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General programme information

This brand new MA focuses on an area of increasing interest to critics and theorists: the relationship between literature and materiality. Material culture has formed an increasingly important aspect of literary studies over the last decade, with subjects as diverse as travel, food, space, the city, sexuality, the body, violence, shopping, work, reading, and the family being fore-grounded in a number of significant literary studies.

Theoretical approaches and methodologies such as cultural materialism, new historicism, book studies, popular culture studies and the like have provided a framework in which the relationship between literature and the culture that surrounds it has been re-examined, and in which the materiality of the text has begun to emerge as evermore important.

The MA in Literature and Material Culture concentrates on literature from the 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, considering a diverse range of canonical, popular and forgotten texts in relation to key aspects of the study of material culture. The basic structure of the MA consists of:

• Research Methods
• a 15,000 word dissertation
• and three core modules: The Text; The Body/Space; and Consumption/The Everyday. These 12-week modules are each split into a number of shorter sections, taught by different tutors, and focusing on particular aspects of the issues concerned.

Research areas

18th, 19th and 20th-century English and American literature, post-colonial literature, literature of war, food writing, travel narratives, literature of addiction, dystopian fiction, crime fiction, working-class writing, literature and race, biography, sensation fiction, literature and religion, middlebrow fiction, material cultures, and the history of reading.

The quality above all that distinguishes the research work of the English team at Roehampton is a cutting-edge engagement with these new agendas. Examples of work in this area includes Dr Ian Haywood’s recent work on violence in the Romantic period (Bloody Romanticism, 2006); Prof Nicola Humble’s work on food (Culinary Pleasures, 2005); Dr Kate Teltscher’s work on travel (The High Road to China, 2006); Professor Zachary Leader’s work in biography (The Life of Kingsley Amis, 2006); Dr Kevin McCarron’s research on prisons, addiction and tattoos; and Professor Martin Priestman’s work on crime writing.

A new Research Centre in Literature and Material Culture was launched in 2006 to bring together the large group of researchers and PhD students with an interest in this area. This Research Centre forms a natural home for the MA, with students very welcome to attend and contribute to the regular talks, functions and conferences.

Length of programme

Full-time: 1 year Part-time: 2-4 years

Number of places

Full-time: 15 Part-time: 15

Number of Credits

PGDip: 120 MA: 180

Fees

Band 3

Contact the course convener

Dr. Mark Knight

Further information

Dr. Mark Knight
M.Knight@roehampton.ac.uk
Ext:3223

Programme details

Module details