This course will introduce you to the key skills of English Studies, in particular close critical analysis and the use of contextual information.
In this course, we shall hone our skills of close critical analysis of prose, poetry, and drama. Through exercises in the analysis of sixteenth to twenty-first-century poems, plays, and narrative fiction in English, you will learn how to develop your opinions about literary texts into informed and convincing arguments. You will be introduced to key concepts and movements in literary criticism, and to key terms of the critical idiom. We shall also consider how placing texts in their literary, historical, and cultural contexts can help us to understand them.