BA (Hons) History and English Literature

This module will broaden your understanding of key moments in America's history that have shaped its development as a nation. It will also provide you with the opportunity to engage with a variety of sources and historical tools to better understand America's past.

This module introduces you to the interdisciplinary study of English at undergraduate degree level through a variety of texts drawn from different historical periods and in different genres. It defines and demonstrates the use of key terms of critical writing, especially in close reading and the formal analysis of texts, and ensures that you understand and use these terms accurately and carefully. It further aims to establish the core studying and writing skills needed for the study of English at degree level, including attentive close reading, reading quickly and efficiently, the use of secondary criticism and research resources, and clear critical prose writing.

 

The aim of this module is to introduce you to a range of seventeenth-century writings in their historical and cultural context to enable you to recognise different forms and genres used in the period. This module will also facilitate an understanding the concept of the Early Modern and issues of historical change and continuity.

You will undertake an in-depth and defined research paper on a topic arising from studies undertaken in another module or modules at Level 5. This will allow you to develop the ability to plan, implement and complete a substantial piece of written work under the guidance of a supervisor who has subject expertise.

The aim of this module is to introduce you to modern African history in order to develop an understanding of colonial rule and decolonisation in Africa.

This module focuses on the emergence of a modernist movement in Europe and America at the beginning of the 20th century and lasting until the decades after the close of the Second World War. You will be introduced to the literature, culture and politics of modernity through an engagement with a variety of modernist texts.

This course will introduce you to an exciting and burgeoning area of social and cultural history. We will turn to the expanding areas of material culture studies, sensory studies and gender studies in order to analyse the most intimate areas of peoples lives in the long nineteenth-century

This module will introduce you to the field of postcolonial studies through a selection of literary and critical works. It will introduce the debates on the relationship between art, politics and culture at the heart of postcolonial literary criticism.

In this module, you will develop an understanding of the manifestations of Romanticism in nineteenth-century literature to assess the cultural afterlife and importance of Romanticism and its modes. You will explore the connections between politics, social history, and literary culture in Britain during a period of social instability and intense and rapid changes in many areas of life at home and abroad.

Between 1853 and the Second World War, Japan was transformed from an isolated feudal country to a great power capable of challenging the great powers of the West. This module explains this emergence by examining the interactions between the natural environment, politics, society and economic development.

The aim of this module is to analyse a wide variety of short writing from the post-Second World War era to develop skills of close reading and textual analysis. You will also explore the relationship between short writing and modernity/contemporary culture.

Within this module, you will extend your familiarity with a range of Victorian texts including novels, poetry and essays. You will explore how the Victorian age was characterized by rapidly developing scientific discourses and popular interest in them and understand how contemporary understanding of genre and cultural prestige were inherited from the Victorian period.

The aim is to provide students with an additional year of study at an approved overseas partner that will complement their programme at LJMU. This is an additional year of full-time study at an approved higher education institution. The modules to be studied must be agreed in advance, and must be appropriate for the student's programme of study. Assuming successful completion of this year, mark-bearing credit will be awarded by the University Recognition Group. The grade conversion scale to be used will be made available in advance of the year abroad.

This module will enable you to develop a range of professional and transferable skills relevant to the world of work. You will be able to critically reflect on your self-development and acquisition of skills and attributes through experience of work in conjunction with their academic studies.

The aim is to provide students with a semester of study at an approved overseas partner that will replace one semester of their LJMU programme at level 5. This is a semester of full-time study at an approved higher education institution which will replace one semester of level 5 study at LJMU. The modules to be studied must be agreed in advance, and must be an appropriate substitute for the modules being replaced. Assuming successful completion of this semester, mark-bearing credit will be awarded by the University Recognition Group. The grade conversion scale to be used will be made available in advance of the year abroad.

This module promotes independent learning activities to give you an opportunity to pursue their own research-informed projects. This module promotes key skills relating to Level 5 work identifying a set of aims or key questions exploring a body of published literature relevant to the project, and effectively communicating information, arguments and analysis.

