Your postgraduate English Literature offer-holder hub
Discover your dedicated English Literature hub with important information about your course.
Congratulations on your offer to study at the University of Birmingham!
Postgraduate offer-holder week
Join your future classmates and academic community online between 12 - 16 May.
Priyodarshini, MA English Literature
"I found Birmingham to be one of the very few universities that lets me study and research popular literature and culture.
Discover Priyodarshini's story
It is fascinating to learn how the literature we so easily dismiss as not being "intellectual" enough is actually descended from a long line of "intellectual" texts."
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Suggested summer reading
The English Literature admissions tutor Dr Amy Burge provides her reading suggestions for each of our English Literature pathways.
If you're considering the Medieval Literature pathway, why not try
-
Donoghue, Daniel, ed., Seamus Heaney, trans., Beowulf: A Verse Translation (W. W. Norton, 2001)
- The Public Medievalist 'Games' archive
- The Public Medievalist 'Film & TV archive'
If you're considering the Long-Nineteenth Century pathway, why not try
-
Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), edited by Tone Brekke and Jon Mee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)
- Elizabeth Gaskell, Cousin Phillis and Other Stories, edited by Heather Glen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)
If you're considering the Modern and Contemporary pathway, why not try
- Virginia Woolf, The Waves, To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway
- T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
- Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
- Bernadine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other
If you're considering the Popular Literature and Culture pathway, why not try
- Kristen Roupenian, "Cat Person", The New Yorker (4 December 2017)
- Mikaella Clements, “From Star Trek to Fifty Shades: how fanfiction went mainstream,” The Guardian (8 August 2018).
Career opportunities
We’re proud to be the UK university most targeted by the country’s leading graduate employers (The Graduate Market in 2024 High Fliers report).
Postgraduate careers support
Our English Literature postgraduate students have gone on to work in careers such as 'Publications Editor', 'Artistic Director' and 'Brand Manager' in organisations such as the Royal Shakespeare Company, Palgrave Macmillan and the National Theatre.
The University has commissioned Cturtle as our data partner for tracking our alumni destinations. The data above is a subset from 43,666 alumni who completed their course up to 31 July 2024.
