English literature preparation
Welcome to English Literature and English Literature and Creative Writing!
Semester overview
The academic year at Surrey is divided into two semesters. In each semester of eleven weeks (the first runs from the end of September to December) you’ll be taking four modules.
As an English Literature student in your first semester you’ll be taking:
- Literary Histories (part one)
- Thinking like a Critic (part one)
- Understanding the Novel
- Global Literatures
As an English Literature and Creative Writing student in your first semester you’ll be taking:
- Literary Histories (part one)
- Introduction to Creative Writing
- Thinking like a Critic (part one)
- Understanding the Novel
Reading lists by module
Below are the reading lists, but we should emphasise that there is no pressure or necessity to read all (or indeed any) of the texts before you arrive. Once you are here, of course, you’ll also have access to texts via the Library and online library resources. What might be a place to start with is reading some of the longer texts i.e. novels, if you want to get ahead, for instance some of the novels from Understanding the Novel or from Literary Histories (see below).
We hope this is helpful – and there are some books and pieces of writing which look exciting here! Do feel free to contact Dr Gabriele Lazzari if you have any questions about English Literature, and Dr Liz Bahs for enquiries about the English Literature with Creative Writing programme – and we look forward to welcoming you here at Surrey in person soon!
Literary Histories
These texts can be found in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, but we would stress that most of the texts can be found for free online and there is absolutely no need for you to read them in advance of the semester.
Introduction to Creative Writing
Natalie Goldberg (2010): Writing Down the Bones: Chapters titled 'Man Eats Car'; 'Writing is Not a McDonald's Hamburger'' and 'Baking a Cake
Peter Elbow (1998): Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process. Second Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chapter 2 'Freewriting' (13-19) and Chapters at the start of Section 6 including 'Power in Writing (Intro)', 'Writing and Voice' (279-313)
Strand, M. and Eavan Boland (2000). The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms. New York/London: Norton. Chapter: “The Stanza” (136-155).
Furniss, T. and Michael Bath (1996). Reading Poetry: An Introduction. Harlow: Pearson. Chapter: “The Sonnet” (355-384)
David Lodge (1992) The Art of Fiction: illustrated from classic and modern texts. London: Penguin.
Alison Bell (2001): The Creative Writing Coursebook, Chapter 3 ‘Abstracts’ (44-49) + 1-2 contemporary short stories [tbc] from Jacob Ross (2015) Closure: Contemporary Black British Short Stories. Peepal Tree.
Alice Munro (2014), ‘How I Met My Husband’ in Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You
Thinking like a Critic
The critical and theoretical approaches we will explore on this module include formalism, structuralism, psychoanalytic literary theory, Marxist literary theory, and the critical writings produced by figures associated with the Harlem Renaissance. The set text for the module will be Literary Theory: An Anthology, 3rd edition, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Blackwell, 2017). If you would like to get ahead with some reading, useful places to start are:
- Toni Morrison, ‘Playing in the Dark’, in Rivkin and Ryan, pp. 1163–1173
- Viktor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’, in Rivkin and Ryan, pp. 8-14
- Roland Barthes, ‘Mythologies’, in Rivkin and Ryan, pp. 196–204
- Sigmund Freud, ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, in Rivkin and Ryan, pp. 615–617
- Karl Marx, ‘The German Ideology’, in Rivkin and Ryan, pp. 730–736.
Global Literatures
In this module, we will be reading a wide range of global texts; if you want, you can begin with:
Jhumpa Lahiri, In Other Words
Han Kang, The Vegetarian
Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Understanding the Novel
The primary texts on this module are:
- Eliza Haywood, Fantomina
- Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
- Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
- Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
- Muriel Spark, The Drivers Seat
- Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day.