English Literature and Philosophy & Ethics BA (Hons) (with Foundation Year)

ENGLISH LITERATURE

*This course is only available as a combined honours for September 2025 entry

**Single honours course is open for 2026 entry only

Liverpool is the ideal city to study English Literature, with its thriving cultural scene, literary festivals, independent bookshops, and the renowned Central Library. Just a short walk from our Hope Park campus, you’ll also find The Reader Organisation in Calderstones Park—an inspiring hub for literature lovers.

Our English Literature degree explores a wide range of genres and historical periods, from fiction, poetry, and drama to autobiography, essays, travel writing, and slave narratives. You’ll study well-known authors as well as new voices offering fresh perspectives on key themes such as sustainability, identity, wellbeing, and power in society.

This English Literature course also looks beyond the texts themselves, inviting you to engage with the world of books through publishing, marketing, media, and digital technologies. You’ll even work with rare books and manuscripts from Liverpool Hope’s special collections.

Key features of the English Literature degree:

- A broad study of literature across periods, genres, and critical approaches

- Exploration of themes such as the environment, global perspectives, and wellbeing

- Hands-on opportunities in publishing, reading, and digital approaches

- Small group teaching and personalised support from expert tutors

- Employability skills embedded throughout the course

Our teaching team are internationally recognised researchers and published writers. In the latest Research Excellence Framework (REF 2021), English at Liverpool Hope achieved outstanding results, with over 80% of staff publications rated “world leading” or “internationally excellent.”

By the end of the English Literature course, you’ll graduate with advanced critical, analytical, and communication skills that prepare you for careers in publishing, journalism, teaching, marketing, the creative industries, or further study.

Hear from one of our English Literature students.

PHILOSOPHY & ETHICS

Philosophy and Ethics explores the big questions of life and morality: on what basis do we judge things good or evil? It challenges you to examine your assumptions, opinions and worldview. Do we need to believe in God for life to have meaning – or have the arguments for the existence of God broken down? What does it mean to be human? Do we have free will, or is our life completely determined?

Through close attention to the primary texts of philosophers such as Plato, Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Kant and Nietzsche, our Philosophy and Ethics degree will help you learn to analyse and evaluate arguments, and to compose and communicate your own ideas in a reasoned way. You will have a grounding in the foundational questions of philosophy. As you progress, you will look in depth at philosophy of religion, political philosophy, applied ethics and issues of human personhood, artificial intelligence, ecology and animality.

Liverpool is a great place to study philosophy: the city famously wears its heart on its sleeve, and is home to a rich web of cultures that explore the human condition through humour, art and performance. The Liverpool Hope team has developed a programme that aims to be contemporary and timely, especially in the field of applied ethics. And in a city that has been riven with sectarian strife in its past, the innovative approaches that the team takes to thinking about religion in the modern world are highly topical. 

This degree will help you to develop your professional capacity by equipping you with the intellectual skills and perspectives needed to face the ethical and ideological challenges of the contemporary world. Such skills are essential for careers that require you to grasp with complex and often conflicting ideas across a whole range of professions.