English pre-arrival information
Congratulations on securing your place to study with us in the School of English - we can’t wait to meet you! On this page you’ll find useful information and tasks to help make your transition to university as smooth as possible.
Your checklist
Complete your registration
The first thing you need to do is complete your registration.
Select Your Modules
Online module selection (OMS) is open. Please make sure this is completed before you arrive to enable you to start your studies. You can find all the information you need to select your modules on the link below
Not sure what you need to do? You can find more information about module selection by clicking here.
Student Laptop Scheme
This year will be our second year of running a laptop loan scheme for all our first year students in the School of English, to ensure you have access to a device to use in teaching sessions and for self-study. Whilst you may have your own laptop and prefer to use this for your course, you are eligible to apply for a long-term loan laptop provided by the University.
If you would like to take part, please complete this online form to tell us if you want to request a loan laptop or use your own. You will need to be logged in to your MUSE account and have your University username to hand. If you submit this form by Monday 15th September we will ensure there is a laptop ready for you to collect before teaching starts. You can still request a laptop after this date, but there may be a slight delay in your loan laptop being ready for collection.
Please also see the 'Making the most of your laptop' resource designed to support you in getting the most from your laptop as a tool to support your studies.
As this is a new scheme, we’d really like to hear feedback from participants, so keep your eye out for a questionnaire later on in the year
Watch the welcome from Anna Barton, Director of Education
- Transcript
Hello! My name is Anna Barton and I am the Director of Education for the School of English, which means that I head up the team of staff who are responsible for all aspects of your experience as a student in the School, from your modules, seminars and lectures, the support you receive from your academic tutor, to your engagement with employment opportunities and skills development.
I am delighted to welcome you to Sheffield and wanted to congratulate you on all the hard work you have done to get here.
Whether you are an undergraduate or a postgraduate student, whether you are coming to us from another country, another city in the UK or whether you are a Sheffield local, I am confident you will find us to be a welcoming, inclusive School. We are really passionate about and proud of the subjects we teach and we want to pass that passion and pride on to you.
So take a look around this site, whet your appetite for the modules you’ll be studying, familiarise yourself with the information about Welcome Week, complete your registration and module choice and I’ll see you soon!
You and Your Academic Tutor
- Introduction to Academic Tutoring
- Introduction to Academic Tutoring
- Why Academic Tutoring is important for student success
- What Academic Tutoring is and isn’t
- How Academic Tutoring works in the School of English
- How to contact your Academic Tutor and Where their office is located
- When can you expect to see your Academic Tutor; your responsibilities/my responsibilities
- Reminder about Core Academic Services
- Expectations and aspirations of University life
- What are you looking forward to?
- What are you confused about? Or concerned about?
- What are your main priorities for the next few weeks?
- Discussion about the School of English Mark Scale: making the transition to university level study.
- “Our Commitment”
We would like you to do some productive preparation for your meeting by thinking about the points above and visiting the links. It is important that you work on this in advance of Welcome Week to help you start the transition to university learning, and so that you can share your thoughts with your academic tutor and other students in your meeting.
Complete your Digital Induction
My Digital Induction is a guide to the apps and software you will use at Sheffield. You should complete this before you arrive to make sure you know how to access everything you need.
You will receive a lot of emails during your time at University, so it’s also important that you learn how to effectively manage your University inbox making sure that you don’t miss any important information.
Welcome week timetable
Our Welcome Week activities are a great way to meet your fellow students, and we strongly encourage your attendance.
- Monday 22 September 2025
Subject Intro Meeting - BA English Language & Linguistics + Duals Intro Meeting - BA English Language & Literature
During this session you will learn more about your academic department and programme of studies.
Time: 11am to 12pm
Location: The Diamond - G04 Workroom 1Intro Meeting - BA English Literature + Duals
During this session you will learn more about your academic department programme of studies.
Time: 11am to 12pm
Location: 38 Mappin Street - G11 - Workroom 2- Tuesday 23 September 2025
What you need to know! - All School of English students
In this session you will meet academic and professional services staff and find out about:
- Student Support
- Student/Staff Committee
- Student Wellbeing
- EngSoc - The English Society & student community activities
- Blackboard Ultra (VLE)
- Attendance
- Employability
Time: 2PM to 4:30pm
Location: The Diamond - Lecture Theatre 2- Wednesday 24 September 2025 and Thursday 25 September
Level 1 Academic Tutor Meetings: - All School of English students.
You will be allocated an Academic Tutor upon arrival . Your Academic Tutor will play a major role in helping you adjust to university life and get the best experience possible from your time in Sheffield. These initial meetings will be a relaxed group discussion; at which you will have the opportunity to ask questions and meet other students who share the same Academic Tutor.
To prepare for your meeting please complete the task (task 3) on the checklist page.
Please check your university email account during Welcome Week for the exact time and location of your first meeting.
