Master English Studies: Writing and Society 1700-1820
Entry requirementsEntry requirements Most applicants will have an undergraduate degree with First or Upper Second Class Honours (or the equivalent) in English or such related fields as History, Cultural Studies and Media Studies. Where a North American marking scheme is used, applicants should have a minimum grade point average (GPA) of 3.3. Promising applicants who do not meet the formal academic criteria but who possess relevant credentials and who can demonstrate their ability to produce written work at Master’s level will also be considered. Applicants may be invited to interview or asked to submit examples of written and/or creative work. We welcome applications from mature and non-traditional students.
Academic titleMA English Studies: Writing and Society 1700-1820
Course descriptionThe MA in Writing and Society looks closely at the interaction between literature, philosophy, politics,
religion, and visual culture during the long eighteenth century. This period in British history was characterised by ongoing ideological controversies around political, religious, and aesthetic doctrine), the emergence of innovative but unstable systems of finance and credit, and a rapid and vigorous expansion in the market for printed texts. These coincident phenomena raise new and difficult questions about the relations between writers and readers, and initiate debates about definitions of cultural value, and constructions of gender and cultural difference.
We consider texts in relation to these debates, addressing both current critical scholarship and the preoccupations of British life during the Eighteenth Century. Amongst the important contexts that the programme continues to examine are the sociable culture of coffee-house and tavern; political life on the street and in parliament; the vocations of women poets and polemicists; polite society and its interests in the management of emotions and the arts; the growth of empire and the challenges to national identity it created; the dimensions of philosophical and cultural enlightenment; the religious revivals and their transatlantic connections; the world-shaking crisis of the French Revolution; the dynamic aesthetic, social, and philosophical experiments of European Romanticism.
Course content
You take two non-assessed modules: Introduction to Research Resources (semester one) and Panoramas of London (semesters one and two). I
In addition you also choose four modules from a list which may include:
* Romantic Manifestos
* Metro-Intellectuals: Women Writing and the City, 1780-1824
* Primitivism and Progress
* The Business of Religion
* Sociability: Literature and the City, 1660-1780
* Rhetorical Cultures of the Eighteenth Century
Assessment
Coursework (67 per cent)
Assessment for each module is a 4,000 word essay
Dissertation (33 per cent)
A dissertation of 12,000-15,000 words