Fiction Literature Courses
Study online & in London
From Dante to DeLillo, revisit classic literature texts and enjoy discovering new writers and adaptations plus share your views in lively classroom discussions.
- 'Wild Places': Katherine Mansfield's imaginative worldsCourse start date: Wed 12 Feb 2025
Location on this date: Online
Tutors: Fiona McCullochThis course will introduce and discuss a selection of short stories by Katherine Mansfield. Mansfield’s approach to art is to embrace hidden depths, to seek untamed and unhindered aspects lurking in the shadows, writing with a wild surmise in an attempt to find new literary vistas. Similarly, describing herself as ‘an alien’, we will consider her self-asserted feeling of strangeness as an outsider, and how this might manifest itself in her fictional work.
This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.Full fee £119.00 Senior fee £119.00 Concession £77.00 - Great works: Jane Austen’s EmmaCourse start date: Thu 6 Mar 2025
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Kate WilkinsonThis short in-college literature course explores Jane Austen’s ‘Emma’ (1815), often considered her finest – and funniest – novel. We’ll study its characters, themes and narrative techniques, and we’ll consider the historical and social contexts in which Austen was writing.Full fee £79.00 Senior fee £63.00 Concession £51.00 - Jeanette Winterson: breaking the narrativeCourse start date: Wed 12 Mar 2025
Location on this date: Online
Tutors: Fiona McCullochThis course introduces British writer, Jeanette Winterson’s novels, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (1985) and The Stone Gods (2007). Discover how these fictional worlds portray the interplay between gender, sexuality, power, reality, cyberspace, nation, and ecological concerns. Learn how she “breaks the narrative” to reboot the love story.
This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.Full fee £119.00 Senior fee £95.00 Concession £77.00 - ‘This is about being’: Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine EvaristoCourse start date: Mon 17 Mar 2025
Location on this date: Online
Tutors: Rebecca BalfourthCome and join us for an exploration of Bernadine Evaristo’s Booker winning novel, Girl, Woman, Other. A great introduction into the lively world of black British literature of our current moment, Evaristo made history in 2019 as the first black woman (and the first black British author) to win the Booker prize. Evaristo brings to life a world of characters with varying experiences, giving the reader an insight into the different historical spaces they occupy, moving in and out of each other’s lives in often surprising ways.
This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.Full fee £79.00 Senior fee £79.00 Concession £51.00 - Drowned Worlds: climate fiction by JG Ballard and Jessie GreengrassCourse start date: Tue 15 Apr 2025
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Lewis WardFor this in-college literature session we will compare two depictions of climate disaster written fifty years apart, JG Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) and Jessie Greengrass’ The High House (2021). We will explore how both novels depict the encroachment of water on human civilisation and the psychology of the survivors, but with very different styles, approaches and conclusions.Full fee £19.00 Senior fee £15.00 Concession £12.00 - Masterworks of 19th Century French and Russian literatureCourse start date: Tue 29 Apr 2025
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Richard NilandThis class explores classic texts of 19th century French and Russian literature, discussing literary style, themes, and contexts as a way of developing and sharing responses to celebrated European writing. Among the French writers examined will be Balzac, Baudelaire, Flaubert and Rimbaud, with our Russians including Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov.Full fee £199.00 Senior fee £159.00 Concession £129.00 - The History of the Irish short story: from James Joyce to Claire KeeganCourse start date: Tue 29 Apr 2025
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Richard NilandThe short story has come to be seen as one of Irish Literature’s most celebrated forms of expression. From the early stories of George Moore and James Joyce, to modern classics by John McGahern, William Trevor and Claire Keegan, the short story has allowed Irish writers to pick apart the complexities of Irish society in powerful, precise and poetic terms. This course will explore some of the most iconic short stories of twentieth-century Irish literature.Full fee £169.00 Senior fee £135.00 Concession £110.00 - First Novels Revisited: Amis, McEwan, Barnes, IshiguroCourse start date: Tue 29 Apr 2025
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Lewis WardMartin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro are household names of contemporary British fiction. But how did their careers begin in the 1970s and 1980s? And how do their early efforts stand up today?Full fee £169.00 Senior fee £169.00 Concession £110.00 - Tales from everywhere: international fictions from the 20th centuryCourse start date: Wed 30 Apr 2025
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Aamer HusseinA selection of novels from 1960 to 1980, including Heinrich Boll's powerful psychological fiction, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum; two works of speculative fiction, Marlen Haushofer's The Wall and Kay Dick's They; Latifa Zayyat's bildungsroman, The Open Door; and Mariama Ba's powerful exploration of mourning, So Long a Letter.Full fee £249.00 Senior fee £199.00 Concession £162.00 - Get together and readCourse start date: Thu 1 May 2025
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Claire AllenEnjoy talking with other people about the things you have read? Want to share great stories, poems and drama? Come along and join the conversation. The group is led by a shared reading practitioner trained by The Reader Organisation. - Classics Remixed and RetoldCourse start date: Thu 1 May 2025
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Kate WilkinsonCome and join us to explore two classic texts and two ‘companion novels’ that retell their famous stories from alternative perspectives: George Orwell, 1984 (1949) and Sandra Newman, Julia (2023); Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Jo Baker, Longbourn (2013).Full fee £199.00 Senior fee £159.00 Concession £129.00 - The Open Road: classics of living on the roadCourse start date: Wed 7 May 2025
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Julian BirkettIt was that great literary voyager Robert Louis Stevenson who said “It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive”. Whether it's to the sound of train wheels, hoofbeats, car tyres or marching feet, and not knowing where day’s end will find you, there is an exhilaration in being on the open road. And the twentieth century saw a host of stirring accounts of journeys made in search of a special kind of freedom. Some of them have become literary classics.Full fee £169.00 Senior fee £135.00 Concession £110.00 - 21st Century Folk Tales: myth and magic in the global worldCourse start date: Thu 8 May 2025
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Katie GossThis in-college course focuses on innovative short fiction from around the globe which reworks folkloric traditions to grapple with conditions of twenty-first century life. As well as engaging with the unique folkloric influences each text draws on, we’ll consider the complexities of the present that they are addressed to – and how the rising popularity of ghost stories, fairy tales, dark fables and surreal myths suggests a renewed fascination with the intrigues of the mysterious, monstrous and inexplicable.Full fee £169.00 Senior fee £135.00 Concession £110.00 - Modern Short Crime Fiction: 1950 to present timesCourse start date: Tue 13 May 2025
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: William BradyFrom Victorian ‘Penny Dreadfuls’ to the pages of mid-twentieth-century American Pulp Magazines, the history and evolution of the Crime genre has always been bound up with that of the short story. This course explores how this short-form legacy has been celebrated and sustained by Crime Writers from the latter half of the twentieth century to the present day. Short form narrative has proved an apt vehicle for emerging and established Crime Writers to experiment with the form—crafting suspenseful, mysterious and beguiling tales of the unexpected.Full fee £169.00 Senior fee £135.00 Concession £110.00 - Brief Encounters: the art of short fictionCourse start date: Tue 13 May 2025
Location on this date: Online
Tutors: Megan BeechWhat does short fiction require of us as readers? How does the compressed space of a few pages change the way in which writers write and the kinds of stories they choose to tell? This online course explores a vast array of nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century short fiction, thinking about the possibilities and limitations of this exciting and vivid form of literature.
This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.Full fee £169.00 Senior fee £135.00 Concession £110.00
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