- Friday 26 September 2025
School of English Welcome - All School of English students
An official welcome from Jane Hodson, Head of School and an opportunity to socialise with School of English staff and other members of your student cohort.
Time: 3pm to 5pm
Location: 38 Mappin Street - Workrooms 3 & 4
Dual degrees
If you’re on one of our dual honours courses, you might find it useful to also take a look at the pre-arrival checklist for your other subject.
English and History
Take a look at your History Checklist.
English/Linguistics and Modern Languages and Cultures
Take a look at your Modern Languages and Cultures Checklist.
English and Music
Take a look at you Music Checklist.
English and Philosophy
Take a look at your Philosophy Checklist.
Useful information
Student Societies
The Students’ Union has a wide range of clubs and societies run by students for students, this includes School academic societies. The English Society is a really active society offering a wide range of events and activities that you can get involved with, it’s also a great way to meet other students on your programme - find out more about the English Society.
Reading list
- EGH104 Varieties of English
- Beal, Joan C. (2010) An Introduction to Regional Englishes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
This book provides an excellent background for most aspects of the module, and if you read it you are likely to have a much better grasp of basic methods and concepts in the study of English accents and dialects, which will assist you in both of your assessments. It is recommended that you have access to this text.
There are electronic copies that you can access via Starplus, as well as physical copies in the library. You may also choose to purchase your own.
If you want to do some additional reading, further suggestions are given below:
- Bauer, Laurie. 2002. An Introduction to International Varieties of English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
- Hughes, Arthur, Peter Trudgill & Dominic Watt. 2012. English Accents and Dialects: An introduction to social and regional varieties of English in the British Isles. 5th ed. London: Hodder Education."Module Convenor - Dr Chris Montgomery
- EGH105 Sounds of English
- Carr, P. (2020). English Phonetics and Phonology: An Introduction (3rd ed.). Wiley Blackwell.
- Zsiga, Elizabeth C. 2013. The Sounds of Language: An Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
This book is available via the University Library as an eBook.
Module Convenor - Dr Ranjan Sen
- EGH106 The Structure of English
- Sportiche, D., Koopman, H., & Stabler, E. (2013). An introduction to syntactic analysis and theory. Wiley
Module Convenor - Jackie Ingram
- EGH108 Early Englishes
The course text book is:
- Elaine Treharne, Old and Middle English c. 890-1450: an anthology, 3rd edition (Oxford: Blackwell,2009)
***Please make sure to get the 3rd edition***
If you want to read about medieval English literature and language, or the English Middle Ages more generally, here is some useful material:
- Campbell, James, The Anglo-Saxons (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991) – wide-ranging and thorough, with lots of pictures (in black and white)
- Lewis, C. S., The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature – this was originally published in 1964 by Cambridge University Press, but several more recent editions are available; old but still a good introduction to the medieval world view (and yes, this is C.S. Lewis of Narnia fame)
- Mortimer, Ian, The Time Traveller’s Guide To Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century (London: Bodley Head, 2008) – a fun introduction to what life was (more or less) like in 14th -century England
- Turner, Marion, Chaucer: A European Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019) – a brilliant biography of Chaucer which also addresses the wider cultural, political, economic, and religious context of the middle to late 14th century
Module Convenor: Dr Charlotte Steenbrugge
- EGH111 Foundations in Literary Study
Shakespeare: Titus Andronicus. Most of you will be studying Shakespeare later on in your degree so it would make sense to invest in a complete works. Blackwells will be stocking the Norton edition. If you want to buy a single-text edition of Titus Andronicus, we recommend the most recent Arden, Cambridge and Oxford edition.
Margaret Atwood: The Year of the Flood
Module Convenor: Dr Meredith Warren - m.j.warren@sheffield.ac.uk
- EGH113 Contemporary Literature
- Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Jonathan Cape, 2006) *
- Abi Dare, The Girl with the Louding Voice (Sceptre, 2020)
- Jennifer Egan, “Black Box” (Available here)
- Ella Hickson, “Oil” (Nick Hern, 2016)*
- Musa Okwonga, In the End, It was All about Love (Rough Trade, 2021) *
- Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Penguin, 2015) *
- Roger Robinson, A Portable Paradise (Peepal Tree, 2019)
- Debbie tucker green, “Truth and Reconciliation” (2011)*
Texts marked * are available for free in digital format via the University Library and there are multiple print copies of all of the texts in the Library. If you prefer to purchase your own print copies for personal use, you can buy any edition of the primary texts including second-hand versions. The first text we will read is “Black Box” which you can access for free via the link above.- EGH117 Renaissance to Revolution
In addition to the optional modules you choose, in your first year you will all take EGH117, ‘Renaissance to Revolution’ as your core module. This module – which introduces you to English Literature from the early sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries – runs across the Autumn and Spring Semesters.
