BAEnglish and United States Literature
| Study location | United Kingdom, Colchester Campus |
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| Type | Bachelor courses, full-time |
| Nominal duration | 3 years |
| Study language | English |
| Awards | BA |
| Course code | T720 |
| Tuition fee | To be confirmed |
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| Entry qualification | High school / secondary education (or higher) The entry qualification documents are accepted in any language |
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| Language requirements | English IELTS: 6.0 |
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| Other requirements | At least 1 reference(s) must be provided. |
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| More information |
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Overview
Essex has always been a major centre for American Studies, and our expertise across literature, film, art, history and politics allows you to unravel and understand the complexities of U.S. society and the American dream. You explore nationalism and regionalism, as well as conflicts of race, gender and religion at the heart of US history and culture. Through this you uncover the deep interconnections in the evolution of U.S. writing and American identities.
Discover the literature of the USA from the early realism of Mark Twain and the slave narrative of Frederick Douglass, through the experimental work of Hemingway and Faulkner, to contemporary authors such as Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison. You also cover the English literary canon from Shakespeare and his contemporaries through to twentieth-century literature.
Your reading can take you beyond the US and Britain to the rest of the Americas and Europe; at Essex you don’t just study English Literature, you study world literature in English. This means that you can study a truly diverse range of topics, including:
- Caribbean writing in relation to European and US texts
- Early modern European literature
- Translating novels for the screen
- Modernist cityscapes
Our course offers a varied, flexible and distinctive curriculum, focused on the study of US and English literature, but also enabling you to take options from the other courses within our Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies including creative writing, filmmaking, journalism and drama.
We are ranked top 20 in the UK (Guardian University Guide 2015), and our students are some of the happiest in the country; we are consistently ranked among the top in the UK for student satisfaction.
Programme structure
Year 1
Understanding Employability: Preparing for Your Future
Literature: Origins and Transformations
Introduction to United States Literature
Close Reading Skills
Introduction to European Literature (optional)
The Enlightenment (optional)
Year 2
United States Literature Since 1850
Approaches to Text
Early Modern Literature (optional)
Alternative Americas: Independent Film (optional)
Introduction to Caribbean Literature (optional)
Final year
Post-War(s) United States Fiction (optional)
The Imagined South (optional)
Transatlantic Romanticisms (optional)
“There is a Continent Outside My Window” : United States and Caribbean Literatures in Dialogue (optional)
Career opportunities
The number of careers that lead from courses in literature is almost as large as the number of graduates, but two particular areas in which our graduates have had recent success are publishing and the theatre. One of our former students is now in charge of editorial at a large publishing house, and another has just taken over running one of the country’s major theatres.
Our recent graduates have gone on to work in a wide range of desirable roles including:
The Civil Service
Journalism and broadcasting
Marketing
Museum and library work
Commerce and finance
Teaching
We are currently NOT ACCEPTING applications from NON-EU countries, except Georgia and Serbia.
We are currently NOT ACCEPTING applications from NON-EU countries, except Georgia and Serbia.