Program Overview

You’ve read the classics, but you want a fresh take on literature, old and new. Perhaps you want to explore particular genres, themes or periods of literature in more depth; or perhaps you want to discover that your new favourite author is someone you’ve never heard of before. Studying literature widens your horizons, sharpens your critical skills, develops your writing ability, and introduces you to the great cultures, thoughts, ideas and imaginations of the world.

Studying at Essex will challenge and revolutionise the way you think about literature. We’ll invite you to reflect on how literature shapes, and is shaped by, the world. Drawing on key texts, core theories and concepts, you’ll develop critical thinking and creative problem-solving skills that will help you make your own mark.

On our four-year MLitSt Literature, you will be part of an interdisciplinary department where literary critics work alongside practising poets, dramatist, film-makers, novelists and journalists.

You have the flexibility to choose from a wide range of optional modules across different topics and areas of specialism, including;

• Literatures of slavery and emancipation
• Themes of love, desire and death
• Identity, diversity and voice in United States literature
• Shakespeare’s tragedies
• Postcolonial literature
• Romantic, Gothic, naturalist, realist and sentimental writing
• 20th and 21st century literature
• Modernism, postmodernism, dystopias, and science fiction
• European, Caribbean and Transatlantic literature
• Poetic, contemporary, avant-garde and political writing

In your fourth year, as a post-graduate student, you will be able to choose from the following masters level modules in literature and, if you wish, creative writing:

• Shakespeare and the Modern
• Research Methods in Literary and Cultural Analysis
• The Modern City: From Modernism to Postmodernism
• Caribbean Crossings: Literature across continents
• African American Literature
• Dramatic Structure
• Memory Maps
• Oulipo and the Avant Garde
• US Avant Garde poetry

At Essex, you can study modules which examine a variety of genres, including travel writing, the podcast, and autobiography among others, and work across different media, including books, newspapers, plays and film. Our modules not only span momentous historical, political and social worldwide events, but also examine the alternative worlds that literature has produced.