English Literature and Creative Writing

Explore the rich traditions of literature while developing your distinctive voice and style as a writer.

In a city that has literary heritage including Dickens, Chaucer and Marlowe you will study a broad range of genres, styles and formats. Whether you love Jane Austen or William Shakespeare, dystopian fiction, the gothic or modern and contemporary poetry, we specialise in the literature you are passionate about.

But English Literature isn’t just about the past - you will also consider themes and topics that are relevant today such as the environment, power and protest, the social impacts of technology or contemporary feminism.

Our unique project-based programme also allows you to experiment with format and voice. You can shape your degree according to your interests; you might make a documentary film, script a video game, assemble a journal, compose a collection of poetry, write a novella or plan and pitch an exhibition.

Whether you want to work as an author, publisher or journalist, or perhaps you just love books, this course combines creativity and criticism and gives you essential employability skills that can be applied to a wide range of careers.

Year 2

The following modules are what students typically study, but this may change year to year in response to new developments and innovations:

Compulsory modules currently include the following:

• Approaching Poetry

  Feminist poet and critic Adrienne Rich suggested that poetry could be a space that allows ‘the structures of power to be described and dismantled’. Romantic poet P. B. Shelley called poets ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’. Can poetry help us reimagine and restructure our world? What forms might those imaginings and restructures take? What are you and your poetry, invested in? And what kinds of writing could your poetry be?

  You'll approach these questions from different angles. You will have the opportunity to discuss and learn how to write texts for sound performance, visual texts, traditional poetic forms, prose poems and lyric essays. We will explore what poetry can be and where it meets prose, art, and music, looking at a range of writers: from more traditional poetic texts to contemporary and experimental writing that defies traditional form and easy categorisation as a ‘poem’, and investigating how language can be played with through writing experiments and exercises.

• Writing Fiction

  How do writers craft stories that are compelling, thought-provoking and original? What are the building-blocks of successful fiction writing, and what can we learn from writers past and present — including each other?

  Each week, you'll explore a key concept of story-telling, such as point-of-view; characterisation; dialogue; plot; structure and planning; voice and tone; description and imagery; location and place; editing and re-editing; theme. You'll also take part in writing workshops, developing your skills as an editor of your own work and that of others.

• Right/Write to the World: Displacement, Social Movements, Political Action

  To have the right to the world is to have the right to write, read and construct the world; the right to make a different world.

  In this project-based module you'll investigate a range of literatures and arts that focus on the right to the world as related to displacement, movements and actions. Drawing on Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’ and ‘right to difference’, you'll interrogate who has the right to the world, and explore the ways authors and artists have struggled to claim the right to construct the world they inhabit. In doing so, you reflect on the world we live in, and highlights the relationship between rights and internal/external displacement, social movements and political action that relate to local, national and global practices of creative activism. In order to equip students with an understanding of the right to the world and creative activism across contemporary and past struggles, the module introduces works in diverse forms (e.g. fiction/non-fiction, written, performative/audio-visuals, archival) that transitions between key moments, movements, mobilities. You'll finish by creating a self-devised creative or critical project that writes to the world and raises public awareness.

Optional modules may include the following:

• Shakespeare: Before and After

• World Literatures in English

• American Modernities: US Literature 1930 to the Present

• Becoming America: From Poe to The Great Gatsby

• Encounters with the Premodern, 1350-1700

• Modernism

• Reading Victorian Literature

• The Contemporary

• When Novels Were Novel: Eighteenth-Century Literature

Please see the course page on our website for full module details.

Year 3

The following modules are what students typically study, but this may change year to year in response to new developments and innovations:

Compulsory modules currently include the following:

• The Project

  Have you ever wanted to research a subject in depth and change the way we look at an issue through literature? Write your own novel or poetry collection? Across two terms, you'll create a guided independent project exploring your personal and/or professional interests.

  You'll take a guided strand relevant to your chosen project and complete your course having created piece of work that can exist independently. You could be guided to make and publish your own book, to write your own dissertation on a topic of your choice, or write a new portfolio of creative texts. You'll explore your own subject matter, develop your independent research skills, enhance your creative/critical skills and lay claim to an area of study in your chosen form.

  You'll write a proposal for your project and are assigned a supervisor accordingly. Feasible project proposals depend on being able to match projects with an appropriate supervisor, so may shift in scope from year to year depending on staff availability. You'll be led through the development of your project by a combination of one-to-one supervisions, and a series of lectures and workshops designed to hone the ideas and skills you need to fulfil your project. During the development of the project, you will submit plans and literature reviews and offer a presentation on your work as it progresses.

  The Project presents a chance to devote a sustained period of time to an area for which you feel enthusiasm, curiosity, and passion. The focus is an in-depth scrutiny of a subject through primary and secondary research and writing and compositional processes.

  In this capstone module, you work as a literary critic or a professional writer to put the research skills and training developed earlier in your degree into practice. The Project will also help foster transferable skills such as: organisation; independence; and project-management.

