Welcome to the English section of Christ's College's website. If you're interested in applying to read English at Cambridge, we have lots of information here for you. Click on the tabs above to browse the sections.

The Milton mulberry tree

Part I Director of Studies:
Dr James Wade (medieval literature)
Part II Director of Studies:
Dr Gavin Alexander (literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries)

Other Fellows in English:
Dr Sophie Read on leave in 2012-13 (literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries)

Number of students admitted each year: 6 - 8
University Website: http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/

First Court

For five hundred years people from Christ's College have contributed to English literature. Lady Margaret Beaufort, the foundress, translated books from French, and sponsored early printers of English books. In the 1550s or 1560s the students 'in Christes Colledge in Cambridge' acted one of the earliest English comedies, the bawdy Gammer Gurton's Needle (printed in William Tydeman, Four Tudor Comedies, Penguin Classics). In the 1950s a recent fellow, C.P. Snow, wrote a set of psychological novels, including The Masters, set in a college suspiciously like ours. In between the college was famous for its writers such as Henry More and William Paley who wrote generously on philosophy - a subject which some students still opt to study within the history of English 'writing'. Poets in college included the modern comic poets C.S. Calverley and Gavin Ewart, the seventeenth-century royalist John Cleveland and his famous contemporary John Milton,

who went on to write the greatest long poem in English, Paradise Lost, and the most moving defence of the freedom of the press, entitled Areopagitica.

There is also a long tradition of the study of English literature by people from our college. Among the earliest students was John Leland who was employed by Henry VIII to study the medieval literature in the monastic libraries that Henry was destroying. Leland went mad under the strain of the job of being the first English literary historian. Another Christ's student, George Puttenham, wrote the first major work of literary criticism in English, The Art of English Poesy, published in 1589 (excerpted in Gavin Alexander, Sidney's 'The Defence of Poesy' and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, Penguin Classics). When people began studying English literature in universities in the Victorian period, one of the pioneers was a fellow of the college, W.W. Skeat - in whose honour we give a prize for the best first-year results. Skeat was the first person to study Chaucer's and Langland's poems in a methodical way. More recently, critics who have been fellows of the college have included L.C. Knights and Christopher Ricks (who remains an honorary fellow). We hope that you will join us in this tradition.

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The English course at Cambridge (called a 'tripos') is a course of literary criticism, of reading, thinking about and writing about great drama, verse, fiction and non-fiction. In the first two years (called Part I), you will follow the thread of literature in English from the writers of the fourteenth century who first dared to write in their mother tongue to those who sought new ways of representing reality in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. You will be required to range widely from the Middle Ages to the present, studying the full range of periods, but within that range there are few 'set texts': for each period you will work with your 'supervisor' (a sort of personal tutor) to choose the literary works or philosophical or cultural questions which seem most of interest. Alongside this story, you study the theory and practice of literary criticism.

In the third year (part II) you will study tragedy from ancient Greece through Shakespeare and Racine to Edward Albee and Sarah Kane.

And you will then have many options for further study: specialist options on (say) medieval dream-visions, the Civil War, Victorian culture or modernist short-stories; literature from America, India, Africa and elsewhere; moral philosophy or aesthetics; or the links between literature and theatre or the visual arts. Finally, you will write one or two dissertations on a literary topic of your choice - a chance to pursue really original research and thinking. The dissertation can relate English literature to foreign literature, another art-form or linguistics if you so wish. Recent topics have included travel in medieval drama, prostitutes in the eighteenth century and Auden's poetry about animals.

The Fellows' Garden in the summer

The course is hard work but exhilarating, combining a thorough training in the essentials of English literature with freedom to explore your own interests. You have the freedom to explore works and ideas with freedom, because it is not until the end of the second year that you have examinations and write assessed coursework. In the third year there are examinations on tragedy, practical criticism (the close analysis of unseen passages) and your chosen optional papers. A table listing all the papers is given in the Course Details section.

Teaching is normally based in college, although for some papers it is conducted by somebody from another college with a special interest. You will be taught in one-to-one and two-to-one 'supervisions', or meetings rather like conversations, for each of which you prepare a short essay or other piece of work as a talking-point. We pride ourselves at Christ's on our supervisions, especially in taking care over people's writing skills. You will also have classes in groups of 6-8 in college and of 10-20 in the central Faculty of English for some papers (for example Shakespeare), giving you the chance to debate with other students. The Faculty of English runs further lectures and seminars, from which you choose the ones most interesting to you or most relevant to the reading you are doing. However, this teaching will fill only a few hours of the week. You will spend most of your time - we expect thirty hours a week - reading and researching, following the guidance of your supervisor.

