Subject guide to English Literature
English Literature at Manchester
Manchester has inspired diarists, activists, novelists, poets, playwrights, and screen writers from Elizabeth Gaskell to Lemn Sissay and Carol Ann Duffy. As a UNESCO City Literature, it’s very easy to engage with a wide range of literature and arts events hosted or staged by Manchester Literature Festival, Royal Exchange Theatre, HOME, and Manchester City Libraries. There are also enough independent and chain bookshops in the city centre and Greater Manchester to while away every Saturday afternoon for a year!
We take a broad definition of English literature and students can study a range of English, American, Irish, and South Asian writers. Our students have broad interests – some deep dive on Shakespeare or Chaucer, others focus on a particular period such as the Renaissance, Romanticism, or Modernism, others take an issues-led approach to their course unit choices and focus on LGBTQ+, feminism, or representation and marginalisation. Many students take an interdisciplinary approach to their studies picking course units from across the range of options.
The Centre for New Writing at Manchester is a hub for students and writers developing their craft and honing their skills as poets, spoken word artists, script writers, novelists, life writers, and short story specialists. Creative writing course units are available to all students on our undergraduate degrees.
From my experience, UoM’s Language Department has an amazing support system and resources and that was very important to me when I was choosing universities.
Zehra Kes / Modern Languages, 2026.
Video: Discover more about studying here
Courses - 2027 entry
BA English Literature and Modern Languages is a 4-year degree course, with an integrated Residence Abroad year. Students can study French, German, or Spanish, and the degree title will state the language studied. For example, BA English Literature and Modern Languages (German).
For information about entry requirements, tuition fees, scholarships and bursaries, please visit the online prospectus.
There are also 3-year course options for English which can be taken as a single honours subject or combined with American Studies, Art History, Creative Writing, Drama, English Language, Film Studies, or History.
Course structure
BA English Literature and Modern Languages provides students with a range of choices. When considering the choices you’d like to make, please note:
- Each year, all students study 120 credits of course units. Each course unit is 20 credits unless indicated.
- The course unit titles for each year of study have been listed.
- Joint honours. The number of credits taken from English Literature varies each year. Year 1 is 60 credits. Year 2 is 40 or 60 credits. Year 4 is 40, 60 or 80 credits. The remaining credits are taken from your chosen language – French, German or Spanish.
- Essential course information for students studying a 4-year degree.
Course content
Students take 60 credits of course units from English Literature, and 60 credits of course units from their chosen language. Course units are 20 credits unless indicated.
In Year 1, there is a tightly curated list of course lists that focus attention on the key skills and knowledge required for course units in Years 2 and 4.
Reading Literature covers key concepts and techniques in the critical reading of prose, poetry and drama. For example, reading with an awareness of genre, cultural context, and formal features such as point of view, word choice, sentence-length, verse form, poetic devices, poetic rhythm and meter.
In Theory and Text students use critical theory to analyse and interpret novels, autobiographies, poems, essays, and films drawn from 4 areas of study – The Novel and Empire, Black Feminist Theory, Ecocriticism, Desirable and Undesirable Bodies on the Screen: Feminism, Psychoanalysis and Whiteness.
Literature and History examines the relationship between text and historical contexts. Using two or three pivotal historic events, such as the French Revolution, students consider how literary texts respond to, shape, and are shaped by local, national and international events.
Joint Honours students
20 credits taken from:
◆ Reading Literature
20 or 40 credits chosen from:
◇ Theory and Text
◇ Literature and History
0 or 20 credits chosen from:
◆ Mapping the Medieval
◆ Free choice units in the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures or University College for Interdisciplinary Learning (10 or 20 credits) Some free choice units are delivered in semester 1, some are delivered in semester 2.
KEY:
◆ Semester 1
◇ Semester 2
◈ Full Year
In Year 2, English Literature can be a minor (40 credits), joint (60 credits) or major (80 credits) subject. Course units are 20 credits unless indicated.
The broad range of course units is designed to stretch student interests and enable them to explore areas of study that are new to them, as well as provide specialist options.
Students that choose English Literature as a joint or major subject have the option of developing and honing their skills in creative writing. These practice-based units help students develop a regular writing habit and build their confidence in sharing their work and receiving feedback.
