BA (Hons) English with History

Beyond Plymouth: Enhance your prospects while studying BA (Hons) English with history

Here at Plymouth, you won’t only study rigorous academic content—you’ll also have the chance to improve your skills and experience to enable you to secure the career you want long-term. We have a dedicated Internships and Placements Officer to help you secure relevant, graduate-level work experience. Our option module Working With Literature helps interested students to gain a formal placement and to practise key skills such as interviewing, CV writing, and more. And there are numerous fully funded, ad hoc opportunities to gain specific types of experience.

• Choose from a wide variety of specialist modules, including period and cultural studies, and creative writing. You’ll be taking two thirds of your modules in English and one third in history. Your history modules will explore aspects of British, European and Global history, allowing you to make comparisons and connections with your English studies.
• Receive free set texts for all core modules throughout the three years.
• Benefit from assessment through coursework, with no written exams.
• Boost your career prospects by working with a publishing house, literary agent, arts organisation or magazine on our work-based learning module or extra-curricular internships.
• Make use of our open-door policy and talk to your lecturers in a friendly and supportive learning environment.
• Learn from internationally recognised research-active staff, including published creative writers.
• Experience other cultures by studying or working abroad in either Europe or the US.
• Write and be published as part of INK, the English and Creative Writing student-run magazine.
• Access resources at any time with the University library, open 24 hours 365 days a year, offering a vast range of electronic and print materials, including a rare books collection.
• Enhance your learning through the history department's close relationship with Plymouth’s wider history community, giving you free access to lectures from world-renowned visiting historians.
• Join the History Society and enjoy events and trips within a fun and supportive community, as well as getting experience in organising and coordinating events.
  
• Make the most of a rich cultural life with The Arts Institute programme and the University’s links with local arts organisations, like the Theatre Royal Plymouth.

If you are interested in taking this normally full-time programme on a part-time basis please contact Rachel Christofides to discuss this possibility.

• Year 1
• In your first year, you'll study historical, theoretical, and aesthetic approaches to literary analysis. You’ll read literature which investigates the making of the modern world; engage with exciting theories of reading such as eco-criticism, psychoanalysis and Marxism; and, if you choose, try your hand at creative writing. You will also learn key research and essay-writing skills. Your history modules in global and British history will inform and provide a context for your study of English.

  Core modules

  • ENGL402 Writing the Modern World, 1600-1700

    This module considers `modern¿ ways of writing, thinking, trading, seeing, and relating to others in the seventeenth century. The literature of this period first explores ideas central to our own time and place, and is crucial both to understanding literary history and to understanding ourselves. The course will be structured through four key narratives, traced through a chronological selection of texts:¿ authority ¿ modern ideas of gender ¿ global capitalism ¿ modern print culture.

  • ENGL404 Critical Theory

    This module will introduce some key critical theories relevant to the study of English literature. It will familiarise students with a range of theoretical perspectives and enable them to develop an understanding of different ways of reading literature, and its wider contexts.

  • ENGL406 Gods, Monsters and Heroes: Myths and Legends in Literature

    This immersive module provides an important grounding for new students studying English and Creative Writing. Based around some of the earliest written texts that underpin Western literature, the module engages with a number of issues to enable students to gain an understanding of the historical development of literature and the ways in which texts relate to each other over the centuries.

  • ENGL407 Rewritings: Contemporary literature and its Histories

    This module will examine how and why modern and contemporary authors have rewritten or reworked influential literary texts of the past. Students will engage with a range of different literary forms, including fiction, poetry, drama and, where appropriate, film. By investigating the impulses behind such intertextual acts, students will explore the ways in which literature engages with the cultural politics of its times, focusing particularly on issues of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class and aesthetics.

  • HIST407 World History since 1850

    This module is an introduction to major themes in the political, social and cultural history of the modern world beyond Europe.

  • HIST409 Fractured Isles: Britain and Ireland 1640-1990

    The module is an introduction to the major themes in political, social nd cultural history of Britain in the period 1640-1900.

• Year 2
• In your second year, you’ll take core modules in Romantic and Victorian literature, studying these key periods from an interdisciplinary perspective, and engaging with debates in philosophy, science, psychology, politics, art, gender and race. Your history modules will focus on democracy, imperialism and colonialism, providing opportunities for comparisons with English. Select from a wide range of other specialist modules, including our work-based learning module (Working with Literature). Optional modules are available this year, but may be subject to change in subsequent years.

