BA (Hons) English Literature with Creative Writing course preparation

• Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (Penguin or Oxford edition)
• Rossetti, Christina, Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 2008)
• Arthur Conan Doyle, select stories from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. For class we read: ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, ‘The Man With the Twisted Lip’, and ‘The Copper Beeches’
• Henrik Ibsen, ‘A Doll’s House’ in Four Major Plays (Oxford, 2008)

Indicative secondary reading – There is no need to go out and purchase your own copies of any of the following texts, but they will all provide some useful introductory reading if you can find them in libraries:

• Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, This Thing Called Literature (London: Routledge, 2015)
• Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, 5^th edition (London: Routledge, 2016)
• Rhian Williams, The Poetry Toolkit (London: Bloomsbury, 2013)

Set Texts:

• Armitage, Simon, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (London: Faber, 2009)
• Bronte, Emily, Wuthering Heights (London: Penguin, 2003)
• Hughes, Ted, Tales from Ovid (London: Faber, 1997)
• Carson, Anne, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (London: Virago, 2003)
• Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)
• Dante, Inferno, transl. Alasdair Gray (Edinburgh: Canongate. 2018)
• Homer, The Odyssey, transl. Robert Fagles (London: Penguin, 2000) – we look at books 9-12 in class

Indicative secondary reading – There is no need to go out and purchase your own copies of any of the following texts, but they will all provide some useful introductory reading if you can find them in libraries

• Alexander, Michael, A History of English Literature. 2nd ed. (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
• Sanders, Andrew, The Short Oxford History of English Literature. 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2004)
• Widdowson, Peter, The Palgrave Guide to English Literature and its Contexts 1500-2000. (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)

Set Texts:

Poetry. Read a selection of the following poems from different writers and time periods. Most are available online:

• Grace Nichols, The Fat Black Woman’s Poems (1984)
• Robert Browning ‘Porphyria’s Lover’
• Tennyson, ‘Ulysses’
• Carol Ann Duffy, ‘Salome’, ‘Havisham’
• Vicky Feaver ‘Judith’
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’
• Derek Walcott, ‘Love After Love’

Later in the module we study some short stories and much longer novels, so you may wish to make a start on:

• Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818 edition)
• Alasdair Gray, Poor Things (London: Bloomsbury, 1992)
• Octavia Butler, ‘Blood Child’ (short story)

If you’re feeling brave enough, you might want to watch:

• Alien (1979) dir. Ridley Scott.

Indicative secondary reading – There is no need to go out and purchase your own copies of any of the following texts, but they will all provide some useful introductory reading if you can find them in libraries

• Bennett, Andrew and Nicholas Royle, Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, 5th edition (London: Routledge, 2016)
• Eagleton, Terry, The English Novel: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005)
• Watt, Ian, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Pimlico, 2000)
• Williams, Rhian, The Poetry Toolkit (London: Bloomsbury, 2013)

• Graham, R, The Road to Somewhere: A Creative Writing Companion. (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004)
• May, S,  Doing Creative Writing. (London: Routledge, 2007)

 Astley, Neil, Being Human (Newcastley: Bloodaxe Books, 2016)

Creative

• Borrowdale, David (ed.) A Girl’s Guide to Fly-Fishing (Reflex Press, 2018)
• Marek, Adam. The Stone Thrower (1^st Edition, Comma Press, 2012)

Craft

• Graham, Robert et al, How to Write a Short Story (And Think About It) (Palgrave, 2017 2nd Edition)