The aim of this module is to introduce you to the diversity of auto/biographical writing. It will equip you with the critical vocabulary and analytical tools to explore and analyse modern life-writing. You will understand key critical topics relating to life-writing, including the relations of subjectivity and form; the intersections of gender, race, class and embodiment; the role of memory and nostalgia; narrative strategies of confession and secrecy.

This module examines slavery from a long historical interdisciplinary and transnational perspective. It will analyse a range of 'slave texts' such as autobiographies, novels about slavery, abolitionist poetry, and contemporary film, to interrogate the diverse ways in which slavery has been represented historically, and contemporary debates around that history.

This module will enable you to understand the development of ideas of slavery, race, gender in the United States. It will also allow you to understand historiographical interpretations of slavery in the United States and how they have changed over time.

This module will develop your understanding of the relationships between gender, sexuality, and literature. Building on the feminist theory you will encounter in your first year, you will explore literature’s role in the developments of the sexual politics and gender norms of Western society and culture since the nineteenth century and up to the present day.

This module helps to gain a deeper understanding of poetic form and how it relates to musical form. It also helps to understand how politics and poetics inform lyrics. You will also gain knowledge of how gender, race, intertextuality, and acculturation processes can influence musical production.

 

 

The aim of this module is to develop key transferable skills including communication, presentation, practical classroom skills and team working. You will be provided with teaching experience if you are considering teaching as a potential career.

This module covers a range of working-class literary traditions and genres from the nineteenth century to the present. You will examine the relationship between literary form and social class, consider how working-class writers have appropriated and developed particular genres, and explore the intersections between class and other markers of identity.

Within this module, you will have the opportunity to acquire a work-based or work-related learning experience. This will help you to identify the links between your degree and employability prospects. LJMU will support you to identify, enhance, and deploy transferable skills and abilities relevant to the workplace.

Building on your encounters with key strands of critical theory in your first year, this module offers you the opportunity to further explore contemporary theoretical concepts and ideas, including postmodernism, posthumanism, gender and queer theory, and critical race theory.

This module will introduce you to the everyday experiences of activists and African Americans during the civil rights movement in the U.S. Throughout the module you will have opportunities to collaborate with peers on an independent study, utilising different types of primary sources, in class and in an assessment (the portfolio). This module will encourage you to challenge established narratives of social movements by engaging with individual perspectives and accounts.

This module will explore the history of international communism in the period from the Russian Revolution to the Cold War. The module will examine the life of Comintern officials in Moscow and their relationship with the Soviet government, but the primary focus will be to explore life in Communist parties outside of Russia.

The aim of the Dissertation is to develop the ability to identify a relevant historical topic and formulate a research proposal designed to explore aspects of that topic to a high level. You will develop the ability to analyse and interpret primary and secondary historical sources in pursuit of a self-defined problem.

This module aims to introduce key social, cultural and political contexts and historical debates concerning everyday life in France in the period leading up to, during and following the Second World War. You will be introduced to key historiographical debates such as the legacies of the First World War, the significance of political and social divisions in 1930s France and the reasons for the defeat of 1940.

This module will extend your understanding of contemporary women's fiction and its relationship to feminist theory, politics, and practice. You will be equipped with an advanced understanding of the complexity and diversity of the history of feminism and feminist theory from the 1960s to the present day.

The aim of this module is to trace the origins and trajectory of place identities and examine the ways in which different place identities are depicted. You will also explore the similarities and differences between place identities.

The aim of this module is to provide an insight into the people's experience of living day-by-day in Britain during the Second World War. You will be introduced to the theoretical approach of cultural history on how people situate themselves within society irrespective of the greater events being played out around them.

This module will give you an opportunity to pursue your own intellectual interests to undertake an independent academic study, working on your own initiative and building strong time management skills.

The aim of this module is to introduce you to Bolshevik concepts of the body, and how these related to wider social, political, economic and cultural issues. You will be provided with an in-depth understanding of the early Soviet state and society, developing their analytical, critical, and communication skills.

The aim of this module is to analyse domestic space as an important aspect of contemporary culture, to familiarize you with a range of disciplinary and philosophical traditions which have focused upon domestic space.

