Travel the world with the turn of a page. Our literary expertise is geographical as well as chronological - here you don’t just study English literature, you study world literature in English. Alongside the English literary canon, you read some of the most important novels, poems, and plays from the United States, the Caribbean and Europe.
Studying literature alongside sociology means that you can investigate what connects people with each other, as well as what divides them. We consider every aspect of our daily lives, from how we relate to politicians, celebrities and friends, to how we define ourselves, our families, and others. You can study topics ranging from digital media and society, to psychiatry and mental illness, to Japanese culture, to the art, film and personal testimony of war.
Topics from both literature and sociology you can choose from include:
- Modernist cityscapes in literature
- Writing of the US South
- Victorian literary realism
- Culture, identity and subjectivity
- Citizenship, multiculturalism and human rights
Our Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies offers 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. From the English Civil War to dystopian literature and film, our modules not only span momentous historical, political and social worldwide events, but also examine the alternative worlds that literature has produced.
Meanwhile our Department of Sociology is rated Top 10 in the UK for research quality (REF 2014) and we are ranked among the top 50 departments in the QS World University Rankings by Subject (2020) for English language and literature.
