English Literature

English Literature

From the traditional canon to the innovative contemporary novel, our BA English Literature programme empowers you to identify how the world is perceived and informed through literary narratives. We will give you the confidence and support to apply your understanding of literature to today's world, gaining critical and creative skills that allow you to effect change and shape your own future.

Tailor your studies according to your interests, choosing from a broad range of literary periods, topics, and themes. You can explore the written word across poetry, drama and prose, but also through narrative forms in queer zines; films; artist books; and video games. Your studies will sharpen your critical tools and nourish your unique creativity in a supportive academic environment. Our curriculum is designed to set you up for a successful and exciting career across wide range of fields.

Your future

Whether you have a specific career in mind or haven’t thought beyond university, our courses embed employability at every turn with modules that focus on careers in growing and emerging sectors; we’ll demonstrate how your degree can give you options in the creative industries and beyond.

We help you plan for success. Through our varied range of assessments and inspirational teaching, you will hone the digital, critical thinking, communication and leadership skills that are essential for a successful career and realising your ambition.

Location

Our city, your time.
It has never been a better time to study in Canterbury. Our high student population creates a vibrant, diverse and student-friendly atmosphere.
We are a hub of exciting new ideas emerging from a stunning historic city - join us and get involved!

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

Stage 1:

Compulsory modules currently include the following:

Changing Literatures;
Other Worlds: Dystopias and Futures;
Adventures in Criticism;
Romantic Ecologies: Literature, Environment and Climate Crisis;
Creative and Critical Conversations.

Optional modules may include the following:

Class: Narratives of Exclusion and Belonging;
American Power, American Protest.

Stage 2:

Compulsory modules currently include the following:

Shakespeare: Before and After;
World Literatures in English;
Right/Write to the World: Displacement, Social Movements, Political Action.

Optional modules may include the following:

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.

Stage 3:

Compulsory modules currently include the following:

The Project.

Optional modules may include the following:

A Woman's Tale: Writing Female Identity and Experience in Medieval Europe;
American Crime Fiction;
Animals, Humans, Writing;
The Brontes 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;
Virginia Woolf and the Novel.