To provide students with the opportunity to develop an in-depth knowledge and understanding of English Literary Studies, enabling students to pursue specialised fields of study or to choose a flexible arrangement of topics which bypass traditional period or national boundaries.
English - Literary Studies highlights
Student Experience
The MA in English Literary Studies offers a number of special features. Some modules engage with contemporary art and culture through field work, while other modules use connections to the History subject area and to the archives in Armagh, Belfast and Trinity College Dublin.
Further Study Opportunities
Students and staff across the degree also take part in a number of discussion groups, workshops and conferences both within and outside the University. There is the opportunity to organise and/or participate in the School's annual PG conference ('Common Ground') and weekly research seminars.
Internationally Renowned Experts
You will be taught by staff with interests that range across the English subject area and who have research profiles of international standing.
Student Testimonials
Having studied at Queen’s as an undergraduate, the decision to do an MA here in the School of English was an easy one to make! Specialising in Renaissance Literature, the opportunity to incorporate other modules from a wide range on offer was fantastic and made for a more exciting and diverse degree.
Jordan Carville
"I applied for the masters in literary studies as I wished to expand on the research skills I had developed at undergraduate level. Literary studies provided me with both the opportunities to expand my investigative skills through tailored research-centred seminars and refine my area of interest through specialised modules. The modules on offer are fascinatingly diverse, covering literatures from Anglo-Saxon verse to 21st century Indian prose, and the teaching staff delivering seminars are world-class. Thanks to support and guidance from my lecturers, I gained the confidence and skills needed to pursue doctoral study, and I look forward to returning to Queen’s this autumn.”
Jasmine McCrory
"Studying the MA in English Literary Studies was an easy decision after a fantastic experience as an English undergraduate at Queen’s. I have always wanted to pursue an academic career and the enthusiastic and supportive English staff gave me the confidence to do so. The opportunities for independent research at MA level are invaluable; the Literary Research Methods module in particular is incredibly rewarding. It allowed me to engage with a variety of challenging theoretical paradigms which paved the way for many exciting class debates as well as equipping me with the skills to undertake further research at PhD level.”
Students may enrol on a full-time or part-time basis. Full-time students take three modules per semester. Part-time students typically take one or two modules per semester.
Course Details
The MA in English Literary Studies offers a flexible system in which students can choose either specific topics to create a focused programme of study or widely diverse areas of literary study, according to their own preferences. The School's literary studies staff comprise the largest group within the School of Arts, English and Languages and are thus able to teach a broad range of material: modules span the earliest writings in English (studied in their own historical and cultural contexts but also in relation to new digital cultures), to contemporary American literature and culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (incorporating literature and other aspects of culture, such as television and graphic arts). Other strengths of the School's expertise include Renaissance literature (particularly women's writing, the history of the child, and Shakespeare and World Cinema), eighteenth-century literature (women's writing, slavery and abolition, and Indian literatures in English) and nineteenth and twentieth-century literature (with specialisms including the fiction of Dickens, the fin de siècle and modernism).
All students on the programme take a subject-specific Literary Research Methods module that addresses the issues, challenges and research questions raised by advanced study in the subject. Students also select from a wide range of optional modules, permitting either specialism or diversity in the choice of study. Most modules are on offer annually, but there can be variation year to year subject to staff availability. Finally, after two semesters of taught modules, all MA students on the programme complete a 15,000 word dissertation, which they choose and design and then work on in conjunction with an academic supervisor.
SAEL Email: j.livingstone@qub.ac.uk
The programme is taught by members of staff from across the English subject area. A full list of staff can be accessed here:
https://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/ael/Connect/KEYSCHOOLCONTACTS/#as-english
Teaching Times
Mondays-Fridays. May also study-skill days and field-trips to archives.
Learning and Teaching
Learning opportunities associated with this course are outlined below:
Additional Teaching Information
Mondays-Fridays. Morning/Afternoon. May also include study-skill days and field-trips to archives.
Assessment
Assessments associated with the course are outlined below:
Essays, practical exercises and seminar presentations.
The information below is intended as an example only, featuring module details for the current year of study (2023/24). Modules are reviewed on an annual basis and may be subject to future changes – revised details will be published through Programme Specifications ahead of each academic year.
This module introduces students to the advanced methods and skills required in postgraduate studies of literature. It is taught through a course of lectures and/or workshops which will address key research questions and paradigms in literary studies, including manuscript and print traditions, textual criticism, methodologies and evidence in literary scholarship. Students will apply these methods and debates to particular case studies within literature.
Learning Outcomes
On completing the module, students will be able to demonstrate a clear grasp of key issues in literary studies including the theory and practical implications of literary editing, literary terminology and the history of the book. They will be able to retrieve information about resources, methods and skills necessary to their chosen specialised field of postgraduate studies in English and identify their own needs in terms of the pursuit of advance literary research.
Skills
This module will develop skills in:
Written and oral communication and presentation
Advanced application of theories and methodologies
Students will also develop skills which will be important for further research, including tracing source material through internet retrieval.
This double-weighted module comprises independent research on a topic that develops from the taught modular coursework.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the module students will:
- have developed the skills needed to conduct an independent line of research;
- be able to organise and develop a complex argument into which detailed points are judiciously integrated;
- be able to write a cogent, well-illustrated dissertation, which displays originality in terms of consistent thinking and application of ideas, concepts and theories;
- be able to use appropriate resources to investigate research questions or support findings;
- be able to write a dissertation which adheres to scholarly norms of presentation and reference.
Skills
The module will provide an opportunity to explore, to investigate and to identify themes for research within the field of English literary studies. You will be able to draw from a variety of theoretical and analytical techniques and make use of your knowledge of historical, intellectual and aesthetic contexts, to examine and evaluate a given research problem.
