Apocalypse London: the city in dystopian fiction - 1880-1974
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- Start Date: 16 May 2025End Date: 20 Jun 2025Fri (Daytime): 10:30 - 12:30In PersonFull fee £169.00 Senior fee £169.00 Concession £110.00
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What is the course about?
On this in-college literature course we will analyse the works for their artistic and narrative value, but also seek to uncover the anxieties each story reveals about the time in which they were written.
What will we cover?
The nature of fear/anxiety; totalitarianism; ecological disaster; aliens – both from space and our own planet; evolution theory; animal and plant life that has got dangerously out of control.
The seven works we will study are (in this order):
* The Doom of a Great City by William Delisle Hay (1880) — a short novella available to read online here http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951002135568t#view=1up;seq=4
* The Time Machine (1895) and The War of the Worlds (1898) by HG Wells
* Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)
* The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham (1951)
* Quatermass and the Pit by Nigel Kneale (1960) Film and TV versions.
* The Rats by James Herbert (1974).
What will I achieve?
By the end of this course you should be able to...
- Identify key themes that recur in these works plus the differences in the approach to these themes shown by individual authors.
- Locate each work within the historical context in which it was written.
-Define significant anxieties about ‘modernity’ and urban life which these books reveal.
-Pursue further reading on these subjects and authors, with detailed bibliographies/secondary reading lists.
What level is the course and do I need any particular skills?
No previous skills or knowledge required, but curiosity and an appetite for reading are desirable.
How will I be taught, and will there be any work outside the class?
There is quite a lot of reading involved, though extracts will also be suggested if you do not have time to complete an entire book.
Teaching will be delivered via mini-lecture and seminar; students are encouraged to present their own short presentation on any of the fictions or subjects that are of greatest interest but this is not mandatory.
Are there any other costs? Is there anything I need to bring?
Most of the works (all listed above) can be purchased relatively inexpensively or borrowed from a library. For Quatermass and the Pit, we will actually be looking at the film and TV versions (rather than the published screenplay), and I will alert you to when the movie version is to be shown (the black and white TV series is available on YouTube); alternatively the film version can be bought as a dvd.
When I've finished, what course can I do next?
Please look for other Literature courses under History, Culture and Writing/Literature at www.citylit.ac.uk.
Sarah Wise is an award-winning writer and historian, with an MA in Victorian Studies from Birkbeck, University of London. She teaches social history and literature at the University of California’s London Outreach Center. Her interests are urban history, working-class history, medical history and nineteenth-century literature and reportage. Her most recent book, Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-Doctors in Victorian England, was shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize. Her 2004 debut, The Italian Boy: Murder and Grave Robbery in 1830s London, was shortlisted for the 2005 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction and won the Crime Writers’ Association Golden Dagger. Her follow-up The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum (2008) was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize. She was a contributor to the volume Charles Booth's London Poverty Maps, published by Thames & Hudson/London School of Economics, and appeared on BBC Radio 4's In Our Time to discuss Booth's work https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000wsxf For reviews www.sarahwise.co.uk/reviews.html
Please note: We reserve the right to change our tutors from those advertised. This happens rarely, but if it does, we are unable to refund fees due to this. Our tutors may have different teaching styles; however we guarantee a consistent quality of teaching in all our courses.