King's College London

Encounter a broad range of nineteenth and twentieth-century literature and culture from Britain, North America and the English-speaking world. This course gives you an opportunity to study an eclectic array of texts and topics - including Victorian Studies and Modernism - and to think across the period boundaries that restrict other courses.

Our optional modules cover almost every aspect of modern literature and culture: from the Victorian novel and Modernist poetics to early science fiction and postcolonial life writing. King’s has one of the oldest English departments in the country, and our unrivalled central London location allows you to explore the city's rich literary history first hand.

Course Essentials
This Modern Literature and Culture MA presents a rare opportunity to study the literature and culture of both the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. You’ll strengthen your knowledge of canonical nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, Henry James, W.E.B. DuBois, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys alongside lesser-known authors and movements.

The inclusive literary approach of this Modern Literature and Culture master’s means you’ll encounter texts in a wide array of forms and formats. You’ll read novels, poetry and drama alongside Modernist magazines, Victorian periodicals, feminist zines and anticolonial manifestoes.

You’ll begin your studies in modern English literature and culture with a required module that considers how theorists, writers, and critics have thought about modernity in—and through –the urban space of London. Starting in the Victorian period and ending at the Second World War, you’ll learn how key notions of self, community, empire, nation, and the planet have evolved and trace how this has impacted London and ideas of the ‘modern’.

You’ll learn how to independently interpret literary texts in a comparative manner alongside non-literary texts, visual artworks and archival material. You’ll also discover how to approach research questions from an interdisciplinary perspective and develop your own ability to critically consider the contemporary city against previous notions of urban modernity.

The second Modern Literature and Culture MA required module will teach you how to navigate archives and how to think creatively and theoretically about the archive as a concept. Through hands-on lessons in libraries and museums, you’ll be introduced to key archival challenges and learn about the pleasures and perils of the archive. You’ll then head back to the classroom for theoretical and literary discussions.

You also get the opportunity to explore topics or periods that interest you the most by choosing two modules from a varied list that ranges from the 1750s up to the 1950s. For example, you could learn about man, woman and machine in Victorian fiction or explore how writers such as Gertrude Stein, Claude McKay, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen engage with Modernist soundscapes. You could also choose to study how a range of African writers try to convey the nuances of pain, memory and resistance by renegotiating stereotypes of violence with an emerging canon of trauma writing or delve deeper into the work of significant American poets with a special emphasis on sexuality, ranging from Langston Hughes to Adrienne Rich and Frank O'Hara, and beyond.

Your Modern Literature and Culture MA will culminate in a dissertation that you’ll produce in close collaboration with an academic supervisor. Thanks to a year-long module in research methods and practises, you’ll be taught the skills and methodologies required to pursue your own piece of research and get the chance to present some aspect of your project at an MA conference during the summer.