This module explores Irish women’s writing in two forms: the novel and the short story. Focusing on the period 1880-1945, we will chart the varying ways in which women writers registered and responded to the seismic changes of this time. Over the course of the first six weeks we will read the ‘Big House’ novels of Somerville and Ross, Elizabeth Bowen, and Kate O’Brien, following the development of the genre from an archetype of Anglo-Irish insularity and decline to its reimagining in the hands of O’Brien as a means of female agency and emancipation in the cities of Europe. These key themes of subalternity, agency, and desire, develop throughout the second part of the module, when we explore the short story by a variety of writers across a range of genres: the supernatural, the comic, modernist, and realist. Over the course of the module we will seek to understand those processes of exclusion by which women’s writing has long been marginalized and obscured in Irish literary tradition.
*Set texts may change from year to year; please check the list of set texts with the convenor.
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this module, you will possess a sound understanding of the literary tradition of Irish women’s fiction as it developed from 1880-1945 and be able to identify and expand upon its distinctive features and concerns. You will demonstrate detailed knowledge and understanding of the key critical debates and theories pertaining to this tradition. You will also be able to situate the key texts of the period in their historical, social, political and national critical contexts.
Skills
Through engaging with this module you will develop the following skills:
• ability to analyse primary and secondary material in a scholarly manner
• ability to develop an original and structured argument well supported by textual analysis and critical reading
• robust engagement with critical theories and debates
• to present individual literary analyses and critical perspective to peers, and respond constructively to material offered by peers
• ability to conduct research effectively across a range of media.
The majority of films have a literary source. They are not ‘original’ texts, but ‘adaptations’ – rewritings and re-imaginings of another kind of literary source. This module takes the literary text in all of its generic forms – the novel, drama, short story, genre fiction, YA fiction, biography, memoir and autobiography – and theorises the ways in which it has been adapted for cinema and television. The module begins by examining three ‘shared texts’ – Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1599-1601), variously adapted on film by Laurence Olivier, Franco Zeffirelli, Kenneth Branagh and Michael Almereyda, Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853), made into the 2013 film (dir. Steve McQueen), and Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018), adapted into a ten-part BBC series (2020). We will discuss the politics and aesthetics of adaptation and the multiplicity of ways in which works of art interact and find a new cultural relevance. Beyond our three ‘shared texts’, this module is shaped by PGT interests. Students choose what we discuss in class according to the kinds of adaptations that most appeal to their interests. For example, students might choose to examine other canonical texts (such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice [1813] or Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women [1868]), other historical/autobiographical texts (such as Lynn Barber’s An Education [2009] or Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark [1983]) or other contemporary novels (such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale [1985] or Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting [1996]) which have been adapted in film or television. Alternatively, students might choose to focus on the ways in which a particular period, genre or author is adapted, how issues of nation and nationality feed into the transition from text to screen, or the place of race, class, age or sexuality in the adaptive encounter. The possibilities are endless – this is a module designed to follow student interests, not the other way around. As such, this module allows PGTs to utilise their own examples in order to think about intertextuality and the relationship between the page and the screen. Adapting the Literary Text provides opportunities for original research and supports the experience of sharing of knowledge and resources between MLS colleagues.
Learning Outcomes
A detailed knowledge of the processes of adaptation and its central place in film and television today.
A greater knowledge of the afterlives of texts and the ways in which they are made relevant to new audiences across time and cultures.
A detailed understanding of particular adaptive texts and the ways in which particular examples transfer to the screen.
A detailed understanding of adaptation theory and methodological approaches to the adapted text.
Skills
Enhanced skills in reading adaptation and in close reading of literary texts, film and television.
Enhanced skills in understanding the adaptive process and the ways in which literary texts are imagined for new audiences.
‘There are no peoples however primitive without religion and magic. Nor are there, it must be added at once, any savage races lacking either in the scientific attitude or in science’ (B. Malinowski, 1926, 79). The difference between what is deemed magic and what is deemed religious or scientific must be related to the culture within which each were produced, and to the social and historical contexts within which each developed. Many of the distinctions modern scholars make in defining magic and religion or magic and science did not appear as distinctions in the early medieval worldview, such as supernatural versus natural, faith versus reason and magic versus scientia. This course will consider how these systems of thought interacted with each other in the Anglo-Saxon period under the influence of Christianity, by focusing on a range of magical, philosophical, theological and scientific texts. Did Christianity, with its other-worldliness and its emphasis on Biblical authority, stifle interest in the natural world, as the old stereotype maintains? The module will begin with an introduction to Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse manuscripts (palaeography and codicology) and their material context. It will then explore the Anglo-Saxons’ concerns with time, healing, miracles, prophecy, geography, natural philosophy, celestial portents and magical rituals, as exemplified in different texts and genres including hagiography, exegesis, homilies, law-codes, scientific manuals, charms, medical remedies, prognostications, poetry and riddles. This course will allow students to study a fascinatingly rich and often overlooked body of texts.
Modern English translations will be provided for all the texts.
Learning Outcomes
On completion of the course students should be able to:
• Demonstrate a critical awareness of the interplay between magic, science and religion in the early medieval period;
• Show a familiarity with the Anglo-Saxons attitude towards medicine, astronomy, prognostication, miracles and the natural world;
• Be familiar with a range of early medieval texts, genres and cultural concepts;
• Demonstrate the ability to engage with both contemporary critical concepts and their applicability to Anglo-Saxon texts;
• Show evidence of independent research and study skills;
Skills
This module will enable students to:
• Rethink and challenge the modern distinctions of magic, science and religion;
• Develop an informed sense of the complexity of the intellectual and historical concepts of religion, magic and science in the early medieval period;
• Acquire an understanding of various Anglo-Saxon literary texts and genres in relation to their cultural context and audience;
• Apply independent thought and academic research skills.
