Enjoy literary events in Lancaster's Castle Quarter
Our rich literary connections extend from Lancaster's LitFest and medieval Castle to Grasmere's Wordsworth Museum
World Top 40 QS World Subject Rankings 2025
(English Language and Literature)
Why Lancaster?
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
Offering options ranging from the medieval to the present day; this degree allows you to curate your study according to your own interests, thus charting your own course through literary studies and create your own programme.
Acts of reading
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.
Supportive community
You will be taught in weekly small-group seminars, and have regular one-to-one tutorials with a supervisor when working on your Dissertation, a long-form project exploring a topic of your own choosing – this could be a traditional scholarly work, or creative-critical, or indeed a study of how literature works in the world(s) outside the university.
We also encourage you to meet in person with all your tutors to discuss your work. And you will have an academic advisor who you meet to review your progress.
Many of our special literary events, such as talks from visiting scholars and authors, take place in the Castle Quarter, with the Department’s October Lecture and May Gathering being usually held at Lancaster’s ancient Priory. In addition, we have a unique partnership with the archive-rich Wordsworth Museum at Grasmere, which includes internships, an annual study retreat day, and free entry at any time of the year.
Department Bursaries and Prizes
Thanks to a generous endowment, the Department is able to offer
The Bailrigg Awards – these are awards of up to £150 and are open to any student in the Department who is suffering financial hardship endowment.
Three end-of-programme prizes for students on this MA .
Careers
This programme will enable you to develop a host of high-level professional skills from within literary study such as researching, persuading, and presenting. Your skills will be valued by a range of sectors -- from marketing to law, social work to professional services, and business to the media.
Our extensive events programme will provide many opportunities to network and create the connections needed to progress beyond Master's.
Some of our graduates continue their studies at PhD level, and then progress to an academic career. Many others go on to careers outside the academy in fields such as:
Master's Programmes in English Literary Studies at Lancaster University
Discover the key features of studying a master's degree in English Literary Studies at Lancaster University. You can choose to study a range of modules or combine English Literary Studies with Creative Writing.
Being so close to the spectacular Lake District, home of the Romantic poets, we have world-class strengths in Romanticism. Our partnership with the Wordsworth Trust, at Grasmere, is long-established, and has a number of new benefits for all our students.
The Castle Quarter is both a wonderful place to enjoy, with many excellent places to eat and drink, and a wonderful resource for literary studies here at Lancaster. Our students have many opportunities to make the most of this resource.
Advance your career with a Master's at Lancaster University - Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences
Hear from alumni in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Lancaster University. What did they study and how did their course propel their career?
Entry requirements
Academic Requirements
2:1 degree in a related subject is normally required. We will also consider applications on an individual basis where you have a degree in other subjects, have a 2:2 or equivalent result or extensive relevant experience. We ask that all applicants on this programme submit a sample of writing.
Please note that we warmly invite all potential applicants to email us (at elcwteaching@lancaster.ac.uk) with any queries they may have, and that our MA Convenors are always happy to have an informal, pre-application conversation
If you have studied outside of the UK, we would advise you to check our list of international qualifications before submitting your application – and again our MA Convenors are more than happy to advise.
Additional Requirements
As part of your application you also need to provide a sample of your academic writing about literature.
English Language Requirements
We may ask you to provide a recognised English language qualification, dependent upon your nationality and where you have studied previously.
We normally require an IELTS (Academic) Test with an overall score of at least 7.0, and a minimum of 6.5 in each element of the test. We also consider other English language qualifications.
Delivered in partnership with INTO Lancaster University, our one-year tailored pre-master’s pathways are designed to improve your subject knowledge and English language skills to the level required by a range of Lancaster University master’s degrees. Visit INTO Lancaster University for more details and a list of eligible degrees you can progress onto.
Course structure
You will study a range of modules as part of your course, some examples of which are listed below.
Information contained on the website with respect to modules is correct at the time of publication, but changes may be necessary, for example as a result of student feedback, Professional Statutory and Regulatory Bodies' (PSRB) requirements, staff changes, and new research. Not all optional modules are available every year.
Core
core modules accordion
The two modules, Research Methodology and Reflective Practice in English Literature Iand II, are designed to help you develop your research, reading, thinking, writing, and presenting skills in ways that will enable to take your next step. You may be planning to study for a PhD, and if so be reassured that the modules align to UK research councils training guidance. Equally you’ll find these are valuable skills for many potential professional roles.
