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This course aims to:

• Develop students’ awareness of significant developments in prose fiction from 1800 to the present, as appropriate.
• Develop students’ knowledge of the main literary and cultural theories used to analyse prose fiction.
• Enable students to understand the complexity of literary and cultural form.
• Enable students to develop critical abilities in the analysis of texts.
• Develop in students’ skills of academic argument, essay-writing and research (both electronic and book-based).
• Enhance student knowledge and employability through the formal provision of the Portfolio.

On successful completion of this module a student will be able to:
1. Understand the development and complexity of the key forms of the novel and the short story.
2. Accurately describe relations between texts and the cultural environment.
3. Demonstrate a detailed critical awareness through close textual analysis with the use of theory where appropriate.
4. Write cogent critical essays that offer a structured argument and awareness of the possibility of more than one interpretation.
5. Show enhanced skills of academic argument, essay writing and research (both electronic and book-based).
6. Reflect on their development of subject-specific and transferable skills, and their enhanced knowledge of the job market.

The precise content may vary from year to year to suit the individual cohort and reflect student feedback. However, in broad outline students will spend the first term studying significant novels of the nineteenth century alongside later filmic adaptations of those same texts, and the second term following the development of narrative form in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The first term would generally begin with Jane Austen’s Emma (1815) and Amy Heckerling’s cinematic adaption, Clueless (1995), proceed via George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), before concluding with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). The second term would begin with modernism as manifested in the novel (Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf) and proceed through the twentieth century taking in significant developments in relation to culture (e.g. the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Protest Movement), genre (e.g. the modernist picaresque) and theory (e.g. deconstruction). The contemporary period would be represented by postmodern works such as Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005) and Olivia Laing’s Crudo (2017).

Seminar:
In seminars texts will be subjected to close scrutiny and, through group discussion, students will be encouraged to develop their confidence in the accurate use of the main technical and critical terms which may be used to describe fictional form and effect.

Lecture:
In lectures, texts will be placed in their historical and cultural contexts and the history of prose fiction in English will be traced from the late 1700s to the present, thereby extending and developing understandings of prose fiction genres gained in Level 4 core modules such as Case Studies in Short Fiction and Literary Forms of Representation.

Group Study:
There is no formal group study component of this module but, as mentioned above, seminars are framed as exercises in collaborative learning and analysis, allowing students to pool skills and knowledge in a mutually supportive environment.

Self-directed learning:
On this module students have a significant amount of reading and viewing to do in order to keep up with what is to be taught week-by-week; they are also expected to reflect on lecture and seminar notes, to engage with secondary reading at specific points, and to work on their coursework and prepare for their exam.

Essay: 25% weighting, 40% pass mark.
Outcomes assessed: 1 - 6.
Word length: 1500.
Outline details: Students will write an essay responding to a selection of questions on the first text to be studied, with an option to write on a specified cinematic adaptation of that text, showing an understanding of prose fiction as a form and historical context.

Portfolio: 50% weighting, 40% pass mark.
Outcomes assessed: 1 - 6.
Word length: 2500.
Outline details: Students will write a 2,000-word critical research essay on any set text studied so far except the one discussed in the first essay; to which will be appended a reflective skills analysis that assesses the employability skills gained from the learning, research and writing process required for the essay.

Exam: 25% weighting, 40% pass mark.
Outcomes assessed: 1 - 5.
Duration: 1 hour.
Outline details: A one-hour exam in which students will answer one question on the twenty-first century texts studied at the end of term 2.

Nature of FORMATIVE assessment supporting student learning (This section must be completed)
Critical research essay proposal, 500 words. Formative assessment designed to prepare students for the second summative assessment.