Enthusiasm for literature and cultural life underpins everything that we do, for literary studies merge work and play to a curious degree. We have had summer supervisions on Milton's prose-style beneath the mulberry tree planted in the year of his birth. We have had evening seminars with guests telling us about Tolstoy or with recent films for discussion. We have an annual Middle English mistranslation competition, an annual trip to The Globe and more bacchanalian revels at our annual dinner, Christmas party and garden party. In 2008 we celebrated Milton's four-hundredth birthday with lectures, plays and a reading aloud of all of Paradise Lost in one day (!). The students launched a website for year 12 and 13 pupils who want to learn about Milton, called Darkness Visible at /darknessvisible/ and themselves taught classes on Milton to visiting year 12 pupils. (See /milton400/).

The English students also independently act in plays, such as Romeo and Juliet in the Master's garden, design theatrical costumes professionally, sell their paintings and hold grants for the visual arts, sing or play in orchestras and musicals, read Dryden aloud on Radio 4, or participate in University Challenge. Some have energized student politics or written journalism for student newspapers and occasionally the national press. Many English students write creatively, and some have even won prizes and been published. They are also frequently awarded travel grants - of which Christ's College has many - to do social work in India or visit Italy to brush up a language or visit museums. After graduation one or two stay at Christ's for MPhils and PhDs, recently in subjects from Renaissance literature and painting to Nabokov's novels; others study topics further at other universities, from the Enlightenment in Harvard to postcolonial writing in Belfast. Most, of course, go into all manner of other professions: barristers and business people, PR consultants for diamond dealers, radio journalists, kindergarten teachers in Italy, schoolteachers in inner cities, and many other things. All take with them the memory of three years of reading the works of some of the greatest minds, and of stretching their own minds to be independent, creative and searching in work and play.

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We are looking for your enthusiasm for literature and for signs that you are a 'self-starter', ready for independent study. Most importantly, you should be a keen reader. You should want to spend a week reading four or five plays by Shakespeare or Beckett (say). You should already read good books - and decide what you think count as good books - beyond the 'set texts' of school. In whatever genres or periods interest you, you should enjoy thinking exactly about the ways in which writers use words, with intelligence, with sensitivity and with a sense of humour.

1st year English students Hope Bryant and Milena Messner discuss literary matters

You should have intellectual curiosity. You should relish the opportunity to have a 'supervision' or conversation about your interests, whether with a professor sharing her years of knowledge or with a brilliant young graduate student developing radical new ideas, hoping to learn from them and to teach them something in turn. You should enjoy a whole class uncovering the language, metre and politics of one poem in depth. And you should enjoy a research-project in which, over weeks in the rare book library, you become the expert on whatever curious question you choose.

Our offers are usually A*AA at A2 Level, or the equivalent in other qualifications. Neither we nor the Faculty of English in Cambridge overall have any fixed rules about which other subjects you should have studied, beyond the requirement to study some English Literature A2. At Christ's College, we select each of you on your abilities in English studies alone. However, we do have recommendations in choosing A2/IB subjects which will prepare you for the course. We find that people with 'combined' English Language and Literature A2 frequently are not as as well prepared when they arrive as people with 'single' English Literature A2.

College snowman, First Court, winter 2013

There is no need to study English Language A2 separately as well as English Literature A2, out of only three subjects, as that might be a slightly narrow preparation. Overall, we would encourage you to consider traditional academic rather than practical or vocational subjects, in order to improve - and to prove to yourself - your ability to read widely in independent study, to conduct critical analysis of primary texts or scientific data, and to engage with long and complex traditions of intellectual thought. We would also recommend a foreign language at A2 - no matter what language - as a way to sharpen your ability to understand the English language and its literature, as well as being a useful tool for the student of the humanities and a useful skill for life. The University of Cambridge has recommendations on A2 or IB subjects which prepare you for academic study.

Firstly, when you submit your applications, on your personal statement tell us mostly about your literary, academic and other cultural interests, so that we can discuss them with you at the interview. These interests are of most concern to us in judging your preparedness for the course. When we receive your application, we will ask you to send to us two essays written for English teachers at school and marked by them. These essays should be samples of your normal schoolwork and not specially prepared projects. (You should keep photocopies for your own reference.)

