English and Classical Civilisation - U6UENGCC

This module will introduce you to the interpretation of ancient literary texts (in translation) as sources for ancient culture, by focusing on a representative range of texts and themes.

We will address issues such as:

• ancient performance-contexts and audiences
• the workings of genres
• analysis of rhetoric and literary style
• representations of gender and sexuality
• study of classical reception
• how to compare translations

The autumn semester will focus on Greek texts, and the spring semester will focus on Latin texts.

This module focuses on the history and development of the scholarship on ancient Greece and Rome and on specific theories, approaches and methods used by modern scholarship. The aim is to sharpen your engagement with and understanding of scholarship, and to give a deeper appreciation of the ways the ancient world has been appropriated. Studying the history of scholarship in its socio-political context will show you how the questions we ask depend on the situations we live in; it will also allow you to judge the merits and limitations of scholarly approaches and will develop your skills of research and analysis, as preparation for your third-year dissertation. As with the Extended Source Study, you will choose a work-sheet relating to an area of the ancient world which particularly interests you; the module is assessed by an oral presentation and a 4,500-5,000 word essay.

Get creative and build your knowledge on an aspect of Classics or Archaeology which interests you.

Your aim in this module is to communicate your chosen topic to the general public. How you choose to do that is entirely up to you. You might explore different types of writing, perhaps for children or in the style of a magazine, or you might experiment with a different medium of communication, such as video, website or phone app.

For example, past students have:

• Created a museum exhibition
• Reconstructed an ancient artefact
• Designed a new public engagement strategy for a historic site
• Developed a board game
• Created a marketing campaign

The module convenor will support you to design an appropriate topic and format for your project.

You will develop vital research, project design and communication skills, which are excellent preparation for a range of careers, as well as your third-year dissertation.

This module is worth 20 credits.

“I designed several T-shirts and hoodies which conveyed information about the site’s art and architecture, history, and its eventual ruination by ISIL in 2015. I wanted to combine my interest of fashion with my love for the classical world, and this project gave me the opportunity to do so.”

- Alexander Gadd, Created a clothing brand based on Palmyra

We have a range of modules which develop your creative and communication skills. Find out more about our innovative teaching and assessments.

This module introduces different kinds of literature, written between 1700-1830. This was a dramatic time in literary history, resulting in the Romantic period. It involved many areas of great contemporary relevance, such as class, poverty, sexuality, and slavery.

We will examine:

• utopian literature (through Gulliver’s Travels)
• the developing novel (such as Moll Flanders and Pride and Prejudice)
• how irony works
• what is self-expression
• how the emergent genre of autobiography can be either manipulated, or used as part of a larger cause

As part of this module, you will explore novels, poems, and prose works that bring to life the intellectual, social and cultural contexts of the period.

This module is worth 20 credits.

This module investigates the relationship between literature and popular culture. You will explore works from across a range of genres and mediums, including:

• prose fiction
• poetry
• comics
• graphic novels
• music
• television
• film

As well as exploring topics such as aesthetics and adaptation, material will be situated within cultural, political and historical contexts allowing for the distinction between the literary and the popular.

This module is worth 20 credits.

‘On or about December 1910 human character changed’: so wrote Virginia Woolf in 1924. ‘And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature.’ This module will familiarize students with relevant aesthetic, generic, and literary-historical strategies for tracing formal and thematic transformations in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature. Moving between genres, the module will unfold chronologically from modernism, through the inter-war years, and into the ‘contemporary scene’ (as notionally defined for literature since 1970) up to the present day. Lectures and seminars will address some key phases of creative transition, while also particularizing the work of representative novelists, essayists, short-story writers and poets. This combination of overview and textual scrutiny will encourage students to explore influences and affinities between writers working in different modes and periods. Weekly topics will primarily be concerned with mapping literary formations and innovations within the artistic and cultural contexts from which they emerge, while also addressing the wider aesthetic and ideological significances of issues such as class, gender, sexuality and race.

Shakespeare and Contemporaries on the Page focuses on material written between 1580 and 1630, to provide a deep and concentrated introduction to methods of contextual reading of early modern texts. Shakespeare’s poetry will be among the core texts; other canonical writers will be included, such as Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney and John Donne. In addition, students will be given the opportunity to read outwith the canon, and to reflect on issues such as genre, rhetoric, transmission and audience, and how they affect reception, both among contemporaries and in modern responses.  There will also be some reflection on the subsequent reception of these works. The module will thus build on the introduction to early modern material in Studying Literature and questions about canon formation raised in Academic Community. This module is intended to be complementary to Shakespeare and Co on the Stage. The module will be delivered through lectures and seminars: the seminars will, on the one hand, give further practice in close reading and equip students with the skills necessary for reading early modern material fluently and easily, and on the other encourage examination of the assumptions made in contextual readings, to enable students to develop their own critical voices and authority.

When we study language, we learn about how society works. Why do some people have more noticeable accents than others? Why are some people taken seriously when they talk, while others aren’t? How do those with power use language to manipulate us into thinking a certain way?

On this module, these are the sorts of questions you’ll be thinking about. We focus on how people use language, how language varies between different speakers, and how language is used to represent different social groups. We consider:

• The way that language is used by people online to create communities
• How the mainstream media uses language to represent particular groups, such as immigrants or gay people
• The ways that language is used in particular contexts, such as the workplace
• How advertisers use language to persuade us that we need their products
• The relationship between language, gender and sexuality
• How language can be used to signal a person’s race or ethnicity

You’ll learn how to conduct a sociolinguistic study which explores topics such as these. You will also spend time each week analysing original language data.

The module is worth 20 credits.

Are you interested in languages and the multilingual world? Have you ever wondered how our brains process learning a second language? Would you like to teach English overseas one day? If so, this module could be for you.

Drawing on current theories of second language acquisition, we will consider:

• How globalisation has increased bilingualism in the world
• How languages are learnt
• How students differ from each other in their mastery of languages
• How the psychology of the classroom environment impacts the effectiveness of learning
• How to motivate students and create good learner groups

You will spend three hours per week on this module, split equally between a lecture and follow-up seminar.

This module is worth 20 credits.

