BA (Hons) Drama and English Literature

The aim of this module is to provide you with an understanding of the basic strands of literary and cultural theories, such as feminism, Marxism, postcolonial theory, and psychoanalysis. It will allow you to explore and evaluate these theoretical perspectives through practical application to literary texts as well as to other primary sources.

This module introduces you to the interdisciplinary study of English at undergraduate degree level through a variety of texts drawn from different historical periods and in different genres. It defines and demonstrates the use of key terms of critical writing, especially in close reading and the formal analysis of texts, and ensures that you understand and use these terms accurately and carefully. It further aims to establish the core studying and writing skills needed for the study of English at degree level, including attentive close reading, reading quickly and efficiently, the use of secondary criticism and research resources, and clear critical prose writing.

This module will introduce you to Liverpool as a global city with a rich literary heritage, tracing the creativity and multiculturalism which has shaped, and continues to shape, our world-famous city. You will read a range of works authored by or about Liverpudlians and consider the historical, social, and geographical contexts for writing in and of the city.

This module introduces you to a range of theories and approaches to acting, including aspects of voice and movement. It establishes a shared sense of ensemble and the codes of conduct and professional work ethic expected of actors. It will link your practical work to an understanding of the social and historical roots and evolving processes of the actor, alongside introducing you to a constructive vocabulary and method of observing and evaluating both your own practice and that of others.

This practical workshop based module offers you the opportunity to explore a range of non-verbal aspects of performance text and their place in the creative and interpretive process. You will examine models of analysis and a range of examples of historical and contemporary practice where non-verbal text is the predominant mode.

This module consolidates and develops aspects of voice, movement, acting and production skills already introduced though rehearsal, leading to performance of existing texts. It provides you with the opportunity to nurture acting skills through research, rehearsal and performance.

This module introduces you to a range of contemporary performance forms and practitioners. It expands and enhances your level of conceptual understanding associated with critical approaches to performance, and develops your ability to write coherently about contemporary performance with appropriate academic presentation.

This module offers you the opportunity to develop original script work through workshop application of performance and, where appropriate, directing skills. You will explore a range of texts for their performance potential alongside enhancing your understanding of dramaturgy and story structure.

The aim is to provide students with an additional year of study at an approved overseas partner that will complement their programme at LJMU. This is an additional year of full-time study at an approved higher education institution. The modules to be studied must be agreed in advance, and must be appropriate for the student's programme of study. Assuming successful completion of this year, mark-bearing credit will be awarded by the Faculty Recognition Group. The grade conversion scale to be used will be made available in advance of the year abroad.

In this workshop module you will develop further skills leading to a sharing of material explored in an appropriate format. You will be offered a choice of specialist areas of practice which activate and extend your awareness of the practical processes involved in creating/performing in a specialist area of Drama. You will then develop your understanding of the particular conventions and stylistic approaches within the chosen specialism, and the critical field in which it sits.

This module enhances your ability to deal with advanced concepts, philosophies and critical frameworks appropriate to drama and theatre practice research. It equips you with appropriate enhanced skills in use of supporting technologies in designing and proposing a piece of focussed academic research.

The aim of this module is to introduce you to a range of seventeenth-century writings in their historical and cultural context to enable you to recognise different forms and genres used in the period. This module will also facilitate an understanding the concept of the Early Modern and issues of historical change and continuity.

This module focuses on the emergence of a modernist movement in Europe and America at the beginning of the 20th century and lasting until the decades after the close of the Second World War. You will be introduced to the literature, culture and politics of modernity through an engagement with a variety of modernist texts.

This module enables you to develop a critical vocabulary to enhance your understanding of poetry. You will be introduced to a range of poetry from different periods, in different forms and from different cultural locations. Alongside this, you will learn to identify the aesthetic qualities of different poetic traditions.

This module will introduce you to the field of postcolonial studies through a selection of literary and critical works. It will introduce the debates on the relationship between art, politics and culture at the heart of postcolonial literary criticism.

