Compulsory modules

Becoming a Critic
How do you craft a compelling university essay, analyse a literary text, and put criticism to use? How can you interpret a work within its historical context, or apply literary theory to it? Through studying a wide range of texts, , you'll develop essential skills for academic reading and writing. This module will enhance your appreciation of literature and prepare you for advanced study throughout your degree. Indicative texts might include: novels such as Wuthering Heights, Renaissance tragedy, short stories by Toni Morrison.

Delivery, Performance, and Other Platforms: All the Writing Selves
This module prepares you for studying creative writing at university, introducing you to all the ‘writing selves’ needed when seeking publication and building an authorial profile. You will explore how self-narratives, new journalism, guerrilla-writing, and broadcasting platforms foster ways to extend and complement your practice outside traditional routes; how to deliver manuscripts to publishers, agents, and competitions, including how to respond to commissions via authentic briefs. You will also gain a practical foundation in performing your work publicly on/offline. 

Voices and Audiences: Building Your Professional Communication Skills
This module introduces you to the many ways that your literary knowledge and communication skills will be useful in future employment. Studying a range of poems, speeches, and plays, you will learn how to employ effective rhetorical strategies to communicate professionally with different audiences, enabling you to give speeches, design lesson plans or exhibitions, or run social media campaigns. The module includes masterclasses from professionals working in, for example, museums, theatres, and social media.

Optional modules

Writing for Children
The module starts at a surprise location. You receive a blank book and start to write. It’s a journal: you submit it later, alongside your creative or critical piece. Back in Keele you look at children’s writing from different periods and cultures. You consider imagination and myth, the politics of representation, the construction and subversion of gender roles. You think about voice and vision. Your expressive skills flower as you explore storytelling techniques and the transformative power of narrative.

Writing Fiction
This module introduces you to key characteristics of fiction. You will gain an understanding of how these can be employed to explore the meaning of a text. Engaging with fiction by writers from all over the world, you will learn how to analyse core elements such as narrative voice, structure and the evocation of place, and develop your own ability to write short, creative prose pieces. Guided by Keele's award-winning novelists, you will attain a solid foundation for writing longer prose pieces in the future.

Writing Poetry
This module introduces you to the characteristics and structure of poems, through an examination of 5 key ‘modes’ of poetry, looking closely at how these achieve their ends. You will learn how to identify these characteristics and structural elements through lecture input, discussion and consideration of example poems by a range of authors. You will also learn how to deploy this understanding into the writing of your own poetry, and share/discuss your own creative work with your fellow writers. 

Writing Scripts
This module will introduce you to the key dramatic principles required to write scripts for stage and screen. Drawing on texts from contemporary theatre, film and television, you will learn a series of fundamental skills, developing your understanding of character, dialogue, and structure. You will engage in a combination of lectures, seminar groups, and practical writing workshops, and guided by feedback from peers and tutors alike, you will work towards writing your own original script. 

Classic Literature and its Adaptations
What makes a work of literature 'classic'? What do we mean when we call something an example of 'popular culture'? This module invites you to compare 'classic' texts  with adaptations that share their themes or challenge their values. You'll learn new ways to think about why some texts are called 'classics' and some are not, and enrich your understanding of the way that texts interact with one another across genres. Indicative texts might include Hamlet, The Great Gatsby, The Color Purple.

Gothic Nightmares: Robots, Monsters and Witches
Gothic Nightmares introduces you to the representation of spooks, automatons, monsters and supernatural horrors in literature, film, and TV from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Each week you will read a short story and a critical text, and watch an example of the gothic genre from film or TV. Why has the gothic persisted as it has? Why do we need (or want) to be scared? What are we afraid of anyway? 

Compulsory modules

Please note: You must choose either ‘Pathways with English: Developing Your Profile’ or ‘Professional Experience with English (Year 2)'.

Genre, Forms and Modes
This module will develop and deepen your understanding of how narrative forms, genres and modes are used in creative writing. It introduces you to forms of creative prose besides fiction.  It asks questions about how genre writing and creative nonfiction are formed, how writers read other literary texts – not as critics, and not necessarily as fans, but as practitioners – and aims to equip your own texts with the structures and techniques which are necessary to develop your own writing.

