Digital Bookcase
Explore the breadth of writing from the Department of English and Creative Writing. Here you'll find a curated selection of work by our departmental staff - from contemporary literature, fiction and poetry to reflections on centuries gone by.
The featured collections and works lean heavily on our sector-leading research, drawing from award-winning authors within the department. You can find comprehensive lists of publications and works by our staff by visiting their staff profile.
Browse our Digital Bookcase by category
Creative Non-Fiction
Standing at the forefront of the growing genre of Creative Non-Fiction, our authors explore the world through research and reflection, revealing a wide range of true stories with personal, social, and historical significance. Topics covered include medical poetry, whale strandings, tree climbing, rewilding, alternative geography, and Victorian celebrity and romance.
Fiction and Poetry
From intimate local characterisations, to playful twists on popular genres, to globally diverse narratives, our authors reflect the range of the human experience in their creative work, covering an array of topics including Cold-War romance, cultures of masculinity, climate change, colonialism and migration, Victorian waste, murder in the world of fashion, and apologetic pigeons!
Literature and Culture
Focussing on the intersection between literature and culture mainly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this category showcases a diverse range of research areas from a broad geographical spread, touching on topics including technology, literary cultures, comics and graphic novels, world cinema, and magic realism.
Literature and Politics
This globally diverse category features critical work which examines the intersections between literature and politics, with a particular focus on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It covers a vast range of topics of vital importance to modern life, including climate change, food systems, class conflict, post-truth cultures, global feminism, and post-colonialism.
Medieval and Renaissance
The Medieval and Renaissance period stretches across a thousand years from the fifth century right through to the late fifteenth century. The literature of this period reflects a diverse range of cultural, religious, and aesthetic attitudes and practices. The Renaissance period is characterised by the development of humanist philosophies and recoveries of classical scientific and artistic works.
Browse our selection of works on Medieval and Renaissance literature
Modernism
The Modernist period, coinciding with philosophical revolutions in politics, psychology, and science, was characterised by artistic experimentation, reflecting the increasingly fragmented and detached nature of modern life. The visual arts embraced abstractions, and a plethora of aesthetic manifestos encouraged practitioners to rewrite the rules of artistic creation. Poetry, fiction, and all literature, was never the same again.
Shakespeare and the Seventeenth Century
This period of early modern history spans the lifetimes of Shakespeare and his contemporaries through to the end of the Eighteenth Century, including the crucial cultural and political rupture of the English Civil War. Its literature includes of course the works of the Shakespeare, the composition of the King James version of the Bible, and also writers such as John Milton, reflecting the religious and political tensions of the day.
Browse our selection of works on Shakespearean and 17th Century literature
Eighteenth Century and Romanticism
The literature of this fascinating period starts with Pope and Swift and Defoe, charts the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 and heralds, towards its end, the rise of Romanticism and the remaking of English poetry. The period is also the age of the novel: Robinson Crusoe, Clarissa, Tristam Shandy, Frankenstein and the works of Jane Austen fall within its boundaries, telling between them the story of the novel’s evolution from novelty to canonical genre.
Browse our selection of works on 18th Century and Romantic literature
Long Nineteenth Century
Bridging the historical gap between Romanticism and Twentieth-Century Modernism, this period features literature which reflects the huge technological and political developments of the age, as well as, in Britain at least, the seismic shift from a largely rural lifestyle to a largely urban one. It is also a period of empire and globalism, and its literature celebrates, critiques, and interrogates this.
Browse our selection of works on Long 19th Century and Victorian literature
