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
We’ve created the most progressive approach to higher education, developing and modernising our curriculum. For 2025 our courses will be designed with you at their heart to deliver a top-class student experience and career outcomes.
The following modules are what students will typically study, but this may change year to year in response to new developments and innovations.
How does literature allow us to place a critical focus upon marginalised and under-represented voices from a range of periods and geographies? We will explore considers the ways through which literary adaptations speak to the questions of agency on which activism and rights depend. Does literature have the capacity to effect change in the political sphere? How do literary and artistic engagements with rights in different spheres shape our understanding of historical and ongoing injustices and inequities? How do writers of colour ‘write back’ into canonical texts via adaptation, and why? These questions frame the enquiry into a body of literature that will focus on a combination of themes such as sovereignty, land/environment, racial politics, movement/mobility, property, civil rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and more (topics will vary from year to year). Students will emerge with an advanced understanding of how literature, adaptation and a focus on marginalised voices can deepen our engagement with politics both in the past and present, and become a catalyst for change and how contemporary political formations can be re-imagined.
To prepare students to undertake and communicate advanced literary research, we will practice using core methodological approaches. Students will explore current theoretical debates that place literary studies in dialogue with exciting interdisciplinary fields, from disability studies and the health humanities to animal studies and the environmental humanities. We will engage with a range of these theoretical interventions in the cultural and political context of the twenty-first century and use them to think about close reading of literary texts. At the same time, students will take part in workshops designed to provide guidance with practical research activities, such as accessing physical and digital archives or presenting research to academic and public audiences. Students will gain an understanding of the value of theoretical, archival, and literary research and the core skills needed to successfully complete the MA programme and beyond.
Are novelists sociologists? Can a novel tell the truth about social reality? This module explores the history and theory of the English novel from the eighteenth century to the present. It focusses on what has been variously described as the ‘social novel’, the ‘condition-of-England’ or ‘state-of-the-nation’ novel: novels which attempt to provide a panorama of English society in the present or recent past. Such novels are often big, sprawling affairs which ‘aspire to portray a social whole’, in the words of the critic György Lukács. Yet they can also be more modest in scope and offer a ‘miniature delicacy in the painting’, as Charlotte Brontë wrote of Jane Austen. Reading major novels alongside a selection of literary theory, we will trace how writers have used the form to hold a mirror up to social reality and reckon with the upheavals of modernity. In the first half of the module, we will consider how the English social novel evolved from kindred genres (the picaresque novel and the comedy of manners) and examine some of the traditional themes of the form (marriage, money, social status). In the second half, we will consider the persistence of the social novel in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries and explore how the form adapted to accommodate new protagonists, new themes, and alternative visions of England and Englishness.
How did eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers imagine and represent the self? What models and metaphors of subjectivity have the literatures of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Victorian age bequeathed to us? This module enables you to explore the construction and representation of the self in a range of literary writings from Britain, Ireland, and the British Empire. We will think critically about how changes in the literary marketplace and society more broadly shaped how writers thought about their identities in relation to questions of gender, race, sexuality, and class across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We will examine a variety of literary forms, including epistolary fiction, diaries, autobiographies, short fiction, poetry, and novels, in order to consider the relationship between literary innovation and changing understandings of subjectivity.
We will engage with contemporary debates about the legacies of European colonialism in a variety of literary and non-literary texts from across the globe. We will examine how cultural forms offer a radical resistance to colonial worldviews that are still very much prevalent today, and expand your expertise about the relationship between politics, culture, and imperialism. You will study how late twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels, poetry, and films open up debate about issues relating to globalisation, migration and national belonging, the climate crisis, criminalisation, and class-related exclusion. Connecting each week will be an analysis of writing from formerly colonised and settler colonial regions since the era of decolonisation that requires an attentive and critical engagement with shifting geopolitical world orders. You will also explore the distinctiveness of theoretical and critical categories such as postcolonialism, Indigeneity, World literature, and global literature.
What does modernist literature look like in a global context? Informed by postcolonial, transnational and planetary approaches, we explore the idea of modernism as a network of artistic, cultural and intellectual exchange that crosses geographical and temporal boundaries. Students will learn about writing from all corners of the world that is both experimental in style and radical in content. Decentring and decolonising the canon of modernism so that it attends to texts from the Americas to Australasia, Africa to Asia, the module will also shed light on European modernism’s fraught relationship to Empire and histories of imperialism. A range of forms will be examined, including poetry, novels, short stories and essays, as well as the aesthetic, cultural and political contexts in which multiple modernisms emerged and grew in influence. In doing so, students will be introduced to the key critical debates on global modernisms, featuring discussion of topics as diverse as race, gender, class and the environment.
What is distinctive about literature in the United States after 1945? How did literary texts articulate and shape the concerns of the Cold War? You will survey a range of key literary texts in their intellectual, historical and social contexts to provide a systematic understanding of the key issues in post-1945 American literature. You will study novels, poems, movies and polemical essays alongside influential interventions by US intellectuals in sociology, foreign policy and literary criticism. Topics will include the rise of anti-Communism in the Red Scare, consumer culture and shifting dynamics of class, gender and race after World War Two. You will read literature addressing the social upheavals of “the Sixties,” the sexual revolution, US imperialism and Cold War paranoia. Emphasis will be placed on historicist modes of reading and understanding literature and culture. By the end of the module, you will have developed an advanced understanding of the trajectory of American literature and culture in the period, the range of social questions it engaged and the spectrum of literary forms it employed.
We will explore the interrelations and negotiations that take place between verbal and visual culture, in theory, literature, visual art, and film, covering a wide range of theorists, novelists, artists, and filmmakers. You will consider diverse theoretical approaches and their recent turns, including Feminism, Marxism, phenomenology, postcolonial theory, animal theory, illness studies, queer theory, and posthumanism, asking what were the moments that generated certain theoretical turns, and examining how theories intersect with verbal and visual culture. We will discuss social, cultural, and national contexts contributing to debates concerning aesthetics and literary history and explore how and where disciplines meet ideologically. The module is intended to be interdisciplinary and considers some or all of the following topics: philosophies of history; perception and embodiment; experience and expression; the politics of racial, differential, and queer space; looking as a political act; the ethics of storytelling; contemporary artists’ books; and the ecological dimensions of colonialism.
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.
For course aims and learning outcomes please see the course specification.
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.
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 2025/26 annual tuition fees for this course are:
For details of when and how to pay fees and charges, please see our Student Finance Guide.
Tuition fees may be increased in the second and subsequent years of your course. Detailed information on possible future increases in tuition fees is contained in the Tuition Fees Increase Policy. 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.
Tuition fees may be increased in the second and subsequent years of your course. Detailed information on possible future increases in tuition fees is contained in the Tuition Fees Increase Policy. If you are uncertain about your fee status please contact information@kent.ac.uk.
You'll need regular access to a desktop computer/laptop with an internet connection to use the University of Kent’s online resources and systems. We've listed some guidelines for the technology and software you'll need for your studies.
Find out more about accommodation and living costs, as well as 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, plus International scholarships up to £5,000.
Next steps
Learn more about the application process or begin your application by clicking on a link below.
You will be able to choose your preferred year of entry once you have started your application. You can also save and return to your application at any time.
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