English and American Literature BA (Hons)

University of East Anglia

Overview

The Atlantic Ocean does not mark a barrier when it comes to literary traffic. In fact, it is impossible to understand British Literature in the modern period, or American Literature in any period, without knowing something of the other nation’s culture.

At UEA, you’ll be able to focus on Anglo-American interchanges. You’ll also explore the many aspects of English and American literature which lie beyond that interchange, such as English Literature prior to the 19th century, and Native American and multi-ethnic writing.

Under the tuition of our world-leading scholars of English Literature and American Studies, you will study the wealth of both countries’ literatures. Your studies will reach back to Chaucer, Julian of Norwich and beyond, and forwards to the likes of Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan and Ali Smith. You’ll study writers as different from one another as Walt Whitman and Sylvia Plath, Brett Easton Ellis and Edith Wharton. After a firm grounding in your first year, you’ll launch yourself into more specialist areas of study, like contemporary fiction, journalism or comics.

About This Course

The writers of Britain and America are deeply connected. Often, they employ the same language, address the same readers, and share the same cultural reference points. But at the same time, the two traditions differ sharply in their typical values and tones of voice. This programme allows you to experience these continuities and distinctions.

In your study of English literature, you’ll have the chance to discover a wealth of writers from Chaucer to the present day – from medieval romance via Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, the Brontës, and James Joyce, to novelists and poets who are still writing now. You’ll explore diverse traditions from across the globe and tackle a heady mix of genres, which currently range from epic to children’s literature, crime writing to lyric poetry, tragedy to biography. You might find yourself honing the perfect essay, experimenting with new forms of critical writing in one of our creative-critical modules, or gaining experience of careers like journalism or publishing which draw on your literary training.

You’ll also be studying the landmarks of American literature, exploring how Americans formed their sense of identity through their literary traditions from the 19th century to the present. Alongside writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson you'll read abolitionist works by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass. Towards the end of the century, you'll discover contemporaries of Mark Twain, Henry James and Edith Wharton such as Charles Chesnutt and Pauline Hopkins. You'll explore the vibrancy of American modernism – from Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald to the Harlem Renaissance. If you choose to explore further in the twentieth century, you'll reach the dizzy heights of postmodernism all the while keeping up with the radical decolonising work of writers like Leslie Marmon Silko and Nobel-prize winner Toni Morrison. You’ll have the chance to immerse yourself in both the big canonical American classics and in areas that are unique, contemporary, interdisciplinary, or cutting-edge.

Disclaimer