You’ll explore how English is learnt from making sounds as an infant through to adulthood. Topics relating to early speech development include: the biological foundations of language development, the stages of language acquisition and the influence of environment on development. Further topics which take into account later stages of development include humour and joke telling abilities, story-telling and conversational skills and bilingualism.

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 module will introduce students to the exceptionally rich period of writing in English at the end of the fourteenth century and turn of the fifteenth. It will focus on the so-called Ricardian poets, Chaucer (selected Canterbury Tales, Parliament of Fowls, Legend of Good Women), Langland (excerpts from Piers Plowman), Gower (excerpts from Confessio Amantis) and the Gawain-poet (Patience). It will include discussion of Thomas Hoccleve’s early poems, and the prose works of the female mystics Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. Students will explore the literary, political and religious preoccupations of Ricardian and early Lancastrian writers, their sources and influences; a range of genres (dream vision, romance, allegory, tale collection, exemplary narrative, life writing / spiritual biography) and forms including the relationship between rhymed and alliterative traditions of poetic composition, and Middle English prose; Fourteenth and Fifteenth-century reading practices and the transmission and circulation of texts in manuscript culture; The dialectal variety of Middle English, from a synchronic perspective.

This module explores the tradition that the poetry and prose of Old English often focuses on warfare and heroic action. You will study and analyse poems from the Exeter Book 'elegies' and also passages from Beowulf to explore this rich and rewarding genre. You'll have a two-hour lecture and one-hour seminar each week for this module.

The gods, heroes and events of Norse mythology are well-known: Odin the one-eyed god of poetry and war, Thor who protects both gods and humans by crushing giants with his hammer, Freya the goddess of beauty who drives a chariot pulled by cats, the final destruction of the world in the ice and fire of Ragnarök; and human heroes like Sigurd the Serpent-Slayer. In this module you will study and analyse the key texts of Old Norse myth and legend from which these familiar stories come, alongside other media, such as depictions in art. The module will explore the development of Norse myth and legend from the Viking Age to medieval Christian Iceland where these texts were recorded.

What can given names, surnames and nicknames tell us about people in the past? What determines the choice of a name for a child? Where does our hereditary surname system come from? How have place, class and gender impacted upon naming through time? This module will help you answer all these questions and more. Interactive lectures and seminars, and a project based on primary material tailored to each participant, will introduce you to the many and varied, fascinating and extraordinary types of personal name and their origins.

Shakespeare and Contemporaries on the Page focuses on material written between 1580 and 1630, to provide a deep and concentrated introduction to methods of contextual reading of early modern texts. Shakespeare’s poetry will be among the core texts; other canonical writers will be included, such as Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney and John Donne. In addition, students will be given the opportunity to read outwith the canon, and to reflect on issues such as genre, rhetoric, transmission and audience, and how they affect reception, both among contemporaries and in modern responses.  There will also be some reflection on the subsequent reception of these works. The module will thus build on the introduction to early modern material in Studying Literature and questions about canon formation raised in Academic Community. This module is intended to be complementary to Shakespeare and Co on the Stage. The module will be delivered through lectures and seminars: the seminars will, on the one hand, give further practice in close reading and equip students with the skills necessary for reading early modern material fluently and easily, and on the other encourage examination of the assumptions made in contextual readings, to enable students to develop their own critical voices and authority.

Develop your understanding of some of the most influential performance theories and practice, from the beginning of the 20th century to the present. 

Building on the ‘Drama, Theatre, Performance’ module, you will deepen your understanding of Stanislavski and Brecht in practice, as well as exploring the work of other influential theorists and practitioners. 

Possible material includes: 

• Konstantin Stanislavski
• Vsevolod Meyerhold
• Bertolt Brecht
• Antonin Artaud
• Jacques Lecoq
• Ensemble physical theatre makers such as DV8, Gecko & Frantic Assembly 

For this module, you’ll have a mix of lectures and practical workshops, totalling three hours a week.

Workshops offer the opportunity for practical drama. You will explore theory in practice, through work with excerpts from canonical theatrical scripts and other performance scripts.

This module is worth 20 credits.

Theatre makers in the long 20th century have been dealing with a series of pressing artistic and social issues, many of which still concern us today.

These issues include:

• What makes a play worth watching?
• Why do audiences enjoy watching bad things happening?
• How are minority groups represented on the stage?
• How might the stage advance the cause of gender or sexual equality?
• What role does social class or nationality play in the workings of theatrical culture?
• How can we talk accurately about an art form like performed theatre, that is so fleeting and transitory?

In order to answer such questions, this module gives an overview of key plays and performances from the 1890s to the present. You will study these key texts in their original political, social, and cultural contexts. You will also:

• consider their reception and afterlife
• focus on the textual and performance effects created
• place the texts alongside the work of relevant theorists and practitioners

This module is worth 20 credits.

Examine a piece of ancient evidence – such as an inscription, a piece of literature or an ancient artwork or artefact – and build key skills in source analysis and presentation.  

You will be given a case study to explore in groups. Your job is to analyse what it can tell us about ancient societies, before presenting and discussing your findings as well as writing an essay. This is designed to train you for the critical thinking and discussion needed in your final year research project.  

You will build skills in: 

• oral and written presentation  

• teamwork 

• critical thinking and creative analysis of ancient evidence 

• assessing the effectiveness of arguments and their basis in potentially incomplete evidence

Public performance of various kinds was an important aspect of the life of communities in the ancient Mediterranean world. In this module, you’ll explore a range of sources that illustrate how ancient people created public representations of themselves and others, and what this tells is about ancient cultures. Topics may include: 

• symposia 

• drama and mime 

• rhetoric  

• public displays of wealth and status 

• or athletic and gladiatorial spectacles 

You’ll learn to combine approaches drawn from various sub-disciplines, including the study of literature, history and visual culture from different time-periods. 

