This year is all about expanding your skills and knowledge, while supporting you in making the transition to university study.

Our modules introduce you to the history of English Literature, looking at moments of influence, transformation, and revolution.

You'll study the texts that ushered in new forms and ideas and influenced generations of writers and thinkers globally. These range from the classical epics of Greece to the shocks of revolutionary poetry and utopian prose.

We'll help you develop your skills in interpreting poetry, plays, prose and film. You’ll learn new critical and theoretical models to support and strengthen your analysis.

You’ll also have the opportunity to broaden your knowledge through modules in other humanities disciplines, including:

• creative writing
• languages, modern or ancient history
• philosophy
• sociology
• media
• psychology

In your second year you'll cultivate your specialised knowledge and independent research skills.

Our modules enable in-depth study of specific literary periods. You'll take at least two pre-19th-century modules and at least two modules focusing on modern or contemporary topics.

Whether you’re studying early Medieval, Renaissance, Romantic, Victorian, Modernist, or Contemporary literature, we'll introduce you to the most recent and innovative thinking, reflecting your lecturers’ own cutting-edge research.

Your own independent research will grow out of your in-depth period studies. The independent project will teach you how to research, plan and write an essay on a topic of your choice. This will prepare you for your third-year independent work on a subject chosen from your own unique interests.

This year builds in further opportunities to pursue the topics that interest you. You'll choose at least three specialist modules, all shaped by the research expertise of your lecturers.

You'll take modules that cover both pre-19th-century and post-19th-century topics.

Current options include modules that feature:

• Gothic literature
• Renaissance drama
• Romantic poetry
• Utopian writing and science-fiction
• Global Anglophone Literature
• Country house literature
• Early feminist writing
• American literature
• Popular and genre fiction
• Literatures of the North and North East of England

In our capstone, ‘dissertation’ modules you'll complete a final-year research project either as a long essay, a digital exhibition, or as a digital edition.

This will draw on everything you have learnt during your degree, will be on a topic you are passionate about, and demonstrate your skills in researching, writing and thinking.