What can I do over the summer to prepare for my degree?

We are looking forward to welcoming you to the School of English in September. Below are some suggestions about how you might begin to get into gear for your degree. We don’t expect you to attempt to do everything listed here: do take time to relax and recharge over the summer so that you arrive ready to make the most of your time with us.

1. Broaden your horizons

One of the biggest challenges involved in reading English Literature at university is getting up to speed with the mythological, generic and religious contexts that literary works past and present draw upon. You can be sure that the degree at Sheffield will give you knowledge and understanding of literature from the Renaissance to the present day, but our focus will naturally be on the particular texts studied on each course. We will always encourage you to read around these texts, but there might not always be time during the semester to absorb all the cultural sources that underlie them. The summer before you arrive is an ideal time to look to fill some of the gaps in your knowledge, and to read works from periods that you may not know from school or from your own reading.

Sample some of the following:

• Classical literature in translation, e.g. Books 4 and/or 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid, a book or two of Ovid’s Metamorphoses; some of Homer’s Odyssey;

• A book or two of the Bible (King James translation recommended), e.g. Genesis, Song of Songs, one of the books of the New Testament (e.g. Gospel according to John, Mark, Matthew, or Luke; Revelation);

• Some medieval literature (e.g. some of Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, such as Book 1, on the birth and rise of Arthur, ‘Tristan and Iseult’, or ‘Lancelot and Guinevere’).

• Read an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century novel and compare it with a version on TV or film.

• You do not need to buy these books if you do not want to; your local library will be very happy to see you.

2. Seek out some performances

The degree programme at Sheffield also gives you the opportunity to study film, theatre and creative writing. In semester 1 you can study key dramatic texts from Ancient Greece to the present by choosing LIT180 Studying Theatre and in semester 2, by opting for EGH115 Theatre Texts: Genre and Adaptation, you can explore the processes through which classic texts are translated into performance.

What theatre is currently on offer in your neighbourhood, the locality, the region? This summer, can you attend a production of a 'canonical' work of drama and/or a production of a play that was written in the last 10 years? Look out also for performances that are not centred on play texts and not presented in formal theatres. Partly in response to the pandemic, you can also see an increasing amount of performance online: check out the Manchester International Festival (https://mif.co.uk/) and LIFT festival (https://www.liftfestival.com/).

If you are interested in taking one or more of our Theatre modules, you might also like to take a look at one or more of the following introductory critical texts:

Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Routledge Introduction to Theatre and Performance Studies. London: Routledge, 2014.

Wallis, Mick, and Shepherd, Simon. Studying Plays. Fourth ed. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.

Wiles, D., & Dymkowski, C. (Eds.). (2012). The Cambridge Companion to Theatre History (Cambridge Companions to Literature). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Zarrilli, Phillip B., et al. Theatre Histories: An Introduction, edited by Tobin Nellhaus, Taylor & Francis Group, 2010.

3. Watch some films

The degree programme at Sheffield also gives you the opportunity to study film. This begins in Semester 2, with LIT 181, Introduction to Film. See what you think of the BBC’s list of the twenty-first-century’s best films:

(http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160819-the-21st-centurys-100-greatest-films).

If you have not seen them before, check out Memento (2000), Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), Fish Tank (2009), Coriolanus (2011), Wuthering Heights (2011), Mad Max Fury Road (2014), Victoria (2015), Lady Bird (2017), US (2019), Tenet (2020), The Power of the Dog (2021)

4. Get ahead on your core reading

In addition to the optional modules you choose, in your first year you will all take LIT120, ‘Renaissance to Revolution’ as your core module. This module – which introduces you to English Literature from the early sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries – runs across the Autumn and Spring Semesters.

Below is a list of the texts, all from the anthology or above mentioned texts, that we’ll be studying on LIT120 across the two semesters.

If you want to make a start on your reading before you arrive, we’d usually recommend looking for copies in your local library, or on friends’ and relatives’ bookshelves. Fortunately, many of the texts are also available via open access web resources such as http://www.luminarium.org. Note that these on-line texts don’t come with the supporting material (e.g. explanatory annotations) that the teaching anthology provides, and some of them are in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century spelling (rather than the modernised texts we’ll use). We don’t study all the poems by Wyatt, Donne, etc: have a browse. Below is a list of authors from this rich period that you’ll read in your first year:

Autumn Semester

John Donne, selected poems

Ben Jonson, Volpone

Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy

Aemelia Lanyer, ‘The Description of Cookeham’ from Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum

Christopher Marlowe, Hero and Leander

Philip Sidney, extracts from Astrophil and Stella

John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi

Mary Wroth extracts from ‘Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’

Spring Semester

Aphra Behn, The Lucky Chance

Aphra Behn, Oronooko

Frances Burney, Evelina

Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative

Thomas Gray, ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’

Eliza Haywood, Fantomina

Andrew Marvell, selected poems, including ‘An Horatian Ode’

John Milton, Paradise Lost, Books 1, 2, 4, 9

Alexander Pope, Rape of the Lock (1712 edn; 2 cantos)

5. Read something contemporary

Another option at Level 1 is LIT 117, Contemporary Literature. This module explores a diverse range of texts (prose, poetry, drama) with a focus on works published in English since 2000. In this module, we explore some of the most urgent and controversial issues of our times which might include: the climate emergency; identity politics; state violence and armed conflict; political activism and social justice; artificial intelligence and the post human; animal lives and ecology; migration and displacement.

If you are interested in this module, you might like to sample one or more of the following texts below or check out one of the episodes from the acclaimed series Underground Railroad (Amazon Prime Video, 2021):

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Jonathan Cape, 2006) *

Jennifer Egan, “Black Box” (Available here https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/06/04/black-box-2 )

Ella Hickson, “Oil” (Nick Hern, 2016)*

Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Melville House, 2016) *

Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Penguin, 2015) *

Roger Robinson, A Portable Paradise (Peepal Tree, 2019)

Debbie tucker green, “Truth and Reconciliation” (2011)*

Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad (Doubleday, 2016)

Texts marked * are available for free in digital format via the University Library and there are multiple print copies of all of the texts in the Library. If you prefer to purchase your own print copies for personal use, you can buy any edition of the primary texts including second-hand versions. Blackwell’s University Bookshop will be offering a bundle price to match online retailers and secondary reading suggestions will be provided for each week on the module Blackboard site. The first text we will read is “Black Box” which you can access for free via the link above.