What did daily domestic life look like in the ancient world? In this module, you’ll examine domestic life in classical antiquity in an interdisciplinary way embracing archaeological, historical and literary perspectives. Topics may include: 

·         gender roles within the home 

·         developments in domestic architecture and furnishings 

·         the wider household including master-slave and patron-client relationships 

·         ancient parties and dining practices 

·         literary representations of ideal or dysfunctional families 

·         the incorporation of religious cults within the domestic space 

What was the role of personal faith in ancient religious belief? How do we characterise the nuanced differences between religious and magical practices in ancient civilisations? In this module, you’ll bring together archaeology, history, and literature to examine religious beliefs and practices in classical antiquity, alongside other beliefs in the supernatural. Topics may include: 

·         religious rituals and festivals 

·         hymns and prayers 

·         votives, temples and other material offerings 

·         religious motivations for major historical events 

·         encounters with neighbouring religious systems including the rise of Christianity 

·         dreams 

·         amulets 

·         ghosts, witches and vampires 

Objects act as windows into what life was like in the ancient world. Each object has its own story of design and making, use, repair and repurposing, display or destruction. They are entwined with the lives of people as they become entangled in individual and social identities and relationships.

In this module you will critically assess interdisciplinary perspectives on ancient material culture from ancient history, art history and archaeology. You’ll explore modern historiography such as the concepts of object biography and materiality, as well as the later reception and reinterpretation of ancient objects in more recent centuries. By examining individual objects as in-depth case studies, you’ll consider how they inform us about life in the ancient Mediterranean world, covering themes including:

• mythology and religion

• monumentality

• memory and topography

• conflict and diplomacy

• the body and the senses

• economy and technology

• trade and colonisation 

In 600, the Middle East was divided between two historic empires, Rome and Persia. By 700, however, this longstanding political order had been overthrown by the armies of the new Islamic caliphate. The Islamic conquests had profound and transformative consequences for Middle Eastern society (and beyond).

In this module, you will examine the remarkable speed and success of the conquests, and consider the conquerors’ approaches to managing their vast new territories. Following recent trends in historical research, it will also examine how the non-Muslim majority of the Middle East, including Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians, viewed their new rulers and adjusted to their new situation.

The module will reflect the diversity of the caliphate, drawing upon sources (in English translation) written in languages including Arabic, Greek, Syriac, Pahlavi, and Armenian, in genres ranging from scholarly Islamic histories to Christian and Jewish apocalyptic accounts.

You’ll also focus on the impressive material culture of the period, including monumental architecture such as the Dome of the Rock and the Umayyad Desert Palaces, as well as coinage and inscriptions. It will tackle big questions about cultural interaction, religious belief and belonging, conversion and community formation, and ask what had really changed between 600 and 800?

You can choose to study either Latin or Classical Greek if you’d like to. The level you study at will depend on your existing knowledge and experience.

Beginners level

For complete beginners and anyone who has done some study of Latin or Classical Greek before (anything up to GCSE).

You’ll be introduced to the grammar and vocabulary of your chosen language - and you’ll be supported to analyse and understand basic sentences and to translate short passages.

You may find it reassuring that, unlike modern language study, there is no speaking and listening element. The main focus is on developing your reading skills so you can read almost unadapted passages from Latin or Classical Greek texts.

Intermediate level

For students who already have an A level in their chosen language - or who have successfully completed their introduction to the language in our Beginners’ level modules.

You will consolidate your knowledge of the vocabulary and grammar of your chosen language. You’ll also begin the detailed linguistic and literary study of unadapted Latin or Greek texts, developing your ability and confidence to read, appreciate and analyse texts in an ancient language.

• In Latin, you will typically read a text such as Cicero’s Pro Archia or a book of Virgil or Ovid.
• In Greek, the text might be a speech by Lysias or selections from a longer work such as Homer's Odyssey or a Greek tragedy. 

Advanced level

For students who have successfully completed our Intermediate level modules for the relevant language.

You will study prose and verse texts in your chosen language, building on the skills you have already learned. You’ll undertake in-depth study of either a single text or a group of texts representative of an author, genre, period or theme, combining literary and linguistic discussion with consideration of the historical and social background.  

The texts covered change each year. In Latin, recent modules have focused on the following topics: 

• Flavian personal poetry (Martial and Statius) 
• The emperor Claudius (Suetonius and Tacitus) 
• The Cupid and Psyche story from Apuleius’ novel Metamorphoses 
• Ethnicity and Empire in Latin Epic (Virgil and Silius Italicus) 
• The Power of Love (Ovid and Propertius) 

In Greek, recent topics have included: 

• Tragedy (Euripides’ Antigone) 
• Selections from Homer’s Iliad 
• Longus’ novel Daphnis and Chloe 
• Plutarch’s Life of Antony 
• Paradoxography (a range of texts exploring the weird and marvellous)

This module offers an in-depth exploration of the historical and theatrical contexts of early modern drama. Drawing on the most innovative and experimental works by Shakespeare and key contemporaries, this module invites you to explore the three-dimensional stagecraft of these writers. You will reflect on issues such as genre, rhetoric, transmission and audience, and how they affect reception, both among contemporaries and in modern responses. You will study:

• the physical environments of the first professional indoor and outdoor theatres
• the political and institutional contexts that shaped dramatic production
• the conditions of performance for which dramatists wrote, recognising early modern playwriting as a vibrant and collaborative process

Explore the novel from the late twentieth century onwards, in Britain and beyond.

We will concentrate on the formal operations and innovations of selected novelists, considering how the contemporary socio-historical context influences these questions of form. Topics considered include:

• an interrogation of the ‘post-consensus novel’
• an exploration of postcolonial texts which represent the transatlantic slave trade
• the cultural politics of late twentieth-century and twenty-first century Scottish literature

Contemporary fiction is focused on writing emerging from Britain and closely-related contexts in the post-war period. This module offers strands structured around a number of political, social and cultural frameworks in Britain. These include:

• formal analysis and literary innovations in Britain
• temporalities and the representation of time
• issues of gender, race and class
• histories of colonialism and slavery
• national traditions and politics of state
• the country and the city
• postmodernism

This module particularly explores the network of relationships between context, content and form, supported by related literary and cultural theory and philosophy.

This module is worth 20 credits.

‘On or about December 1910 human character changed’: so wrote Virginia Woolf in 1924. ‘And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature.’ This module will familiarize students with relevant aesthetic, generic, and literary-historical strategies for tracing formal and thematic transformations in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature. Moving between genres, the module will unfold chronologically from modernism, through the inter-war years, and into the ‘contemporary scene’ (as notionally defined for literature since 1970) up to the present day. Lectures and seminars will address some key phases of creative transition, while also particularizing the work of representative novelists, essayists, short-story writers and poets. This combination of overview and textual scrutiny will encourage students to explore influences and affinities between writers working in different modes and periods. Weekly topics will primarily be concerned with mapping literary formations and innovations within the artistic and cultural contexts from which they emerge, while also addressing the wider aesthetic and ideological significances of issues such as class, gender, sexuality and race.

