English Studies - Modules

Please note curricular information is subject to change. Information is displayed only for guidance purposes.

Junior Fresh Modules 

In the Junior Fresh year, Single Honours students must complete all eight of the modules listed below. Joint Honours students take four of these modules. All modules are taught by lectures and tutorials except for Origins of English, which is taught through a combination of lectures and weekly language classes.

 Single Honours and Joint Honours Compulsory Modules

• Genre: An Introduction to Literary Studies 
• Imagining the Middle Ages
• Early Modern Literature – Themes, Texts and Contexts: 1540-1660
• Irish Writing

Single Honours Only Compulsory Modules

• US American Identities
• Writing Childhoods: Power, Voice and Agency 

• Origins of English: Introduction to English Language and Literature before 1100
• Cultures of Retelling 

Senior Fresh Modules

In the Senior Fresh year, Single Honours students take six modules in English. Joint Honours students take two to four modules, depending on the pathways they choose. These modules cover further periods of literary history as well as Literary Theory and Postcolonial Literature. Modules are again taught through a combination of lectures and tutorials, alongside various forms of independent student learning.

• Writing the Body: Gender, Race and Power, 1690-1800
• British Romantic Literature
• Reading the Victorians: Literature, Culture, History
• Modernisms: Making it New
• Fundamentals of Literary Theory
• Postcolonial Literature: An Introduction to Key Debates and Texts

Junior and Senior Sophister Modules

In the Junior Sophister year, students follow two further core modules, choosing between a focus on Shakespeare, Popular Literature, Contemporary Literature and Creative Writing. All Senior Sophister Students also complete a substantial independent Capstone research project, which might be a dissertation, a study of material from the Library’s Open Collections, or a portfolio of Creative Writing.

Beyond these requirements, students choose from an array of over forty option modules taught at an advanced level in small group seminars. Reflecting the diverse research and teaching interests of staff in the School of English, these range from specialist Creative Writing workshops to modules focused on the work of specific authors, from modules considering certain areas of the English language to the exploration of particular literary genres. Recent options offered have included:

• Arthur Conan Doyle
• Cultural Encounters in the Global Eighteenth Century
• The Wild Child: Wildness in Children's Literature
• Writing Postwar England
• Irish Short Fiction
• Writing Prose Fiction: a Toolkit
• Global Shakespeare
• Irish Poetry After Yeats
• Nineteenth-Century Art Writing
• The Art of Murder: Nineteenth to Twenty-First Century Crime Writing
• The Art of Non-Fiction
• Children's Literature: Collections and Recollections
• Beckett's Contemporaries
• Humans, Other Animals, and Literary Genres
• The History Play: Shakespeare and After
• Writing Undead Gods from Plutarch to Lovecraft
• Writing from the Creole Americas
• Censorship and Irish Writing
• Poetry in Practice: Form, Voice, Image
• Ulysses in Contexts
• Amiable Hustlers: How to Sell a Children's Book
• Marriage, Sex, and Genre in Eighteenth-Century Ireland
• Surviving Trauma in the Middle Ages
• The Marriage Plot
• Violence and Contemporary Irish Fiction
• Environmental Picturebooks, Ecocriticism and Visual texts for Children
• The Ghost Story
• The Literature of Eating
• Early American Writing: Exploration, Settlement, Encounter
• Modernist Essayisms
• Past and Present: Irish Theatre since 1964
• Not a Waste of Time: Metaphor from Medieval to Modern
• Shakespeare in Ireland
• The ‘Other’ in Early Modern English Drama

For further information on course modules visit: www.tcd.ie/English/undergraduate/fresher