Cultures in Conflict: Victorian to Contemporary World Literature
This module expands your understanding of literature’s relation to history. You will study novels, poems, and plays from the Victorian period to the present, relating them to social, political and cultural contexts including class, race, gender and sexuality. You will be exposed to a range of literary styles and genres including realism, modernism, postmodernism and the postcolonial, extending your knowledge of different types of literature in preparation for the final year of your degree.

Pathways with English: Developing Your Profile
This module broadens your knowledge of the variety of career pathways open to you, enabling you to identify, analyse, and showcase your degree skills and experiences effectively. Through completing and reflecting on problem-based tasks relating to different sectors, such as telling the story of a business, or writing a funding proposal to support a literary festival, you will build your creative and collaborative skills and learn how to articulate them in ways that will be attractive to employers.

Professional Experience with English (Year 2)
This module offers you the chance to contribute to the world outside the University through completing a work placement, a project for a client (or a series of projects for different clients), or working as a team to deliver a successful festival or event. You will be trained to showcase your creative and collaborative skills and abilities effectively before applying for an opportunity advertised through the module (or you can source your own, subject to it meeting the module’s requirements).

Optional modules

Revolutions in Thought: Medieval Pioneers to Romantic Rebels
The 1500s to the 1830s was a period of rapid historical change, including shifts in cultural norms, new debates about gender, class, empire, and race, and the questioning of traditional religious beliefs. You will explore how English poetry, drama, and fiction responded to these transformations, and develop your understanding of how texts relate to their wider social and cultural contexts. You will acquire the advanced critical skills you will need to draw on in the final year of your degree.

Literature, Creativity and the Cultural Industries
This module builds on L4 introductions to cultural platforms/industries and to adaptation/script-writing, enabling a focused study of how the New Vic Theatre adapts texts for the stage; you will explore how the theatre as cultural industry produces social value through programmes of research and creativity; you will use this knowledge to reflect on societal impacts of cultural industries more widely, for example music, film, creative writing. You will be assessed in ways that enable you to reflect on your own creative and critical practice.

Literature and Society
Building on your first year, in this second-year module you will extend your knowledge of different literary approaches and theories, exploring topics such as feminism, race studies, ecocriticism, and the history of emotions. You will explore how literature reflects and influences social issues, both those contemporary to the literature you study and those relevant in today’s society. You will deepen your skills in critical analysis as you apply your literary understanding to real-world debates and situations.

Brave New Worlds? Science Fiction and Fantasy
Building on your understanding of genre fiction, ‘popular’ literature, and questions of value developed in year 1, on 'Brave New Worlds?' you'll examine the connections between two types of 'speculative fiction': sci-fi and fantasy. As you explore how their strange fictional worlds critique the real world, you'll think further about the relationship between ‘popular’ genres and the literary establishment, consolidating your skills in independent critical analysis. Why are such genres still often not regarded as ‘serious’ literature? Is this justifiable?

Radical Writing: From Modernity to Counter-Culture
Radical Writing looks at twentieth-century experimental writing, from Modernism's rallying call of 'Make it New!' to the mid and late twentieth century’s experiments with poetry, narrative forms, film, and revolutionary counter-politics. Why did this impulse towards radical politics and disruption of literary form occur in tandem at this time? What do we mean when we call something ‘experimental’? What were these writers trying to do or to rebel against?

Local Literature in Action
As you are introduced to place-writing skills, you will reflect on what writing can do in the world. You will be supported to create vivid settings that are close to home (Stoke or elsewhere). As you think about form, genre, and voice, you will explore writing’s capacity to shape and re-shape people’s lived experiences of cities, towns and regions, and explore the concept of regional and/or global Englishes. You will receive practical training in working with communities outside the University.

Teenage Dreams: Youth Subcultures in Fiction and Film
Youth culture has had profound influences on society. On 'Teenage Dreams' you will examine the historical development of subcultures from the ‘classic’ period to postmodernism and study a range of representations of youth subcultures, from the 1950s to the present, including fiction, film, fashion, and music. These texts will be explored through theories of subcultures, building on critical skills you acquired in year 1, and thinking about pressing issues of class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity.

