English

This course introduces fiction narratives, both literary and cinematic. Students learn the fundamental concepts of the storytelling art, through the analytical interpretation of fundamental literary and film works.

This seminar is divided into two parts exploring the relationship between literature, history, gender, and cultural representation from the early modern period to the present. The first part on revolution, utopia and gender examines utopian thought from Thomas More’s UTOPIA (1516) to the revolutionary era. Focusing on the English and French Revolutions, the course analyzes how utopian writing and political upheaval challenged—or reinforced—gender norms, women’s agency, and patriarchal structures. Through a range of texts by men and women, it assesses the emancipatory and oppressive dimensions of utopian imaginaries. The second part of the course focuses on contemporary film and television portrayals of Shakespeare and his circle from 1998-2025. From SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE to recent series and films, the course explores biofiction, authorship, historical imagination, and the place of Shakespeare in modern visual culture, in dialogue with major screen adaptations of his plays. Together, the course investigates how literature and media reimagine alternative social worlds and canonical figures across time. 

This is a translation workshop where students translate and do research on activism. It includes several guests speakers, including a certified court interpreter, a Translation Studies specialist on gender, a sociolinguist, and representatives from the U.S.'s Montclair State University Human Trafficking Center. Students are also introduced to a free language corpus analyzer software.

This is a survey of a century of Anglophone literature from the mid 19th to the mid-20th century. Since this period covers a challenging range of texts and authors from various backgrounds and nationalities, a central focus is on writers who, until a few decades ago, were hardly considered to be part of the canon: female or queer-identifying authors, writers of color, outsiders, exiles. In the case of the well-established authors, the focus is on texts that frame the impact of industrialization and mechanization; that represent landscapes of war, imagined or real; that explore technologies of time, that problematize gender and sexuality; and on less explored themes, such as the occult and the surreal. The course considers the distinctive characteristics of a range of literary genres; identify the historical and cultural movements specific to each period; and read the themes and formal elements of poetry, prose and essays against the social and political backgrounds that compose the ‘Brave New Worlds’ of the era.

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.