Program Overview

• Develop your own critical voice with support from widely published scholars and critics.
• Be inspired by our rich programme of literary events on campus, online, and in the city’s historic Castle Quarter
• Study on campus in the University Library’s bespoke Postgraduate Study Space, or in the Castle Quarter within the University’s Postgraduate Study Hub at The Storey, the city’s Victorian-build arts venue.
• Get involved with our four student-run literary journals: Cake, Lux, Flash, and Errant
• Present your work at the Department’s Master's Literary Studies Conference, usually held in the impressive surroundings of the Castle.
• Enjoy the benefits of our partnership with the archive-rich Wordsworth Grasmere, including internship opportunities

Literary studies at Lancaster means not only a deep and close engagement with literature itself but the opportunity, if you wish, to explore how literature opens onto many other worlds – politics, ecology, philosophy, psychology, theology, film, and fashion, etc. To support this, you can if you wish take one a module from outside of the Department -- in, say, History, Philosophy, Religious Studies, Politics, Sociology or Film Studies (subject to availability).

Literary study here also entails the conviction that reading is not passive but active, something which acts upon both the texts that we read and the world in which we live. Neither those texts nor the world are left the same as they were before. This means that as well as encouraging and nurturing all kinds of established forms of literary scholarship, such as archival work, historicism, close reading, and literary theory, we also welcome experimental or creative forms of literary criticism