatures and contexts of Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines, you will develop an understanding of how literary texts are imbricated with their national contexts and literary traditions. The pod compares different national and literary manifestations of colonialism and postcolonialism, multiculturalism and multilingualism, globalisation, climate catastrophe and political oppression.

This pod offers a comprehensive overview of the literary-linguistic framework ‘Text World Theory’. Through a focus on scholarship from the last twenty years, you will apply, augment, and critically evaluate the framework, explore a range of Text-World-Theory applications to discourse, both literary and otherwise, and consider the future potential of text-world scholarship.

This pod explores stylistic, cognitive and narratological approaches to digital fiction, examining literary texts which are designed to be read and engaged with on a screen. Particular focus is given to hypertext fiction, ludic narratives, interactive film and app-based fiction, as we investigate the experience of reading and engaging with digital texts. 

Taking a stylistic perspective, this pod examines the features of language that characterise dystopian narratives, analysing a range of textual examples from across time periods, and investigating the evolution and hybridity of contemporary dystopia. We will explore the construal of dystopian worlds, the conceptualisation of dystopian minds, and the experience of dystopian reading.

Moving beyond traditional presentations of the written word, multimodal texts experiment with more than one semiotic mode, for instance incorporating graphics, creatively employing typeface, or featuring tactile elements. Taking a mixed stylistic, cognitive and narratological perspective, this pod will analyse a range of literary texts which manipulate and experiment with narrative across modes.

This pod explores the artistic movement of surrealism, with emphasis on the form and technique of literary surrealist writing in English. Surrealist output is considered from a literary-linguistic and cognitive poetic perspective in order to explore a view of surrealism and surrealist activity from the vantage point of current understanding of language and linguistics.

This pod explores the formal and thematic features of the modernist short story, identifying important nineteenth-century influences and showing how key practitioners innovated with interiorised narration, the presentation of character, form and chronology, and symbolism. You will gain an understanding of the modernist short story form and construct your own responses to modernist texts.

This pod explores the detective novels of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham. It opens up the social and cultural world of interwar detective fiction, examining how these books handle questions of gender, Empire and class whilst unravelling mysteries. We read critically, uncovering the ideologies encoded into famous characters and how those ideologies are transformed through adaptation.

Across this pod, we will explore the role, position and identity of the reader, thinking in detail about who we are referring to when we talk about ‘the reader’ in stylistics. We will investigate a range of experimental and naturalistic methods of gathering reader-response data, and examine the benefits and limitations of empirical approaches in stylistic analysis.

This pod presents key contexts and frameworks in order to enable a critical exploration of the changing relationships between the making and reception of drama, theatre and performance. The focus throughout is on the multiple potential relationships between text, stage, performance and audience in a variety of contexts, drawing upon your own encounters with performance.

This pod examines the origins of the vampire myth, and traces its evolution from the late eighteenth century to contemporary cultural productions. We explore early vampire texts and how they relate to modern representations of the vampire, using theories associated with the Gothic, adaptation, gender and sexuality in analysing vampire literature, cinema and television.

This pod provides a detailed study of world literatures in the twenty-first century. You will: 

• look at key developments and trends in the study and theory of world literatures 
• consider how these affect the ways in which we read contemporary literary texts from around the world 
• study the historical development of different global economic and political systems from colonialism to the present day

Focusing on the novel, we will look at texts with origins in Pakistan, Morocco and the UK - all of which have English as a common language.  

This pod explores the ways in which utopian studies and world-literature studies intersect. We interrogate three texts from the ‘superpowers’ of the early twentieth century: Russia, the UK and the USA. The pod considers the political and aesthetic qualities of utopia, and considers how literary forms cross and recross world borders.

In this pod we introduce a range of techniques and skills for writing poetry, and for reflecting on and developing you creative practice. You are guided through explorations of contemporary poetry, and supported to consider craft and style, while reflecting on the social context and the social function of poetry and creative production.

This pod is concerned with literary retellings of traditional fairy tales, taking a global approach to the choice of fairy tale traditions as well as literary adaptations. We study historical and political contexts behind the late-twentieth-century resurgence of fairy tale literature, with gender and feminist theory providing the major theoretical framework of the pod.

This pod presents a theoretical and critical introduction to ecocriticism and to environmental writing. It takes in broad chronological and generic perspectives, introducing the ways in which environmental ideas manifest themselves in poetry, fiction and the ‘new nature writing’, taking in not only anglophone writing from the UK, the United States, Australia and India, but also writing in translation.

