English and Creative Writing

By combining the study of creative writing with English, you'll become an informed and critical reader as well as a confident and expressive writer - whether specialising as a poet, playwright, or author of fiction.

Studying at one of the UK's most dynamic English departments will challenge you to develop your own critical faculties. Learning to write creatively and critically analyse in tandem, you'll be exposed to a huge variety of literature while you develop your own writing practice. Studying English will allow you to place your writing within a wider cultural context of literature throughout history, considering key texts and acquiring a sound understanding of significant periods, genres, authors and ideas.

Modules are taught by nationally and internationally known scholars, authors, playwrights and poets who are specialists in their fields who write ground-breaking books, talk or write in the national media and appear at literary festivals around the world. This means the course you take covers the most up-to-date ideas, whether in Creative Writing, Victorian Literature, Shakespearean studies or contemporary literature.

Find your voice as a writer and develop writing techniques, learn how to create, criticise and shape an artistic work: a valuable life skill with uses beyond writing poetry, plays or novels. From journalism and website creation to advertising and academic publishing – you'll be able to use the skills you pick up in character, voice, ambiguity, style and cultural context.

• Writing practice at the heart of your learning experience.

• Taught by high-profile, award-winning writers.

• Create and shape artistic work – ideal skills for a career in media or publishing.

• Choose one of three distinct pathways: fiction, poetry, or playwriting.

• Access to a thriving culture of creative writing.

Course Modules

Core Modules

Year 1

• Introduction to Creative Writing

• Why Write? The History and Theory of Creative Writing

• Reorienting the Novel

• Introduction to Poetry

• Critical Foundations: Thinking As A Critic

Year 2

• Playwriting

• Fiction

• Poetry

Year 3

• Creative Writing Special Focus (Term 1)

• Creative Writing: Special Focus (Term 2)

• Playwriting 2

• Fiction 2

• Poetry 2

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

• Old English Riddles

• Intensive Shakespeare: Comedy, History, Tragedy

• Drama and Witchcraft

• Early Modern Bodies

• Literature after the Conquest: 1066-1340

• Creative Writing: Structure and Style

• Literature of the Fin de Siècle, 1883-1903

• Contemporary Debates in Literary and Critical Theory

• Renaissance Literature

• Victorian Literature

• Romanticisms

• Modernisms

• Literature and the Digital

Year 3

• Old English Riddles

• Advanced Shakespeare: The Problem Plays

• Early Modern Bodies

• Literature and Philosophy

• James Joyce: Revolutions of the Word

• Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

• Literature, the Digital and the Creative Industries

• Poetic Practice

• Visual and Verbal in the Long Nineteenth Century

• The New York Schools: Poetry, Painting, Composition

• The 1930s British Fiction and the Road to War

• The Girl in the Book

• Children's Literature

• The Post-Colonial Novel

• Special Author: Chaucer

• Special Author: Charles Dickens

• Reading the Waste Land

• English Dissertation

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

You’ll be taught through a combination of lectures and seminars, and participate in study groups, essay consultations and guided independent study, plus you will produce a portfolio of creative work.

You will be assigned a Personal Tutor and have access to many online resources and the University’s comprehensive e-learning facility, Moodle.

In your first year, you will 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 preparing your CV.

You will also take a study skills course, 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.