Module Convenors: Dr Stuart Middleton and Dr Jonathan Schroeder

This 30 CATS second-year module is compulsory for all English and History joint-degree students, and is not available to students of other courses.

This module builds upon the core first-year module, ‘EN126 History and Textuality’, by developing a more ‘hands-on’ practical approach to historical analysis and interpretation. Writing History is built around a sequence of four historical episodes or processes, and examines how they have been figured in prose fiction, history, poetry, and film. By engaging with different modes of making history, students will apply the theoretical knowledge they have acquired during their first year to historicise and critically evaluate historical and literary texts; consider the bases, nature and limits of historical and literary scholarship, and the relationship between them; and enhance their understanding of how the qualities of writing, and the intellectual and literary traditions within which it is undertaken, fundamentally shape our conception of historical knowledge and ‘truth’.