Course summary

This programme examines a range of literary and theoretical contexts, introducing ways that writing and imagination shape and share in cultural and political processes. You will explore the ways literature since 1900 has sought to change and modernise itself, in the context of wider developments of modernity characterising the age. Your studies will take you through a broad and fascinating field, from the originators of literary ‘modernity’ – including TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf – to the present day and the continuing impact of their innovations. Studying in the world’s first UNESCO City of Literature, you will analyse the most challenging and exciting literature written in English since 1900, and explore the range of historical, intellectual, cultural, political and philosophical factors informing the period’s writing – particularly in its highly innovative modernist and postmodernist phases.