Optional modules may include the following:

• A Woman’s Tale: Writing Female Identity and Experience in Medieval Europe

• American Crime Fiction

• Animals, Humans, Writing

• Beginning to Write a Novel

• The Brontës in Context

• Centres and Edges: Modernist and Postcolonial Quest Literature

• Cross-Cultural Coming-of-Age Narratives

• The End of Empire: Post-Imperial Writing in Britain

• Foundations of Activism

• Global Capitalism and the Novel

• Innovation and Experiment in New York, 1945-2015

• Magic, Marvels and Monsters in Medieval Literature

• Marlowe vs Shakespeare

• Perceptions, Pathologies, Disorders: Reading and Writing Mental Health

• Places, Journeys, Borders

• Queer Literature

• Representing World War Two

• #ShakeRace: Shakespeare and Racial Politics

• The End of the World

• The Gothic: Origins and Exhumations

• The Love Poem: Romantic Language from Thomas Wyatt to Taylor Swift

• The New Woman: First Wave Feminism and Women’s Writing, 1880-1920

• The Unknown: Reading and Writing Creative Non-Fiction and Autofiction

• Utter Lyric

• Virginia Woolf and the Novel

Please see the course page on our website for full module details.

Year In Industry (optional)

Year in Industry

Your placement year usually takes place between your second and final year of study, and can be either paid work or an internship. Taking a placement year increases your professional contacts and gives you the chance to gain some knowledge of the work environment, acquire new skills, and develop your confidence.

The Year in Industry can be added during your studies at Kent.

Year Abroad (optional)

Go Abroad

Going abroad as part of your degree is an amazing experience and a chance to develop personally, academically and professionally.  You experience a different culture, gain a new academic perspective, establish international contacts and enhance your employability. The Year Abroad can be added during your studies.

You are expected to adhere to any academic progression requirements in Stages 1 and 2 to proceed to the year abroad. If the requirement is not met, you will be transferred to the equivalent three-year programme. The year abroad is assessed on a pass/fail basis and will not count towards your final degree classification.

Year 1

The following modules are what students typically study, but this may change year to year in response to new developments and innovations.

Compulsory modules currently include the following:

• Changing Literatures

  How free are writers to make and break literary forms? How do literary forms shape our understanding of selfhood, history, and society? Gain an introduction to the relationship between form and context in literary studies as you explore a rich variety of literary forms from the medieval period down to the present, including poems, plays, novels, and short stories. In lectures and seminars, you will examine how forms produce aesthetic effects and relate to ideologies, with a particular attention to the roles of innovation and adaptation in literary history.

• Other Worlds: Dystopias and Futures

  There is another world, which is this world. Dystopias, futures and other forms of speculative writing offer us a new clarity on the some of the most pressing issues we face in our world today. Through examining four thematically structured units over the course of the term, you'll discover how the study of narratives that exist in ‘other worlds’ can offer insightful and nuanced analyses of complex questions involving environmental, political, historical, and/or societal concerns. You'll also consider how these broader contexts and concerns can be utilized to further interrogate the texts you read. Generic terms such as ‘dystopian fiction,’ or ‘science fiction’ will be understood both broadly and generatively and your studies will therefore cover both literary and paraliterary examples, as well as works in other media. You'll have the opportunity to respond to the other worlds you explore through creative and critical means.

• Adventures in Criticism

  What are the key ideas you need to become a literary critic? What are the different approaches to interpreting a literary text? In this module, students will learn about some of the most important thinkers in the history of literary criticism, understand how their ideas and methods changed the way we study literature, and put them into practice in your own writing. They will study revolutionary ideas about class and capitalism, explore dreams and the unconscious, and discuss landmark texts in the history of thinking about race, gender and sexuality.

• Creative and Critical Conversations

  How do writers emerge from, work within, speak to and challenge their cultural and creative contexts? How do those contexts shape our creative identity and practice? What are the varied professional practices and communities that form part of a critic and/or writer's work?

  You'll be introduced to a range of methodologies to help you develop your identity and interests as a writer, be that critical, creative, or a mixture of the two. You'll explore approaches to creating and developing your own writing through conversation and exchange, broadly understood, as a starting point. This will include using research; intertextual practices; collaborative and editorial exercises; interviewing; and reviewing.

• Becoming a Writer

  What does it take to be a creative writer today? How can you create exciting stories and relatable characters? And does your poetry really have to rhyme? By introducing you to the working methods of the contemporary writer, you'll develop skills in both fiction and poetry. Each week you'll learn an exciting new writing skill like composing a sonnet or developing plot diagrams. The purpose of creative writing is to make other people feel things and see the world in a new way. You'll become a much more confident writer, able to take readers on a meaningful journey.

Optional modules may include the following:

• Class: Narratives of Exclusion and Belonging

• American Power, American Protest

Please see the course page on our website for full module details.