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.
- City Lit evening reading groupCourse start date: Mon 25 Sep 2023 (and 1 other date)
Location on this date: Online
Tutors: Claire AllenShare thoughts and ideas about what you are reading, with books chosen by the group. Please come to the first session with suggestions (contemporary fiction in paperback) and having read The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed. Monthly meetings on 25 Sept, 23 Oct, 27 Nov; 15 Jan, 19 Feb, 18 March, 29 April, 10 June, and 08 July.
This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.Full fee £149.00 Senior fee £149.00 Concession £97.00 - Great European Short StoriesCourse start date: Tue 24 Sep 2024
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Julian BirkettThe short story in Europe has characteristics all of its own. While British, Irish and American stories are rooted in psychological realism, many European writers have tended towards a more philosophical approach, reflecting the concerns of the modern age as experienced by the sensibilities of individual writers. Authors such as Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka and Albert Camus are masters of the kinds of tale which ask profound question about the nature of our existence. They are also supreme stylists capable of sustaining a gripping narrative. - Memoir Fiction: Karl Ove Knausgaard, Martin Amis, Philip RothCourse start date: Tue 24 Sep 2024
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Lewis WardWe will discuss questions of memory, history and genre through readings of three fascinating examples of ‘memoir fiction’: Karl Ove Knausgaard’s A Death in the Family, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, and Martin Amis’ Inside Story.Full fee £169.00 Senior fee £169.00 Concession £110.00 - Writing from Life: memoir, autofiction, novelsCourse start date: Tue 24 Sep 2024
Location on this date: Online
Tutors: Kate WilkinsonWhat do we want and expect from life stories? On this online literature course we’ll read a selection of fascinating books and extracts, which experiment in different ways to combine stories of personal experience and literary invention. As well as memoirs the course includes ‘autofiction’ – a description for the work of novelists whose material is, explicitly, their own life – and we’ll explore this tricky and sometimes controversial category of writing. We’ll think too about some of the ethical and cultural questions that writing from life can raise, including privacy and a right of reply, and think about factors that may affect a book’s critical reception.
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 £169.00 Concession £110.00 - It Can't Happen Here: Sinclair Lewis, Philip Roth, Muriel SparkCourse start date: Tue 24 Sep 2024
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Alexander Fairbairn-DixonExplore three ground-breaking works of ‘speculative’ prose fiction, each offering a highly innovative examination of C20 American political populism. From bitter satire, unnerving dystopia, to the lightly comic, we’ll see how the texts embody genuine anxieties of authoritarianism in America. Surely,- ‘it can’t happen here’?Full fee £169.00 Senior fee £135.00 Concession £110.00 - Nineteenth Century American Literary ClassicsCourse start date: Fri 27 Sep 2024
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Richard NilandThis class explores the wonderful world of 19th century American literature, reading classic texts to broaden knowledge of literary history through a range of influential novels, stories, and poems. Among the writers considered in their literary, political, and cultural contexts will be Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain.Full fee £199.00 Senior fee £159.00 Concession £129.00 - City Lit reading group 1Course start date: Fri 29 Sep 2023 (and 1 other date)
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Kate WilkinsonShare thoughts and ideas about what you are reading, with books chosen by the group. Please come to the first session on Friday 29 September with suggestions (English-language contemporary fiction in paperback) and having read 'Unsettled Ground', by Clare Fuller. Meetings take place on 29 September, 10 November, 2 February, 1 March, 10 May and 14 June.Full fee £149.00 Senior fee £119.00 Concession £97.00 - From the Land of the Rising Sun: an introduction to Japanese LiteratureCourse start date: Thu 3 Oct 2024
Location on this date: Online
Tutors: Woody RiverExplore the strange and beautiful world of Japanese literature from the 17th century to the present. Follow the footsteps of a medieval travelling poet, delve into the Tokyo pleasure district, view Hiroshima through the eyes of survivors after the atomic bombing, and interpret dreams to illuminate Japanese history and culture. Using art, photography, history and film, you will explore poems, journals, short stories and novels by ten of Japan’s most important writers.
This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information. - Writings on solitudeCourse start date: Mon 7 Oct 2024
Location on this date: Online
Tutors: Kate WilkinsonWhat does it mean to be alone? This online literature class focuses on solitude. We’ll read and discuss extracts from two books – non-fiction and fiction – to think about different representations and experiences of solitude, its history of creative and spiritual significance, and the meanings solitude has for us today.
We’ll discuss extracts from:
Sara Maitland, A Book of Silence (2008). This unusual memoir combines autobiography, travel writing, meditation and essay, describing Maitland’s journey over several years away from a busy urban life towards contemplative solitude.
Dave Eggers, The Circle (2013). A dystopian satire of the early internet age, this novel imagines a future in which technology is reshaping human connection in unsettling ways.
This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.Full fee £19.00 Senior fee £15.00 Concession £12.00 - 20th & 21st Century Black British LiteratureCourse start date: Mon 4 Nov 2024
Location on this date: Online
Tutors: Rebecca BalfourthExplore some important names in Black British Literature – from Booker-winning novelist Bernadine Evaristo to T.S. Eliot Award-winning poet Roger Robinson, through to new and exciting work by Okechukwu Nzelu, who was longlisted for the 2023 Jhalak Prize, and non-fiction by Zadie Smith. Read, analyse and discuss this literature in context to earlier examples of writing by Black people in Britain, including pioneering feminist, poet, playwright, and broadcaster Una Marson and novelist and short fiction writer, Sam Selvon.
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 - The rise and fall of Oscar WildeCourse start date: Mon 22 Apr 2024
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Julian BirkettOscar Wilde was the most controversial writer of late Victorian Britain. He was famed for his wit, extravagant lifestyle, and sexual adventures. His plays and his sensational novel The Picture of Dorian Gray were celebrated and admired. But his scandalous trial and conviction “for gross indecency with men” ruined him, and he ended his life in Paris, destitute and alone. His dramatic trial marked a turning point in British attitudes to sex and culture.Full fee £149.00 Senior fee £119.00 Concession £97.00 - Tales from everywhere: international fictions from the 20th centuryCourse start date: Wed 24 Apr 2024
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Aamer HusseinJoin us to read and discuss a selection of novels from the 1950s and 1960, in English and in translation, some of which, like Stan Barstow’s powerful story of upward mobility A Kind of Loving and Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s poignant portrait of unrest in Kenya Weep Not, My Child, have rarely been out of print. Some are recent rediscoveries, such as Han Suyin’s story of forbidden romance in wartime London, Winter Love, and Chingiz Aitmatov’s delicate Kyrgyz fable, Jamilia. Fresh translations of Magda Szabo’s Iza’s Ballad and Tove Ditlevsen’s autobiographical coming of age story,Youth, are also included.
NB. This course will have a break week on Wednesday 29 May.Full fee £229.00 Senior fee £183.00 Concession £149.00 - A day in the life of the everyday: the twentieth century circadian novel: Mrs. Dalloway, One Fine Day, The HoursCourse start date: Fri 26 Apr 2024
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Jenny StevensNovels that fit all their action into just one day (‘circadian novels’) have been penned by some of literature’s most esteemed authors. This course focuses on three novels which use the one-day structure to tell their stories: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), Mollie Pater-Downes’s One Fine Day (1947), and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1999). It explores how they portray the inner life of characters, at the same time as engaging with broader social issues of the time.Full fee £179.00 Senior fee £143.00 Concession £116.00 - The History of the Irish short story: from early Joyce to Claire KeeganCourse start date: Tue 23 Apr 2024
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 £149.00 Senior fee £119.00 Concession £97.00
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