English Literature study guide 2024/25
What you can study
Bristol is a truly literary city, home to the Bristol Festival of Literature, Bristol Women's Literature Festival, Bristol Poetry Festival, and a host of theatres, cafés, and independent bookshops. It has inspired writers throughout its history, from William Wordsworth and Jane Austen to Helen Dunmore, as well as Bristol alumni Angela Carter, David Nicholls and Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. At Bristol, you'll study texts written from medieval times to now, as you explore literary traditions ranging from the local to the global.
You will find units on:
- poetry, fiction, children's literature, creative non-fiction, media, and visual culture
- postcolonial theory and Black studies
- gender studies
- environmental studies and medical humanities
Pre-requisites
At UK universities, students specialise from their first year and rarely take units outside their degree subject. This means that:
- Year 1 units are suitable for all students.
- Year 2 units require some university study in the discipline.
- Year 3 units require a strong background in the discipline.
Subject pathway students
If you have been nominated to Bristol on the Study Abroad (English pathway), you must take the majority of your credits from this guide.
Year 1
Pre-requisites: suitable for all students
Teaching Block 1
Teaching Block 2
- Literature 1550-1740 - ENGL10043
- Reading Identities - ENGL10062
- Representations: This is not my America - HUMS10014. Please note this unit is graded as pass/fail and involves no numerical mark.
- Texts in a Global Context - ENGL10052
- Transformations - ENGL10046
Year 2
Pre-requisites: some university study in the discipline.
Students may take only ONE Seminar unit per Teaching Block due to the heavy workload.
Teaching Block 1
Seminar units - choose a maximum of ONE:
- American Literature 1945-present - ENGL29007
- Literature and Trauma, 1900-present - ENGL20129
- Paradise Lost: Inception and Reception - ENGL29032
- Revenge Tragedy - ENGL29008
- The Art of Grief - ENGL20116
- The Fairy Tale in English - ENGL20028
- Utopian Literature - ENGL20058
Teaching Block 2
- Arthurian Literature - ENGL20060
- Chaucer and Chaucerians - ENGL20061
- Literature 1900-present - ENGL20064
- Old English Language and Literature - ENGL20065
Seminar units: choose a maximum of ONE:
- American Avant-Garde - ENGL20114
- Black British Literature - ENGL20041
- Dangerous Books - ENGL20023
- Drinking in the Words: the pleasures and pains of alcohol in British fiction and culture - ENGL20127
- Gender, Desire and the Renaissance Stage - ENGL20206
- The Author as Character - ENGL20048
- The Radical Gothic - ENGL20136
Year 3
Pre-requisites: strong background of study in the discipline.
Students may take only ONE Seminar unit per Teaching Block due to the heavy workload.
Teaching Block 1
- American Revolutions - ENGL30108
- Literatures of Decolonisation - ENGL30147
- Novel Territories: Eighteenth-century Prose Fiction - ENGL30115
- Victorian Fiction: Art and Ideas in the Marketplace - ENGL30117
Seminar units - choose a maximum of ONE:
- Hero or traitor? Outlaws in Literature - ENGL30069
- Homing Desires/Imaginary Homelands: Representing South Asia and its Diasporas - ENGL30145
- Illness Narratives - ENGL30089
- Representing HIV/AIDS - ENGL30141
- Shakespearean Tragedy: Textual and Literary Criticism - ENGL39027
Teaching Block 2
Seminar units - choose a maximum of ONE:
- Caribbean Literature - ENGL30148
- Medievalism and the Modern Age - ENGL30150
- Modernism and the Movies - ENGL30128
- Victorian Poetry: Belief, Doubt, Dissent - ENGL30143
- Writing for Art - ENGL39019
- Writing the Anthropocene 1945-present - ENGL30124
- Writing the Self: Literature and Autobiography - ENGL30107
Application queries
Contact the Centre for Study Abroad inbound team if you have any queries about the application process for the study abroad programmes:
Phone: +44 117 39 40207
Email: cfsa-inbound@bristol.ac.uk