  Core modules

  • ENGL501 Romanticism

    In this module literary Romanticism, in its rich and problematic diversity, is introduced and explored through a consideration of imaginative conceptions of the individual in writing between 1790 and 1830. The study ranges through a selection of texts in verse ¿ lyric and narrative ¿ and prose - essayistic, theoretical and fictional.

  • ENGL506 Victorian Literature and Culture

    This module aims to introduce students to the Victorian period through an examination of literature read in conjunction with a range of other contemporary cultural documents including scientific, sociological, psychological, political economic and aesthetic texts.

  Optional modules

  • ENGL502 Gothic Fictions: Villains, Virgins, Vampires

    This module looks at eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels to trace the variety and scope of literary contributions to the Gothic. It begins by discussing the origins of the Gothic novel, then moves to the heyday of the genre in the revolutionary 1790s, on to authors writing in the early and mid-nineteenth century, through to the decadence of the 1890s.

  • ENGL505 Rakes, Rascals and Rudeness in the Eighteenth Century

    Introduces historical & contemporary satirical theories; analyses satirical forms; enables critical engagement with the foundational associated modes: comedy, parody, irony and hyperbole.

  • ENGL510 Shakespeare and the Early Modern Stage

    This module provides an introduction to many aspects of Shakespeare's plays with emphasis on the practice and practicalities of playwriting for the early modern stage and on Shakespeare's plays in performance. Students will also be introduced to a range of critical approaches to the plays, from Shakespeare's contemporaries to the present day.

  • ENGL516 American Novel

  • ENGL519 Working with Literature

    While remaining focused on English and English and Creative Writing projects, this module will provide students with the opportunity to apply their literary and creative skills in a 'work-facing' environment.

  • ENGL520 Creative Nonfiction

    This module introduces students to the key concepts and issues in contemporary works of creative nonfiction including autobiography, travel writing, essays and reportage. We will produce our own works of poetry, short story and nonfiction, and critically evaluate and contextualise them.

  • ENGL521 Re-Thinking Historical Fiction

    This module aims to explore the interface between literature and history. Using key ideas in narrative theory and historiography, it will examine the ways in which narratives of history are crafted through literature and how literary texts can impact on our understanding and interpretation of history.

  • ENGL522 Dramatic Writing for Stage, Screen, and Beyond

    This course explores a wide range of dramatic writing and dramatic writing theory, integrating critical reading with creative writing projects. Class time will be spent discussing published authors/texts/productions, writing/reading theories, compositional processes, practical exercises, and student work.

  • ENGL526 ‘Hurt Minds’: Madness and Mental Illness in Literature

    This module considers changing attitudes towards, and a variety of theories of, the mind, examining how different cultures have understood ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ mental states. It will look at how the experience and treatment of mental illness has been represented in fiction. The mind is at its most fascinating when it behaves outside of expected social norms. By considering a variety of literary texts over several centuries, this module explores shifts in the definition, understanding, evaluation, and management of exceptional mental states.

  • ENGL527 Literatures of Environmental Crisis

    his module explores the ways in which contemporary literature and literary studies are responding to our current era of ecological crisis. It introduces students to the debates, modes of reading and key ideas of ecocritical literary criticism.

  • HIST515 Other Voices - Marginalisation in Early Modern Europe

    This course explores the ways in which early modern society confronted difference, and constructed its norms and mores. We will consider the role of religion, race, class, and gender in early modern Europe through the study of those groups who found themselves on the outside.

  • HIST519 Tudor and Stuart Britain

    This module examines the political, social and cultural history of Britain from 1485 to 1660, a vibrant and exciting period that witnessed significant developments: the growth of the state; major religious and political upheavals; increased education and literacy; the advent of print and popular politics; exploration and new ways of understanding the world.

  • HIST520 Global Cold War: Politics, Culture and Society

    This module is an introduction to major themes in the political, social and cultural history of the modern world with special focus on the 20th century and the Cold War.

  • HIST526 Dunkirk to D-Day: The Second World War in Europe

    The module examines the Second World War in Europe and the Atlantic Ocean from 1940 to late 1944

• Final year
• In your final year, you’ll complete your period studies core modules with the ground-breaking literature of early 20th-century Modernism. You’ll also choose from specialist modules, with a focus on 20th-century and contemporary literature. Your further engagement with history will deepen your understanding of the contexts that produce literary texts. Finally, you'll produce a year-long dissertation on any topic of your choice, which you'll work on with the support of your personal supervisor. Optional modules are available this year, but may be subject to change in subsequent years.

  Core modules

  • ENGL603 Modernism

    This module will explore a number of themes through an examination of writing published in the approximate period 1910-1930. The themes will include structural and linguistic experimentation, historical and artistic influences, the First World War and literary networks.