The modules include sessions on, for example, advanced research, working with archives, working with theory, and both scholarly conventions and inventions. In addition, we will explore some of the many ways in which literature lives and flourishes in fields such as publishing, museums, film, journalism, new media, podcasting, fashion and more.
The seminars will run across the academic year and prepare you for the Dissertation (with one-to-one supervision) which takes place in the summer. The course culminates with the English Literary Studies Master’s Conference which is usually held in Lancaster Castle.
The two modules, Research Methodology and Reflective Practice in English Literature I and II, are designed to help you develop your research, reading, thinking, writing, and presenting skills in ways that will enable to take your next step. You may be planning to study for a PhD, and if so be reassured that the modules align to UK research councils training guidance. Equally you’ll find these are valuable skills for many potential professional roles.
The modules include sessions on, for example, advanced research, working with archives, working with theory, and both scholarly conventions and inventions. In addition, we will explore some of the many ways in which literature lives and flourishes in fields such as publishing, museums, film, journalism, new media, podcasting, fashion and more.
The seminars will run across the academic year and prepare you for the Dissertation (with one-to-one supervision) which takes place in the summer. The course culminates with the English Literary Studies Master’s Conference which is usually held in Lancaster Castle.
Optional
optional modules accordion
This module will explore Gothic representations of, for example: pain and illness experience, chronic illness, psychiatric confinement, eating disorders, organ harvest and transplantation, genetic testing, and epidemic or disease emergence. Traditional Gothic tropes find ready echoes in illness.
Subjects may experience their bodies as uncanny, once familiar but now strange; they may feel helpless and physically vulnerable; they strive to decipher the cryptic signs of the medical record and the body’s symptoms; they endure strange temporalities and carceral hospital sites; they are subjected to rituals of medical monitoring; and they become supplicants to powerful figures with mysterious knowledge.
The Gothic mode can be part of a critique of the complex biopolitics of medicine and illness. Yet at the same time, representing illness and pain through a Gothic mode can carry ideological risks, reinforcing problematic cultural assumptions about which human lives are of value. You will explore the promise and perils of the Gothic mode in the arena of health humanities and critical medical humanities.
This module is concerned with a range of wonderful texts from c.1919 to c.1980 that together suggest a line of broadly modernistic writing that has a fascination both with the city (primarily Paris, but also Berlin, Oxford, London, Zurich, and even that city of death which is the death camp) and with the mixing of genres - in particular, such genres as critical essay, philosophical treatise, poetry, comic dialogue, fragment, novel, anecdote, manifesto, autobiography, history, textual commentary, and travelogue. Featured authors currently include Walter Benjamin, Virginia Woolf, Hope Mirrlees, Mina Loy, Samuel Beckett, Paul Celan, and Jacques Derrida. Special attention will be paid to texts that blur the genre-boundary that, traditionally, separates critical writing from creative writing, and students will be invited, if they wish, to submit such texts themselves.
This module examines manhunt narratives -- stories about the systematic pursuit of people who don't want to be found - in British and American writing from the early nineteenth century to the present day. It will address questions of space, power, violence, mobility and surveillance as they are raised by a range of set reading that covers classic thrillers (Buchan, Orczy), proto-feminist stories of female runaways (Gaskell, Wollstonecraft), narratives of escape from slavery (the Crafts, Whitehead), SF stories of hi-tech pursuit and evasion (Dick, Wells), and uncanny experiences of self-hunting (Conrad, Stevenson). The module asks how manhunt narratives work, what fears, desires and fantasies they cater for, and why they are such a prevalent feature of both highbrow and popular literature.
Primary Texts:
John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps
Joseph Conrad, 'The Secret Sharer'
Ellen Craft and William Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom
Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Elizabeth Gaskell, 'The Grey Woman'
Emmuska Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel
Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man
Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria; Or, the Wrongs of Woman
This module explores some of the ways in which literature has explored and expressed the complexity of belief and doubt, redemption and apocalypse, damnation and revelation, in the modern world.
We will consider the ways in which moments, motifs and ideas indebted to the sacred can be found within the traces, margins, narratives and echoes found in the literature of the modern world.
Although welcoming consideration of all three Abrahamic faiths, we will focus primarily on Christian traditions and their life, afterlives and influences in literature.
Authors studied vary from year to year and may include such as Toni Morrison, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Oscar Wilde, Douglas Coupland, Kamilla Shamsie, James Baldwin, Marilynne Robinson, Christina Rossetti, Samuel Beckett, Flannery O'Connor, Charles Dickens, Cormac McCarthy, G. K. Chesterton and the Brontës.
