MA English Literature: Modern and Contemporary

This pathway explores literature in its social and cultural contexts from the late-nineteenth century to the present, focusing on Modernist and Postmodernist literature, and contemporary critical debates.

• Get tailored support from staff with a rich variety of research specialisms
• Consider key issues in the study of modern and contemporary literature
• Study in a leading centre of research with a renowned teaching team
• Create a bespoke degree that reflects your interests
• Gain specialised, transferable research skills

The pathway aims to explore Modernist and Contemporary Writing in relation to broad ideas about twentieth-century and twenty-first century history, the historical present, the problems of periodization, and the changing cultural context of literary writing. Special attention is devoted to questions of technology, innovation and social change that alter and bring into question the category of writing itself, its role in theoretical debates and its place in modern and contemporary philosophy.

The pathway offers the opportunity to think about the recent history of technological innovation and the digital cultures of the twenty first century as contexts for literary production, and to provide a detailed survey of issues that relate to the definition of modernism, the nature of modernity and the notion of the contemporary, both in academic contexts and in lived social experience.