Most of the texts you study on this module will be available via the Norton Anthology of English Literature, 10th edn (which will be provided for you by the School when you arrive), or via the module’s Virtual Learning Environment, which you will be able to access once you have registered as a student in September.
Module Convenor- Dr Marcus Nevitt
- EGH118 Studying Theatre: A History of Dramatic Texts in Performance
PRIMARY READING/PREPARATION
The optional first year module EGH118 Studying Theatre provides a way to deepen and expand your knowledge of drama and performance by encountering theatre from different periods and genres. In preparation, and if you enjoy theatre texts, we encourage you to:
Read or attend a production of at least one significant or ‘canonical’ work of drama written since 1950. Possible examples would include something by:
- Samuel Beckett (e.g. Waiting for Godot)
- Harold Pinter (e.g. The Birthday Party)
- John Osborne (e.g. Look Back in Anger)
- Caryl Churchill (e.g. Cloud 9)
- Debbie Tucker Green (e.g. Random)
- Sarah Kane (e.g. Blasted).
Read or attend a production of at least one play written in the last 10 years. Possible examples would include something by:- Nina Raine (e.g. Tribes)
- Simon Stephens (e.g.Fatherland)
- Bola Agbaje (e.g. Take a Deep Breath and Breathe)
- Mike Bartlett (e.g.King Charles III)
- Caryl Churchill (e.g. Love and Information)
- Jez Butterworth (e.g. Jerusalem)
- Cordelia Lynn (e.g. One for Sorrow)
- Rory Mullarkey (e.g. Cannibals)
Read or attend a production of at least two plays written prior to 1950 and by someone other than Shakespeare! For instance you could choose a classical Greek tragedy in translation e.g:
- Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Euripides’s Medea or Sophocles’s Antigone or Oedipus)
- A Jacobean tragedy (e.g. John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi or John Ford’s Tis Pity She’s a Whore )
- A Restoration comedy (e.g. William Wycherley’s The Country Wife or John Vanbrugh’s The Relapse)
- A nineteenth century melodrama (e.g. Mary Braddon/C. H. Hazlewood’s Lady Audley’s Secret)
- A play written in the historical Avant-Garde (e.g. Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi) or a play by Ibsen (e.g. Peer Gynt), Strindberg (e.g. Miss Julie), Chekhov (e.g. The Cherry Orchard) or Brecht (e.g. The Good Person of Setzuan).
SECONDARY READINGIn order to expand your perspectives on theatre and performance, and on ways of thinking about them, we recommend that you look at one of the following:
- Duska Radosavljevic ed., The Contemporary Ensemble: Interviews with Theatre-Makers (Routledge, 2013).
- Deidre Heddon and Jane Milling, Devising Performance: a critical history (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
- Peter Brook, The Empty Space (Penguin, 1968). Reprinted many times, so any edition will serve.
- Richard Drain ed., Twentieth Century Theatre: A Sourcebook of Radical Thinking (Routledge, 2001). If you choose this, feel free to dip in and browse rather than trying to read it from cover to cover.
Please note, we are not at all recommending that you should buy any of these books, as they are not necessarily texts you will be specifically studying in classes. It is better to make use of libraries or any other likely sources you may have.
And finally, here’s a question to think about (and perhaps to have in mind as you’re reading): What is theatre for?
From the Theatre Academic TeamDr Carmen Levick
Professor Frances Babbage
- EGH120 Darwin, Marx, Freud
Seminar Schedule
Week 1 Module Introduction
Week 2 Nature, History, Origins, Endings
Charles Darwin, from The Origin of Species, Chapter 3, ‘The Struggle for Existence’ (pp. 114-129), Chapter 4, ‘Natural Selection’ (pp. 130-172), Chapter 14, ‘Recapitulation and Conclusion’ (pp. 435-460, London: Penguin, 1985).
Week 3 Is there any such thing as the ‘human’?Charles Darwin, from The Descent of Man, Chapter 1, ‘The Evidence of the Descent of Man from Some Lower Form’ (pp. 21-43), Chapter 3, ‘Comparison of the Mental Powers of Man and the Lower Animals’ (pp. 85-118), Chapter 21, ‘General Summary and Conclusion’ (pp. 675-689, London: Penguin, 2004) & Charles Darwin, from The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Chapter 14, ‘Concluding Remarks and Summary’ (pp. 319-334, London: Penguin, 2009).
Week 4 Biology & PoliticsPeter Kropotkin, Chapter 1 and Conclusion from Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution (London: Heinemann, 1902), pp. 1–31 &; pp. 292–300
Francis Galton, ‘The Possible Improvement of the Human Breed’, from Essays in Eugenics (London: The Eugenics Education Society, 1909), pp. 1–34.
Week 5 Theories of ValueKarl Marx, from Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, Chapters 1, Sections 1–4,
‘The Commodity’ (London, etc.: Penguin, 1990), pp. 125–177.