A Space for Radical Openness? Writing the Margins in Twentieth-Century British and Irish Literature
Overview
In her essay “Choosing the Margin as a space of Radical Openness”, bell hooks argues that the margin is, rather than simply a site of disempowerment, a “space of radical openness … a profound edge”, a “place of resistance … for oppressed, exploited, colonized people”. For her, conventional assumptions that the marginalised require correction or reform risk “co-opt[ing] or undermin[ing]” counter-hegemonic perspectives; the margin ought not to be viewed as a position “to give up or surrender as part of moving into the centre—but rather … a site one stays in, clings to even, because it nourishes one’s capacity to resist”. This module explores a range of marginalised perspectives—those of women, the precariat, immigrants, the working class, criminals, those condemned as ‘immoral’, those marginalised because of their sexuality, ethnicity or skin colour—across a diverse range of drama and fiction depicting twentieth-century British and Irish life.
Learning Outcomes
Students taking this module will increase their knowledge of writing from and representations of marginalised groups in British and Irish society, including those marginalised because of their sexuality, gender, religion, class and race. They will gain a strong understanding of the difficulties facing these groups and the narrative and aesthetic strategies they use to challenge inequality and othering. Those on the course will also gain understandings of more theoretical approaches to these issues and how those perspectives can be applied to the core texts.
Skills
In this module, students will gain a range of subject specific and transferable skills. Students will:
• develop their understanding of intersectionality in literary studies, including how class, race and gender oppression's are represented and challenged by a range of renowned writers
• refine their skills in textual analysis
• enhance their skills in assessing secondary scholarship and popular sources
• develop their ability to engage in independent research projects
• improve their skills in academic writing and argumentation
• hone their skills in group discussion and oral presentation
• develop their knowledge of British and Irish societies and cultures over the course of the twentieth century
Via film, performance and translation, Shakespeare has a long history in Asia. This module explores how Shakespeare’s plays have been adapted in Asian cultures and contexts. The module allows students to study the texts of the original plays as well as the various forms in which they have been reimagined. Hence, we concentrate on the texts of Hamlet, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet while, at the same time, studying their film and theatre adaptations/equivalents. We will be working, in particular, with some excellent online resources, including the MIT Global Shakespeares (Video and Performance Archive) website, which features hundreds of Shakespeare productions from around the world. Other parts of the module cover film adaptations of the plays from China, Japan, India and Singapore. This is a module designed not only to introduce an important area of Shakespeare and adaptation studies but also to stimulate you to explore further. The presentations are designed to encourage you to find examples outside of the module and to reflect upon them in class. Shakespeare and Asia provides you with new knowledges of global Shakespeares, hones your writing and presentation skills, introduces you to theories and methodologies, develops your skills in reading and interpreting film and performance and enables you to understand the complex dynamics of postcolonial history.
Learning Outcomes
New knowledges of global Shakespeares.
A knowledge of how key Shakespearean texts are adapted in Asian cultures and contexts.
Acquisition of theories and methodologies relevant to Shakespeare and literary studies.
An understanding of the ways in which texts are reimagined in performance and on screen.
An understanding of the complex dynamics of postcolonial history.
Skills
The development of skills in the reading of literary texts.
The development of skills in interpreting film and performance.
The honing of your writing and presentation skills.
‘How do I love thee?’ asks Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘Let me count the ways’. As Laura Barber notes, she then comes up with ‘at least eight different ways’ within one sonnet; and by the end of the poem, love 'bursts beyond the very limits of life itself'. Barber concludes that ‘rather than offering a precise calculation of the “ways” she loves, the poem actually proves them to be countless and immeasurable’.
From Plato to Simone de Beauvoir, the bible to the beat generation, ‘love’ has been the subject of philosophical and literary speculation: ‘love’, Da Sousa points out, as more a ‘condition’ than an emotion, ‘might be manifested in sorrow, fear, guilt, regret, bitterness, gloom, contempt, humiliation, elation, dejection, anxiety, jealousy, disgust, or murderous rage’ To fill in the blanks on ‘Love is ---’ is to open up to multiplicity and paradox: love is selfish, selfless, kind, cruel, transient, permanent – as well as, so the song goes, ‘all you need’.
If ‘love’ resists definition, what about the ‘love poem’ itself? In this module, we will situate poems and poets in historical context, reading closely love poetry from the 1500s through to the present day. We will investigate love in its various philosophical forms as they have informed poetry in English, and examine what we mean by love poetry in all its ‘infinite variety’ - as expressive, for instance, of unrequited love, platonic love, sexual love, religious love, queer love, forbidden love, romantic love, obsessive love, courtly love, familial love. We will also think about the relations between love, law, power, and politics (particularly gender politics) as they manifest themselves in poetry.
In the process, we will discuss poems by: Thomas Wyatt, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Andrew Marvell, Lord Rochester, Aphra Behn, John Keats, Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, William Blake, Christina Rossetti, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, W.B.Yeats, e.e. cummings, Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, D.H. Lawrence, Robert Graves, Gwendolyn Brooks, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Frank O’Hara, Seamus Heaney.
Course text:
- The New Faber Book of Love Poems, ed. James Fenton (2008)
- Other primary materials supplied on Canvas.
Additional key texts:
- Laura Barber, ed. Penguin’s Poems for Love (2009).
- Ronald Da Sousa, Love: A Very Short Introduction (OUP 2015).
- Stephen Kern, The Culture of Love (Harvard UP, 1998).
- Roger Lamb, ed. Love Analysed (Westview, 1996).
- Adrienne M. Martin, The Routledge Handbook of Love in Philosophy (2020).
- Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen Higgins, eds., The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love (Univ. of Kansas, 1991).
- Robert E. Wagoner, The Meanings of Love (Praeger, 1997).
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this module, students will have;
(1) An appreciation of the multi-faceted ways and forms in which ‘love poetry’ may be both written and read.
(2) An understanding of how love in poetry is historically and politically inflected.
(3) An insight into how form affects the nature of the love poem.
(4) An understanding of the basic philosophies of love.
(5) An understanding of the gender politics of love poetry.
