BA (Hons) English Literature Bachelor's degree at the University of Kent

Explore a rich variety of literary forms from the medieval period down to the present, including poems, plays, novels, and short stories. Examine how forms produce aesthetic effects and relate to ideologies, with a particular attention to the roles of innovation and adaptation in literary history. Gain a thorough grounding in the writing and research skills necessary for studying English literature at university level.

Examine four thematically structured units over the course of the term to discover how the study of narratives that exist in 'other worlds' can offer insightful and nuanced analyses of complex questions involving environmental, political, historical, and/or societal concerns. Cover both literary and paraliterary examples, as well as works in other media. Respond to the other worlds explored through creative and critical means.

Learn about some of the most important thinkers in the history of literary criticism, understand how their ideas and methods changed the way we study literature, and put them into practice in your own writing. Study revolutionary ideas about class and capitalism, explore dreams and the unconscious, and discuss landmark texts in the history of thinking about race, gender and sexuality. Develop your own writing skills as a literary critic.

Discover what happened to the idea of the natural world between the time of Defoe and Wordsworth and how the debates produced during the period are still relevant today. Examine how the legacy of Romanticism influences our understanding of global warming and climate change, mechanisation, technology and urban living. Read Romantic texts in conversation with nature writing and ecological debates of our own time.

Develop your identity and interests as a writer, be that critical, creative, or a mixture of the two. Explore approaches to creating and developing your own writing through conversation and exchange, including using research, intertextual practices, collaborative and editorial exercises, interviewing, and reviewing. Reflect upon and analyse the current literary and publishing landscape. Learn skills essential to the work of a professional writer.

Consider how class features in contemporary literature today and how writers tell their class stories. Examine British working-class writing in an environment of global economic crisis, insecurity, and austerity. Explore how questions of class belonging, community, and identity shape contemporary culture, and how class interacts with other forms of non-class social exclusions.

Consider how language speaks power and how it speaks against it in relation to US from the times of the Puritan settlers to the age of Donald Trump. Look at how certain forms of speech, specific rhetorical manoeuvres and particular metaphors have structured power and how they have been mobilised to challenge a status quo. Analyse the social factors that give rise to these texts.

Examine key literary texts from around 200 years before the publication of Shakespeare's sonnets and the performance of his plays, to late in the century of his death, the seventeenth century. Explore narrative poetry, from Chaucer's pioneering Canterbury Tales, to Milton's Paradise Lost. Examine lyric poetry and the diversity of premodern drama. Understand the forms we see in Shakespeare within their deeper temporal and cultural contexts.

Study selected literary forms and texts from the eighteenth century through to today, focusing on the global origins of the modern world. Study the rise of European colonialism and slavery, the impact of wars and decolonisation across the Global South, and the spread of globalisation. Explore debates surrounding the contested category of 'world literature' and how we read texts in translation.

Investigate a range of literatures and arts that focus on the right to the world as related to displacement, movements and actions. Drawing on Lefebvre's 'right to the city' and 'right to difference', interrogate who has the right to the world. In this project-based module, create a self-devised creative or critical project that writes to the world and raises public awareness.

Capstone module where you are mentored in individual tutorials. Take the lead on project development and management by designing, drafting and completing a longer piece of work in the form of your choice: dissertation, video, creative-critical essay, game, artist's book, podcast or print media.