Visiting Students - English Literature

English Literature

As an Oxford student, you will find that you are given a great deal of freedom to follow your own interests and work independently. Each course you take will be designed in consultation with your tutor, usually in an initial meeting at the start of term.

Formal teaching consists of one or two tutorials each week; either on your own or with another student. Each tutorial lasts and hour, and will usually consist of a discussion of the written work you have produced tha tweek, and of the reading you have been advised to do. In addition to tutorials, you will have the chance to attend any lectures you choose. Oxford also has a vast number of extra seminars, talks, readings, workshops, discussion groups, theatrical events and so forth, all of which will be open to you.

As a Visiting Student, you have considerably more flexibility than registered undergraduates because they study specified courses leading to final examinations. You are more likely to be taught on your own or with another Visiting Student than with the undergraduates at St Peter's. However, if you wish to be more fully integrated into the 2nd year - the year you will be associated with - you can take the same courses as students in that year. There are survey courses of particular literary periods - those primarily studied in the 2nd year are: Medieval literature, Literature in English 1550-1660, Literature in English 1660-1760 and Literature in English 1760-1830.

In the course of each eight-week term, we expect you to take 12 tutorials. The normal division is to take 8 tutorials in one subject and 4 in another. Those taking a double major, or with a major or minor in English, will have a similar workload divided over the two disciplines.

List of Courses

Anglo-Saxon Literature

Medieval Literature

Literature in English 1550-1660

Literature in English 1660-1760

Literature in English 1760-1830

Romantic Literature/Romantic Poetry (1780-1830)

Victorian Literature

Literature in English 1910 - the present

Chaucer

Shakespeare/Renaissance Drama

Milton

Wordsworth and Coleridge

Tennyson and Browning

Charles Dickens

George Eliot

The Brontës

Jane Austen

Twentieth-Century British and Irish Drama

Irish Literature, 1900 - present day

Toni Morrison/African American fiction

Literature and Empire

Decadence and the 1890s

Virginia Woolf

American Literature

Critical Theory

Nineteenth or Twentieth Century Children's Literature

Creative Writing