English (1900-Present) MSt

University of Oxford

The English master's programmes are designed to serve both as an autonomous degree for students wishing to pursue more advanced studies in English literature, and as a solid foundation for doctoral research.

The English Faculty includes numerous scholars and teachers working in the modern period. Within the modern period, particular areas of interest among faculty members include modernist poetry, fiction, and drama, the cultural contexts of literature, literature and science, life writing, modern drama and performance studies, contemporary poetry, post-colonial studies and Irish literature.

The Bodleian Library, the English Faculty Library, the Taylorian, the History Library and the Rothermere American Institute Library provide a great wealth of resources for the study of modern literature at Oxford. Students are welcome to attend lectures across related disciplines. The faculty has a number of visiting lecturers and writers every year.

Course structure

The MSt programme consists of four main components as outlined below.

A. Core course: Literature, Contexts and Approaches

The ‘A’ course on ‘Literature, Context and Approaches’ will

explore significant texts, themes, and critical approaches in our period, in order to open up a wide, though by no means exclusive, sense of some possibilities for dissertation research. The exact topics covered change from year to year according to the course convenors’ expertise and analysis of what will be valuable. Topics in recent years have included ‘Models of Modernity’, ‘Interdisciplinarity’, ‘Theories of the Avant-Garde’, ‘Formalism and Historicism’, ‘The Transnational Turn’, ‘Multimediality, Intermediality, and Remediation’, ‘Limits of the Human’, and ‘Late Styles’.

There will be five classes across five weeks, followed by two weeks in which students present on their ideas for their dissertations.

B. Core course: Bibliography, Theories of Text, History of the Book, Manuscript Studies

This is a range of lectures and seminars in each of the first two terms designed to train students for research in English. Within this strand, there will be classes on book history and theories of text, appropriate to the period.

C. Special options

Special option courses are one-term courses on specialist themes usually relating to the current research interests of the teacher(s).

Recent ‘C’ options for this strand - some of which cross period boundaries - have included: ‘British Literature and Culture at Mid-Century: 1940-70’, ‘20th and 21st Century Theatre’, ‘Modernism and Philosophy’, ‘The New T. S. Eliot Studies’, ‘Literature and Science, 1890-present’, ‘Sea-Voyages, Literature, Modernity’, ‘Contemporary Poetry by the Book’, ‘Aesthetic Education: Goethe to Coetzee’, ‘Modernism and the Ideal Society’, ‘Citizens of Nowhere: Literary Cosmopolitanism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century’, Henry James and His Legacies’, ‘Senses of humour: Wordsworth to Ashbery’, ‘Literatures of Empire and Nation’.‘

Students take one special option in each of the first two terms.

The special option courses present an excellent opportunity for you to develop your research interests. You are not constrained to follow option courses within your designated period, and indeed, option courses often traverse the boundaries of the broad periods.

D. Dissertation

All students write a dissertation on a subject of their choice, but related to the work they have been doing over the year. You will be assigned to a member of the faculty who will act as your supervisor.