Week 6 Capital & AccumulationKarl Marx, from Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, Chapters 4, 5, & 6: ‘The General Formula for Capital’, ‘Contradictions in the General Formula’, ‘The Sale and Purchase of Labour Power’ (London, etc.: Penguin, 1990), pp. 247–280.
Week 7: Reading Week
Week 8 The Labour ProcessKarl Marx, from Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, Chapters 7 & 10, ‘The Labour Process and the Valorization Process’ & ‘The Working Day’, up to & not including ‘The Greed for Surplus Labour’ (London, etc.: Penguin, 1990), pp. 283–306 & pp. 340–344.\
Week 9 Mourning &MelancholiaSigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, in James Strachey (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14 (London: Hogarth, 1961),pp. 243–258.
Week 10 The Ego & the IDSigmund Freud, The Ego and the ID, in James Strachey (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 19 (London: Hogarth, 1961), pp.12–66.
Week 11 The WolfmanSigmund Freud, ‘The History of an Infantile Neurosis’, from The Wolfman and Other Cases (London, New York: Penguin, 2002), pp. 203–319.
Week 12 Module Review & Essay Preparation
Further ReadingDarwin
There’s an enormous amount and range of resources of Darwin, his work and its influence.
Search on Jstor and MLA bibliography for articles related to your particular interests (you’re bound to find something). There are two key websites that you should have a good browse through:
http://darwin-online.org.uk/
http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/
Here is a select list of texts that will be of use (they’re mostly in the library):
- Amigoni, David, Colonies, Cults and Evolution: Literature, Science and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Writing (Cambridge: University Press, 2007)
- Armstrong, Philip, What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2007)
- Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: University Press, 2009)
- Beer, Gillian. Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: University Press, 1996).
- Browne, Janet. Charles Darwin, two vols (London: Pimlico, 2003)
- Carroll, Joseph. Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (London: Routledge, 2004)
- Dawson, Gowan. Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability (Cambridge: University Press, 2007).
- Denenholz Morse, Deborah and Danahay, Martin (eds.). Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture (Ashgate, 2007)
- Dennett, Daniel. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (London: Penguin, 1996).
- Desmond, Adrian. Huxley: The Devil’s Disciple (London: Michael Joseph, 1994).
- Dyson, George. Darwin Among the Machines (London: Penguin, 1999)
- Eldredge, Niles. Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life (New York: Norton, 2005).
- Ellegard, Alvar. Darwin and the General Reader (Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg Press, 1958).
- Glendening, John. The Evolutionary Imagination in late-Victorian Novels: An Entangled Bank (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
- Gottschall, Jonathan and Wilson, David Sloan. The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (Evanston, ILL: Northwestern University Press, 2005)
- Haraway, Donna, Primate Visions (New York: Routledge, 1989)
- Levine, George. Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (Chicago: University Press: 1991).
- Levine, George. Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World (Princeton University Press: 2007)
- Levine, George. Darwin: The Writer (Oxford: University Press, 2011).
- Lightman, Bernard and Zon, Bennett. Evolution and Victorian Culture (Cambridge: University Press, 2014)
- Merrill, L. L. The Romance of Victorian Natural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Milburn, Colin. ‘Monsters in Eden: Darwin and Derrida’, MLN, 118 (3), 2003, pp. 603-621
- Miller, John, Empire and the Animal Body: Violence, Identity and Ecology in Victorian Adventure Fiction (London: Anthem Press, 2012).
- Moore, James. ‘Deconstructing Darwinism: The Politics of Evolution in the 1860s’,
- Journal of the History of Biology, 24 (3), 1991, pp. 353-408.
- Morton, Peter. The Vital Science: Biology and the Literary Imagination, 1860-1900 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1984).
- Norris, Margot. Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst &; Lawrence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).
- Pick, Daniel. Faces of Degeneration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
- Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992).
- Richardson, Angelique, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman (Oxford: University Press, 2003).
- Richter, Virginia, Literature After Darwin: Human Beasts in Western Fiction, 1859-1939 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011).
- Rupke, Nicolaas A. Richard Owen: Victorian Naturalist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).
- Schmitt, Cannon. Darwin and the Memory of the Human: Evolution, Savages and South America (Toronto: University Press, 2009).
- Secord, James A. Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: University Press, 2003)
- Smith, Jonathan. Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture (Cambridge: University Press, 2006).
- Steeves, H. Peter. Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology and Animal Life (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999).
- Stott, Rebecca. Darwin’s Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
- Stott, Rebecca. Darwin and the Barnacle (London: Faber, 2004).
- Vint, Sheryll, Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2012)
- Wilson, E. O. On Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).
- Wilson, E. O. Biophilia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).
MarxWe highly recommend David Harvey's lectures on Capital and you should also scroll down the website to find a range of brilliant books on Marx, including Harvey's. There's also plenty of introductions to Marx available through the library, including the Cambridge Companion to Marx (online access).
- Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of the Enlightenment (London: Verso,1997).
- Louis Althusser, On Ideology (London: Verso, 2008); Reading Capital (London: Verso,1997); Lenin and Philosophy & Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001).
- Etienne Balibar, On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (London: NLB, 1977).
- Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International (London: Routledge, 2006).
- Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction & the Feminist
- Struggle (Oakland: PM, 2012) & Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn: Automedia, 2004)
- Richard Godfrey, Jack Gavin & Campbell Jones, ‘Sucking, Bleeding, Breaking: On the Dialectics of Vampirism, Capital, and Time’, Culture and Organisation, Vol. 10, No. 1 (March 2004), 25-36.
- Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard UP, 2000); Multitude: War & Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York & London: Penguin, 2005).
- David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (London: Verso, 1999); A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); A Companion to Marx’s Capital (London: Verso, 2010); Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001); The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism (London: Profile, 2010).
- Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London:
- Verso, 1992); The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (London: Verso, 2009).
- Ann E. Kaplan & Michael Sprinker, The Althusserian Legacy (London: Verso, 1992).
- Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, Capital, in Collected Works (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1996).
- Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Macmillan, 1971); A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971).
- Matthew Maclellan, ‘Marx’s Vampires: An Althusserian Critique’, Rethinking Marxism, Vol. 25, No. 4 (October 2013), 549-564.
- Charles W. Mills, From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (Lanham & Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).
- Shahrzad Mojab, Marxism and Feminism (London: Zed Books, 2015).
- Warren Montag, Louis Althusser (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
- Antonio Negri, Goodbye Mr. Socialism: Radical Politics in the 21 st Century (London:Serpent’s Tail, 2008); Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1999); The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Polity, 1989).
- Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Zed, 1983).
- Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 2009).
Freud
- Cambridge Companion to Freud (online access through Starplus)
- Louis Breger, Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision (New York: Wiley, 2000).
- Malcolm Bowie, Psychoanalysis and the Future of Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).
- Henk de Berg, Freud's Theory and its Use in Literary and Cultural Studies (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003).
- Maud Ellman, Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism (London: Longman, 1994)
- Sigmund Freud, Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., ed. by James Strachey (London: Vintage).
- John Forrester, The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
- Diana Fuss, Identification Papers: Readings on Psychoanalysis, Sexuality & Culture (London: Routledge, 1995).
- Andre Green, Love and Its Vicissitudes (London: Routledge, 2005).
- Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (NY: SUNY Press 1991)
- Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (New York: Columbia UP, 1991); Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia UP, 1982).
- Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection (New York: W.W Norton & Co., 2004); The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997).
- Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale UP, 1990).
- Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis & Feminism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975).
- Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989).
- Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven & London: Yale UP, 1970).
- Peter H. Steeves, Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology and Animal Life (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999).
- Elizabeth Wright, Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reappraisal (Oxford: Polity, 1998)
- Slavoj Žižek, Everything You Wanted to Know About Lacan but Were Afraid to Ask
- Hitchcock (London: Verso, 2010).
- EGH102 Exploring Literary Language
The coursebook for this module is:
Simpson, P. (2014) Stylistics: A Resource Book for Students. London: Routledge.
There are two editions of the coursebook and the second edition is the most up-to-date. A free ebook of the first edition is available through the library.Module Convenor - Professor Joanna Gavins -j.gavins@sheffield.ac.uk
- EGH103 Hybrid Forms
Module Reading
Primary Material
- Plautus, Menaechmi
- Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
- Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors and Romeo and Juliet
- Noel Coward, Private Lives
- Michaela Coel, I May Destroy You
- Angela Carter, Wise Children **
- Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things **
Theoretical Material
- Aristotle, The Poetics
- Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World
- Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp’
- Martha Nussbaum, ‘The Morality of Pity’
** = texts for purchase (any edition will suffice for these two novels). The rest of your reading will be available freely/digitally via the module Blackboard site. The two novels by Carter and Roy are substantial (and fabulous); we recommend that you plan well ahead with your reading for these weeks in particular.
All secondary reading will be made available via the module reading list on Blackboard. Should you wish to start thinking about genre earlier than semester 2, however, the following are books are all extremely useful places to start (and can be
located via Starplus, the online library catalogue):
- Bevis, Matthew, Comedy: A Very Short Introduction
- Bushnell, Rebecca, (ed.), A Companion to Tragedy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005)
- Dubrow, Heather, Genre (London: Methuen, 1982)
- Danson, Lawrence, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Genres (Oxford: OUP, 2000)
- Nevitt, Marcus, and Pollard, Tanya, (eds.), Reader in Tragedy: An Anthology of
- Classical Criticism to Contemporary Theory (London and New York: Bloomsbury, (2019)
- Orgel, Stephen, ‘Shakespeare and the Kinds of Drama’, Critical Inquiry (1979), 107-23
- Poole, Adrian, Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: OUP, 2005)
- Snyder, Susan, ‘The Genres of Shakespeare’s Plays’, in Margreta de Grazia and
- Stanley Wells (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (Cambridge: CUP, 2001), 83-98
- Stott, Andrew, Comedy (New York and London: Routledge, 2005)
- Wallace, Jennifer, The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy (Cambridge: CUP, 2007)
- Weitz, Eric, The Cambridge Introduction to Comedy (Cambridge: CUP, 2009)
- EGH107 History of English
Please contact the convenor
Module Convenor - Dr Graham Williams - g.t.williams@sheffiled.ac.uk
- EGH109 Linguistic Theory
We use sections from these textbooks; they are not strictly followed as course texts. All the texts are available in some form electronically for EGH109 students.