(6) Detailed knowledge of individual love poets and love poems.
Skills
Students will acquire/hone the following skills:
(1) Conceptual analysis of texts in historical context.
(2) Heightened skills in recognising, analysing and evaluating formal techniques in poetry.
(3) The ability to apply philosophical ideas to reading poetry.
(4) Development of discursive and analytical critical writing skills.
(5) Development of imitative and reflective creative writing skills.
This module will analyse discourses of crime and deviance across fictional and non-fictional discourse arena including traditional media, social media, television and film, and literary fiction. A broad critical language studies (CLS) approach will be taken, additionally informed by insights from literary linguistics, forensic linguistics, cultural criminology and legal studies. The module will be organised into core themes (crime in the media/crime in the courtroom/crime in fiction) and will focus on key topics which include trial by media, adaptation, novelization and ‘true crime’. Themes of gender, class, and age will be addressed in these areas. The module will be available to students on the 4th year of the MLibArts programme and students undertaking the MRes in Arts and Humanities, which does not currently offer a taught module from English Language and Linguistics.
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, students will have refined their broad critical understanding of the construction of crime across contexts. Students will engage in a range of historical and social debates, analysing the recurrence of key themes and ideas in areas of critical language studies. Students will relate these key themes to ongoing developments in culturally complex language settings, and through traditional as well as emerging digital mediums.
Skills
During this module, students will have the opportunity to practise the following skills: * Critical analysis of key debates on criminality in several contexts. * Engagement with interdisciplinary debates regarding perceptions of crime and deviance in various contexts, including the media, the justice system, films, and television. * Application of learning to key social and political debates. * Writing critically and reflectively.
This module will introduce students to Romantic-era print and magazine culture associated with the development of the mass media of the period which embodied emerging notions of nation, empire, identity, and the natural world. The polarized nature of public discourse in the wake of the revolutionary debates of the 1790s ushered in an exponential growth in the number of periodicals catering to the divergent kinds of readership formed in the period. Squibs, cartoons, news, reviews, poetry, short fiction, life writings – were often to be found within the covers of a single issue of a magazine – and could be seen as part of coherent publishing venture representing the voice of the journal/ editor/ publisher encompassing that of the canonically determined author. Periodical texts, largely dismissed as ephemeral in the literary canon, derived their significance from their proximate relationship to other works appearing alongside them even as they tilted at rival and opposed publications. Consequently, we will attempt to read these works in relation to the periodical culture of the period responding to events and arguments engendered by the ongoing war with France until 1815, calls for reform, issues of gender and class, the Irish question, and the growth of empire amongst other newsworthy topics. Four areas of critical focus for the module will be: the revolution controversy viewed through the medium of reviews; the formation of new periodicals and readerships; personality, anonymity, and pseudonymity in the magazines; the expression of new identities representing the otherness of nationality, gender, class, race and ethnicity during the period; and finally, scientific, environmental and natural history perspectives in the journals. The bulk of primary materials will be drawn from major databases particularly British Periodicals, British Library Newspapers, Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) and Nineteenth-Century Collections Online (NCCO) all available via the McClay library, and these will be supplemented by modern editions and anthologies of selected authors who wrote for periodical press. An exemplary list of authors we may study on the module includes writers such as William Cobbett, Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah More, William Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincey, Charles Lamb, Felicia Hemans, and Sydney Owenson (among others) though many of the texts we will read remain anonymous/ unattributed to this day. Exemplary journals and newspapers of the period include the Edinburgh Review, Blackwood’s Magazine, Quarterly Review, Westminster Review, London Magazine, Two-Penny Trash, The Black Dwarf, the Morning Post, and the Times alongside many lesser-known titles.
Learning Outcomes
This module will introduce students to the media culture of Romantic-era periodicals. They will learn to use major databases that have been revolutionizing research in the field. They will engage with a diverse range of topics, writers and texts as detailed in the contents.
Skills
This module will develop the following skills:
- ability to engage in complex forms of literary and cultural analysis
- the ability to search, read and critically examine periodical works
- digital skills required to work with databases
- the ability to work closely with peers and the tutor in a structured learning environment
- oral engagement through discussion and class presentation
- formal written presentation of individual research work in the area
This module covers an array of fiction that engages with African and European religious traditions and the complex historical and contemporary encounters between them. The module is oriented to the postcolonial period, beginning with literature published in and around decolonisation and continuing to the present. Ranging widely in geography, it addresses writers from across sub-Saharan Africa, such as Nigeria, Cameroon, South Africa, Botswana, Kenya and Tanzania. Areas for discussion include representations of traditional cultures and religious practice; reassessments of the European missionary enterprise; appropriations and rewritings of biblical narratives; engagements with African initiated churches and African Islam; and explorations of African religious modernities. In addition to its specialist focus, the module will also develop students’ understanding of postcolonial theory and major debates in African literary studies.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this module, students will have analysed a range of postcolonial African fiction that engage with religious practices and interreligious encounter. They will have gained an understanding of the complexity of the concept “religion” and developed a critical vocabulary for its study. Students will have developed a familiarity with postcolonial theory and an ability to engage in theoretically informed close readings of sub-Saharan African Anglophone texts. They will be able to demonstrate a knowledge of key debates in African literary studies and an awareness of the literary, cultural and wider historical contexts relevant to the field.
Skills
In this module, students will gain a range of subject specific and transferrable skills. Students will:
- develop their understanding of African and postcolonial literary studies
- refine their skills in textual analysis
- enhance their skills in assessing secondary scholarship and popular sources
- develop their ability to engage in independent research projects
- improve their skills in academic writing and argumentation
- hone their skills in group discussion and oral presentation
Almost every generation experiences a ‘migrant crisis’, portrayed as a once in a lifetime panic. However, as this module will highlight, migration is a constant phenomenon, and has been for centuries. Examining how certain migrant groups are vilified while others are praised as ‘go getters’ and ‘ex-pats’ across the last 180 years (1840-2022) allows students to ask important questions about representation and contested ideas of belonging and entitlement. We will examine different international migrant group case studies (nation, geographical, and temporal) and apply theoretical framings to analyse ‘the archive’ of migration.
