English Literature: Modern and Contemporary Fictions MA

Development, execution, and writing-up of an independent research project on a topic chosen by you. All students will attend regular research seminars. Individual supervision will provide topic-specific guidance.

This module introduces you to current major themes in contemporary literature, with a particular focus on how global crises post-2001 have been mediated in literary texts. Topics will include the representation of capital and financial crisis; migrant narratives; ecology; the Anthropocene; and the contemporary resurgence of populist politics. While maintaining a primary focus on the 21st century, the module also encourages you to think historically and comparatively through 19th and 20th century representations of crisis.

This module introduces you to different perspectives on how selfhood is constructed in literature. It considers the links between identity, personhood, selfhood and writing, with a particular emphasis on how recent literature has critically interrogated the connections between these concepts. Through the close analysis of short literary texts and engagement with theoretical ideas, the module explores issues such as life-writing, autofiction, embodiment, biography, memory, otherness, and the non-human.

This module explores the relationship between London and literature past and present. It considers a range of fictional and non-fictional representations of London and work by London-based writers spanning the period from 15th century to the present. There is close attention to the cultural institutions that have sustained the city's literary life, the relationship of literature to other cultural forms and to the ways in which literature has been entangled with London's urban development.

Focusing on the 1990s to the present day, this module examines the idea of the “queer”. Examining a range of theoretical, literary and cultural perspectives on the topic, the module will investigate what queer means and how it has shaped our ideas about sexuality, identity, intimacy, desire and representation. Each week you'll engage with some theoretical writing to complement and extend our engagement with the primary material.

This module explores how different literary and cultural forms have been used to construct and contest expressions of nationhood, nationality, and nationalism in diverse cultural and historical contexts from the Global North and South. You will engage with writing from a variety of periods and genres to examine how writers have (re)imagined ideas such as sovereignty, citizenship, belonging, and statelessness. In so doing, you will consider the ways in which literature has shaped, resisted, and responded to seismic historical movements such as imperialism, postcolonialism, mass migration, globalisation, and contemporary neonationalism. These ideas and processes will be explored through readings of key theorists and commentators.

Using a range of theoretical, historical, literary, cinematic, visual and other cultural texts, you'll explore the idea of urban culture as it has developed since the mid-19th century. The module considers a variety of different representations of the city, and the ways in which they understand the specificity of urban experience itself. You will also explore the changing global forms and interrelations of ‘western’ and ‘non-western’ urban forms. 

This module examines ways in which the world and 'other worlds' were formed through literary and cultural representation during the later nineteenth century. It focuses on themes such as mapping the Empire and the city, scientific views, the natural world, hauntings, sexology and ideas of gender, and the life of the mind.

This module offers you a chance to spend time in a working environment and to think critically about the issues raised by their time there. In the past, students have gained work placement places in schools, galleries, publishing companies and translation agencies, among others.