This pod explores a range of Anglophone literature from the Indian sub-continent written during the period spanning the last decades of the British Empire and the growth of post-independence India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The pod focuses in particular on the intersection between literary texts and wider political debates around nationalism, caste, sex and gender.

Through the literatures and contexts of Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines, you will develop an understanding of how literary texts are imbricated with their national contexts and literary traditions. The pod compares different national and literary manifestations of colonialism and postcolonialism, multiculturalism and multilingualism, globalisation, climate catastrophe and political oppression.

This pod explores the artistic movement of surrealism, with emphasis on the form and technique of literary surrealist writing in English. Surrealist output is considered from a literary-linguistic and cognitive poetic perspective in order to explore a view of surrealism and surrealist activity from the vantage point of current understanding of language and linguistics.

This pod provides a detailed study of world literatures in the twenty-first century. You will: 

• look at key developments and trends in the study and theory of world literatures 
• consider how these affect the ways in which we read contemporary literary texts from around the world 
• study the historical development of different global economic and political systems from colonialism to the present day

Focusing on the novel, we will look at texts with origins in Pakistan, Morocco and the UK - all of which have English as a common language.  

This pod explores the ways in which utopian studies and world-literature studies intersect. We interrogate three texts from the ‘superpowers’ of the early twentieth century: Russia, the UK and the USA. The pod considers the political and aesthetic qualities of utopia, and considers how literary forms cross and recross world borders.

Fear of death and what would come afterwards haunted writers throughout the Middle Ages. Covering a range of late medieval literature, this pod explores the idea of a ‘good death’, and the influence of this on conceptions of identity, illness, faith, memory and emotion.

From patronage and composition to book ownership and reading, women contributed to all stages of production and circulation of literature in the Middle Ages. This pod focuses on the early medieval period, tracing the role of women as teachers, authors, narrators, scribes, and readers in texts from England and Continental Europe.

This pod introduces the study of field-names in England, and its contribution to disciplines such as agricultural history, archaeology, environmental geography, and historical linguistics. We will think especially about evidence for local and regional community and language, as well as the way the historical population perceived and described the world around them.

This pod provides an introduction Old Norse, famously the language spoken by the Vikings. Using examples from real Old Norse texts, you will acquire skills in reading and translating medieval language, and a critical awareness of the cultural and chronological contexts required for work on Old Norse language and literature.

This pod explores representations of space and place in medieval literature and culture. Through literature, graphic maps, written descriptions, and artefacts, we will consider the local and the global; history and geography; and the ways cosmology and mythology shape conceptions of the world. We will also reflect on current critical debates about the 'Global Middle Ages'.

Old English was the language spoken from the fifth to the eleventh century in what would become England. It is the ancestor of modern English, but is distinct from it, with different sounds, vocabulary, and grammar. The language is studied through real Old English texts, building linguistic knowledge while exploring early medieval English culture.

This pod discusses the background to and development of research in place-names and landscape, and consider the different types of evidence landscape and place-names provide for history, geography, language, and culture. The pod highlights recent and current research in the discipline, giving you the opportunity to engage critically with a range of recent multidisciplinary research.

Before the advent of the printing press, texts circulated in hand-written copies. Each manuscript was therefore unique and tells us about the tastes and habits of medieval readers. Through a case study, you will develop and apply skills in transcription (palaeography), examine editorial choices, learn how to compile a glossary and provide an explanatory commentary.

Runes are a form of alphabetic writing mostly encountered in inscriptions on physical objects, which provide some of our earliest evidence for the Germanic languages. This pod introduces runic writing systems in their various forms, their development, their historical contexts, and their value for linguistic and historical study.

This pod introduces Old English heroic poetry in its cultural and historical context. Through a selection of poems studied in both their original language and in translation, we approach the form, themes, and stylistic features of heroic poetry, and explore the way religious and cultural values are represented through this genre.

This pod explores the origin, development and use of surnames in England. You will examine the main categories of name, including their formation and development, and will acquire the skills to identify names and their possible meanings, and to discuss the evidence they provide for linguistic, social, and cultural history.

English place-names began as transparent descriptions in the everyday languages spoken in Britain over the past millennia. This pod introduces the study of English place-names, providing a background in onomastic research methodology, and relating historical linguistics to English settlement history and the languages spoken in England’s past.

This pod introduces you to Middle English language, poetics, and textual transmission through primary texts including lyrics on topics such as love, religion and politics. We will consider the ways lyric poetry was read in its manuscript context and how editorial practice shapes the experience of modern readers.