In addition to considering representation, this module takes an interdisciplinary approach to exploring how migrant communities encourage and encouraged a sense of belonging abroad, reframing power dynamics of migration to centre migrant voices and agency. Its focus on a range of sources and time periods allows for consideration of representations of migrant generations and the ways that later generations have sought to reclaim and refashion those representations. Engaging with concepts including ‘diaspora’, it considers historic and contemporary migrant community initiatives through the ‘stuff’ of migration – including material culture, built environment, literary and visual representations, and memory studies. It will examine a number of interconnected themes, including gender, race, class, religion, and politics, over multiple generations.
Texts/sources:
Olivette Otele, African European: An Untold Story (2020)
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998)
Deborah Willis, Ellyn Toscano & Kalia Brooks Nelson, Women and Migration: Responses in Art and History (2019)
Ann Laura Stoler, Against the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2009)
Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (1997)
Rose A. Sackeyfio (ed.), African Women Writing Diaspora: Transnational Perspectives in the Twenty-First Century (2021)
Delphine Fongang (ed.), The Postcolonial Subject in Transit: Migration, Borders and Subjectivity in Contemporary African Diaspora Literature (2018)
Robert Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1959 (1985)
Alyssa Maldona-Estrada, Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamburg, Brooklyn (2020)
Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (1996)
Hervé Anderson Tchumkam, Precarious Lives and Marginal Bodies in North Africa: Homo Expendibilis (2021)
Michelle M. Wright, Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora (2004)
Gargi Bhattacharyya, Adam Elliott-Cooper, Sita Balani, Kerem Nisancloglu, Kojo Koram, Dalia Gebrial, Nadine El-Enany & Luke de Noronha, Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State (2021)
Nadine El-Enany, (B)ordering Britain: law, race and empire (2020)
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this module, students will be able to:
1. demonstrate critical awareness of how multi-disciplinarity enables a fuller understanding of historical and contemporary migration.
2. apply advanced critical and theoretical models to a range of primary sources, including typed, manuscript, material, and oral sources.
3. demonstrate an ability to engage with, and contribute to, contemporary discussions and scholarship of migration and migrant community connections in the twenty-first century
4. develop advanced theoretical insight into how migration and migrants are, and have been, represented in different national contexts.
Skills
1. develop close critical reading skills of a range of literary, cultural, visual, and archival texts
2. articulate complex theoretical arguments and concepts to different audiences
3. effective communication and group work skills
4. basic Wordpress/blogging/vlogging and digital skills
5. ability to apply theoretical concepts of study to cultural and archival texts
6. independent thought and the ability to conduct higher level academic research
This course opens up a number of key questions. How do popular literary genres open up debates about censorship, politics and literary value? How did writers at the end of the nineteenth engage with dramatic social change, from ‘The New Woman’ and new masculinities, to science (evolutionary and ‘psychic’) and the rise of the New Imperialism? This module considers the ways writers forged new genres and adapted older forms to capture a period in political flux. It explores a wide range of literature (detective fiction, science fiction, ghost stories, fairy tales, imperial adventure and journalism, as well as realist novels). Mapping changing urban and rural realities and engaging with class as well as gender, the module considers the ways popular genres found ways of re-imagining the world, the nation and the self.
Learning Outcomes
Having completed the module, students will have an appreciation of the ways in which the literature of the fin-de-siècle was embedded in wider cultural movements and debates about progress, as well as an understanding of the ways in which fiction is shaped by its commercial contexts. They will be able question period and literary definitions, and engage with relationships between late nineteenth-century critical writings and more recent theoretical approaches.
Skills
Students will have developed their skills of independent research, their ability to work as part of a group, and their oral presentation skills. They will have learnt how apply theoretical approaches (including the sociology of texts and the history of reading) to the study of popular literature.
This module engages with a range of Dickens’s writings from several stages of his career, examining his output as novelist and journalist. Particular attention is paid to the social, political and cultural issues affecting mid-Victorian England, including class; technological innovation and industrialisation; privilege and meritocracy; the experience of the metropolis; sanitary reform; and domestic ideology. Conditions of production and reception will also be examined, in order to reflect upon Victorian publishing, reading, and critical practices. The module will also consider the dialogue between Dickens’s prose and the works’ original illustrations.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this module students will be able
- to demonstrate an advanced knowledge of Dickens’s fiction and journalism
- to interpret nineteenth-century texts with originality, through close reading
- to evaluate current scholarship on nineteenth-century prose and its contexts
- to apply advanced knowledge with independent judgement in the course of research, essay writing, and class presentations
Skills
In this module, students will gain a range of subject specific and transferrable skills. Students will:
- develop their understanding of Dickens and the context around his artistic output
- refine their skills in textual analysis
- enhance their skills in assessing secondary scholarship and internet sources
- develop their ability to engage in independent research projects
- improve their skills in academic writing and argumentation
- hone their skills in group discussion and online presentation
This module considers the ways in which writers from a range of backgrounds have responded to crises characterising our contemporary age. Connecting the texts on this module are the central concerns of: the affective implications of neoliberal systems of control, oppression and governance; how identity narratives of gender and race shape structures of nationhood; how these narratives are played out on and through the human body; the ramifications of global capitalism on individual and interpersonal subjectivity; the ways in which fiction works to thematize and interrogate disaster and crisis and the way crisis is managed in the contemporary.