Phonology:- Gussenhoven, Carlos, and Haike Jacobs (2017). Understanding Phonology, 4th edn. London and New York: Routledge. [Available as an ebook via StarPlus]
- Czaykowska-Higgins, Ewa, Michael Dobrovolsky & Francis Katamba (2011). ‘Phonology: the function and patterning of sounds’ in William O’Grady, John Archibald & Francis Katamba (eds),
- Contemporary Linguistic Analysis: an introduction. Harlow: Longman, Chapter 3, 59-115. [See also earlier/later editions of the same book with other editors]
Syntax:- Sportiche, Dominique, Hilda Koopman & Edward Stabler (2014). Introduction to Syntactic Analysis and Theory. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. [Available as an ebook via StarPlus]
Semantics:
- Hurford, James R., Brendan Heasley & Michael B. Smith (2007). Semantics: A coursebook, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Relevant sections made available on Blackboard]
- Löbner, Sebastian (2013). Understanding Semantics, 2nd edn. London: Taylor & Francis. [Available as an ebook via StarPlus]
Module Convenor - Dr Ranjan Sen -ranjan.sen@sheffield.ac.uk
- EGH110 Introduction to Creative Writing
The only text book you’ll be required to buy is Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
Required Reading
- Franz Kafka – Metamorphosis (Penguin, 2015)
Recommended Reading- Poetic Form and Writing Technique
"Let the neophyte know assonance and alliteration, rhyme immediate and delayed, simple and polyphonic, as a musician would be expected to know harmony and counterpoint and all the minutiae of his craft" – Ezra Pound
Understanding prosody - the elements of diction, stress, rhythm/metre and rhyme – means you will have an awareness of how music is woven into language in poetic writing, creating and/or assisting meaning in the words, or even sometimes subverting their prosaic meaning. It will help you to work with these elements in your own writing and editing, and to observe and critique the way your peers in the workshop are using them as well. Knowledge of poetic styles and forms (such as the sonnet or ballad, metrical and free verse) can also be useful to understand the work of others; playing with form will be a part of our workshops and homework. It is useful to know these ‘rules’, if only to be informed in the way you break them, Similarly, an awareness of the building blocks of fiction can help us to understand the mechanisms at work in the writing we are drawn to, and thus help us to experiment with these techniques ourselves. Understanding the application of eg. Interior Monologue, Intertextuality, Unreliable Narrators, Metafiction can increase our toolset when we come to writing our own work, as well as reading and critiquing that of others. The books below are a good starting point for understanding techniques, forms and their function. No need to read them all, and ask your course tutor for guidance in which might be most relevant to your particular interests:
- Peter Samson, Writing Poems (Bloodaxe, 1993)
- Peter Barry, Reading Poetry (MUP, 2013)
- Shira Wolosky, The Art of Poetry (OUP, 2001)
- David Lodge, The Art of Fiction (Penguin, 1992)
- H. Porter Abbot, The Cambridge Introduction To Narrative (CUP, 2005)
- Tom Bailey, On Writing Short Stories (OUP, 2010)
Writing about writing
The texts below are a selection of books in which writers reflect of the art of writing from the view of creators as well as critics of literature. There are opinions from a range of different angles within this list; some are almost manifestos; others are more meditations on the art and act of writing. By the end of the course it is hoped you will have a clearer idea about your own reasons for writing, and perhaps your own philosophy of what writing should be aiming to achieve. Reading widely about other writers’ divergent views on this subject brings your own work and thinking into a sort of silent dialogue with them; this is an enriching process. Many (most?) writers will speak or write about their writing in some format, so you are encouraged to seek out the reflections of your own favourites to build your understanding of how they work, whether this is essays, interviews, videos of lectures or talks. These are just some suggested starting points:
- W. N. Robert and Matthew Hollis (ed.) Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry (Bloodaxe, 2000)
- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (Ignota, 2019)
- Eavan Boland, Object Lessons (Carcanet, 2006)
- John Wilkinson, The Lyric Touch (Salt, 2007)
- Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry (Fitzcarraldo, 2016)
