NOTE: Almost all tutorial descriptions are taken from the University of Oxford website and are copyright University of Oxford.  Only the selection and matter for tutorials which reflect the research interests of SCIO staff members are copyright SCIO.

Except for tutorials in Old English and Old Norse the tutorials listed below cover only works written originally in English.  Students should not expect to be able to study in translation works originally written in a language other than English.

Old English Literature
In this course students will read a range of Old English texts—both poetry and prose—in their original language (though students are not expected to have any previous knowledge of Old English).  Texts may include: The Dream of the Rood, The Wanderer, The Battle of Maldon, Aelfric’s life of St. Edmund, Bede’s account of the poet Caedmon, and short extracts from Beowulf.  Students may be asked in tutorial essays to comment on aspects of content and style, and to show that they have a good understanding of Old English as a literary language by discussing such poetic devices as occur in selected passages (for example, kennings or variation).

Beowulf and its Cultural Background
Students will have the opportunity to make a thorough study of this poem.  They will explore aspects of content and style and will have the opportunity to demonstrate in tutorials their understanding of the meaning of various passages.  Students may study related texts including other Old English poems such as Finnsburg, Wedsith, and Deor, as well as modern translations of the poem.

Old Norse

This language has made a sizeable contribution to the vocabulary of English, giving us such basic terms as ‘sky’, ‘window’, ‘start’ and ‘they/them/their’.  The student gains enough knowledge of the language to be able to read one or two short works in the original (no previous knowledge is assumed).

English Literature 1100–1509
This course in medieval English literature enables students to study British texts and authors from the early Middle Ages to the early Tudor period.  Students may study Chaucer and other major fourteenth-century writers such as Langland, the Gawain-poet and Gower, and may also choose to study early texts such as the Owl and the Nightingale or Ancrene Wisse, as well as late medieval writers such as Malory and the Older Scots poets (e.g., Henryson and Dunbar).  This course of study will look at a rich range of genres in verse and prose, including the lyric, ballad, romance, devotional and mystical writing, and drama.

Shakespeare
Students for this subject may choose from a variety of genres and modes in their approach to the study of Shakespeare, including comedies, histories, tragedies, romances, and the sonnets and other non-dramatic poems.  Students may choose to focus on such issues as Shakespeare’s engagements with classical and later literary models, the relation of his writings to works by contemporary dramatists and poets, Englishness and foreignness, religion, and gender.  Students also may be given opportunities to think critically about the history of performance of Shakespeare plays, about specific interpretative approaches to Shakespeare, and about questions of disputed authorship, collaboration, textual variance, and revision.

English Literature 1509–1642
The course spans the period from the accession of Henry VIII to the start of the Civil War.  It includes Skelton at the beginning and Milton’s early poems at the end.  This period is rich in many famous authors: poets include Spenser, Sidney, and Donne; dramatists include Marlowe, Webster, and Jonson; and prose writers include Nashe, More, and Bacon.  Students will have the opportunity to relate their study of literature to its historical and cultural context, and to explore matters of form and genre.

English Literature 1642–1740
Students may address the writings of this period by author, theme, or genre.  This course is designed to give students a broad sense of the major forms and styles of the period and to introduce students to key texts, as well as allowing students the chance to explore less well-known materials.  The period covers Milton’s prose and later poems, Behn, Marvell, Rochester, Dryden, drama of the Restoration (1660–88), Bunyan, Defoe, Swift, and Haywood. 

English Literature 1740–1832
Students may study texts from this period by author, theme, genre, or historical context.  This course is designed to give students a sense of the major literary and cultural developments, as well as an opportunity to explore both well-known and less well-known materials from this very diverse period.  In terms of the better-known figures, the period covers novelists such as Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Burney, Austen, Edgworth, and Mary Shelley; poets such as Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Percy Shelley, and Keats; and non-fiction prose writers such as Hazlitt and De Quincey.  Mid-century writers such as Samuel Johnson and the poets Gray, Godsmith, and Smart are also possible topics for study.  Genres such as the Gothic novel or the fiction of sensibility are popular subjects.  Themes such as ‘the sublime’, ideas of national identity, historical issues such as the literary response to the French Revolution, and the exchanges between political writers such as Burke and Paine may also be studied.

English Literature 1832–1900 (Victorian Literature)
Students will study a variety of authors of this period from the following list: Dickens, the Brontes, G. Eliot, Hardy, Tennyson, Browing, Rossetti, Swinburne, Wilde, Hopkins, James, Collins, Thackeray, Clogh, Patmore, Carlyle, Ruskin, Pater, Gaskell, Braddon, Shaw, Meredith, Carroll, and Stevenson.  Issues that can be covered in this course include the development of realism, responses to industrialism, women’s writing, concepts of identity and selfhood, guilt and transgression, verbal and metrical experimentation, attitudes towards race and Empire, class, treatment of children, romance, and the relationship between literature and art.