The exploration of literature will be complemented by philosophical writings on religion and may include writers such as J. Kameron Carter, Zhange Ni, Walter Benjamin, Ziad Elmsafy, Sarah Coakley, Michael D. Hurley and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Taking our cue from Haruko Maeda’s remarkable twenty-first century painting Heartbeat of the Death, Queen Elizabeth I (2013), Tudor Gothic critically considers the relationships between traces of Tudor history and culture in four gothic novels (Deborah Harkness’s Shadow of Night (2012), Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (c.1803), Sophia Lee’s The Recess, or a Tale of Other Times (1784) and Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764)) and proto-gothic tropes (such as wonder, terror, strange places, clashing time frames) in select poetry, prose and drama produced in the Tudor period (1485-1603) itself. Rather than viewing the Tudor Gothic as an anachronistic term, the module suggests that Tudor Gothic informs and shapes literary gothic’s social, political and imaginary landscapes.
This module?investigates the various bodies at work in Victorian literary texts. You will explore not only?human?bodies, and how they relate to discourses of race, sex, class, and industrialization, but also such?nonhuman?bodies as animals, water or weather. You will also examine conceptual?bodies such as the body politic and the body of Christ.
Attention to the material dimensions of human existence – including affect, the senses, objects and things – has been the focus of much recent critical discussion. Drawing on this discussion, this module will enable you to explore both the operations of the nonhuman and the preconscious.
You will also examine how the Victorian literary text is a privileged site through which interhuman, intra-human and human-world relations can be considered.
?The texts we study vary from year to year, but previously examples include work by authors such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, John Ruskin, Mary Seacole, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christina Rossetti, Henry Mayhew, and M P Shield, and theoretical ideas from such as Friedrich Schiller. Gaston Bachelard, Jane Bennett, and Robert Esposito.
There may be extra costs related to your course for items such as books, stationery, printing, photocopying, binding and general subsistence on trips and visits. Following graduation, you may need to pay a subscription to a professional body for some chosen careers.
Specific additional costs for studying at Lancaster are listed below.
College fees
Lancaster is proud to be one of only a handful of UK universities to have a collegiate system. Every student belongs to a college, and all students pay a small College Membership Fee which supports the running of college events and activities. Students on some distance-learning courses are not liable to pay a college fee.
For students starting in 2025, the fee is £40 for undergraduates and research students and £15 for students on one-year courses.
Computer equipment and internet access
To support your studies, you will also require access to a computer, along with reliable internet access. You will be able to access a range of software and services from a Windows, Mac, Chromebook or Linux device. For certain degree programmes, you may need a specific device, or we may provide you with a laptop and appropriate software - details of which will be available on relevant programme pages. A dedicated IT support helpdesk is available in the event of any problems.
The University provides limited financial support to assist students who do not have the required IT equipment or broadband support in place.
For most taught postgraduate applications there is a non-refundable application fee of £40. We cannot consider applications until this fee has been paid, as advised on our online secure payment system. There is no application fee for postgraduate research applications.
For some of our courses you will need to pay a deposit to accept your offer and secure your place. We will let you know in your offer letter if a deposit is required and you will be given a deadline date when this is due to be paid.
The fee that you pay will depend on whether you are considered to be a home or international student. Read more about how we assign your fee status.
If you are studying on a programme of more than one year’s duration, tuition fees are reviewed annually and are not fixed for the duration of your studies. Read more about fees in subsequent years.
Scholarships and bursaries
You may be eligible for the following funding opportunities, depending on your fee status and course. You will be automatically considered for our main scholarships and bursaries when you apply, so there's nothing extra that you need to do.
Unfortunately no scholarships and bursaries match your selection, but there are more listed on scholarships and bursaries page.
The information on this site relates primarily to 2025/2026 entry to the University and every effort has been taken to ensure the information is correct at the time of publication.
The University will use all reasonable effort to deliver the courses as described, but the University reserves the right to make changes to advertised courses. In exceptional circumstances that are beyond the University’s reasonable control (Force Majeure Events), we may need to amend the programmes and provision advertised. In this event, the University will take reasonable steps to minimise the disruption to your studies. If a course is withdrawn or if there are any fundamental changes to your course, we will give you reasonable notice and you will be entitled to request that you are considered for an alternative course or withdraw your application. You are advised to revisit our website for up-to-date course information before you submit your application.
More information on limits to the University’s liability can be found in our legal information.
Our Students’ Charter
We believe in the importance of a strong and productive partnership between our students and staff. In order to ensure your time at Lancaster is a positive experience we have worked with the Students’ Union to articulate this relationship and the standards to which the University and its students aspire. View our Charter and other policies.
