Overview
Pursue your love of literature at an advanced level, study modules on topics from the Renaissance to the modern day, and gain research skills that will help you stand out to employers or progress to a PhD. Our Masters course is ideal if you want to advance your teaching career or begin the move into academia.
Additional Descriptions
- Join an ideal course to advance your teaching career or begin the move into academia
- Gain a broad understanding of English literature on modules from the Renaissance to the modern day
- Tailor the course to meet your own interests, with optional modules including novel writing and publishing.
- Develop research skills that will help you stand out to employers or progress to a PhD
With an overall focus on literature, politics and social change, our MA English Literature will equip you to engage with the interface between literature and society. By reading and contextualising a wide range of texts within their critical, cultural and historical contexts, you will be encouraged to evaluate the ideas of others and develop your own critical perspectives and areas of specialised knowledge.
You will develop skills and knowledge through a range of teaching and learning methods and by producing essays, presentations, annotated bibliographies, review essays, dissertation proposals, and a major research project in the form of a dissertation. The skills you learn will provide new directions for future employment and form the basis for further study.
The course focuses on three periods of literary history: the Renaissance, the ‘long’ nineteenth century and the 20th/21st century. Each of the three period-based modules is structured around ideas of politics and social change. The fourth module is a research methods module, which will equip you with the skills needed to complete your dissertations.
You will study in a lively and intellectual department with a long tradition of teaching excellence and an international reputation for research.
Course Leader: Dr Elizabeth Ludlow.
- Careers
This course will give you the higher-level skills to stand out in today’s competitive job market.
If you are a teacher, you could study with us to update your knowledge and further your existing career, or even move into another discipline. Or, if you are hoping to move on to an academic post, this course will give you the research skills you will need for a PhD.
- Your department and faculty
At the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, we believe in thinking critically about the past, present and future to challenge perceptions and better understand communities and people.
With expertise from gender issues to literary analysis to exploring how the past has shaped our modern world, all our staff members are active researchers. This is reflected in our teaching, allowing us to support our students with the latest theories and practices, as well as essential employability advice.

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