Learning Outcomes
Students completing this module will be able to:
- understand a range of approaches to the study of American and global literature and culture
- develop an informed sense of the complexity of issues covered in the module
- develop an advanced understanding of a variety of primary materials in relation to theoretical ideas and their cultural contexts
- demonstrate an ability to engage with and contribute to current scholarship on those materials, ideas and contexts
- conduct interdisciplinary analysis in relevant subject fields
Skills
Students will acquire and/or develop the skills of:
- close critical reading of a diversity of texts (fiction, critical writing, memoir, memoir, theory, photography, art, etc.), and the ability to articulate claims regarding these texts in class discussions and in assessments
- the synthesis and weighting of different, sometimes competing interpretations of literary texts
- interrogating and synthesising critical approaches
- independent thought and academic research
- critical and reflective writing on paper and online
- basic blogging on a Wordpress platform
This is a Special Topic module offered by a visiting Fulbright Distinguished Scholar. The contents of the module, which will change on an annual basis, depending on the academic area of expertise of the Visiting Scholar, will examine an aspect of modern Irish literature. The specific module content will be announced as early as possible each academic year. Students who sign up for this module will, as normal, have the right to switch to another module if the content does not suit their academic plans.
Learning Outcomes
On successful completion of this module students will achieve a detailed and complex understanding of an aspect of modern Irish Literature in English. Students will also acquire the ability to analyse a range of Irish literary texts, and further their understanding of appropriate historical and cultural contexts and particular critical approaches. Students will also be able to identify and analyse significant aspects of Irish literary texts and will have developed their skills in written and spoken argument with ability to draw on appropriate primary and secondary evidence.
Skills
Students will acquire and / or develop the skills of:
• close critical reading of primary material;
• the synthesis and weighing of different, sometimes competing, interpretations of literary texts;
• contextualisation of primary texts in relation to a range of historical and cultural narratives.
“World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural” (Louis MacNeice, from ‘Snow’).
With a nod to local contexts (Louis MacNeice in particular) and building on the diverse range of experiences of the student cohort, especially after their study abroad or placement, this module emphasises pluralism as a guiding principle of academic debate and social engagement. Co-requisite with the Liberal Arts dissertation module (LIB7002) this module concludes with a mini-conference or showcase event at which the students each present an aspect of their Liberal Arts experience or their dissertation topic.
Among the issues the students will examine will include the importance of diversity, disciplinary flexibility, vocational training; the interplay of research and teaching at the tertiary level, the role of the University, and the necessity of arts and humanities subjects in forming, knowing and reforming our world.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this module student will:
(i) have an in-depth awareness of issues of plurality and diversity within the arts and humanities;
(ii) be able to contextualise their studies to date within a pedagogical framework defined by and dedicated to plurality;
(iii) understand how their learning to date, and their semester/year abroad, combine in diverse and multiple ways;
(iv) provide peer support and constructive feedback through group work and the concluding mini-conference;
(v) recognise and demonstrate the relations between cognate disciplines in the arts and humanities and their contribution to diversity in society.
Skills
(i) enhanced group and teamwork skills based on open and supportive communication and the ability to provide constructive peer feedback;
(ii) oral and presentational skills;
(iii) flexibility of thinking across disciplines and the ability to move between theoretical and practical applications of the module content;
(iv) ability to self-reflect on the learning process;
(v) demonstrable understanding of the relation between a student’s degree pathway and the concerns of the module and the Liberal Arts programme more broadly;
(vi) advanced ability to construct and present an appropriate and relevant case study.
This module will provide students with a comprehensive introduction to Decadence, a literary movement that flourished in the late nineteenth century in France and Britain, and was a vital influence on the development of twentieth century literature. Decadent literature emerged as a challenge to conventional morality and literary value; conservative commentators bemoaned what they perceived to be the decadence of their contemporary culture. Decadent writers embraced this pejorative label, developing art that revelled in decay, the grotesque, the morbid, the erotic, the artificial, the excessive. Beginning with the French Decadence of the Second Empire and moving through into British aestheticism, classic writers of the fin de siècle like Wilde, the adoption of decadent tropes in popular fiction, the emergence of modernism, and the development of American Decadence in the Jazz-Age this module will introduce students to a range of both canonical and forgotten texts. Students will cover Decadence in its myriad forms, from essays to short stories, novels, plays, short poems, and periodicals. Student should expect to explore such issues as: the linguistic idea of decadence; Hellenism; impressionist and symbolist poetry; Decadent Gothic; Decadence and Philosophy; Decadent periodicals; Decadence in America; Decadence and Science; Decadent temporality; The New Woman; Camp Decadence; deviant sexualities; Decadence and Modernism.
Learning Outcomes
By the completion of this module students should be able to:
*understand the concept of ‘decadence’ in broad historical and philosophical terms
*identify the components of literary Decadence as they pertain to British, American, and French literature from 1860-1940
*analyse stylistic feature of Decadent literature
*apply a range of methodological frameworks to Decadent literature
*develop sophisticated, independent research practices.
Skills
• Analyse Decadent literature in both a historical and critical context.
• Demonstrate an understanding of the complex relationship between formal literary innovation and social transformations.
• Examine the relationship between elite cultural forms and popular genre fiction (Gothic, Science Fiction).
• Explore how literary texts challenged, and conformed to, dominant understandings of race, gender, and class.
• Demonstrate transferrable skills in the forms of critical thinking, group discussion, written communication, and individual academic research.
The module will examine key figures and movements in Irish poetry through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. It will begin with the study of Yeats, and assess the different ways in which Yeatsian influence pervades the century. Reactions against the Revival, in the work of modernists such as Devlin and MacGreevy will be considered, as well as the work of Kavanagh and MacNeice from the 1930s through to the 1960s. In the post-1969 period, particular attention will be paid to poetry from the North of Ireland, and the emergence of a generation of writers – Heaney, Longley, Mahon, Muldoon, McGuckian in the years of the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’. Recent poetry from Ireland, and the work of a younger generation – Morrissey, Flynn, Quinn, Wheatley and others – will provide an opportunity to assess the landscape of present-day Irish poetry.
