Explore the richness and diversity of English Literature from a wide range of periods, cultures, and genres. Strengthen your skills, develop your specialism and expand your critical and theoretical knowledge.
Immerse yourself in your chosen topics and create a bespoke course that suits your interests.
You'll develop advanced research skills, which you'll apply to your dissertation. This will provide you with knowledge and skills for a range of careers, including teaching, publishing, arts management, journalism and many other sectors, or a solid foundation for PhD study.
Working alongside world-leading researchers with expertise ranging from the medieval to the contemporary, you'll have the opportunity to discover and expand your knowledge on a diverse range of literary periods and topics, including global literatures and indigenous decolonial knowledges, American literature and culture, postcolonial theory, ecocriticism, phenomenology, disability studies, migration, and rights and activism.
A first or second class honours degree or equivalent in a relevant subject.
All applicants are considered on an individual basis and additional qualifications, professional qualifications and relevant experience may also be taken into account when considering applications.
Please see our International Student website for entry requirements by country and other relevant information. Due to visa restrictions, students who require a student visa to study cannot study part-time unless undertaking a distance or blended-learning programme with no on-campus provision.
This course requires an Excellent level of English language, equivalent to C1 on CEFR.
Details on how to meet this requirement can be found on our English Language requirements webpage.
Examples:
IELTS 7.0 with a minimum of 7.0 in each component
PTE Academic 76 with a minimum of 76 in each sub-test
A degree from the UK
A degree from a Majority English Speaking Country
The following modules are indicative of those offered on this programme. This list is based on the current curriculum and may change year to year in response to new curriculum developments and innovation. Most programmes will require you to study a combination of compulsory and optional modules. You may also have the option to take modules from other programmes so that you may customise your programme and explore other subject areas that interest you.
This module will train students in the core practical and methodological skills necessary to undertake and communicate advanced literary research. It will introduce practical (and transferable) techniques for planning and managing research, and writing longer assignments, and will explore the ways in which scholars communicate and expand on research in non-academic contexts, as well as how MA graduates can use research skills acquired on the course in their future careers, whether in or beyond the academy. The module will include sessions on, for example, accessing and using archives in the UK and internationally; approaches to, benefits and challenges of collaborating with non-HEI partners; working across disciplines and with multi-media projects; communicating research to non-academic audiences; and undertaking community and outreach projects. The module will equip students with the skills, techniques and approaches to undertake exciting, innovative and outward-looking literary research.
This course investigates the development of American modernism in art and literature in the fifty year period between 1890 and 1940; a time bookended by official closing of the American frontier (which effectively concluded the period of the nineteenth century associated with manifest destiny") and the outbreak of World War Two. The course will explore key texts of the period within their artistic and social contexts
This module explores the intersections between art, literature, rights and activism. The module considers how art and literature speak to the questions of agency on which activism and rights depend. Does literary fiction have the capacity to effect change in the political sphere? Can poetry picture spaces in which new political relations are possible? How do literary and artistic engagements with rights in different spheres shape our understanding of historical and ongoing injustices and inequities? How do they help us imagine alternatives? These questions frame the enquiry into a body of literature that will focus on a combination of themes such as sovereignty, land/environment, movement/mobility, property, civil rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and more (topics will vary from year to year). How this literature reveals the paradoxes and dialectics at the heart of rights discourse, and how it interrogates the ways international rights-based language both enables and intrudes upon nation state frameworks for such paradigms as citizenship and belonging, ownership and invitation, protection and vulnerability will be at the heart of the reading on the module. Students will emerge with an advanced understanding of how literature and art deepen our engagement with politics, and how contemporary political formations can be re-imagined.
This module will introduce you to a variety of theoretical frameworks for reading nineteenth-century literature as 'world literature': that is, the product of global circuits of knowledge and commodity exchange, as well as cross-cultural encounters. We will also look at how marginalised colonial writers such as ex-slaves, Indigenous people and those of mixed heritage sought to make their lives and experiences legible to predominantly white reading publics in a literary marketplace structured by the racial logic of capitalism and imperialism. This necessitates studying a broad array of writings from poetry and novels to sketches and travelogues. This module will also introduce you to a range of scholarly approaches to these texts including those frameworks provided by black feminism, critical indigenous studies, new imperial history and settler colonial studies.
