Early Modern English Literature: Books That Matter MA

This master’s in Early Modern English Literature is uniquely taught in collaboration with the British Library. You’ll study early modern literary texts—published between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—through contemporary critical lenses such as race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, religion and nationality. And you’ll be given the tools to delve into archives independently and work with neglected texts to decide why they matter, what key questions they can answer about the early modern period and our own time, and how they should be edited and re-presented to modern readers. Throughout the Early Modern English Literature MA: Books That Matter, you’ll discover alternative readings of canonical texts and get the unique opportunity to learn not only how to re-read them from new theoretical perspectives but also how to explore the archives of the British Library, which houses the largest collections of early modern texts in the world.

Key benefits

• Get unique access to the British Library and its unparalleled collections.
• Learn from world-class curators at the British Library, who will teach a required module that uses rare original books as case studies.
• Benefit from the strong tradition of Shakespeare, textual editing and early modern literary studies at King’s English Department and its close links with the London Shakespeare Seminar, the London Renaissance Seminar and the Institute of English Studies.
• Discover a wider variety of texts and authors that tell unexpected, richer, and more diverse stories about this key period in the history of English literature and the rise of world literatures in English.
• Learn how to read early modern handwriting, transcribe neglected literary manuscripts and rare printed texts, and edit them for the modern reader.
• Use London as your classroom, with some of the world’s best archives and libraries on your doorstep and dozens of unique historical sites just minutes away from campus.

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