Learning Outcomes
Upon completion of the module, students will have: the ability to situate Irish poetry in its complex historical and political contexts; an understanding of the debates surrounding the politics of form in Irish poetry from Yeats to the present day; a refined and heightened grasp of the forms and themes of poetry; an awareness of the workings of literary influence in the Irish tradition; an understanding of the critical debates surrounding the reception of Irish poetry.
Skills
The following skills will be developed and enhanced through the module: the ability to analyse the nuances of poetic form through close reading of individual poems; the ability to relate poetry to its historical, social and political context; the ability to trace and analyse literary influences; the ability to assess and intervene in critical debate about Irish poetry.
This module explores narrative engagements with slavery during the ‘long’ eighteenth century and the twenty-first century, with a particular focus on Britain’s involvement in the Atlantic slave trade. The ‘triangular’ trade reached its commercial height during the eighteenth century, with much of the nation’s new wealth deriving from the plantations in its West Indian colonies. At the same time, the period also saw the emergence of political movements that would issue, in the early nineteenth century, in the abolition of the slave trade and, in the British territories, the ending of slavery itself. In this module, we examine how various writers have sought to understand and represent the world of Atlantic slavery. Our texts will comprise fictional and autobiographical works from the period of slavery itself and recent examples of historical fiction which re-imagine the trauma of enslavement and the brutalities of plantation labour. It was during the second half of the eighteenth century that English-language texts by black writers were first written and published. Along with novels from the period, we will examine the slave narratives of Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince, which recount the ordeal of slavery and endeavour to fashion new forms of personal, cultural, and national identity. In recent years, novelists have re-engaged with Britain’s history of slave trading and ownership to reflect upon and publicise this important chapter in the nation’s past and its continuing legacy in British society. By examining a series of paired narratives, the module will consider the relationships between representation and reality, genre and knowledge; portrayals of enslavement, colonial culture, and slave labour; the possibilities for resistance, rebellion, and liberation; and the movements towards abolition and emancipation. By exploring a variety of texts from the ‘long’ eighteenth century and the twenty-first century, we will also address the aims and motivations of narratives about slavery during the two periods: the sometimes conflicting claims of education and entertainment, personal testimony and political activism, documentary realism and imaginative reconstruction.
Learning Outcomes
Having completed this module, students will have developed higher-level knowledge and understanding of narrative representations of slavery within two time periods: the ‘long’ eighteenth century and the twenty-first century. They will be able to identify and articulate the key critical and theoretical issues surrounding this body of writing, such as the relationships between narrative and history, fiction and fact; the competing claims of instruction and entertainment, witnessing and activism; and the particular historical and thematic issues highlighted in individual texts, such as gendered experiences of slavery and the scope for slave resistance. They will be equipped to determine the role of genre in the portrayal of slavery and the significance of a specific narrative form that first emerged during the eighteenth century: the autobiographical slave narrative. They will have developed a broad understanding of Britain’s role in the Atlantic slave trade, abolition and emancipation, and of current debates about slavery’s continuing influence on national identity and social relations in Britain. On completion of the module, students will possess greater awareness and understanding of the narrative literature concerning slavery during the period of British slave-trading and ownership, and the re-imagining of that world in the twenty-first-century novel.
Skills
Having completed this module students will be able to:
• Demonstrate understanding of authorial representations of Atlantic slavery during the ‘long’ eighteenth century and the twenty-first century
• Analyse narratives of slavery in terms of time-period, genre, aims and techniques
• Demonstrate understanding of British involvement in the history of Atlantic slavery and the movements towards abolition and emancipation
• Analyse narratives about British Atlantic slavery with regard to particular historical and thematic issues, such as enslavement and plantation labour, slave rebellion, female experience, and ‘global’ mobility
• Show awareness of current debates about slavery’s continuing legacy in Britain.
• Demonstrate transferrable skills in the forms of group discussion, written communication, and individual research
This module considers representations of exclusively female community through a range of Utopian and satirical fictions, depictions of girls’ schools, and theoretical and political writings. Such representations offer possibilities of thinking about female identity beyond the traditional marriage plot of much domestic fiction and raise issues concerning feminism and women’s rights, female education and friendship and formal considerations of the place of the hypothetical and the novel of ideas. The module also ranges across the modern period, beginning with the ‘early modern’ writings of Margaret Cavendish in the 1660s and concluding with a novel by the contemporary writer Sarah Hall. A number of the fictions are linked thematically but are published in very different contexts (e.g. Millenium Hall and Herland as fictions of women-only societies; The Governess and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie as fictions of girls’ schools; The Convent of Pleasure and The Princess as dramatisations of male intrusion). The module thus has an important historicising impulse, as we consider the diverse contexts in which these fictions are conceived and, initially, received. A further context is provided by different strands of theoretical thinking concerning female homosociality and learning. These are initially surveyed in the introductory week and then are threaded throughout the module.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this module students will be able:
• To demonstrate critical understanding of a range of texts drawn from different historical periods (early modern to the contemporary) and different genres (fiction, poetry, drama, theoretical and philosophical prose and feminist theory and experimentalism).
• To engage with significant conceptual, historical and philosophical contexts for the study of modern literature, particularly in relation to feminism and gender and queer theories.
• To analyse the principal ideas and critical strategies of a range of literary and critical work.