The genre of dream-vision inspired work by all the major poets of the Middle Ages, including William Langland, the Pearl-Poet, and Geoffrey Chaucer. The course will aim to give you a detailed knowledge of a number of canonical texts in this genre, as well as ranging widely into the alliterative revival, and chronologically into the work of John Skelton in the early sixteenth century. The course will depend upon close, detailed reading of medieval literary texts, as well as focusing on the variety and urgency of issues with which dream poetry is concerned: literary, intellectual, social, religious and political.

This module is based around a challenge: how do we use the digital humanities?

You are presented with a series of problems about how we can use the arts and humanities to address some of the major issues we face in technology and society.

For example, the acceleration of technology in both private and public life is immense, but this rapid pace of change should not prevent reflection.

In this module, you consider the major contemporary issues of how technology shapes our present and our future. We respond to these concerns using the specific skillset of the arts and humanities, where we ask: what does it mean to be human?

This module is worth 10 credits.

Stand out in your job search with employability skills and hands-on experience.

Learn key skills, from constructing an outstanding CV to practicing interview technique, before completing a part-time placement in the spring. This will be for one day a week, or equivalent, for up to eight weeks.

You can apply for placements in relevant local organisations. The dedicated faculty placement team have an established list of providers, or you can arrange your own placement, subject to approval.

Our placements include a range of sectors, including:

• creative and cultural industries
• media
• marketing
• heritage and museums
• the music industry
• education
• charitable and third-sector organisations

These are subject to change each year.

You will develop a wide range of transferable skills, including:

• communication
• presentation
• organisation
• professionalism
• time management skills

Assessment is through an online portfolio of materials, including application materials, reflective writing and a research report.

This module is worth 20 credits.

Community engagement is important in many careers, from politics and social work to marketing and business.

We do not work in a vacuum - our research and activities are linked to individuals and groups across society. By learning to engage with communities, researchers can reach wide audiences, learn from them and collaboratively make a real contribution to overcoming social problems. 

We need to understand how engagement works in order to work collaboratively, respectfully and sustainability with communities.

In this module, we will:

• Explore how our staff and students work with communities – from supporting immigrant communities settling into Nottingham, to engaging with schools to promote literacy and career opportunities
• Discuss how activism and advocacy can become part of academic work
• Explore how community engagement is structured and organised and how we can ensure our work within the arts and humanities has relevance and impact for diverse audiences

This module will prepare you for your future career, by focusing on the key skill of the arts and humanities: our ability to support and engage with those around us.

This module is worth 10 credits.

Explore the histories and legacies of colonisation, alongside the routes to justice through decolonisation.

Using examples from across the globe, we explore the impact of colonisation on society, politics, economics, and culture.

You will consider contemporary examples and a wide range of evidence, sources and perspectives, including from:

• art
• film
• literature
• archive materials and documents
• music and performance

You will also explore the debates around reconciliation, restitution and justice.

Together we will build an interdisciplinary analysis, drawing upon the research of the whole faculty to uncover, assess and deconstruct the practices of colonialism and their implications for our contemporary world.  

This module is worth 10 credits.

Doing an arts and humanities degree means you’ll gain the skills which are essential for changing the world we live in. Not only that, you are uniquely positioned to understand people, processes and culture.

This module lets you apply that knowledge to solve a real-life problem. The aim is for you to develop your understanding of your degree, and the range of careers open to you.

You will work in an interdisciplinary team on a real project connected to impact, which we define as our ability to ‘make change happen’. These projects have been designed by individuals, groups and organisations that are looking to make a difference to our world. This might be about sustainability, business, equality, culture, politics or society.

Teams will be given a project brief. You will then be guided through how to shape a project, and how to work as a team and deliver results. This will give you the employment skills and experience to show how you can make an impact as an arts and humanities graduate.

This module is worth 20 credits.

Wellbeing, the crisis in mental health care, and clapping for NHS staff during the Covid pandemic are all examples of health humanities. On this module, you will be exploring contemporary challenges in this area.

To build a healthier society, enabling access to healthcare for all, we must consider how people act, behave and build connections.

You will look at:

• how the arts and humanities respond to major issues in health, medicine and wellbeing – i.e. exploring how individuals use art, literature and culture to understand pain and loss, or analysing human behaviour with regard to new medicines and our relationship to health sciences
• topics such as cultural representations of health, places of medical treatment, or the relationship between medicine and emotions

The major challenges in health provision and healthcare can be influenced and directed by the arts and humanities. This module shows you how this field can be a powerful tool for change.

This module is worth 10 credits.

Discover how our world is experienced through language.

We live in a global society, where different languages build our perceptions, ideas and values. In this module, we respect that difference and participate in it.

You will:

• Use multilingualism as a tool to challenge our own thinking and to comprehend the lives of others in society
• Work through etymologies and translations from a wide range of languages, including Russian, Spanish, French and German
• Learn how understanding languages - not just speaking and reading them - can be vital in contributing to our community, enriching your experience, and participating in a global society

No knowledge of any language is needed, as we focus on understanding what it means to live in our multi-lingual world.

This module is worth 10 credits.

Explore how Nottingham creates ideas, identities, culture and products, alongside how you as a student are also ‘Made in Nottingham’.

This module will help you begin shaping your skills for the career you want, drawing upon the way arts and humanities work has transformed the city.

From the entrepreneurs who have set up businesses or those who have created and enriched charities and social projects, to the writers, artists, musicians and teachers who have all been created in Nottingham. We use their experience, their understanding and their skills to help you define your own path for after university.

You will be able to build your profile through this module, develop your own career narrative to use in your future work as well as engage in the variety of opportunities that are open to you as an arts graduate.

Through this module, we’ll address what it means to be ‘Made in Nottingham’.

This module is worth 10 credits.

You will study prose and verse texts in your chosen language, building on the skills you learned in the Intermediate modules.

By this stage you will be at or above A-level standard, and will benefit from being taught together with first-year students who have an A-level in the language.

