Discover Ancient Civilisations - Online Courses

This course explores the Medieval Mystery plays, also known as the York Corpus Christi plays, focusing on the oldest of the four great cycles of biblical drama that have survived from late Medieval England. We will consider theatrical conventions, costumes and props, the performances and open-air staging of the plays and the medieval guilds and writers that were responsible for them.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

Shakespeare presents us with two visions of marriage, the Macbeths’ longstanding but filled with passion and rivalry, Othello’s fragile and still largely innocent. Macbeth and his wife know each other only too well – Othello and Desdemona barely at all. We the audience become sucked into these marital dramas through the force of Shakespeare’s dazzling imagery, psychological insight and sensational plotting. We’ll be studying the characters, the poetry and the ideas of both plays in detail.

Explore the intimate relationship between Beckett’s universe of unbelief, presided over by a Godot who never comes, and Dante’s poem, the most exalted, vastly influential literary expression of medieval Christianity, whose presence can be felt everywhere in the Irishman’s long oeuvre, in every genre – in his plays, novels, stories, poems, essays - and at every stage of his career. What brought them together, and what were the results?

This one day short course will explore the writing of two contemporary queer writers, both of whom use innovative form to tell unique stories of lesbian and trans experience. We'll look at the exhilarating, T.S Eliot Prize winning, C+nto and Othered Poems (2021) by Joelle Taylor and Variations (2022).

What do we mean by ‘literary fiction’? What expectations do we bring to the novels we read? Do we really ‘escape’ when we enter fictional worlds? These are just some of the questions addressed in a course which focuses on the analysis of prose fiction. Reading texts as short as one-sentence ‘flash fiction’ to complete short stories, it engages with writing from a wide range of periods and authors, paying close attention to narrative techniques and their effects.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

Explore new directions in contemporary travel literature, as authors from across the world take the genre beyond the colonial European gaze that once characterised it. We examine themes such as diaspora, postcolonialism, language and ethics, looking at classic texts by Caryl Phillips, Pico Iyer and Jamaica Kincaid, and recent works by Emmanuel Iduma, Noo Saro-Wiwa, and Raja Shehadeh.

Join us to explore three works of life writing set in Paris and Berlin between the wars, where café culture, the adventure of the streets, bohemian life, and nocturnal temptations offer opportunities for artistic, personal, and sexual freedom. Set in post-WW1 Paris and pre-WW2 Berlin, writers, artists, and adventurers find themselves entangled within the moving fabric of unpredictable social and political changes. Writers include Ernest Hemingway, Jean Rhys and Christopher Isherwood.

Join us to explore the rise of a dark, psychologically complex strain of Crime Fiction in the 1940s and 50s. Often termed the ‘psycho-thriller’, these novels put the criminal mind centre-stage, delving into murkier recesses of the human psyche than had previously been entertained. Focusing on two key examples of the genre, Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square and Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, we will analyse and contextualise the psycho-thriller as it evolved in Britain and America.