BA English Literature with Creative Writing

This course asks how the contemporary British novel has engaged with, and helped to shape, a host of important cultural and political debates since around the turn of the millennium. Focusing on four key novels from the period, for two weeks at a time, the course will require students to develop a rigorous understanding of how this particular literary form has dealt with issues including: neoliberalism; debates around ‘British national identity’, devolution, and multiculturalism; and new configurations of gender and sexuality. Students will also be expected to read widely in related critical and theoretical literature so as to develop a detailed, confident, and sophisticated approach to the question of how the British novel might enable us to better understand the contemporary intersection of cultural and political discourse.  

• to introduce students to a series of important and influential British novels and their cultural and political contexts since the turn of the millennium; 

• to consider the development of the contemporary novel as a political form; 

• to consider how the contemporary British novel engages with issues such as class, gender and sexuality, race, ethnicity, nationality, and religion; 

• to develop skills of critical thought, speech, and writing in relation to the study of contemporary literature. 

Week 1: Introduction
Weeks 2 and 3: Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004)
Weeks 4 and 5: Zadie Smith’s NW (2012)
Reading Week
Weeks 7 and 8: Ali Smith’s How to be both (2014)
Weeks 9 and 10: Anna Burns’ Milkman (2018)
Week 11: Revision and essay tutorials

 • 1 x one-hour lecture per week: lectures will introduce students to key arguments, texts, and contexts. 

• 1 x two-hour seminar per week: seminars are an opportunity for students to engage with the weekly text in an open, collaborative way. Active participation is expected from all students on the module.  

• Weekly office hours: students will have a weekly opportunity to meet the module leader on a one-to-one basis. Office hours are also a chance to discuss ideas and plans for assignments, as well as any feedback pertaining to those assignments.  

• Blackboard: relevant information and reading materials will be uploaded to the module’s Blackboard shell on a regular basis.  

By the end of this course, students will be able to: 

• think in an independent and rigorous way about the relationship between culture and politics in the contemporary British novel; 

• draw on a range of historical, critical, and theoretical materials in forming arguments about this relationship; 

By the end of this course, students will be able to: 

• advance persuasive, well-structured, and critically-informed arguments, both orally and in writing. 

• think carefully about the relationships between contemporary British literary/cultural production, socio-political identity, economic conditions, and ideology.  

By the end of this course, students will be able to: 

• interpret and discuss an important contemporary literary form; 

• carry out independent research that links this form to a range of related political and historical contexts; 

• work effectively as an individual and as part of a small group; 

• write persuasively and rigorously about a set of crucial cultural and political debates.  

• initiative: students will be expected to work on their own initiative in order to read and research texts/topics.  

• leadership: there will be opportunities for students to take the lead in seminar discussions.  

• organisation: students will need to develop methods for mapping out and managing their time in an effective way.  

• teamwork: students will be required to work effectively as part of small groups.  

• oral communication: there will opportunities for students to develop their skills of oral presentation and public speaking.   

• written communication: students will be expected to submit written work that is lucid, well-structured, and persuasive.  

• creativity/innovation: students will be encouraged to think in innovative, original ways about their approach to literary and cultural texts.  

• research: students will need to retrieve, scrutinise, sift, evaluate, summarise, and synthesise large amounts of information in preparing for classes and assignments.  

Indicative Primary Reading (students will need to purchase all texts):
Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004)
Zadie Smith’s NW (2012)
Ali Smith’s How to be both (2014)
Anna Burns’ Milkman (2018)

Selected Course Preparatory Reading:
Caroline Magennis, Northern Irish Writing After the Troubles: Intimacies, Affects, Pleasures (London: Bloomsbury, 2021) 
Daniel O’Gorman and Robert Eaglestone, eds, The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction (London: Routledge, 2019)
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005)
Len Platt and Sara Upstone, eds, Postmodern Literature and Race (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015)
Nick Bentley, Contemporary British Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008)
Roger Luckhurst and Peter Marks, eds, Literature and the Contemporary: Fictions and Theories of the Present (London: Routledge, 1999)
Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2005)
C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings (electronic access available via library)