The modules may involve in-depth study of a single text, or may cover a group of texts representative of an author, genre, period, or theme. They will combine literary and linguistic discussion with consideration of the historical and social background.

The texts covered change each year. In Latin, recent modules have focused on the following topics:

• Flavian personal poetry (Martial and Statius)
• The emperor Claudius (Suetonius and Tacitus)
• The Cupid and Psyche story from Apuleius’ novel Metamorphoses
• Ethnicity and Empire in Latin Epic (Virgil and Silius Italicus)
• The Power of Love (Ovid and Propertius)

In Greek, recent topics have covered:

• Tragedy (Sophocles’ Antigone)
• Selections from Homer’s Iliad
• Longus’ novel Daphnis and Chloe
• Plutarch’s Life of Antony
• Paradoxography (a portfolio of texts exploring the weird and marvellous)

Each module is worth 20 credits.

This module examines a fascinating and tumultuous period of Roman history: from Diocletian’s seizure of power (A.D. 284) to the sack of Rome by a Visigothic army (A.D. 410). In the 126 years which separated these two events, the Roman world was fundamentally transformed, by (amongst other things) the rise of Christianity and the decline of imperial power. This transformation is documented for us by a range of captivating sources: from St. Augustine’s disarmingly frank autobiography, his Confessions, to Zosimus’ savage indictment of the damage he alleged Christianity had done to the empire.

Over the semester, we will work our way through the period, looking at key political, social, religious, and cultural developments and analysing the source material for this absorbing chapter in Rome’s imperial story.

You will explore the ancient evidence for the myth of Oedipus and selected representations of the myth in the post-Classical world. In terms of evidence, you will have the opportunity to explore ancient drama and other poetry as well as visual culture and mythographic writings. In terms of post-Classical representations, there will be a particular focus on performance and on modern popular culture, including (but not necessarily limited to)

• film
• popular mythology books,
• material aimed at children,
• on-line representations,
• humour

In 600, the Middle East was divided between two historic empires, Rome and Persia. By 700, however, this longstanding political order had been overthrown by the armies of the new Islamic caliphate. The Islamic conquests had profound and transformative consequences for Middle Eastern society (and beyond).

In this module, you will examine the remarkable speed and success of the conquests, and consider the conquerors’ approaches to managing their vast new territories. Following recent trends in historical research, it will also examine how the non-Muslim majority of the Middle East, including Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians, viewed their new rulers and adjusted to their new situation.

The module will reflect the diversity of the caliphate, drawing upon sources (in English translation) written in languages including Arabic, Greek, Syriac, Pahlavi, and Armenian, in genres ranging from scholarly Islamic histories to Christian and Jewish apocalyptic accounts.

You’ll also focus on the impressive material culture of the period, including monumental architecture such as the Dome of the Rock and the Umayyad Desert Palaces, as well as coinage and inscriptions. It will tackle big questions about cultural interaction, religious belief and belonging, conversion and community formation, and ask what had really changed between 600 and 800?

This module explores the representation of animals in ancient Greek and Roman literature and culture. Core questions include:

• What criteria did the Greeks and Romans use to distinguish humans from animals?
• What responsibilities were human beings said to have towards the natural world?
• How were animals used to explore ideas about ‘nature’, ‘culture’, and ‘civilisation’?
• How close are these ideas to our contemporary attitudes toward non-human beings?

While incorporating discussion of material evidence and the day-to-day realities of animal life in the ancient world, the module focuses primarily on the ways in which animals were perceived, analysed, and represented in ancient texts, from philosophy and natural history to satire, fable, and tales of metamorphosis. Both ancient and modern theoretical approaches will be considered, and all material will be read in translation.

The Roman Empire was a mad, mad place! How else would you call an empire where any individual city can decide it wants to start issuing its own money – and the authorities let them do it? A place where hundreds of cities produced hundreds of currencies of local bronze coinage, each city with its own weight standards, and each using its coinage for self-promotion, celebrating local gods, temples, festivals and any other attractions that made their hometown special.

According to one calculation, some 500 cities across the Roman Empire minted coins in the 350 years from Caesar to Diocletian, churning out approximately 100,000 different coin types. This module is all about this city or ‘civic’ coinage. We won’t have quite enough time in this life to discuss 100,000 coin types, so we focus especially on what we call the Near East, i.e. Roman Syria, Phoenicia, Judaea and Arabia (30 BC to AD 270). Dozens of Near Eastern cities produced coins during this time, contributing to an immensely rich and varied tapestry of local cultures.

We will first grapple with the historical circumstances which put cities in a position to issue their own money despite being subject to Rome. The local autonomy the cities enjoyed was not a consequence of Roman folly, negligence, or administrative malpractice, but a deliberate and well-advised hands-off approach whose wisdom is proven by hundreds of years of stable and successful rule over the provinces.

In Coins, Cults and Cities, you will learn how the coins can shed light on the life of the issuing city in all its facets:

1. World of art: reception of Classical models; Greek-inspired art forms vs. local traditions; stylistic developments over time
   
2. Religious life, cults and gods: significance of religious imagery, local cult images, ‘icons of difference’
   
3. Civic pride, local identity: coins as vehicles for expressions of patriotism and public self-congratulation
   
4. Ideology and propaganda: coins as the only mass medium of the ancient world, as tools for collective self-promotion.
   
5. Complex dynamics between audience and authority: Who was responsible for text and image on coins? Who was the target audience?
   

You will get your hands on actual ancient coins of Damascus, Palmyra, Tyre, Sidon and many other cities (you get to choose which ones). Holding actual 2,000-year-old pieces of history in your own hands and examining them will teach you how to apply the knowledge and understanding you’ve gained in class to get the most out of the evidence. You will learn how to observe, analyse and interpret the evidence, and how to turn your thoughts and observations into building blocks for arguments when addressing questions or engaging in scholarly debate.

The civic coins of the Roman Near East have been the focus of my research for close to 20 years. Like me, you will find that these coins are inexhaustible fonts of insight and inspiration. There is no other kind of evidence from the Roman Near East even remotely as rich and deep as this coinage, and yet this precious source is unknown to the general public and under-appreciated even by historians and archaeologists.