Modern Literature (1900 to the present)
Students will have the opportunity to examine a range of authors, focusing on some of the major thematic and stylistic preoccupations of the period.  Issues that might be covered include ideas of literary language, literary experimentation, primitivism, popular culture, concepts of literary value, journalism, women’s writing, modernism, post-modernism, innovations in modern theatre, and ideas of the self.  Authors that might be studied include Conrad, Yeats, Kipling, Joyce, Woolf, T.S. Elliott, Forster, Lawrence, Orwell, Shaw, Auden, Waugh, Bowen, Amis, Golding, Lessing, Beckett, Osborne, Pinter, Stoppard, Larkin, Hughes, Plath, Hill, and Heaney.

American Literature
There are no specified authors here that each student will necessarily study, but students will explore the American cultural and historical context for the chosen writers.  Students may choose to focus on a particular genre or period or on a particular group of writers.

Students should specify at the time they choose this tutorial which authors they hope to study.

Postcolonial Literature

This allows study of Australian, South African, Nigerian, Indian, and other major modern novelists writing in English, and provides an introduction to postcolonial studies, covering topics such as: oppositional discourse; questions of gender in relation to empire, nation and globalisation; diaspora, cosmopolitanism and identity; and the problems of decolonisation. When this tutorial is selected for application, students should indicate interest in a particular country for study.

Special Authors
Students may opt to focus on a single author in this course, exploring the writings of the author as well as accompanying relevant issues relating to them, such as theme, genre, and historical context.  Possible authors for selected study include Chaucer, Rossetti, Hardy, Beckett, Heaney, Donne, Austen, Milton, Swift, Wordsworth, G. Eliot, Wilde, Joyce, T.S. Elliott, and Woolf.  Students should specify at the time they choose this tutorial which author they hope to study.

C.S. Lewis in Context
A detailed examination of all Lewis’s major works, including The Narnia Chronicles, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and Till We Have Faces.   In addition to discussion of his life as a writer, academic, and Christian apologist, Lewis’s literary and apologetic aims will be placed in context by comparing his texts with selected works by other writers, such as Milton, Spenser, Swift, and Tolkien, many of whose works Lewis taught at Oxford.

Women’s Writing
This course covers writing by women from the early Middle Ages to the present day feminist theoretical writing.  Students may choose to focus on a particular historical period.  As well as novels, drama, and poetry, students may have the opportunity to examine other types of writing, such as letters and journals.  Writers’ status as women writers will be considered, and feminist theorists will be studied.  Areas of concentration for this course may include women and language, feminism and psychoanalysis, women as reader, transmission and canonicity in relation to women’s writing, constructions of femininity, gender and genre, and the relation of gender to race, sexuality, and class. 

Critical Theory
Students will have the opportunity to study such topics as the nature of literary language, the formation of English literature as a discipline, the canon, literary form, textuality and intertexuality, theories of narrative, interpretation, the production and reception of literary texts, the relation of literature to gender, sexuality, history, ideology, philosophy and psychoanalysis, and theories of culture, cultural difference, ethnicity, and the postcolonial.

The History, Use, and Theory of the English Language
This course is designed for students with little or no formal knowledge of linguistics to write on aspects of the development and use of English and/or theories of language.  The periods covered in the course are typically from Chaucer to the present day, but students may cover material from earlier periods if this is of particular interest.  This course is meant to equip students with a sense of the history of English, an awareness of its cultural status, and some of the major controversies and debates surrounding its use.

Linguistic Theory
This course is designed to give students a general knowledge of theoretical linguistics with special reference to phonology, phonetics, grammar, lexis, semantics, and discourse structure and pragmatics.  Students will have the opportunity in tutorial essays to answer questions on major developments in linguistic theory since 1800. 

Poetry in English
Students may choose to cover poetry in English from the Old English period until the present day.  Students may wish to concentrate on a particular genre or historical period.  In addition, students may wish to focus on a particular region or country—e.g., Irish poetry.

Drama in English
Students can concentrate on the drama of a particular period—e.g. medieval, Restoration or twentieth-century drama.  Students will be given the opportunity to study different playwrights and to explore various themes related to the works of drama studied.

Fiction in English

Students can study the development of the novel in a particular period, e.g. the eighteenth century, or study a particular genre of writing across centuries, e.g. the horror novel, or compare several authors from different periods.

Medieval and Renaissance Romance

An opportunity to study e.g. the Arthurian legends across several centuries, as in the works of Layamon, the Gawain-Poet, Malory, and Spenser, or to look at other key works such as Sir Orfeo or Sidney’s Arcadia.

Prose in English

This allows the study of religious writings, philosophical texts, travel literature, biography and similar forms of serious prose.  Students choose one or more of these genres, but exploring one or two genres in depth is encouraged.  Writers could include medieval mystics such as Julian of Norwich, sixteenth-century philosophers such as Thomas More and Francis Bacon, essayists such as Dr Johnson and his circle, or nineteenth-century thinkers such as John Stuart Mill.

Creative Writing  SECONDARY TUTORIAL ONLY
Students will have the opportunity to study various aspects of how to write creatively, although the emphasis for this course will be on the students’ own attempts at writing.  Students may choose to focus on writing fiction, poetry, or prose.