Joint Honours students
20 or 40 credits chosen from:
◆ Renaissance Literature
◆ Old English: Writing the Unreadable Past
◆ Chaucer: Texts, Contexts, Conflicts
◆ Satire and Sentiment: British Literature, 1660-1820
◇ Shakespeare
◇ Medieval Metamorphoses
20 or 40 credits chosen from:
◆ Romanticism (1790-1832)
◆ Writing, Identity and Nation
◇ Gender, Sexuality and the Body
◇ Modernism
◇ Victorian Rights: Victorian Wrongs
0, 20 or 40 credits chosen from:
◆ Introduction to Screenwriting
◆ Creative Writing: Poetry
◆ Creative Writing: Fiction
This course unit is available in semester 1 and semester 2
◆ Free choice units in the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures or University College for Interdisciplinary Learning (10 or 20 credits). Some course units are delivered in semester 1, some are delivered in semester 2.
KEY:
◆ Semester 1
◇ Semester 2
◈ Full Year
This is the Residence Abroad year and students live in a country where their chosen language is spoken. Opportunities vary from year to year, and some opportunities are selective.
Please see Residence Abroad for information about funding and finance, the support provided to students to find suitable study or work placements, and for videos and blog posts from current students.
In Year 4, English Literature can be a minor (40 credits), joint (60 credits) or major (80 credits) subject. Course units are 20 credits unless indicated.
The Long Essay is an optional but popular choice. It is guided research project, leading to a 6,000-word essay, and students devise their question/topic in consultation with an academic supervisor. Contact hours are low (3 hours) and independent study hours are high (197 hours).
In the lists below, course units have been grouped to make it easier to get an overview of the range of options available. Students can choose from one or more of the groups. As in Years 1 and 2, there is the option to include a free choice unit from another subject.
To take Creative Writing: Fiction or Creative Writing: Poetry, students must have achieved a minimum pass mark of 60% in Creative Writing: Fiction or Creative Writing: Poetry, respectively, in Year 2.
Joint Honours students
0 or 20 credits taken from:
◆ Long Essay (20 credits)
This course unit is available in semester 1 and semester 2
0, 20 or 40 credits chosen from Medieval and Early Modern course units:
◆ Vital Matters: Medieval Ecologies
◆ Apocalypse: Early Modern Imaginings
◇ Things That Talk: Nonhuman Voices in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Culture
◇ Dreaming the Middle Ages
◇ Sex, Disease and the Body: 1660-1760
◇ Women’s Writing, Citizenship, and Political Radicalism
0, 20 or 40 credits chosen from Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century course units:
◆ Global Victorians
◆ Imaginations of the Future: People, Earth and Power
◆ Co-Operation, Competition, and Happiness: Dangerous Ideas in Victorian Britain
◇ Romantic Venice
◇ Queer Forms: Objects and Animals in Eighteenth-Century Poetry
0, 20 or 40 credits chosen from Twentieth and Twenty-First Century course units:
◆ Culture and Conflict
◆ Culture and Politics in the Contemporary British Novel
◆ Radical Turns: Culture and Politics in the 1930s
◆ Crossing Over with Tilda Swinton: Feminist and Queer Readings of Cinema, Politics and Culture
◆ Irish Fiction Since 1990
◆ Contemporary South Asian Literatures
◆ Interdisciplinary Literature and Theology: Empathy, Ethics, Liberation
◇ Confronting Marginality
◇ Crime and Contemporary Culture
◇ Humans and Other Animals in Contemporary Literature
◇ British Fiction and Empire in the Twentieth Century
0 or 20 credits chosen from American Studies and Creative Writing course units:
◆ Climate Change and Culture Wars
◆ American Hauntings
◆ James Baldwin in Context: Race, Sexuality and Activism
◆ Creative Writing: Fiction
This course unit is available in semester 1 and semester 2
◇ Creative Writing: Poetry
◇ Love American Style
◇ Occupy Everything
0 or 20 credits from:
◆ Free choice units in the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures or University College for Interdisciplinary Learning (10 or 20 credits. Some course units are delivered in semester 1, some are delivered in semester 2.
KEY:
◆ Semester 1
◇ Semester 2
◈ Full Year