PhD English Literature/Creative and Critical Writing

About This Course

If you take your PhD or MPhil in course in The School of English at Bangor University you will experience:

One-to-one teaching and supervision by established writers and academics.
The opportunity to develop your own specific interests, working in the genre and style of your choice.
The flexibility to study on a full or part-time basis.
The opportunity to develop an awareness of your own writing and writing processes through combining creative and critical work, preparing you for a future career in writing or as an academic.

The course provides you with the opportunity to work over an extended period on a collection of short stories, a novel or a collection of poems under the individual supervision of a writer actively publishing in your field.

What will you study on this course?

The MPhil in English Literature is awarded for a dissertation of not more than 60,000 words and the PhD in English Literature for a dissertation normally of not more than 100,000 words. Research may be carried out in the main fields of English literature post-1300; Arthurian literature. Areas of staff research expertise include: Arthurian literature, Chaucer and his contemporaries, medieval and early modern women’s writing, medieval and early modern drama, early modern autobiography, Shakespeare, George Herbert, Restoration drama, Milton, the literature of the English Civil Wars, Romanticism (especially Hazlitt and his contemporaries), Victorian literature (especially Dickens and Oscar Wilde), Welsh writing in English (especially R.S. Thomas), London-Welsh writing at the turn of the twentieth century, Modernism, Edward Thomas, the poetry of the First World War, Modern English and American Drama, David Mamet, film history and the screenplay, the history of reading, experimental writing, contemporary poetry, global literatures, comparative literature and postcolonialism.

PhD/MPhil in Creative and Critical Writing

This programme provides the opportunity to work over an extended period on a collection of short stories, a novel or a collection of poems under the individual supervision of a writer actively publishing in your field. Your creative work will be accompanied by a critical commentary, which should be mainly focused on exploring some idea, topic, genre, theme, writer or group of writers that has a relationship with the creative work being undertaken. Researching this element will ensure a good knowledge of current literary concerns. The critical commentary should include a section in which you discuss your own work and the ways in which it relates to the literary texts you have discussed. The major component of the PhD is the creative element, which the critical commentary is intended to support. The creative element should be 70,000 to 80,000 words in length if prose. For poetry an equivalent length, depending on the exact nature of the creative work submitted, will be negotiated with your supervisor. The critical commentary should be 20,000 to 30,000 words. The thesis, comprising both creative and critical components, is expected to have a total word count of about 100,000 words or equivalent.

You will be joining a vibrant postgraduate community and taught by staff with significant experience in teaching creative writing at postgraduate level. A number of staff members are published and award-winning authors, and are involved in a variety of editing and judging activities. We also benefit from the presence of the poet Professor Carol Rumens and the visits of Honorary Professor Philip Pullman.