English Literature and French

English literature and French is a degree that combines serious engagement with literary tradition across two languages, developing your ability to read, analyse, and interpret texts from two of the world's richest literary cultures. At the University of Surrey, the BA English Literature and French is a four-year full-time programme that includes a year abroad, giving you extended immersion in the French-speaking world. The programme integrates an understanding of how artificial intelligence is shaping workplace expectations into its course design, building the digital confidence and creativity that contemporary employers increasingly value.

The English literature strand develops your skills in close reading, literary analysis, and critical theory across a range of periods and genres. You will engage with texts from Old English to the contemporary, learning to situate literary works within their historical, social, and cultural contexts and to engage with the major critical debates that each period and genre has generated. The French strand develops your language to a high level of proficiency, with simultaneous engagement with French and Francophone literature, culture, history, and contemporary society.

Reading in French with the depth that literary study requires is a significant achievement, and the year abroad provides the immersive experience that consolidates and extends your linguistic and cultural competence.

Graduates of English and French degrees carry a combination of linguistic fluency, cultural literacy, and analytical skill that is genuinely valuable across a wide range of careers. Translation and interpreting, publishing, journalism, teaching, communications, public relations, arts administration, and work in European institutions are all natural career directions. The critical reading and writing skills developed in English literature transfer well to law, the civil service, consultancy, and the media, while French language competence adds significant value in any career involving work with French-speaking organisations, markets, or communities.

Many graduates go on to postgraduate study in literature, translation, European studies, or professional programmes such as law. The year abroad deepens both the linguistic and the cultural dimension of the degree significantly.