You have the option of writing an individual research project in your final year. You will choose an initial topic or project from a range of supervisor research areas and then work on a one-to-one basis with a supervisor, producing a detailed and sustained piece of writing.

Recent dissertation titles include:

• 'From Diamonds to Dust: An Ecocritical Comparison Between Modernist Literature and Contemporary Environmental Fiction'

• 'The Representation of Racial Injustices in Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric'

• 'Seamus Heaney and Samuel Beckett in Relation to British Imperialism'

• 'Ethical Criticism and Zadie Smith'

This module focuses on the connections between literary texts, politics, and relevant historical/cultural contexts in gothic texts. You may cover:

• poetry
• novels
• graphic novels
• films

Examples include The Haunting of Hill House (both Shirley Jackson’s novel and the Netflix adaptation), The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez, and Saga of the Swamp Thing by Moore, Bissette and Totleben, and The Visions of the Daughters of Albion by William Blake.

You will explore various critical and theoretical approaches to literature, film, comics, adaptation, and popular culture. The module also seeks to decolonise Gothic Studies, including work by creators from a wide range of backgrounds who identify with a diverse range of subject positions.

This module is worth 20 credits.

Moving from the Spanish Armada of 1588 to the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, we will read a range of texts and authors.  Through these works, we will explore major themes of the period's literary and intellectual culture, such as witchcraft, music, allegory, and others.  There will be an emphasis on understanding the literature in its historical era, and in its subsequent reception and influence.  In your final assessment, you will have the opportunity to design and pursue your own research question, blending close analysis of the period’s literature with discussion of its historical contexts.

This module examines the late twentieth and early twenty-first century globe through its correlates in fiction. The primary materials for the module will be post-war Anglophone works drawn from a wide geographical range across the world. After introducing the history of the idea of world literature, these works will be situated within a series of theoretical ‘worlds’: world literary systems; post-colonial criticism; cosmopolitanism; world ecologies; resource culture; literary translation theory. The module will also attend to critiques of 'world literature’ as a concept.

The module is designed to provide students with an understanding of the process of English Language Teaching (ELT) and of the theoretical underpinnings of this practice. In this module students will learn the principles behind the learning and teaching of key aspects and skills of English, including:

• vocabulary
• grammar
• reading
• writing
• speaking
• listening
• intercultural communicative skills

Students will also learn how to apply these theoretical principles to the development of teaching materials. This module will therefore be of interest to students who want to pursue a teaching career, and in particular to those interested in teaching English as a second or foreign language.

This module is worth 20 credits.

Speaking, listening, reading, and writing are a complex set of behaviours that are a fundamental part of our daily lives. And yet they remain difficult to fully explain.

When you hear ‘FIRE’, you immediately look for an exit and start moving. Yet all that a speaker has done is produce a string of sounds. Your mind distinguishes these from the murmuring of other voices, feet clomping on the floor, and any background music. Your mind matches the sounds f-i-r-e with a word, retrieves the meaning, and relates them to the current circumstances and responds accordingly.

How does the mind do this? And what makes our minds so special that we can do this? On this module, we begin to address these questions.

You will consider:

• Is there a language gene?
• What makes human language different from animal communication?
• What is the relationship between thought and language?
• Does everyone talk to themselves? What purpose does our inner voice serve?
• How do we learn language? And does cognition underpin our ability to learn language?
• What do language deficits tell us about language and the brain?
• How do we understand and produce speech, words, and sentences?
• What is the best way to teach children to read?
• How is sign language similar to/different from spoken language?

This module is worth 20 credits.

This is a course in advanced stylistic analysis, exploring threads of stylistic patterning across literary and cultural history. Building on your prior knowledge of both linguistic and literary scholarship, the module bridges the gap between literary and linguistics aspects of the BA degrees. The course focuses in particular on aspects of style from a formalist, functionalist, cognitive, social and narratological perspective, as well as adding a historical dimension to the study of style. The module provides you with an understanding of how linguistic techniques contribute to the creation of meaning and literary interpretations. There is also an engagement with the emotional response of readers, as well as the practical application of literary linguistic pedagogy, in accordance with the educational and applied linguistic traditions of the discipline. The module represents an engagement with the professional, scholarly and disciplinary practices of literary stylistics.

This module explores the vital role that discourse plays in various communicative domains in healthcare and workplace settings. Students will explore these domains through a variety of contemporary frameworks for examining discourse and communication, including critical discourse analysis, multi-modal discourse analysis, and interactional sociolinguistics.The module offers the opportunity to analyse and reflect on the discourses of healthcare and the workplace, as two crucially important domains of social and professional life. To this end, professional and healthcare discourses will be investigated through a range of genres and communicative modes, including face-to face communication advertising, media discourse and digital interactions. The module offers a rich resource for discourse-based studies of language in professional and social life and enables students to examine the strategic uses of communicative strategies in specific social settings.

This module provides comprehensive knowledge of feminist theory, as applied to a series of language and linguistic contexts.

You will explore a range of analytical approaches to language, including conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, and interactional sociolinguistics. You will also respond to, and critically engage with, contemporary real-world problems associated with gender and sexuality, through the consideration of discourse-based texts.

Topics covered include:

• gender and sexual identity construction in a range of interactive contexts
• sexist, misogynistic, homophobic and heteronormative representations in texts
• feminist theory from the 1970s to the present, with particular focus on contemporary approaches to gender theory

This module is worth 20 credits.

The module employs the study of place-names to illustrate the various languages - British, Latin, French, Norse and English - that have been spoken in England over the last 2000 years. You will learn how place-name evidence can be used as a source for these languages, and also for the histories and landscapes of the country. The module coursework can be directed at a geographical area of particular interest to the student.

The genre of dream-vision inspired work by all the major poets of the Middle Ages, including William Langland, the Pearl-Poet, and Geoffrey Chaucer. The course will aim to give you a detailed knowledge of a number of canonical texts in this genre, as well as ranging widely into the alliterative revival, and chronologically into the work of John Skelton in the early sixteenth century. The course will depend upon close, detailed reading of medieval literary texts, as well as focusing on the variety and urgency of issues with which dream poetry is concerned: literary, intellectual, social, religious and political.

