Bachelor of Arts (BA)

BA English Literature and American Studies

English Literature and American Studies at Manchester combines literature with history, politics and popular culture of the United States.

  • Duration: 3 years
  • Year of entry: 2025
  • UCAS course code: QT37 / Institution code: M20
  • Key features:
  • Study abroad

Full entry requirementsHow to apply

Fees and funding

Fees

Tuition fees for home students commencing their studies in September 2025 will be £9,535 per annum (subject to Parliamentary approval). Tuition fees for international students will be £26,500 per annum. For general information please see the undergraduate finance pages.

Policy on additional costs

All students should normally be able to complete their programme of study without incurring additional study costs over and above the tuition fee for that programme. Any unavoidable additional compulsory costs totalling more than 1% of the annual home undergraduate fee per annum, regardless of whether the programme in question is undergraduate or postgraduate taught, will be made clear to you at the point of application. Further information can be found in the University's Policy on additional costs incurred by students on undergraduate and postgraduate taught programmes (PDF document, 91KB).

Scholarships/sponsorships

Course unit details:
Queer Forms: Objects and Animals in Eighteenth-Century Poetry

Course unit fact file
Unit code ENGL31282
Credit rating 20
Unit level Level 3
Teaching period(s) Semester 2
Available as a free choice unit? No

Aims

· explore a range of canonical and noncanonical poems written by women in Britain and America across the long eighteenth century;

· use these texts to introduce students to eighteenth-century poetry – its history and development, its critical reception today (including legacies of feminist recovery), and some of its principal preoccupations across forms and genres;

· examine this poetry’s renewed importance for the intersecting research fields of gender and sexuality studies, environmental humanities, and poetic form / formalism

· build on critical skills and vocabularies developed in such courses as Theory and Text; Literature and History; Gender, Sexuality and the Body: Theories and Histories; Romanticism (1776-1832); and Satire and the Novel: English Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century.

Teaching and learning methods

1 x 1hour Lecture and 1 x 2 hour seminar

Knowledge and understanding

-Confidently engage with work in eighteenth-century poetry, from feminist recoveries of poems by women to the enduring significance of these texts for research in gender and sexuality studies, environmental humanities, and poetic form / formalism 
-Demonstrate understanding of cultural contexts for eighteenth-century poetry, including debates about gender and sexuality, the body and its aesthetic representation, class and race, objects and animals, and the construction of the canon 
-Display aptitude for writing critically about poems from a range of theoretically informed perspectives

Intellectual skills

-Analyse how encounters with the nonhuman in eighteenth-century women’s poetry generate opportunities to think beyond the limits of the human and its normative categories 
-Discuss how this project of revising existing orders of knowledge and representation can be read in new ways through queer, gender, and critical race, and environmental studies  
-Demonstrate proficiency with critical and theoretical vocabularies from studies in poetics, gender and sexuality, race, and environmental humanities

Practical skills

-Sustain a sophisticated scholarly argument focusing on how and why poetry is especially adept at facilitating these explorations, engaging with current ideas about form / formalism 
-Sharpen skills in close reading 
-Independently develop concepts and critical practices in an assessed portfolio of close readings of poems and an essay, informed by critical theory from the course

Transferable skills and personal qualities

-Close reading and textual analysis
-Argumentation and criticality: the construction of clear, rigorous, and detailed critical writing
-Interpersonal and presentation skills in posing and defending perspectives to a group

Employability skills

Analytical skills
Group/team working
Oral communication
Written communication

Assessment methods

Method Weight
Written assignment (inc essay) 60%
Portfolio 40%

Feedback methods

 

Feedback method   

Formative or Summative  

 Written Feedback 

Summative

 

 

Recommended reading

Indicative primary reading: poetry by Anne Finch, Jane Holt, Elizabeth Thomas, Mary Leapor, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Phillis Wheatley Peters, Ann Yearsley, Charlotte Smith, Felicia Hemans, and others.

Selected Course Preparatory Reading: 
· Kadji Amin, Amber Jamilla Musser, and Roy Pérez (eds), ‘Queer Form: Aesthetics, Race, and the Violences of the Social’, ASAP/Journal 2, no. 2 (2017) 
· Paula R. Backscheider, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre (Johns Hopkins, 2005) 
· Brycchan Carey, Sayre Greenfield, and Anne Milne (eds), Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Reason, Emotion, and Ornithology, 1700–1840 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) 
· Mel Y. Chen and Dana Luciano (eds), ‘Queer Inhumanisms’ special issue, GLQ 21, nos. 2–3 (2015) 
· Jeremy Chow (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Environmental Humanities (Bucknell, 2022) 
· Ramzi Fawaz, Queer Forms (NYU, 2022) 
· Lynn Festa, Fiction Without Humanity: Person, Animal, Thing in Early Enlightenment Literature and Culture (Pennsylvania, 2019) 
· Jack Halberstam, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (Duke, 2020) 
· Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (NYU, 2020) 
· Heather Keenleyside, Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century (Pennsylvania, 2016) 
· Lisa L. Moore, Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes (Minnesota, 2011) 
· Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Duke, 2014)

Teaching staff

Staff member Role
James Metcalf Unit coordinator

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