- Steven King, On Writing: A Memoir of The Craft (Hodder, 2012)
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (Norton, 2004)
- Ruth Padel, The Poem and the Journey (Vintage, 2008)
- In Their Own Words, eds. George Szirtes, Helen Ivory (Salt, 2012)
- Jorie Graham, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4w9DDt3Odgg [accessed 19/1/2021]
Recent Contemporary Poetry
If you are looking for an overview of the contemporary poetry landscape, or would just like to browse a large selection of writers work at once, then anthologies and journals can be a good place to start. Some of the bigger journals such as Poetry Review, Poetry London and PNR provide both a selection of fresh work and thoughtful essays and criticism of new poetry. There are also great online journals, some of which have a particular emphasis on certain styles eg. Molly Bloom focuses on ‘Modernist’ writing. Some suggestions for anthologies include:- Dear World and Everyone In It, ed. Nathan Hamilton (Bloodaxe, 2012)
- New Poetries, a series of anthologies from Carcanet, currently on its 8th edition
- The Forward Anthology published annually with work considered for the Forward Prize Sheffield, ed. Emma Bolland (Dostoevsky Wannabe, 2019)
Cast: The Poetry Business Book of New Contemporary Poets eds. Simon Armitage, Joanna Gavins, Ann Samson, Peter Samson (Smith/Doorstep, 2014) – this is full of writers who progressed from the very course you are on now:
- Wretched Strangers, ed. Ágnes Lehóczky and J. T. Welsch (Boiler House, 2018)
The collections listed below give a flavour of the landscape of contemporary poetry as it is today: diverse in subject, form, style and approach. Reading widely in poetry is the best way to develop as a writer and critic yourself, as you will understand the breadth of different styles and approaches you can take to your own work. Developing a sense of what appeals to you personally in a poem can then lead to a more critical understanding of how that appeal is crafted by the writer. Some of the books below work with traditional form, others are heavily influenced by the Spoken Word scene. Yet more create new forms based on ecological processes, the notes app on a smartphone, on song forms from various cultures, on contemporary understandings of the occult and spells… The list below is just a starting point; you are encouraged to explore your own taste in contemporary poetry and bring your reflections and findings to the workshops:- Daisy Lafarge, Life Without Air (Granta, 2020)
- Jericho Brown, The Tradition (Picador, 2019)
- Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic (Faber, 2019)
- Sumita Chakraborty, Arrow (Carcanet, 2020)
- Jay Bernard, Surge (Chatto and Windus, 2019)
- Rebecca Tamas, WITCH (Penned in the Margins, 2019)
- Sam Sax, Madness (Penguin, 2017)
- Mina Gorji, Art of Escape (Carcanet, 2020)
- Jorie Graham, Runaway (Carcanet, 2020)
- Juana Adcock, Split (Blue Diode Press, 2019)
- Caleb Femi, Poor (Penguin, 2020)
- Hannah Sullivan, Three Poems (Faber, 2018)
- Inua Ellams, The Actual (Penned in the Margins, 2020)
- Ocean Vuong, Night Sky With Exit Wounds (Cape, 2017)
- John Burnside, Black Cat Bone (Cape, 2012)
- Karen Solie, The Living Option (Bloodaxe, 2013)
- Ben Lerner, No Art (Granta, 2016)
- Kayo Chingonyi, Kumukanda (Chattto and Windus, 2017)
- Caroline Bird, In These Days of Prohibition (Carcanet, 2017)
- Ágnes Lehóczky, Swimming Pool (Shearsman, 2017)
Fiction Writers
You should read widely in modern and contemporary fiction, with particular focus on the short story as this is the prose form you are most likely to work with in this module. However, prose writing skills are easily transferable between the novel, experimental fiction, the short story… the key is to read fiction you like and to think about why you like it, how the writers achieve the effects you enjoy technically, to try and get inside the mind of the writer as much as possible. There are so many fiction writers a list is almost redundant, but the following gives a selection of writers working in numerous different styles: Elena Ferrante, Rachel Cusk, Chinua Achebe, Virginia Woolf, Eimear McBride, Olga Tokarczuk, Ralph Ellison, W. G. Sebald, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ursula K. Le Guin, Iain Sinclair, Angela Carter, Franz Kafka, Don DeLillo, Zadie Smith, Haruki Murakami, Milan Kundera, Primo Levi, Italo Calvino, Paul Auster, Marilynne Robinson, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Doris Lessing, Alasdair Gray, Katherine Mansfield, Margaret Atwood, Fernando Pessoa.
