BA Film Studies and English Literature

This final-year module will interrogate various aspects of love in the period of Victorian empire, encompassing desire, marriage, celibacy, romance, pornography. It will include canonical and non-canonical authors and we will be studying the cultural and material conditions in which love poetry was written by visiting the archives in the Rylands Library. We will study poets from Britain and India from theoretical perspectives including race and empire and queer studies.

• To develop the ability to work between poetic texts and other forms of cultural discourse, such as journalism and visual art.
• To develop and foster skills of close reading and to develop an understanding of poetic form in the nineteenth century
• To examine the various portrayals of love in nineteenth-century poetry and poetry’s engagement with Victorian culture.
• To develop digital literacy in level 3 students by asking them to research digital databases in search of poetry and other relevant material to complement texts chosen by me.

1 x one-hour lecture per week (Some weeks this may take the form of a 25-30 minute lecture and 20 minutes of student group work)

1 x two-hour seminar per week

Office hours for further individual and small group discussion

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

• Display confidence and competence in talking and writing about texts that pose distinctive formal questions
• Display a critical understanding of some key cultural contexts for Victorian poetry
• Demonstrate a wide-ranging knowledge of canonical and non-canonical poets writing about love in the nineteenth century
• Demonstrate an understanding of different methods of publication in the nineteenth century and the significance of these different media

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

• To read and analyse closely texts of varying formal complexity and to expand understanding of the relationship between theme and form
• To debate in a persuasive and reasoned way the relationship between poetry and culture and engage critically with constructions of ideal love in the nineteenth century.
• To make informed judgments about valuations of canonical and non-canonical poetry and about the cultural contexts which inform poetry.
• To select texts and analyse material from different media to create a sophisticated and persuasive argument.

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

• To increase critical engagement with e-learning tools and digital archives and to develop digital research skills
• To improve ability to work as an individual and group researcher, and to communicate clearly as a small group
• To write a persuasive and coherent argument using the available evidence
• To engage an audience by giving an oral presentation that is well-researched and communicated with some sense of passion for the subject

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

• The ability to present material in a coherent and persuasive way through the podcast and seminar discussion (particularly useful for job interviews)
• The ability to think quickly and respond immediately in a respectful but rigorous way to the ideas of others through seminar discussion (a skill needed in most jobs)
• The ability to understand and analyse complex information
• The ability to research independently

Group Project - Podcast (40%)

Exam (60%)

• Numerical grade and written comments on essay for essay assignment
• Numerical grade and written comments on podcast
• additional one-to-one feedback (during the consultation hour or by making an appointment)

Secondary

Lisa Lowe, Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke University Press, 2015)

Erik Gray, The Art of Love Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2018)

Primary

Most of the poems we cover will be provided in the course handbook

Alfred Tennyson, Maud

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, selections from Aurora Leigh

Selections from Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–1913 (Ohio University Press, 2011)

Selections from Voices Beyond Bondage: an anthology of verse by African Americans of the 19th century (Georgia Press, 2014) 
 

Tuition fees for home students commencing their studies in September 2027 will be £10,050 per annum. Tuition fees for international students will be £29,200 per annum.

For general information please see the undergraduate finance pages.

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).

We know that student finance can be complicated. The links below provide further information to help guide you.

Learn more about student finance options for UK students .

Learn more about f ees and finance for international students .

As an international student you may be eligible for our Global Futures Scholarships . This is open to students starting their studies in September 2026.