This module is designed to introduce postgraduates to high level research in the field of post-45 American literature and culture, spanning the period from the end of World War Two to the late twentieth century. Proceeding in chronological fashion, it will address key issues such as the cultural Cold War, Black Power, feminism and cosmopolitanism through the close analysis of cultural items in their historical moment. These will include texts such as novels by Ralph Ellison and, Thomas Pynchon; essays by Susan Sontag and Joan Didion; cultural criticism by Clement Greenberg and Lionel Trilling; and sociological analysis by C. Wright Mills. In addition, painting and film will be discussed where appropriate. Students will be encouraged to approach and understand aesthetic texts and objects both on their own terms and in relation to broader historical phenomena such as shifting geopolitical configurations, changing race and gender relations, and the rise of neoliberalism. Ultimately they will be in a position to address fundamental questions about the nature and function of culture" itself in the period. Throughout the module
This module examines the relation between race and power from the premodern period to the contemporary. Through symptomatic readings of a range of literary and theoretical texts, this module introduces students to critical concepts and historical moments that are essential for understanding race and power. Key questions addressed are: how does race emerge and develop as a concept, how does its relation to power change, and what role does literature, theatre and film play in shaping and challenging racial identity? From Shakespeare's Othello and Zadie Smith’s The Wife of Willesden (2021) to race theory and anti-racist politics, this module explores discourses that grapple with the stark realities of our age.
Further information to be confirmed.
This module studies the ways in which the idea of culture has been contested in the United States from the end of the American Civil War to the close of the twentieth century. It will focus on a series of significant texts that intervened in the cultural debates of their time, bringing questions of aesthetics and representation to bear upon the social and political issues, and each making a claim about the nature and value of culture in the United States. These texts, such as W.E.B. Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk or Susan Sontag's Against Interpretation do not belong to conventional literary genres such as the poem or novel, but their literary qualities of style, tone, rhetoric and voice are nevertheless to be studied as inseparable their distinctive interventions.
The module begins with the idea that culture is a terrain upon which social and political conflicts take place and proceeds to trace an intellectual history of those conflicts. Topics to be covered include the place of race and ethnicity in determining ideas of culture, the relationship between indigenous and settler-colonial cultures; the politics of culture; the development of modernist and postmodernist aesthetics; transnational cultural exchange; intersectionality; capitalism and culture; and the influence of scientific and technological developments on culture.
Writing a Masters dissertation provides the opportunity for you to explore a topic of interest at greater length and in more depth than any academic assignment you will have undertaken to date. As such, it can be both an exciting and daunting experience. This module addresses what is involved in writing a dissertation and helps you to plan your research, prepare your dissertation proposal, and begin writing. It also provides a forum to share ideas with other students and to discuss any questions you might have about the process of researching and writing an extended piece of work.
Duration: One year full-time, two years part-time
You take two modules in the autumn term and two in the spring term. You are also expected to attend the Faculty and School Research Methods Programmes.
You then write the dissertation between the start of the Summer Term and the end of August.
Assessment is by a 5000 word essay for each module and a 15,000 word dissertation.
This programme aims to:
You will gain knowledge and understanding of:
You develop intellectual skills in:
You gain subject-specific skills in:
You will gain the following transferable skills:
The Templeman Library is well stocked with excellent research resources, as are Canterbury Cathedral Archives and Library. There are a number of special collections: the John Crow Collection of Elizabethan and other early printed texts; the Reading/Raynor Collection of theatre history (over 7,000 texts or manuscripts); ECCO (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online); the Melville manuscripts relating to popular culture in the 19th and early 20th centuries; the Pettingell Collection (over 7,500 items) of 19th-century drama; the Eliot Collection; children’s literature; and popular literature. A gift from Mrs Valerie Eliot has increased the Library’s already extensive holdings in modern poetry. The British Library in London is also within easy reach.
Our research centres organise many international conferences, symposia and workshops.