Skills
* Advanced critical writing and oral skills
* Ability to comprehend and debate a range of theoretical and conceptual
positions
* Ability to relate theoretical contexts to the study of modern literature
Resonating with Stephen Dedalus exclamation in James Joyce’s Ulysses that ‘History … is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’, Irish history has been frequently associated with trauma, or as Joep Leerssen suggests, it finds itself collapsed in a subaltern, ‘traumatic paradigm’. The decade of centenary commemorations emphasised the important role of memory and trauma in Irish culture, which is reflected in contemporary Irish fiction by authors such as Anna Burns, Sebastian Barry, Seamus Deane, Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright, Jennifer Johnston, Deirdre Madden, Patrick McCabe, Dorothy Nelson, and David Park. Often, these writings do not focus on historical events as such, but explore how specific historical-political circumstances impact upon the personal. As apparent in the frequently experimental style of these novels, characters struggle with how to narrate the traumatic experience. This module focuses on trauma fictions from both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, exploring the ways in which novelists both engage with and struggle to represent instances of personal, political and social violence, and how these impact on conceptions of identity and society.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the module, students will (1) understand key critical and theoretical concepts and debates in Trauma Studies and Irish Studies; (2) be able to apply these concepts in textual analysis of Irish fiction; (3) have developed critical, analytic, presentation, and writing skills and gained a deeper understanding of trauma and memory in Irish fiction.
Skills
The students will gain a range of subject-specific and transferable skills: they will develop their critical assessment and gain deeper analytic and textual competence. They will also hone their presentation and writing skills and learn to present and discuss their ideas in an academic environment.
Normally a strong 2.2 Honours degree (with minimum of 55%) or equivalent qualification acceptable to the University in English, World/Comparative Literature, or joint or combined Honours with one of these subjects as a major subject.
All applicants are required to submit a piece of written work which may be assessed to determine if an offer of admission can be made. The piece of written work should demonstrate literary analysis, taking a specific literary text or a number of texts as its core focus. A personal statement expressing interest in the subject is not sufficient.
The University's Recognition of Prior Learning Policy provides guidance on the assessment of experiential learning (RPEL). Please visit http://go.qub.ac.uk/RPLpolicy for more information.
Applicants are advised to apply as early as possible and ideally no later than 16th August 2024 for courses which commence in late September. In the event that any programme receives a high number of applications, the University reserves the right to close the application portal. Notifications to this effect will appear on the Direct Application Portal against the programme application page.
International Students
Our country/region pages include information on entry requirements, tuition fees, scholarships, student profiles, upcoming events and contacts for your country/region. Use the dropdown list below for specific information for your country/region.
English Language Requirements
Evidence of an IELTS* score of 6.5, with not less than 5.5 in any component, or an equivalent qualification acceptable to the University is required.
*Taken within the last 2 years.
International students wishing to apply to Queen's University Belfast (and for whom English is not their first language), must be able to demonstrate their proficiency in English in order to benefit fully from their course of study or research. Non-EEA nationals must also satisfy UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI) immigration requirements for English language for visa purposes.
If you need to improve your English language skills before you enter this degree programme, INTO Queen's University Belfast offers a range of English language courses. These intensive and flexible courses are designed to improve your English ability for admission to this degree.
Academic English: an intensive English language and study skills course for successful university study at degree level
Pre-sessional English: a short intensive academic English course for students starting a degree programme at Queen's University Belfast and who need to improve their English.
Graduates from these programmes have a good employment record. Professions including publishing, journalism, public relations, teaching, IT, library science, corporate advertising, the Civil Service, business, industry and the media all recruit from our range of graduates. Some students choose to continue their studies to PhD level on a chosen, specialised topic in one of the pathways in English Literary Studies.
Queen's postgraduates reap exceptional benefits. Unique initiatives, such as Degree Plus and Researcher Plus bolster our commitment to employability, while innovative leadership and executive programmes alongside sterling integration with business experts helps our students gain key leadership positions both nationally and internationally. http://www.qub.ac.uk/directorates/sgc/careers/
Graduate Plus/Future Ready Award for extra-curricular skills
In addition to your degree programme, at Queen's you can have the opportunity to gain wider life, academic and employability skills. For example, placements, voluntary work, clubs, societies, sports and lots more. So not only do you graduate with a degree recognised from a world leading university, you'll have practical national and international experience plus a wider exposure to life overall. We call this Graduate Plus/Future Ready Award. It's what makes studying at Queen's University Belfast special.
1EU citizens in the EU Settlement Scheme, with settled status, will be charged the NI or GB tuition fee based on where they are ordinarily resident. Students who are ROI nationals resident in GB will be charged the GB fee.
2 EU students who are ROI nationals resident in ROI are eligible for NI tuition fees.
3 EU Other students (excludes Republic of Ireland nationals living in GB, NI or ROI) are charged tuition fees in line with international fees.
All tuition fees quoted relate to a single year of study unless stated otherwise. Tuition fees will be subject to an annual inflationary increase, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
There are no specific additional course costs associated with this programme.
All Students
Depending on the programme of study, there may be extra costs which are not covered by tuition fees, which students will need to consider when planning their studies.
Students can borrow books and access online learning resources from any Queen's library. If students wish to purchase recommended texts, rather than borrow them from the University Library, prices per text can range from £30 to £100. Students should also budget between £30 to £75 per year for photocopying, memory sticks and printing charges.
Students undertaking a period of work placement or study abroad, as either a compulsory or optional part of their programme, should be aware that they will have to fund additional travel and living costs.
If a programme includes a major project or dissertation, there may be costs associated with transport, accommodation and/or materials. The amount will depend on the project chosen. There may also be additional costs for printing and binding.
Students may wish to consider purchasing an electronic device; costs will vary depending on the specification of the model chosen.
There are also additional charges for graduation ceremonies, examination resits and library fines.
How do I fund my study?
The Department for the Economy will provide a tuition fee loan of up to £6,500 per NI / EU student for postgraduate study. Tuition fee loan information.
A postgraduate loans system in the UK offers government-backed student loans of up to £11,836 for taught and research Masters courses in all subject areas (excluding Initial Teacher Education/PGCE, where undergraduate student finance is available). Criteria, eligibility, repayment and application information are available on the UK government website.
The deadline for applications is normally 30th June 2021. In the event that any programme receives a high volume of applications, the university reserves the right to close the application portal earlier than 30th June deadline. Notifications to this effect will appear on the Direct Entry Portal (DAP) against the programme application page.