The module will explore the unique saga literature of medieval Iceland, with close reference to its historical and cultural contexts, via a selection of set texts. The set texts will be studied in translation but understanding will be enhanced by some study of the Old Norse-Icelandic language. Topics covered may include representations of kinship, gender, health, belief, the supernatural, landscape, emotion, feud and violence within the Old Norse sagas as well as stylistic and literary features of the sagas themselves.

Through the exploration of lyric poetry, this module examines cultural and literary change from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. It will consider the rise of ‘named poet’, the interaction of print and manuscript culture, the representation of love, and the use of the female voice. It will develop further students’ confidence in handling formal poetic terminology and reading poetry from this period. It will also enable students to think pragmatically about the transmission of lyric in modern editions, and about how best to represent the form.

This module will consider Irish literature and drama produced in the twentieth century. Taking the Irish Literary Revival as a starting-point we will consider authors in their Irish and European context, such as W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge, Lady Gregory, James Joyce, Seán O'Casey, Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel and Marina Carr.

The focus throughout will be upon reading texts in relation to their social, historical, and political contexts, tracking significant literary and cultural responses to Irish experiences of colonial occupation, nationalist uprising and civil war, partition and independence, socio-economic modernisation, and the protracted period of violent conflict in Northern Ireland. Discussion will also seek to highlight a number of recurrent thematic issues, including language, tradition, gender and sexuality, class, place, and memory.

The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen major changes in the way theatre is financed, produced, and presented, on stage and on screen. This module delves into the fascinating world of theatre production, beginning with late nineteenth-century actor-managers and the development of long-running, commercial productions and moving through subsidised theatre, touring and national theatre companies, processes of remediation (particularly through film), and the advent of the mega-musical.

The module utilises case studies including Shakespeare in production, new plays, revivals and international hits such as Les Miserables and Hamilton, to illustrate how theatre responds to changing contexts and audiences. A portfolio assessment allows students to respond to key subjects and types of theatre explored on the module. 

Explore the novel from the late twentieth century onwards, in Britain and beyond.

We will concentrate on the formal operations and innovations of selected novelists, considering how the contemporary socio-historical context influences these questions of form. Topics considered include:

• an interrogation of the ‘post-consensus novel’
• an exploration of postcolonial texts which represent the transatlantic slave trade
• the cultural politics of late twentieth-century and twenty-first century Scottish literature

Contemporary fiction is focused on writing emerging from Britain and closely-related contexts in the post-war period. This module offers strands structured around a number of political, social and cultural frameworks in Britain. These include:

• formal analysis and literary innovations in Britain
• temporalities and the representation of time
• issues of gender, race and class
• histories of colonialism and slavery
• national traditions and politics of state
• the country and the city
• postmodernism

This module particularly explores the network of relationships between context, content and form, supported by related literary and cultural theory and philosophy.

This module is worth 20 credits.

This module introduces key modern and contemporary poets.

You will build a detailed understanding of how various poetic forms manifest themselves in particular historical moments. Unifying the module is an attention to poets’ responses to the political and ideological upheavals of the 20th century.

The module will include such (primarily) British and Irish poets as:

• W.B. Yeats
• T.S. Eliot
• W. H. Auden
• Dylan Thomas
• Ted Hughes
• Sylvia Plath
• Wislawa Szymborska
• Tony Harrison
• Seamus Heaney
• Derek Mahon
• Adrienne Rich
• Geoffrey Hill
• Jo Shapcott
• Patience Agbabi
• Alice Oswald

Some of the forms examined will include: the elegy, the pastoral (and anti-pastoral), the ode, the sonnet (and sonnet sequence), the ekphrastic poem, the version or retelling, the villanelle, the parable and the sestina.

To develop a more complete perspective on each poet’s engagement with 20-century formal and political problems, we also examine these figures’ writings in other modes. This includes critical essays, manifestos, speeches, and primary archival materials such as letters and manuscript drafts.

Grounding each week will be readings on poetry and the category of the ‘political’ from an international group of critics, including such thinkers as Theodor Adorno, Charles Bernstein, Claudia Rankine, Peter McDonald, Angela Leighton, Christopher Ricks and Marjorie Perloff.

This module is worth 20 credits.

This module focuses on the creative process of making theatre as an ensemble. The first half of the module explores a range of theory-in-practice approaches to performance, such as those of Stanislavski, Lecoq, Laban, Meyerhold, along with approaches to devised, physical theatre influenced by companies such as Frantic Assembly and Gecko. For the second half of the module, students draw on these practical and theoretical models as they develop and rehearse a short, assessed, ensemble piece(s) for public performance. Students are also asked to critically reflect on the process of making performance encountered during workshop, rehearsal and performance on the module.The module builds on the understanding of performance conventions developed through practical workshops begun in the first year 'Drama, Theatre, Performance' module, and the performance theory-through-practice approach of the second year 'From Stanislavski to Contemporary Performance' module.   

Building on from what you’ve learned throughout your course, the research project gives you the opportunity to delve deeper into a topic of your choice. Subject to approval, your project can take a variety of forms including but not limited to: 

• a journal-style article  

• a dissertation 

• a substantial conference presentation  

• a report on practical research activity such as digitisation 

Collaborative projects are also possible. Your personal research is supported by workshops with peers, opportunities to network with selected external partners such as Manuscripts and Special Collections, and one-to-one supervisions with a member of the Department who provides feedback on your project design and on up to 4000 words of draft writing.  

Choose from one of four topics and attain deep familiarity with the latest developments in scholarship on that area. Guided by staff with expertise in the area, you’ll learn through small group-discussion to gain a deep understanding of a cutting edge area of Classics scholarship. Topics will change each year but will complement each other and cover a range of subdisciplines. 

As with years one and two, you can choose to study either Latin or Classical Greek through optional modules in year three. The level you study at will depend on your existing knowledge and experience.

Beginners level

For complete beginners and anyone who has done some study of Latin or Classical Greek before (anything up to GCSE).

You’ll be introduced to the grammar and vocabulary of your chosen language - and you’ll be supported to analyse and understand basic sentences and to translate short passages.

You may find it reassuring that, unlike modern language study, there is no speaking and listening element. The main focus is on developing your reading skills so you can read almost unadapted passages from Latin or Classical Greek texts.

Intermediate level

For students who have successfully completed their introduction to the language in our Beginners’ level modules.