Screenwriting: Principles and Practices
This module forms a gateway to the worlds of professional screenwriting and story development. You’ll explore key screenwriting concepts in practical, writing-based seminars, as well as analysing a range of film and TV industry texts. You’ll then produce a number of screenplay samples which respond to the theme of the seminars, receiving feedback in regular writing workshops. You’ll go on to develop your own creative project plan, which provides an invaluable basis for any project work in your final year. 

The American South: US Summer School (Level 5)
Study Southern US culture on location! The American South is a distinctive but difficult to define geographical and cultural entity, and attitudes to the South range from celebration to derision. Studying with others from a range of disciplines, you will think through historical and current constructions of the US South through its history, literature, film, and wider culture. You spend four weeks at one of our partner universities taught by Keele staff, shaping your own research project with their support.

Compulsory modules

Please note: You can either choose 'English Project' or 'Creative Writing Portfolio' or the 'Extending Screenwriting Project'. You can choose to complete two of these three options if one of the two is the 'English Project'.

You must also take 'Employing English: Putting Your Subject into Practice’ or ‘Professional Experience with English (Year 3)’.

English Project
In your final-year independent research project you will showcase the skills that you have developed over the three years of your degree. In group workshops and individual supervisions you will work closely with a member of the Keele English team to produce either an 8-10,000-word dissertation on a topic of your choosing, or a modern edition of a (normally pre-1800) lesser-known text. Either route will require you to use advanced skills in English literature research, theoretical debate, and textual analysis.

Creative Writing Portfolio
This module gives you the opportunity to plan and develop an extended creative writing project, such as a collection of poems or short stories, or a longer piece of fiction. In Semester 1, you will read and discuss contemporary writing and experiment with examples of your own in a workshop, so you can settle on a project. In semester 2, you will work closely with a supervisor to produce a portfolio of creative writing. You might consider using any acquired understanding of digital/alternative platforms for the presentation of your Portfolio as an alternative to traditional text-based work. 

Extended Screenwriting Project
This final-year project is the culmination of your critical and practical work on screenwriting, building on modules undertaken in years one and two. With the consultation of tutors, you will identify and devise your own screenplay idea (for a feature film, TV show ‘pilot’, short film or adaptation), producing a professional-standard treatment to showcase your skills. The module will therefore provide a significant platform and output for anyone hoping to move into careers within the creative film and TV industries.

Employing English: Putting Your Subject into Practice
Now you are preparing for life after graduation, this module enables you to put your degree skills into practice and work with employer-clients on a series of real-life projects. Enhancing the creative and collaborative skills you developed in your second year, this final-year module will develop your ability to work effectively with clients from a variety of settings, such as charities, publishers, museums, and will enhance your confidence in presenting your work to your chosen employer-client.

Professional Experience with English (Year 3)
In your final year we offer you another opportunity to complete a work placement, a project for a client (or a series of clients), or work as part of a team to deliver a successful festival or event. Completed during the final stages of your degree, the module gives you cutting-edge experience of the sector you wish to enter following graduation as well as valuable employer contacts, thereby providing you with an effective career launchpad.

Optional modules

Shakespeare on Film
How have Shakespeare's works been adapted by the film industry, and why do screenwriters and directors make the creative decisions they make? In 'Shakespeare on Film' you will explore a range of Shakespeare plays adapted for film, and develop your understanding both of the original works and of the possibilities they offer for reinterpretation and adaptation. You can practise film adaptation yourself, as you explore possibilities for cutting and modernising Shakespeare’s text for the screen.

Angels and Demons: Conflict and Rebellion in Seventeenth-Century Literature
In 'Angels and Demons' you will focus on one of the most turbulent periods in English history. In the mid-1600s, civil war turned the country upside down, and writers turned to the supernatural to explain their experiences of conflict, as well as to justify or condemn rebellion. Through studying a range of printed matter – including epic supernatural tales, ghost narratives, and religious prophecies – you will enhance your ability to scrutinise the ways in which imaginative writing shaped political debate.

