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. You can study in-person or in the comfort of your home with our online courses. For more information about our live online courses, please see our guide to online learning.
- Modernist OutsidersCourse start date: Thu 7 Jul 2022
Location on this date: Online
Tutors: Stephen WinfieldKafka, Beckett, Pessoa, Schulz, Walser, Lispector: what does it mean to be a literary outsider, socially, intellectually, geographically? How does such a condition affect the quality of your imagining, your ability to build and sustain a personal vision that is at the same time sufficiently responsive to the concerns of the world around you?
This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.Full fee £69.00 Senior fee £69.00 Concession £42.00 - Borderlines of Madness in 19th century fictionCourse start date: Mon 9 May 2022 (and 2 other dates)
Location on this date: Online (other locations are available)
Tutors: Sarah WiseWe will explore various themes related to insanity and altered states of consciousness by examining a number of 19th-century works of fiction. Novelists and poets often had the greatest insights into the workings of the mind, and many Victorian psychiatrists cited works of fiction in their case studies. Among the authors we will cover are Charlotte Bronte, Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, Gogol, Herman Melville and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.Full fee £49.00 Senior fee £39.00 Concession £30.00 - The Golden Age of the British Short Story 1890-1914Course start date: Mon 19 Sep 2022
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Julian BirkettThe years 1890 to 1914 were a golden age for British writers of short stories. As the country moved from Victorian certainties to an unknown, possibly exciting, possibly frightening future, writers found the short story form perfectly suited to their concerns. The roll call is an impressive one: from Kipling, Hardy, HG Wells and Conan Doyle through Chesterton and Conrad to Katherine Mansfield and DH Lawrence.Full fee £219.00 Senior fee £175.00 Concession £142.00 - American Gothic: the darker side of fictionCourse start date: Tue 20 Sep 2022
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Julian BirkettExplore and discuss the work of great 19th and 20th century writers such as Hawthorne. Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson and Flannery O’Connor – and learn about the dark streak that runs through so much of the best American literature.Full fee £219.00 Senior fee £175.00 Concession £142.00 - Stories from EuropeCourse start date: Wed 21 Sep 2022
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Aamer HusseinFreshly translated or newly rediscovered gems of European writing from the second half of the 20th century include Arturo’s Island by Elsa Morante (Italy), The Last and the First by Nina Berberova (Russia), The Inseparables by Simone de Beauvoir (France), Train was on Time by Heinrich Boll (Germany), Forty Lost Years by Rosa Maria Arquimbau (Catalonia/Spain) and The Man From London by Simenon (Belgium).Full fee £219.00 Senior fee £175.00 Concession £142.00 - Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, PersuasionCourse start date: Wed 21 Sep 2022
Location on this date: Online
Tutors: Sophie OxenhamThis online Literature course explores three novels by Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion. We will develop an appreciation of Austen’s narrative style and social critique through close analysis of her language, informing our reading by engaging with the literary, historical and critical contexts of these novels.
This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.Full fee £139.00 Senior fee £111.00 Concession £90.00 - What's the Big Idea?: classic and contemporary short storiesCourse start date: Thu 22 Sep 2022 (and 1 other date)
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Richard NilandRead and discuss celebrated short stories each week for six weeks – discuss and explore what we understand might be the writers’ intentions, and what it means for us as readers – which can be quite different. Join us in sharing feelings about, and reactions to, a selection of classic and contemporary short stories and how they withstand the shifting context of readers, and time.Full fee £99.00 Senior fee £99.00 Concession £64.00 - City Lit reading group 1Course start date: Fri 24 Sep 2021 (and 1 other date)
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Tabby ToussaintShare 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 Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett. Monthly meetings on 24 Sept; 22 Oct, 26 Nov; 14 Jan, 18 Feb, 25 March; 06 May; 10 June; 08 July.
Please note: this course will take place in the college but will revert to online if necessary.Full fee £189.00 Senior fee £151.00 Concession £123.00 - Between East and West: Orhan Pamuk's IstanbulCourse start date: Sat 24 Sep 2022
Location on this date: Online
Tutors: Stephen WinfieldOrhan Pamuk is the greatest Turkish novelist of his generation, internationally admired for the power of his storytelling and Istanbul, where he lives, is the creative inspiration for all his writing. Explore two of his finest novels, set in the Ottoman Empire and the present day, alongside his powerful memoir of the city’s changing fortunes and major fictions by his Turkish contemporaries.
This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.Full fee £59.00 Senior fee £47.00 Concession £38.00 - Secret Histories, Intrigues and Time Travel: curious letters in contemporary fictionCourse start date: Sun 25 Sep 2022
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Kate WilkinsonDo you still write letters? Novelists do! This one-day course opens up the dynamic and curious life of letters in twenty-first century fiction. Reading extracts from four novels, we’ll unfold stories of past wrongs, present dilemmas and interstellar futures, to investigate how and why writers today continue to work with letters.
Includes extracts from An American Marriage (2018) by Tayari Jones, Double Negative (2010) by Ivan Vladislavic, Where'd you go, Bernadette? (2012) by Maria Semple and the Book of Strange New Things (2014) by Michel Faber.Full fee £59.00 Senior fee £47.00 Concession £38.00 - London ‘lowlife’ in fiction: 1889-1907Course start date: Mon 26 Sep 2022
Location on this date: Online
Tutors: Sarah WiseWe will explore the themes of poverty, politics, gender and ethnicity in London at the end of the 19th century/start of the 20th century through the eyes of writers of fiction, but also through the testimony of their non-fiction contemporaries – social investigators, government officials, journalists and philanthropists.
This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.Full fee £179.00 Senior fee £179.00 Concession £116.00 - City Lit Evening Reading GroupCourse start date: Mon 27 Sep 2021 (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 Offing by Benjamin Myers. Monthly meetings on 27 Sept, 25 Oct, 29 Nov; 17 Jan, 21 Feb, 28 March, 09 May, 13 June, and 11 July.
This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.Full fee £139.00 Senior fee £139.00 Concession £90.00 - Migration and the Literary Imagination: Andrea Levy, Kazuo Ishiguro and Abdulrazak GurnahCourse start date: Tue 27 Sep 2022
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Peter CherryThis course explores literature that has emerged from the colonial and postcolonial migration of people from different cultures to Britain. We will be discussing how literature provides a creative space for reflecting on experiences of migration, how fiction attends to legacies of colonialism, racism and xenophobia and how ‘migrant aesthetics’ have created new forms of literature.Full fee £159.00 Senior fee £159.00 Concession £103.00 - Writing from Life: from Maggie O'Farrell to Ocean VuongCourse start date: Tue 27 Sep 2022
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Kate WilkinsonWhat do we want and expect from ‘life stories’? How does this change when we read memoirs and novels? This course reads a selection of fascinating books and extracts, which experiment to combine memoir, personal experience and invention in different ways. As well as memoirs we’ll study ‘autofiction’ – a relatively new description for the work of novelists whose material is, explicitly, their own life – and consider ideas about this tricky and at times controversial category of writing. We’ll think too about some of the ethical and cultural questions that ‘writing from life’ raises, including privacy, a right of reply, and factors that may affect a work’s critical reception.Full fee £139.00 Senior fee £139.00 Concession £90.00 - Get together and readCourse start date: Thu 30 Sep 2021 (and 3 other dates)
Location on this date: Online (other locations are available)
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.
This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.Full fee £99.00 Senior fee £79.00 Concession £50.00
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