You will consolidate your knowledge of the vocabulary and grammar of your chosen language. You’ll also begin the detailed linguistic and literary study of unadapted Latin or Greek texts, developing your ability and confidence to read, appreciate and analyse texts in an ancient language.

• In Latin, you will typically read a text such as Cicero’s Pro Archia or a book of Virgil or Ovid.
• In Greek, the text might be a speech by Lysias or selections from a longer work such as Homer's Odyssey or a Greek tragedy. 

Advanced level

For students who have successfully completed our Intermediate level modules for the relevant language.

You will study prose and verse texts in your chosen language, building on the skills you have already learned. You’ll undertake in-depth study of either a single text or a group of texts representative of an author, genre, period or theme, combining literary and linguistic discussion with consideration of the historical and social background.  

The texts covered change each year. In Latin, recent modules have focused on the following topics: 

• Flavian personal poetry (Martial and Statius) 
• The emperor Claudius (Suetonius and Tacitus) 
• The Cupid and Psyche story from Apuleius’ novel Metamorphoses 
• Ethnicity and Empire in Latin Epic (Virgil and Silius Italicus) 
• The Power of Love (Ovid and Propertius) 

In Greek, recent topics have included: 

• Tragedy (Euripides’ Antigone) 
• Selections from Homer’s Iliad 
• Longus’ novel Daphnis and Chloe 
• Plutarch’s Life of Antony 
• Paradoxography (a range of texts exploring the weird and marvellous)

Higher level

This is our most advanced level of language study for those who have already developed a good level of language learning through our Intermediate and Advanced level language modules.

You will: 

• improve reading fluency in your chosen language 
• gain deeper insights and appreciation of the language and its literature
• discuss texts at greater length and use more sophisticated skills of literacy and linguistic analysis that are valued by employers

As at the Advanced level, modules will involve in-depth study of either a single text or a group of texts representative of an author, genre, period or theme of Latin or Classical Greek literature. These modules will allow you to make further connections between the texts you are reading and their literary, social and historical contexts. 

This module introduces students to aspects of ancient Greek medicine, with sources ranging from the earliest surviving medical texts of the ‘Hippocratic corpus’ (late 5th century BCE) to Galen and Soranus, who worked under the Roman Empire in the 2nd century CE.

We will consider topics including:

• ancient physiological theories including the theory of ‘four humours’ and methodism
• development of knowledge about anatomy and diet
• theories about psychology
• theories about sexual differentiation
• problem-based medical education
• ancient pharmaceuticals and surgery
• diagnostic techniques
• professionalisation
• patient experiences
• religious sanctuaries as healing centres.

Have you ever wondered of the truth behind the myths of ancient Greece? In this module, we’ll examine visual and material culture, as well as epigraphic and literary sources to explore the real-life civilisations that inspired legends. You'll step into the shoes of pioneering archaeologists like Heinrich Schliemann, whose stunning discoveries at Mycenae, Tiryns, and Troy proved that these cities had a historical reality outside of Homer's epics. We'll also follow Sir Arthur Evans's uncovering of Knossos on Crete, and how it became the landmark of a new culture terms as ‘Minoan’.

We will examine visual and material culture, as well as epigraphic and literary sources and archival data, to gain familiarity with the achievements and the material culture of Minoans and Mycenaeans, two of the most fascinating European Bronze Age civilizations of the 2nd millennium BCE.  

Through a combination of lectures and workshops, you'll study major social, cultural, political and economic processes as you learn about the Minoans and Mycenaeans, two of the most fascinating European Bronze Age civilizations of the 2nd millennium BCE. Topics may include:

• the formation, nature and fall of palace states

• cultural interactions of the Minoans and Mycenaeans overseas

• the production, trade and consumption of various material goods

• the introduction and development of administration and early writing

• archaeologies of cult and death

• the eruption of Thera/Santorini and its effect

• the rise of the Mycenaean culture

• social and economic structures as documented in Linear B tablets

Deepen your understanding of the modern reception of the classical world in film, tv, comic books, or children’s literature. You’ll explore how modern representations can help us better understand both the ancient world, and our relationship to it. 

Particular case studies will introduce you to a range of methodological and theoretical approaches from cultural studies, reception studies, media theory, and elsewhere, as well as discussion of the modern technology and processes involved in producing these representations. You’ll also be assessed in a non-traditional format, such as creating a comic storyboard, a film voiceover commentary, or a portfolio reflecting on how the module’s content can help you meet your career goals. 

This module examines the poetry and prose of Old English: warfare and heroic action, thought and feeling, love and loss, and its place in the invention of national England. You’ll explore this rich and rewarding genre through texts authored by men and women, including poems from the Exeter Book ‘elegies’ like The Wanderer and The Seafarer, or passages from Beowulf in the original language.

This module explores writing by, about and for women in the early modern period in the years between the Reformation and Restoration. You'll explore a diverse range of texts, including those written for the stage, within their literary, cultural and political contexts. This will help you understand their textual transmission and reception, as well as the modern critical debates and theories surrounding them, including early modern understandings and presentations of gender. The module may feature texts by male canonical figures such as Shakespeare and Marvell, and more recently recovered and significant women’s voices such as those of Elizabeth Melville, Amelia Lanyer, and Lucy Hutchinson.

This module encourages you to engage in depth with modern writers and texts from canonical modernism. You will also, on occasion, study rival formations from the same historical period by marginalised writers, as well as proto or post-modernist authors. You will focus on the work of one or more writers, allowing you to examine the development of technique and shifts in thematic, political, and theoretical alignment. Through this, you will gain an understanding of literary culture and the changing relationship between the work of a single author, their forebears, and contemporaries.

This module explores a recurring series of connected figures, ideas and texts across centuries. Following the publication of John Milton’s Paradise Lost in 1667, you’ll examine the ways in which Milton’s enormously consequential poem is reimagined by later Romantic writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Mary Shelley. Explore how its mythic archetypes and aspects (the monstrous and Satanic, the Fall, Eve) inspire or recur in later reactions and works such as those by Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, Henry James, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Anthony Burgess. Areas of focus may include the Satanic, the myth of Eve, monsters and the monstrous, doppelgangers, free will, the posthuman, the Edenic in literature, creatures and creators.