The below are some great poetry books recommended by previous tutors on this module if you are looking for further inspiration:- W. S. Graham, Malcolm Mooney's Land (1970)
- W. S. Graham, Implements In Their Places (1974)
- Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems: 1927-1979 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1983)
- George Szirtes, Reel (Bloodaxe, 2004)
- John Ashbury, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1977)
- Denise Riley, Selected Poems (2000)
- Frank O’Hara, Lunch Poems. (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, The Pocket Poets Series (No. 19), 1964)
- Geraldine Monk, Selected Poems (Salt, 2003)
- Roy Fisher, The Dow Low Drop: New and Selected Poems, (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1996)
- Capildeo, Vahni, Undraining Sea (Egg Box, 2009)
- Catling, Brian, Bobby Awl, An Authentic Narrative of an Imaginary Conversation between the Death Mask of Bobby Awl and B. Catling (Etruscan, 2007)
- Halsey, Alan, Marginalien (Five Seasons, 2005)
- Riley, Denise, Mop Mop Georgette: New and Selected Poems 1986-1993, (Reality Street Editions, 1993)
- Peter Robinson, The Look of Goodbye: Poems 2001-2006 (Shearsman, 2008) and English Nettles and Other Poems (Two Rivers, 2010)
- Fernando Pessoa, Selected English Poems, (Shearsman Books, 2007)Ben Borek, Donjon Heights (Egg Box, 2007)
- Simon Armitage, Selected Poems (Faber 2001)
- Eavan Boland, Outside History (Carcanet, 1990)
- Eavan Boland, The Lost Land (Carcanet, 1998)
- Polly Clark, The Kiss (Bloodaxe, 2000)
- Gillian Clarke, Collected Poems (Carcanet, 1997)
- Collins, Billy Taking off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes Picador 2000
- Mark Doty, My Alexandria (Cape, 1995)
- Carol Ann Duffy, The Other Country (Anvil, 1990)
- Carol Ann Duffy, Mean Time (Anvil, 1993)... and Rapture (Picador, 2005)
- Vicki Feaver, The Handless Maiden (Cape, 1994)
- Vicki Feaver, The Book of Blood (Cape, 2006)
- Jorie Graham, The Dream of the Unified Field (Carcanet, 1996)
- Tony Harrison, Selected Poems (Penguin, 1987)
- Seamus Heaney Opened Ground New Selected Poems (Faber, 1998)
- Seamus Heaney, District and Circle (Faber, 2006)
- Ted Hughes, Collected Poems (Faber, 2003)
- Jackie Kay, The Adoption Papers (Bloodaxe, 1991)
- Jackie Kay, Life Mask (Bloodaxe, 2006)
- Kate Kilalea, One Eye’d Leigh (Carcanet, 2009)
- Galway Kinnell, Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2001)
- Edwin Morgan, Collected Poems (Carcanet, 1990)
- Paul Muldoon, Moy Sand and Gravel (Faber, 2002)
- Daljit Nagra, Look We Have Coming to Dover! (Faber, 2007)
- Alice Oswald, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (Oxford, 1996)
- Alice Oswald, Dart (Faber, 2004)
- Ruth Padel, Rembrandt Would Have Loved You (Chatto, 1998)
- Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems (Harper/Collins, 1981)
- Jo Shapcott, Of Mutability (Faber, 2010)
- George Szirtes, Reel and The Burning of the Books (Bloodaxe, 2009) (and any other Szirtes collections)
- Wislawa Szymborska, New and Collected Poems (Faber, 1998)
Module Convenor Dr Agnus Lehhoczky -a.lehoczky@sheffield.ac.uK
- EGH117 Renaissance to Revolution
Core Module
In addition to the optional modules you choose, in your first year you will all take EGH117, ‘Renaissance to Revolution’ as your core module. This module – which introduces you to English Literature from the early sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries – runs across the Autumn and Spring Semesters.Most of the texts you study on this module will be available via the Norton Anthology of English Literature, 10th edn (which will be provided for you by the School when you arrive), or via the module’s Virtual Learning Environment, which you will be able to access once you have registered as a student in September.
Module Convenor- Dr Marcus Nevitt
- EGH119 Introduction to cinema
D. Bordwell & K. Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (McGraw-Hill, 12th edition, 2020)
S. Hayward Cinema Studies : The Key Concepts (Routledge, 6th edition, 2023)
P. Phillips & British Film Institute Understanding Film Texts : Meaning and Experience (British Film Institute, 2000)
International Students
Arriving in Sheffield
You should arrive in Sheffield ahead of welcome week starting on 22 September. This gives you plenty of time to settle in, find out more about your course, meet other students across the School and explore Sheffield before teaching starts on the 29 September.
International student success programme
In preparation for arriving in the UK, you might like to take our international student success programme, which is designed to equip international students with the knowledge, understanding and skills that are essential to prepare for and adjust to university study in the UK.
The programme includes four modules focussed on preparing for student life in the UK; culture: adapting and managing expectations, effective communication and looking after yourself and finding support.
Contact us
If you have any questions about our modules, your timetable or any other part of welcome week, please do not hesitate to contact the School of English support services team at: english-studentenquiries@sheffield.ac.uk