Literature Graduate Program

The Literature Graduate Program focuses primarily on literature in English, with special attention to English, American, Irish, and Scottish literatures, and its relationships with Continental European literatures (classical and modern). Offered courses also occasionally include, or indeed focus on, film studies and comparative studies of English language and Asian literatures. The program emphasizes the cultural contexts of Western literature as well as critical trends and their implications for literary study. Students’ continued work on mastering English speaking and writing is also a priority; therefore, all courses are conducted primarily in English and require written work and oral presentations in English. To help provide students with financial support as well as relevant work experience, the program offers Teaching Assistantships. 

Past graduates of this program have gone on to PhD studies at such institutions as The University of Wisconsin-Madison and The University of Washington-Seattle in the USA, The Universities of Glasgow, Nottingham, Reading, and Wales-Swansea in the UK, and Cheng Kung, Cheng Chi, and Sun Yat-sen in Taiwan.

For a list of requirements to complete the MA degree, please see the Curriculum page.

Examples of accepted theses within the past several years:
        “Þou Art not Gawayn ...Þat Is so Goud Halden”: Problems of Reputation and Expectations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
        “Haply, for I Am Black”: A Study of Orientalism in William Shakespeare’s Othello
        Why Faustus Refuses to Repent: A Secular Reading of The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus
        Socially Constructed Womanhood in the Fin de Siècle: Fettered Destiny as an Enigma in Mona Caird’s The Daughters of Danaus
        Redefining “The Ideal Lady”: Class, Education, and Love in Charlotte Brontë
        Shell Shock and Recovery in Pat Barker’s Regeneration
        “Good has its reward and evil has its cost”: Choice Making in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend
        A Study of the Persona and the Shadow in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
        “Bartleby”: A Marxist Reading
        Trauma and War in Slaughterhouse-Five
        Is Katniss Everdeen a Good Role Model for Young Women?
        What Makes a Hero? : J. R. R. Tolkien's Concept of Heroism in The Lord of the Rings
        From Naive to Elevated Self-Enlightenment: Symbols of Memory in Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away