THE UNIVERSITY of EDINBURGH

DEGREE REGULATIONS & PROGRAMMES OF STUDY 2026/2027

Draft Edition - Due to be published Thursday 9th April 2026

Timetable information in the Course Catalogue may be subject to change.

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DRPS : DPTs : School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures DPTs

Jump to: Year 1

Year 1 Academic year: 2026/27, Starting in: September

* Two 20 credit optional courses must be taken in total, one in semester 1, the other in semester 2

* The optional courses listed are recommendations although students are welcome to take 20 credits of other level 11 courses. These enrolments should be discussed with your Programme Director.

*Please note that all optional courses are subject to availability and that some courses may have limited spaces

Compulsory courses

Research Skills and Methods

Must be taken during Semester 1

Literature and Modernity I: Modernist Aesthetics

Must be taken during Semester 1

Literature and Modernity II: Late Modernism and Beyond

Must be taken during Semester 2

Research Methods and Problems in English Literature

Must be taken during Semester 2

MSc Literature and Modernity 1900-to the present Dissertation

Must be passed at 50% and taken during Block 5 (Sem 2) and beyond

Course options

These elective courses are Postgraduate ONLY

Selected courses must be taken during Semester 1

The Reign of Terror: Fear and Loathing in Romantic Literature

Twenty-First Century Fiction (PG Version)

The Graphic Novel: Narrative in Sequential Art (PG Version)

Modern and Contemporary Life-Writing (PG)

Representing Race on the British Stage, 1600-1850

OR

These elective courses are JOINTLY TAUGHT with Undergraduate honours level

Selected courses must be taken during Semester 1

Theatre, Performance, Performativity

The Long Summer: Edwardian Texts and Contexts, 1900-1910

Fairy Tales

Medieval Romance

Sex, Seduction and Sedition in Restoration Literature

Poetry and Northern Ireland

Black American Fiction

Modernism: Text, Image, Object (Level 11)

Censorship (PG Version)

Modern and Contemporary Scottish Poetry (Level 11)

Modernism, Myth, and Romance 1880-1940 (PG Version)

The Novel in the Romantic Period: Gender, Gothic, and the Nation (PG Version)

Global LGBT Fiction

The Queer Eighteenth Century

Illness Narratives through History (PG version)

Great Victorian Novel

Decadence, Dazzle, Dissent: Aestheticism and Cultural Politics in the Long Twentieth Century

Modernism's Moving Bodies: Text, Dance, Performance after 1890

AND

These elective courses are Postgraduate ONLY

Selected courses must be taken during Semester 2

The Literary Absolute

Acts of Story-Telling: Narrator, Text, Audience

Exploring the Novel

Commodities of Empire: Colonialism, Ecology, Culture

OR

These elective courses are JOINTLY TAUGHT with Undergraduate honours level

Selected courses must be taken during Semester 2

Listening for God: Silence in Modern and Contemporary Literature (PG)

Postcolonial Writing

Contemporary Scottish Fiction

Joyce and Style

Shakespearean Sexualities

Strangers to Ourselves: Post-war & Contemporary Writing

The American Novel, 1920-1960

Shakespeare Adapted

Decolonization and the Novel (PG Version)

Fiction and Espionage

Paradise Lost

Medical Ethics in Literature

Beastly Writing: Animals, Literature, Modernity

The American Novel 1970-2010

Desire and Writing: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Criticism

Fear and Fascination: Vampire Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century

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