In this module, you will develop an understanding of the manifestations of Romanticism in nineteenth-century literature to assess the cultural afterlife and importance of Romanticism and its modes. You will explore the connections between politics, social history, and literary culture in Britain during a period of social instability and intense and rapid changes in many areas of life at home and abroad.

The aim of this module is to analyse a wide variety of short writing from the post-Second World War era to develop skills of close reading and textual analysis. You will also explore the relationship between short writing and modernity/contemporary culture.

Within this module, you will extend your familiarity with a range of Victorian texts including novels, poetry and essays. You will explore how the Victorian age was characterized by rapidly developing scientific discourses and popular interest in them and understand how contemporary understanding of genre and cultural prestige were inherited from the Victorian period.

This module will enable you to develop a range of professional and transferable skills relevant to the world of work. You will be able to critically reflect on your self-development and acquisition of skills and attributes through experience of work in conjunction with their academic studies.

This module promotes independent learning activities to give you an opportunity to pursue their own research-informed projects. This module promotes key skills relating to Level 5 work identifying a set of aims or key questions exploring a body of published literature relevant to the project, and effectively communicating information, arguments and analysis.

The aim of this module is to introduce you to the diversity of auto/biographical writing. It will equip you with the critical vocabulary and analytical tools to explore and analyse modern life-writing. You will understand key critical topics relating to life-writing, including the relations of subjectivity and form; the intersections of gender, race, class and embodiment; the role of memory and nostalgia; narrative strategies of confession and secrecy.

This module examines slavery from a long historical interdisciplinary and transnational perspective. It will analyse a range of 'slave texts' such as autobiographies, novels about slavery, abolitionist poetry, and contemporary film, to interrogate the diverse ways in which slavery has been represented historically, and contemporary debates around that history.

This module will develop your understanding of the relationships between gender, sexuality, and literature. Building on the feminist theory you will encounter in your first year, you will explore literature’s role in the developments of the sexual politics and gender norms of Western society and culture since the nineteenth century and up to the present day.

This module focuses on post-1948 literature about ethnic diversity in Britain. You will explore a tradition of writing by and about post-colonial migrants and their British-born children, including works of prose, poetry, and drama, and read these texts in relation to contemporary debates about multiculturalism, race and (anti-)racism, and British identity and society.

This module helps to gain a deeper understanding of poetic form and how it relates to musical form. It also helps to understand how politics and poetics inform lyrics. You will also gain knowledge of how gender, race, intertextuality, and acculturation processes can influence musical production.

This module covers a range of working-class literary traditions and genres from the nineteenth century to the present. You will examine the relationship between literary form and social class, consider how working-class writers have appropriated and developed particular genres, and explore the intersections between class and other markers of identity.

Building on your encounters with key strands of critical theory in your first year, this module offers you the opportunity to further explore contemporary theoretical concepts and ideas, including postmodernism, posthumanism, gender and queer theory, and critical race theory.

This module offers you an opportunity to extend independent preparation and practice and develop advanced skills in a chosen role. It enables you to realise work that will be useful as part of a professional portfolio or in accessing further advanced skills training.

This module is the cumulative point of application of skills and creative practice developed during the course, and provides a public platform for showing work. This creative and practical module is designed to give you the opportunity to develop and work independently with an ensemble.

This module further offers you the opportunity to develop either a festival event pitch or a personal company business plan as a means of enhancing potential future employability. Where appropriate the module will invite alumni who have real world experience of founding and running their own companies, or who have run festivals or similar events, to contribute to delivery.

This module aims to form a balance between the Drama Dissertation and Advanced Practice 2 in offering you a cumulative opportunity to set practice and scholarship side by side. You will learn to locate, collect, review and evaluate relevant research material and justify clearly its relevance, and to develop a critical and analytical argument, according to conventions of academic papers and in a form related to your chosen subject.

This is a year-long module, at the end of which you will have produced a dissertation of 7- 8,000 words. As such, it offers you the opportunity to investigate a topic of personal interest within the field of English Studies: you might wish to revisit something studied on a previous module, with a fresh approach or in greater detail, or choose an area as yet unexplored. You will be given guidance by a supervisor through the different stages of researching and writing, but above all you will be expected to work independently in the formulation of ideas, selection of key texts, and production of the final piece.

