MA, Texts and Contexts: Medieval to Renaissance
The MA consists of two parts. In Part 1, which runs from September to March, students complete the requirements for 3 modules:
EN6014 Texts and Contexts Subject Unit
EN6010 Preparing for Research
EN6015 Contemporary Literary Research: Skills, Methods, Strategies
Part 2, EN6017, involves researching and writing a dissertation of 15,000-17,000 words on a topic agreed by the student and their assigned supervisor. The dissertation is submitted in early October.
EN6014 Texts and Contexts Subject Unit
UCC provides a unique and privileged place in which to develop an advanced, interdisciplinary study of literature from the middle ages and Renaissance. Munster was home to a brilliant monastic and literary culture in the medieval period and also (in a far more problematic sense) to Elizabethan colonizers such as Edmund Spenser and Sir Walter Raleigh. The physical remains of this experience reside on the surrounding landscape in counterpoint to the associated texts; we draw upon this heritage where appropriate.
Students choose two of the following options in the taught course:
Option A: Soldiers, Scholars and Saints - Old English Language and Literature to 1100
Option B: Literature in the Age of Chaucer - Middle English writing and its contexts 1100-1500
Option C: Literature in the Renaissance - Reform and Revolution
Topic areas may include:
- Interactions between pagan and Christian culture in the Anglo-Saxon period
- The heroic ethos in Old English literature
- Questions of identity, religion and belief in Middle English literature
- Middle English literature of mortality
- Gender, sexuality, and writing in the early modern period
- Elizabethan Ireland and early modern colonial writing
- Theories of authorship, reading, and books in material culture
- Film representations of the medieval and early modern periods.
Teaching staff: Dr Tom Birkett, Dr Andrew King, Dr Kenneth Rooney, Dr Edel Semple
For further details, please consult the current Course Outline, browse the UCC Book of Modules or contact the co-ordinator, Dr Ken Rooney (021) 490 1841 k.rooney@ucc.ie
