University of Kent

Welcome

Comparative Literature at Kent

Rated 3rd in the UK in the 2009 National Student Survey, the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Kent offers courses that cover literature from the classics to the modern age, crossing the traditional boundaries of national literature programmes. Alongside notable works originally written in the English and American traditions, our students have the opportunity to study (in English translation) a wide range of major literary works from other countries. Novelists such as Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf, and Franz Kafka; dramatists such as Sophocles, William Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen, Bertolt Brecht, and Samuel Beckett; poets such as Dante, J. W. von Goethe, Charles Baudelaire, and Sylvia Plath: these are just some of the major writers whose works are included on our courses.

Undergraduate Studies

At undergraduate level we focus on what the great German poet and dramatist Goethe called 'World Literature'. We investigate how different literary forms have evolved in different cultures and linguistic traditions, and why they have developed as they have. For example: what makes a tragedy from ancient Greece so different from one written in seventeenth-century France? How does an English historical novel differ from a Russian one? How has the genre of science fiction developed in Europe? Why has the tale survived as a literary form from ancient times to the present day? Our undergraduate modules are designed to give students the opportunity to engage with literature from a wide range of cultures and historical periods. For further information, please see our Undergraduate Studies Prospectus.

Postgraduate Studies

At postgraduate level we offer a taught MA in Comparative Literature and a taught MA in Modern European Literature. These include modules on topics such as autobiography, the fantastic, literary theory, myth in modern and postmodern literature, the European avant-garde, and psychoanalysis and literature. Students may choose to study for these MAs either with both the Autumn and the Spring Terms in Canterbury or with the Spring Term in Paris. For more, on the Paris option, see Paris MA Option. At research level (MA, MPhil, and PhD) our staff can offer supervision to students working in a range of fields, including modernism and postmodernism, literary theory, and postcolonial writing.