School of English postgraduate students are encouraged to organise and participate in a conference which takes place in the summer term. This provides students with the invaluable experience of presenting their work to their peers.
The School runs several series of seminars, lectures and readings throughout the academic year. Our weekly research seminars are organised collaboratively by staff and graduates in the School. Speakers range from our own postgraduate students, to members of staff, to distinguished lecturers who are at the forefront of contemporary research nationally and internationally.
The Centre for Creative Writing hosts a very popular and successful weekly reading series; guests have included poets Katherine Pierpoint, Tony Lopez, Christopher Reid and George Szirtes, and novelists Abdulrazak Gurnah, Ali Smith, Marina Warner and Will Self.
Staff publish regularly and widely in journals, conference proceedings and books. They also edit several periodicals including: Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities; The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature: 600-1500; The Dickensian; Literature Compass; Oxford Literary Review; Theatre Notebook and Wasafiri.
All students registered for a taught Master's programme are eligible to apply for a place on our Global Skills Award Programme. The programme is designed to broaden your understanding of global issues and current affairs as well as to develop personal skills which will enhance your employability.
Research in the School of English comes roughly under the following areas. However, there is often a degree of overlap between groups, and individual staff have interests that range more widely.
The particular interests of the Centre for Studies in the Long Eighteenth Century converge around gender, class, nation, travel and empire, and the relationship between print and material culture. Staff in the Centre pursue cutting-edge approaches to the field and share a commitment to interdisciplinary methodologies.
The Centre regularly hosts visiting speakers as part of the School of English research seminar programme, and hosts day symposia, workshops and international conferences.
The 19th-century research group's interests include literature and gender, journalism, representations of time and history, sublimity and Victorian poetry.
Research in North American literature is conducted partly through the Centre for American Studies, which also facilitates co-operation with modern US historians. Staff research interests include 20th-century American literature, especially poetry, Native American writing, modernism, and cultural history.
The Centre for Creative Writing is the focus for most practice-based research in the School. Staff organise a thriving events series and run a research seminar for postgraduate students and staff to share ideas about fiction-writing. Established writers regularly come to read and discuss their work.
The Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies has a distinctive brand of interdisciplinarity, strong links with local archives and archaeological trusts, and provides a vibrant forum for investigating the relationships between literary and non-literary modes of writing in its weekly research seminar.
The Centre for Modern Poetry is a leading centre for research and publication in its field, and participates in both critical and creative research. Staff regularly host visiting speakers and writers, participate in national and international research networks, and organise graduate research seminars and public poetry readings.
The Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Research has acquired an international reputation for excellence in research. It has an outstanding track record in publication, organises frequent international conferences, and regularly hosts leading postcolonial writers and critics. It also hosts a visiting writer from India every year in association with the Charles Wallace Trust.
Full details of staff research interests can be found on the School's website.
Many career paths can benefit from the writing and analytical skills that you develop as a postgraduate student in the School of English. Our students have gone on to work in academia, journalism, broadcasting and media, publishing, writing and teaching; as well as more general areas such as banking, marketing analysis and project management.
The 2024/25 annual tuition fees for this course are:
For details of when and how to pay fees and charges, please see our Student Finance Guide.
For students continuing on this programme fees will increase year on year by no more than RPI + 3% in each academic year of study except where regulated.* If you are uncertain about your fee status please contact information@kent.ac.uk.
The University will assess your fee status as part of the application process. If you are uncertain about your fee status you may wish to seek advice from UKCISA before applying.
For details of when and how to pay fees and charges, please see our Student Finance Guide.
For students continuing on this programme, fees will increase year on year by no more than RPI + 3% in each academic year of study except where regulated.*
The University will assess your fee status as part of the application process. If you are uncertain about your fee status you may wish to seek advice from UKCISA before applying.
Find out more about general additional costs that you may pay when studying at Kent.
Search our scholarships finder for possible funding opportunities. You may find it helpful to look at both:
We have a range of subject-specific awards and scholarships for academic, sporting and musical achievement.
Next steps
Learn more about the application process or begin your application by clicking on a link below.
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