Course summary

Creative Writing enhances your evolving writing skills at your own pace and in your own way, while showing you how your work relates to the wider realms of literary and cultural context. In English Literature, study is wide-ranging and includes modern and traditional literature, cultural study and critical analysis, Shakespeare and rap poetry. You move progressively through a structured series of writing assignments and exercises, working on all genres of writing in the first academic year and specialising in subsequent years. You receive positive critical encouragement and direction throughout. This is enhanced by a workshop environment which helps you form a critical understanding of your own writing and the writing of others. The English Literature elements in the first year provide an awareness of the range of different approaches to understanding texts and develop skills of critical analysis, research and writing. This is achieved through the study of an assortment of texts from various periods in history across the genres of prose fiction, poetry and drama. In the second academic year, the focus becomes more specific with modules that look at elements of different genres such as writing for children, media writing, poetry, song and play, film and TV script. English Literature modules involve studying of a group of texts representative of a period of history, a particular genre or a particular area of the world. In the final academic year, the modules look increasingly at the relationships between writing and the world beyond the University – looking at publishing, producing, community audiences, writing and teaching – and a specific collection of writings, a particular theme or critical theory is considered in detail. Modules tend to be closely related to the research interests of teaching staff and engage with cutting-edge developments in the discipline.