Program Overview

Why study Comparative Literature at Kent?

• Your course, your way: Tailor your degree and inspire your curiosity with modules exploring childhood and adolescence, vampires in literature and film, women writing and gender, morality in literature, and film adaptation.
• Global perspective: all the benefits of a traditional literature degree combined with the study of literatures from around the world, including Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.
• Unearth hidden treasures: Gain access to the Canterbury Cathedral Library and our Special Collections archive containing manuscripts, historic records, photographs, maps and printed books dating back to the late 8th century.
• Explore historic Canterbury: Our city is steeped in literary traditions from Chaucer to Dickens, from Marlowe to Conrad. In the heart of Kent, you can travel to London in under an hour by train, and coastal beaches are a short bus ride away.
• Join a welcoming community: Kent was first institution in the UK to teach Comparative Literature. Take advantage of our experienced, world-leading lecturers, working at the cutting edge of their fields and providing excellent support.
• Get career-ready: develop important skills to prepare you for tomorrow's world, leading to a wide range of careers including journalism, broadcasting, PR, teaching, marketing, publishing and writing.

What you'll learn

Throughout your course you will explore questions such as: What can a book say that a film cannot? What makes a tragedy by Sophocles so different from one written by Shakespeare? How have writers such as James Joyce engaged with Greek mythology? What is the evolution of the fairy tale from Charles Perrault to Walt Disney? In what ways might an English nineteenth-century novel of female adultery relate to a French, German, or Russian one?

Themes and areas you may explore include politics, testimony and power; the fairy tale; crime fiction; Latin American fiction, postcolonial literature; literature and seduction and creative writing.