Fiction Literature Courses
Study online & in London

We will go on a journey to investigate the art and form of the essay through a variety of women essayists from the early 20th century to the present day. We will explore the essay’s hazy boundaries between memoir, confession, nature writing, elegy, sermon, polemic and mystical/religious experience through key women essayists including Virginia Woolf, Simone Weil, Audre Lorde, Clarice Lispector, Kathleen Jamie, Anne Carson, and Claudia Rankine.



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

Why are we drawn to historical fiction? What do we want to discover? This course investigates historical fiction written in the twenty-first century and how it reimagines past societies for contemporary readers. Reading novels and selected extracts, we’ll explore the strategies, pleasures and challenges of historical fiction: how it can bring unknown lives into the light and ask us to think again about the present. Includes The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell, The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker and The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins.



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

Explore the world of Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro as we focus on the second twenty years of his writing career. Books include When We Were Orphans, Never Let Me Go, The Buried Giant and Klara and the Sun. We also take a look at his ventures into song lyrics and film screenplays.



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

Explore and discuss a selection of contemporary fictional texts by Scottish women writers, including Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon and Ali Smith’s Hotel World. We will think about key themes and issues, such as nationhood, women’s contribution to remapping the nation through its fictional imagining and relationship beyond its borders, social class, gender, sexuality, and journeys.



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

Japanese literature in translation has often been dominated by male writers such as Haruki Murakami. Increasingly, however, books written by female authors are now receiving English-language translations and critical acclaim, as seen with the publication and success of Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman last year. This 6-week online course explores some of the most exciting literature translated in the last few years, which give an insight into the experiences of women in modern Japan.



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

“I aint got no home, I’m just a roamin’ round” (Woody Guthrie). This class explores the figure of the vagabond and representations of hardship and the road in works by celebrated authors and filmmakers. From Charlie Chaplin and George Orwell to Woody Guthrie and Agnès Varda, we investigate the historical and cultural contexts of the image of the vagabond in 20th century literature and cinema.



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

The late 19th/early 20th century was a tumultuous time in London, and many fiction writers sought a new way to explore the themes of poverty, social injustice, gender and ethnicity in the capital. We will explore each author’s approach to the subject matter, and travel in fiction to many vividly realised London locations, ranging from Lambeth to Soho, Whitechapel to Seven Dials, Shoreditch to Shadwell, identifying innovations in narrative style and literary genre.



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

We will read works of fiction and view their cinematic transformations, developing an understanding of plot,



characterisation and narrative in a film making context. Each session includes analysis and discussion of the literary



text and an opportunity to view and consider the film.



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

Delving into this lyric and haunting text, we will consider Robinson’s vision of the house disrupted and how this releases the energies of constricted identities. Exploring ideas and understanding around the questioning of domestic and traditional constructs and how this impacts female identity, we will study how Robinson creates intimate spaces and relationships to overturn assumptions around parenting, the home and our relationship to the natural world.



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

Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is one of America’s most celebrated novels. Published in 1869, it charts the adolescence and young womanhood of the March sisters, growing up in Massachusetts. The novel’s popularity and familiarity with audiences across the world has led there to be several adaptations of the film. In our course, we will look at two versions, one from 1933, and one from 2018, and examine their particular readings of the book.



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

Inspired by Lauren Elkin’s book Flaneuse, and the journey of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, this two-day workshop explores literary representations of women exploring the city.



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

We will explore three of the most powerful voices in Scottish writing today, focusing on critically-acclaimed novels from 2020 and 2021 by Ali Smith, Jenni Fagan and Douglas Stuart. Their originality and narrative power is matched by a passionate moral commitment and willingness to engage – as Scottish literature has always done - with the most challenging issues faced by their society and ours.



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

Animals leap, crawl, hop, and gallop across the pages of modern fiction. Why do authors write about animals? What effect does it have on us as readers when we encounter animals in novels and short stories? From Beatrix Potter and Black Beauty to the contemporary novel, this course explores the role of the animal in modern literature. Themes that we will think about together include: animal suffering, animals in depictions of childhood, and animal transformations and dehumanisation. Includes 'Happiness' (2018) by Aminatta Forna and writings by J.M. Coewtzee and John Berger.



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

This online literature course explores classic shorter 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. From history and travel to memory and madness, the class tackles some of the finest works ever written. Among the French writers examined will be Balzac, de Nerval and Flaubert, with our Russians including Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Chekhov.



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