College in the snow

It is likely that you will be invited for interview in November or December. In your interviews we might well discuss your essays (see below), as we would in a 'supervision'. We may also offer you a short passage or poem to read and discuss on the spot ('unseen' or 'practical criticism'). We will certainly ask you about your interests in literature in general beyond your set schoolwork. In addition, we will ask you to sit a short written test on the same day as your interviews.

The written test will ask applicants to offer a commentary on a short extract of verse or prose. It is not intended to test applicants' familiarity with any particular text; rather, it will be an opportunity for them to demonstrate their approaches to literature more broadly, and to show what strategies and techniques they might bring to bear in the analysis of literary writing.

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	Dr Gavin Alexander teaches a wide range of topics across the whole of English literature, as well as specialising in Renaissance literature, the area of most of his research. Papers he teaches within College and the Faculty include (Part I) Renaissance literature, Shakespeare, and Practical Criticism and Critical Practice; and (Part II) Tragedy, Practical Criticism, History and Theory of Literary Criticism, and Lyric. His books include a study of the literary afterlife of the great Elizabethan writer Sir Philip Sidney, Writing After Sidney (Oxford, 2006); a Penguin Classics anthology of Renaissance Literary Criticism (2004); and an edition of a recently discovered Elizabethan treatise on poetics, William Scott's The Model of Poesy (Cambridge, 2013). Among his particular interests are the reception of ancient literature and thought, rhetoric, poetics, the history of versification, the relations between literature and music, and lyric poetry.
	Dr Sophie Read worked formerly as a publisher. Her main research interest is the rhetoric of religious language in seventeenth-century poems and sermons, but she also works on and teaches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. She has written essays on puns in the work of Shakespeare and Lancelot Andrewes and on contemporary poetry, which is her other academic interest.
	Dr James Wade studies and teaches the literature of the Middle Ages (1066-1550). He writes primarily on romance, including the Arthurian legends, though he is also interested in how these stories of adventure relate to other forms of writing in the period, including chronicles, court poetry, lyrics, Saint's Lives and exempla.

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In Part I you are introduced to the full range of English literature from the Middle Ages to the present day. There are few set texts, so that while you must study widely, you can also focus on topics of interest. Over the first two years, you take two compulsory papers:

• English Literature and its Contexts 1300-1550
• Shakespeare

And you choose four from the following:

• Practical Criticism and Critical Practice
• Early Medieval Literature and its Contexts 1066-1350
• English Literature and its Contexts 1500-1700
• English Literature and its Contexts 1660-1870
• English Literature and its Contexts 1830-1945, or English Literature and its Contexts 1870-Present

One or two of the last three optional papers can be replaced with coursework (one dissertation and one portfolio of essays).

In Part I you are also given options to borrow papers on Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, Classics, Modern Languages, and Linguistics.

Compulsory papers:

Then one dissertation plus either two of the following or a second dissertation and one of the following:

1. Practical criticism
2. Tragedy
3. Chaucer
4. Dreams and visions 1066 - 1500
5. Special period 1500 - 1547
6. Special period 1847 - 1872
7. Choose from:
   
   1. Shakespeare in performance
   2. Literature, culture and crisis 1631-71
   3. Lyric poetry
   4. Modernism and the short story
8. Moralists (moral philosophy from Plato to the present)
9. History and theory of literary criticism
10. Commonwealth and postcolonial literature
11. American literature
12. Choose from:
    
    1. Literature and visual culture
    2. Contemporary writing in English

New options are regularly introduced in papers 3 - 12. It is also usually possible to 'borrow' papers from the courses in modern languages or linguistics.

• one supervision (in pairs or alone), for which you write an essay of about 1,500-2,000 words most weeks
• one class in practical criticism or critical theory (in a group of three or four), for which you write one or two short timed essays each term
• one fortnightly class on a foreign literature or on English linguistics (in a group of six to twenty), with some preparatory homework
• one seminar for wider study (in a group), for which you prepare one or two short oral presentations each term
• roughly five or six lectures, chosen from any on offer that interest you
• about thirty hours of reading and private study to complete the above
• about half and hour a day practising skills in a foreign language or the analysis of English language

Cambridge Authors: http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/cambridgeauthors/

Darkness Visible: a resource for studying Milton's Paradise Lost, made by Christ's students: /darknessvisible/

Milton 400: 400th anniversary celebrations of John Milton: /milton400/

Medieval Imaginations: http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/medieval/

Converse: http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/converse/

English Virtual Classroom: http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/classroom/index.htm

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