  Optional modules

  • ENGL601 Project in Critical Writing

    The student will complete, under tutorial supervision, a project in critical writing in the form of a literary - critical dissertation based on an idea, theme, author/s, theoretical consideration etc: or a dissertation which arises from literary - critical interests connected to issues arising from the student's work in other English modules. Maximum length 12,000 words.

  • ENGL602 Project in Creative Writing

    The student will complete, under tutorial supervision, a project in creative writing such as a collection of poetry, short stories, a longer piece of prose fiction, autobiography, travel writing or other suitable modes which may draw upon issues encountered in other English modules and which includes relevant literary-critical material. Maximum length 12,000 words.

  • ENGL608 American Crime Writing

    This module considers the development of twentieth-century American crime fiction from hard-boiled detectives, to myths of the mafia, and postmodern reinventions of the genre. This module will explore the cultural contexts of American crime writing, prevailing conventions of the genre, as well as challenges to those conventions.

  • ENGL610 Reading Jane Austen - then and now

    This module explores the cultural politics of Jane Austen's novels and of reading her work, both at the time it was written and now. Attending to social and historical contexts, the course selects some of Austen's major works, together with a selection of early and minor material and work by her contemporaries, to consider how we can read Austen as a novelist, as a political writer, and as a writer of `romance'.

  • ENGL617 Advanced Poetry Workshop

    In this final year module we will examine a range of contemporary poetry and poetic theory as a way for students to advance their own composition of poems. Class time will be divided between seminar discussions of published poetry/theory, writing exercises, and workshops of student poetry.

  • ENGL618 Features Journalism Workshop

    This module offers students an in-depth experience of professional writing. We will explore technique in features and literary journalism; music reviews, opinion columns and longer immersion features as well as other contemporary works of non-fiction feature writing, both short- and long-form, from sub-genres including profiles and interviews, autobiography and columns, travel writing, and reportage. We will learn to research and produce our own works of professional nonfiction and critically evaluate them.

  • ENGL621 Black Atlantic Literature and Culture: Race, Resistance, and Revolution

    This module explores a range of black writing and cultural formations in transatlantic contexts. Adopting the critical paradigm of the 'Black Atlantic', the module investigates literary and cultural exchanges between Africa, Europe, North America and the Caribbean. It explores questions of identity formation, resistance, national memory, and knowledge hierarchies by examining different literary forms and cultural productions, ranging from nineteenth-century abolitionist texts through to contemporary fiction and memoir. In addition to introducing texts from various locations and time periods of the Black Atlantic, the module will also engage with theoretical perspectives concerning race, memory and nationhood, as well as recent critical work centred on decoloniality in relation to literary studies.

  • ENGL622 Brave New Worlds: Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Politics

    Science Fiction seems to be a field or mode that is particularly difficult to define, in part because it crosses over with many other forms. But it is also one of the most popular types of literature easily ranging from the highbrow to the low. This module will explore SF writing since 1960, with a particular focus on the hybridity of the field and the ways in which it intersects with fantasy writing, to explore a range of political issues in the contemporary world. SF is ‘a wide-ranging, multivalent and endlessly cross-fertilizing cultural idiom.’ (Roberts, 2006, 2) But is it really concerned with the future, or in fact, driven by nostalgia to engage with the ways in which the past has constructed the present? The module will be thematically structured and will concentrate on Anglophone writing.

  • HIST606 The Civil Rights Movement

    Examining the African American struggle for civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s.

  • HIST609 The French Wars of Religion 1558 - 1598

    The module will examine the causes, progress and termination of the French Wars of Religion after 1558. The main topics will be the relationships between Catholic and Protestant, the impact of war on royal authority, the experiences of confessional groups, towns, nobles and peasants, and the resolution of conflict under Henri IV.

  • HIST616 America, the United Nations and International Relations 1945 to the present

    This module provides a detailed examination of the relationship between the United States of America and the United Nations in the management of international relations from 1945 to the present.

  • HIST620 Elizabeth I: The Failure of a Dynasty?

    This module will allow students to explore how Elizabeth I and her regime dealt with the major religious, dynastic, social and international conflicts and challenges of her reign. Students will explore the limits of the Elizabethan regime¿s success, engaging directly with contemporary views, while also considering the subsequent history and mythology of the last Tudor monarch.

Every undergraduate taught course has a detailed programme specification document describing the course aims, the course structure, the teaching and learning methods, the learning outcomes and the rules of assessment.

The following programme specification represents the latest course structure and may be subject to change:

BA Hons English Combinations programme specification 1526

UCAS tariff

104 - 112