English

BA English allows you to choose from a diverse and extensive range of modules, covering works across time, cultures, genres and geographies. Offering more than 40 modules from across a thousand years of English, American and global literature, English at Royal Holloway is a particularly wide-ranging subject which allows you to develop your passions, debate cutting-edge ideas, and to pursue, if you wish, your own creative writing.

The flexibility of this course encourages discovery: from the Knights of the Round Table to contemporary literature on global questions like migration or the environment, you will encounter many new literary worlds and new ways of understanding familiar ones. Most importantly, you will discover your own voice as a writer in an environment which places particular value on independence of mind and intellectual creativity. Alongside expertise in all the major literary periods which ensures that our students are informed by deep knowledge, the English department prides itself on educational expertise, offering small group teaching, a ‘transition’ programme when you join us and individual attention, to ensure that our students are confident, happy and successful academically.

Studying at one of the UK's most dynamic English departments allows you to develop a strong understanding of key periods, genres, authors, and critical concepts. After a first year which gives you firm foundations, you can choose from a huge range of options both innovative and traditional: for example, Drama and Witchcraft, Sensation Fiction, World War I Poetry, Science Fiction, Children's Literature, African-American Literature, the Girl in the Book, Queer History as well as courses on the Medieval period, Shakespeare and the Renaissance, Eighteenth-century and Victorian literatures, Modernism and Postmodernism. In your third year, you can write a dissertation on a specialist subject of your own choice.

You will be taught by nationally and internationally known scholars who write prize-winning books, talk or write in the national media, or advise cultural bodies like Liberty or the Charles Dickens Museum. Outside the vibrant community of the English department, you can take courses in other departments, and even opt to study abroad for a year.

• Study literature from across time and space.

• Choose from innovative, interdisciplinary modules on the relationship between literature and the digital, film, music, the visual arts, and the creative industries.

• Opportunity to gain work experience through our micro-placements scheme, at an organisation such as Penguin, the Press Association or the BBC.

• Study abroad for a year at one of our international partner institutions.

• Take options in creative writing and/or modules in another department.-

Course Modules

Core Modules

Year 1

• Encountering Medieval Literature: From Beowulf to Chaucer

• Critical Foundations: Thinking As A Critic

• Literature and Crisis

• Shakespeare

• Reorienting the Novel

• Introduction to Poetry

Year 2

• All modules are optional

Year 3

• All modules are optional

Optional Modules

Below is a taster of some of the exciting optional modules that students on the course could choose from during this academic year. Please be aware these do change over time, and optional modules may be withdrawn or new ones added.

Year 1

• All modules are core

Year 2

• Middle English Poetry

• Tolkien's Roots

• Medieval Dream and Vision

• Strange Fictions: Romance in the Middle Ages

• Renaissance Literature

• Intensive Shakespeare: Comedy, History, Tragedy

• Drama and Witchcraft

• Early Modern Bodies

• Victorian Literature

• Romanticisms

• Creative Writing: Structure and Style

• Literature of the Fin de Siècle, 1883-1903

• Contemporary Debates in Literary and Critical Theory

• Modernisms

• Literature and the Digital

Year 3

• Ideas in Contemporary Fiction

• Literature, the Digital and the Creative Industries

• Advanced Shakespeare: The Problem Plays

• Reading Like a Victorian

• The Girl in the Book

• Children's Literature

• Poetic Practice

• The New York Schools: Poetry, Painting, Composition

• The 1930s British Fiction and the Road to War

• Special Author: Virginia Woolf

• Special Author: Chaucer

• Special Author: Charles Dickens

• Special Author: Herman Melville

• Reading the Waste Land

• Creative Writing Special Focus (Term 1)

• English Dissertation

https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/studying-here/undergraduate/english/english/

You’ll be taught through a combination of lectures and seminars, and participate in study groups, essay consultations and guided independent study. In your first year, you will also work in small groups of just four or five students focusing on study skills such as close reading, essay writing and presentation and self-editing. As you progress through your degree, these tutorials focus on your own personal development, for instance working on your CV. Private study and preparation are essential parts of every course, and you will have access to many online resources and the University’s comprehensive e-learning facility, Moodle. When you start with us, you are assigned a Personal Tutor to support you academically and personally.

You will also take a study skills course during your first year, designed to equip you with and enhance the writing skills you will need to be successful in your degree. This course does not count towards your final degree award but you are required to pass it to progress to your second year.

All undergraduate degree courses at Royal Holloway are based on the course unit system. This system provides an effective and flexible approach to study, while ensuring that our degrees have a coherent and developmental structure.

We use a variety of assessment methods, including long and short essays, formal examinations at the end of each year, online tests and exercises, presentations, commentaries and portfolios of creative work.