English

This course explores literary engagements with the French Revolution together with responses to the Haitian Revolution, while Sir Walter Scott's inauguration of the historical novel frames our discussion of later responses to the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865. The course considers the multiple forms of discursive and ideological connection between literature and history, and students think about what literary forms are capable of registering the shock of historical novelty: the historical novel looms large in that respect, but students also explore the transformation of the bildungsroman, the differing poetics of various mid-Victorian writers, fin-de-siècle utopian imaginaries and early examples of the Empire "writing back." The seminars discuss various non-literary "para-texts," including writings by anti-colonial rebels such as Toussaint L'Ouverture, Firoz Shah and Paul Bogle, in order to explore the broader intertextual, international and political constellations that inform the literature of revolution and rebellion during the long 19th century.

Starting from the assumption that gendered differences are at the basis of an unequal gendered system, to which are added other forms of domination, such as race and class, and that this inequality results from a social construction based on prejudices and stereotypes, this course explores how these mechanisms of gender assignment are reflected, constructed but also challenged in literature. It reflects upon the processes of construction and deconstruction of gender in a corpus of Anglophone and Francophone literary texts, and also in the back-and-forth movement between languages and cultures, insofar as geographical displacement very often induces a displacement of gendered and textual issues: how is gender inscribed in literature and how is it translated? The course considers the literary space as a symbolic space where gendered models can be transgressed and undermined. To do this, it alternates theoretical readings and textual analysis of literary texts in English and French. These texts are systematically contextualized and historicized in order to show how literary writing and translation are determined by ideology. Finally, the course tries to define what “feminist” literary translation is and investigates how queer theory has transformed literary and translation studies.

This course supplements existing teaching on Romantic-period literature, allowing students the opportunity to study works by and about women written between 1789 and 1820. It complements two other courses at St Andrews: EN3162 and EN3163, but students are not required to take these classes. The focus of this course is the richly varied and often exciting fiction, poetry and non-fictional prose emanating from the "revolution in female manners" which sprang out of the momentous changes of post-1789 European society. Students explore how arguments about women’s education, marriage, inheritance, and status in society connect with the more general political and ideological ferment of the 1790s and beyond.

This course explores a wide range of contemporary British drama from the 1950s to the present day, examining its existence on both page and stage. Students read a broad spectrum of work, including plays by John Osborne, Samuel Beckett, Sarah Kane, Brian Friel, Tim Crouch, Caryl Churchill, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Liz Lochhead, Ella Hickson, debbie tucker green, Mojisola Adebayo and Travis Alabanza. They also consider the evolution of specific trends, movements and forms across 20th- and 21st-century drama, including in-yer-face theatre, participatory performance and state-of-the-nation drama. The course engages with critical and theoretical perspectives on these playtexts and performances.

 

This course introduces students to a cross-period tradition of English literary satire, both as a bold genre with precise conventions (verse satire, Menippean) and as a scurrilous mode that infects a wide range of writings, traditions, and media. We will learn the form's main conventions, techniques, and models, and analyse how it reflects on the power of language to dissent, transgress, playfully evade censure, and ultimately provoke change.

This course introduces students to the study of the novel in English. Focusing on a mixture of established and contemporary texts by a diverse range of authors, it melds critical exploration with skill-acquisition via a series of interactive workshops, alongside seminars and lectures. Students are encouraged to refine their appreciation of the novel as an art-form, and develop transferable skills in communication, critical reflection, and digital fluency.

Venice today is a manifestation of Romanticism’s continuing influence on modern-day culture: Romantic-period literature transformed the city from an almost forgotten backwater into the iconic city of modern tourism. This course is focused on the international re-imagining of Venice by Romantic-period writers such as Goethe, Radcliffe, de Staël, Byron and P. B. Shelley, and the influence of this re-imagining across Europe and beyond. However, this international focus on "Romantic Venice" also enables students to re-think Romanticism in Britain, in terms of its inherently international nature and its international impact. It does this by foregrounding Romanticism’s interest in urban as well as natural worlds; its reinvention of literary genres to address new aesthetic, social, and political objectives; the importance of writers (especially women writers), and kinds of writing (especially travel writing), often marginalized in scholarly accounts of Romanticism; and the influence of "Romantic Venice" on writers such as Dickens, George Sand, and Henry James.

This course uses the framing concept of "metamorphosis" to explore the ways in which late medieval poets creatively reworked and re-imagined classical stories dealing with change, loss, and violence, while working out new modes of poetic representation and form. Many of these stories were taken from the works of that most popular of Roman poets in the Middle Ages, Ovid (predominantly from the Metamorphoses). Engaging with these narratives allowed medieval authors to confront and explore questions of transformation and change in language and forms that were themselves often innovative and experimental. It also required them to think about how to engage with the writings of a pagan poet within their own, Christian context. The course introduces students to selected stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and to reworkings of them by late medieval authors such as John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate and Robert Henryson.

The origins of this rich and complicated genre lie in the Middle Ages, when romance was the most popular form of secular literature and the particular narrative form in which women characters developed agency and subjectivity. Medieval romance has a profound influence on later literature, and, as students explore, on the novel, making it one of the most important genres to English literary history. Despite this, romance is a peculiarly discredited genre – a bit of an embarrassment to write, and to be seen reading. The course asks why the discrediting of romance in later periods is bound up with its association with women readers, and, indeed, with women writers. This course introduces students to the history of romance, to feminist scholarship on it, as well as to a history of women as readers and writers, and the ways in which male writers thought about and adapted a genre that was assumed to be feminine.

From the 1960s, British and North American publishing industries started to undergo a process known as conglomeration, a form of financialization that increasingly held publishers accountable to producing books that would make near-immediate profit rather than incentivizing editors to pursue work that might amass reputation and financial returns over time. In this course students examine the narrative of conglomeration amidst other developments in literary publishing and editorial politics during this time, covering topics including: commercial and independent presses; feminist publishing; under representation of POC authors; the relationship between publishing and political movements; the poetics of editing; the outsourcing of work to the Global South; and self-publishing. Throughout the course, students remain attuned to questions of literary form and the politics of editing and publishing.