This module will give you an opportunity to pursue your own intellectual interests to undertake an independent academic study, working on your own initiative and building strong time management skills.

The aim of this module is to analyse domestic space as an important aspect of contemporary culture, to familiarize you with a range of disciplinary and philosophical traditions which have focused upon domestic space.

This module will extend your knowledge of the diversity and range of British writing in the twenty-first century in order to explore key events that shape literary culture in Britain today.

You will learn important critical and theoretical views relating to racial formations, racial identities, and racism in American history to develop cultural and historical understanding of the dynamics of race in post-war America.

This module will reinforce the ability to critically analyse texts in close detail to examine a range of Shakespeare's plays in the context of their original cultural production.

Terrorism and Modern Literature will establish terrorism as a significant and persistent literary, political and cultural preoccupation in modern literature (1880s to present), and examine key instances in which the language and concept of terror is at issue.

This module will examine the genre of Gothic fiction as it has developed over two centuries to explore the cultural, historical and intellectual contexts that shape the moment of its production.

This module will introduce the concept of 'world literature' through a selection of texts from the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries in relation to the rise and expansion of a global modernity. You will examine on-going critical debates around key areas of research in the global humanities: a singular modernity, the politics of translation, the periphery and the world system.

This module will establish violence as a significant and persistent literary, political and cultural preoccupation in nineteenth-century literature (1800-1900), and examine key works in which the issues of class, empire and gender were explored by authors of this period in relation to conflict and crisis.

This module explores how Victorian writers responded to environmental changes. It examines key historical and intellectual developments shaping debates about the natural world in the Victorian period; you consider links between the historical past and current modes of environmentalism.

This module examines the representation of the mind and mental states in a range of literary texts, with particular attention to representations of madness and other extreme or unusual states of mind. It introduces you to the interdisciplinary study of literature alongside psy-sciences, including psychoanalytic literary criticism and theory, the history of psychiatry and its institutions, contemporary medical-model psychology, and the field of cognitive literary studies. It will help to understand and question accepted discourses and modes of representing madness and the mind in contemporary culture, with an understanding of the challenges that have been offered to scientific and medical authority over the mind.

This module will extend your knowledge about a wide range of non-fiction on the themes of travel, place, region and locality. Throughout the module you will have opportunities to develop your confidence in writing about and discussing your own nuanced interpretations of complex and hybrid non-fictional texts. This will further develop your ability to effectively communicate complex ideas and arguments in long-form writing.

Within this module you will gain familiarity with a range of current developments and genres across contemporary literary forms, including fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. This module will help you explore areas of current debate within the contemporary English-speaking publishing world. It will help you reflect on the significance of the circumstances of production informing contemporary texts. It will also help to reflect on the position of the writer within contemporary society.

This module focuses on modern fiction focused on the urgent environmental crises with which we are now obliged to reckon. Some of the issues you will engage with on this module include climate, the environment as a concept, the non-human, and the alternative approaches to nature represented in indigenous narrative systems.

This module explores writing by and about African Americans from the mid-twentieth century to the present; you will consider how Black writers and artists have contested racial injustices, articulated new identities, and identified grounds for solidarity and alliance.

This module focuses on recent works of transnational fiction that have been adapted for the screen. Drawing on literary studies, film studies, adaptation studies, and postcolonial studies, you will examine novels about migrants alongside their film adaptations, considered as ‘migrants’ from page to screen.

This module explores how extinction on various scales, from the local and national to the planetary, is conceptualized and represented in American environmental and ecocritical texts, including fiction, nature writing, and ecocritical theory.

This module will deepen your understanding of the early modern world (or worlds) through attention to travel writing, early science fiction, early colonialism, and approaches to race and slavery, through topics such as the representation of piracy, and utopian writing.

This module examines shifting identities and the intersections of class, sexuality, gender and regionality in British literature of the interwar years. It moves across popular, middlebrow and experimental fiction and looks at poetry, non-fiction and magazine publishing as a means of examining the changing cultural formations of the period.