Mean Streets: The Detective and the American City
As you explore the relationship between literary detectives and the city since the early nineteenth century, you will extend the understanding of genre that you established in the first and second year of your degree. Through literature, painting, and film, you will examine how literary detectives reflect anxieties about cultural and political changes in urban worlds, and will consider whether, in their quest to reconstruct plots and deliver explanations, detectives might function as avatars of readers and writers.

Not just superheroes! Contemporary Comics and Graphic Novels
Contemporary comics and graphic novels deal with a startling range of themes: alongside superheroes, they explore questions of racial identity, sexual politics, teenage angst, events such as 9/11 and the legacy of colonialism. You will learn how to read these complex, exciting texts, exploring the challenges and pleasures that graphic narratives offer to readers. In discussing how the combination of text and image offer new approaches to understanding contemporary issues, you will develop an advanced appreciation of different literary genres.

In the Matrix: Postmodernism in Fiction, Film and Theory
On 'In the Matrix', you'll explore postmodernism: a cultural and literary movement characterised by scepticism towards authority and an emphasis on irony, playfulness, and fragmentation. You’ll examine its implications for notions of history, identity, sexuality, politics, and consumer society, considering how techniques like intertextuality and unreliable narration challenge traditional structures and conventions. You'll assess the influence of these ideas on authors and film directors and study the main themes and techniques in postmodern fiction and film.

The Alcohol Question
From Shakespeare to Bridget Jones, alcohol has always held a fascination for writers. On this module you will extend considerations of gender, sexuality, and class from previous modules and apply these questions to literary, televisual and filmic representations of alcohol use and drinking cultures. You can produce critical and creative work on key themes such as pub culture, alcoholism, and lads and ladettes – and you can even write your own drinking song or temperance tale!

Life Writing
‘Autobiography’: that’s writing about the self, right? Wrong! That’s Rule One. You look at canonical texts by saints and sinners, scientists and sages. You study key theories. Then you look for other voices. You construct a counter canon and interpret it. This is about your creative practice as well as your academic development, though. What grain of sand will be your pearl? Workshops provide support, but this is your journey through the self to the world. Remember Rule One. 

Literature and the Lived Experience of Ageing, 1908-2018
How is the experience of ‘older age’ represented in the literature of the twentieth and twenty first centuries, among men, women, families, people who migrated to Britain from different continents, and people who live on those continents? Is dementia an inevitable feature of ageing? What is it like to live with dementia? We will answer these questions by studying novels, memoirs, films, and policy/critical texts that have shaped a pressing experience of our times.

Writingscapes
This module enables you to specialise in various forms of place-writing. It introduces you to some spatial theories, including sensoryscapes, geopoetics, and psychogeography, offering you different approaches you might adopt in your writing. You’ll be supported to reflect on the relations between theory and practice. You’ll also read published examples of creative texts (poetry, prose, creative nonfiction) by English-language and bi-/multi-lingual writers from the UK and elsewhere, to help you develop your writing and situate it within broader literary landscapes.

Other-than-human worlds: nature writing, environmental writing
This module supports you to hone your place-writing to focus on non- or other-than-human worlds. You’ll study a wide variety of nature and environmental texts by global majority writers, working-class writers, disabled writers, queer writers, and others. You’ll analyse various uses of form, reflecting on the possibilities and limitations of, for example, hybrid, multimodal, and critical-creative writing. The module thinks about interrelations between humans and the other-than-human, and the potentials for writing to effect social and environmental change.

Thresholds: Young Adult Fiction
Young Adult Fiction, occupying a borderline between children's and adult fiction, often focuses on moments of crisis, its characters caught between innocence and ruin, naivety and understanding, and sometimes literally between two worlds. What is it about young adulthood that invites these explorations of the threshold and the liminal? Can we read 'growing up', through these fictions, not as gradual development but as series of shocks? This module emphasises diversity and we will read fan-fiction, genre fiction, and ‘issue’ novels.

The American South: US Summer School
Study Southern US culture on location! The American South is a distinctive but difficult to define geographical and cultural entity, and attitudes to the South range from celebration to derision. Studying with others from a range of disciplines, you will think through historical and current constructions of the US South through its history, literature, film, and wider culture. You spend four weeks at one of our partner universities taught by Keele staff, shaping your own research project with their support.