This module will extend your knowledge of the diversity and range of British writing in the twenty-first century in order to explore key events that shape literary culture in Britain today.

This module will reinforce the ability to critically analyse texts in close detail to examine a range of Shakespeare's plays in the context of their original cultural production.

This module will encourage you to think historically about conflict in post-colonial Africa, paying attention to continuity and change over time. It will also encourage you to think about local, national, regional and global dimensions to so-called 'civil wars' in Africa.

Terrorism and Modern Literature will establish terrorism as a significant and persistent literary, political and cultural preoccupation in modern literature (1880s to present), and examine key instances in which the language and concept of terror is at issue.

This module will examine the genre of Gothic fiction as it has developed over two centuries to explore the cultural, historical and intellectual contexts that shape the moment of its production.

This module will introduce the concept of 'world literature' through a selection of texts from the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries in relation to the rise and expansion of a global modernity. You will examine on-going critical debates around key areas of research in the global humanities: a singular modernity, the politics of translation, the periphery and the world system.

This module will apply historiographical themes in the study of decolonisation to a set of case studies in the Southeast Asia region to examine the programme themes of 'nation, state and power', 'structure and agency' and 'culture, locale and identity' in relation to decolonisation in the developing world, and specifically in Southeast Asia. You will be able to demonstrate variety and diversity in the experience of decolonisation, particularly in Southeast Asia.

This module examines shifting identities and the intersections of class, sexuality, gender and regionality in British literature of the interwar years. It moves across popular, middlebrow and experimental fiction and looks at poetry, non-fiction and magazine publishing as a means of examining the changing cultural formations of the period.

This module will establish violence as a significant and persistent literary, political and cultural preoccupation in nineteenth-century literature (1800-1900), and examine key works in which the issues of class, empire and gender were explored by authors of this period in relation to conflict and crisis.

This module explores how Victorian writers responded to environmental changes. It examines key historical and intellectual developments shaping debates about the natural world in the Victorian period; you consider links between the historical past and current modes of environmentalism.

The aim of this module will enable you to engage in a critical debate about the historiography associated with key events in Irish history. You will engage with different methods of teaching history to different audiences to critically assess the way in which the 1798 Rebellion, the Great Irish Famine and the 1916 Easter Rising have been commemorated and celebrated by later generations.

This module explores the representation of the mind and mental states in literary texts, with a focus on madness and unconventional states of mind. It introduces students to the interdisciplinary study of literature alongside psycho-sciences, including psychoanalytic literary criticism, the history of psychiatry, medical-model psychology, and cognitive literary studies. Students will question established discourses and modes of representing madness and the mind in contemporary culture, challenging scientific and medical authority. 

This module enhances students' understanding of non-fiction travel literature, encouraging nuanced interpretations and effective long-form writing. It explores travel narratives' reflection of encounters with otherness, reassessment of the familiar, and their link to human identity and the non-human world. Indicative texts range from Mary Wollstonecraft to Robert Macfarlane, spanning from the late-eighteenth to the early 21st century.

This module focuses on modern fiction focused on the urgent environmental crises with which we are now obliged to reckon. Some of the issues you will engage with on this module include climate, the environment as a concept, the non-human, and the alternative approaches to nature represented in indigenous narrative systems.

This module will introduce you to the social activism and change of the 1960s, specifically that which occurred in the U.S. It will inspire you to think critically about the intersections of social change, racial backgrounds, gender, and sexuality in the 1960s. We hope this will encourage you to challenge established narratives of social movements by engaging with individual perspectives and accounts.

This module focuses on recent works of transnational fiction that have been adapted for the screen. Drawing on literary studies, film studies, adaptation studies, and postcolonial studies, you will examine novels about migrants alongside their film adaptations, considered as ‘migrants’ from page to screen.

Within this module, you will have the opportunity to acquire a work-based or work-related learning experience. This
will help you to identify the links between your degree and employability prospects. LJMU will support you to
identify, enhance, and deploy transferable skills and abilities relevant to the workplace.

This module explores how extinction on various scales, from the local and national to the planetary, is conceptualized and represented in American environmental and ecocritical texts, including fiction, nature writing, and ecocritical theory.