Fiction Literature Courses
Study online & in London

This 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.

What 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.

Explore the rewards of close reading analysis, focusing on the three main literary genres of fiction,



poetry and drama. Read, analyse and debate British, European and American works from different periods of time, including The Awakening(1899) by Kate Chopin, Hedda Gabler(1891) by Henrik Ibsen, and poetry by Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barratt Browning, Matthew Arnold, Alfred Tennyson, and Christina Rossetti.

Would you ever open other people’s letters? This contemporary fiction course invites you to read intimate correspondence over characters’ shoulders, to piece together the stories of long-forgotten letters, and to watch stolen letters set comic and catastrophic events in motion. We’ll study four absorbing novels in detail, exploring ideas about memory, time and communication, and discovering how letters are tangled up in them all. Includes



Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (2011), Claire Fuller, Swimming Lessons (2017), Denis Thériault, The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman (2017) and Tayari Jones, An American Marriage (2018).

Explore the rewards of close reading analysis, focusing on the three main literary genres of fiction, poetry and drama. Read, analyse and debate works from the early 20th century that represent a transition to modernity. Includes Quicksand (1928) by Nella Larsen, The Cherry Orchard (1903) by Anton Chekhov and poetry by T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats, Edward Thomas, Charlotte Mew and Edna St.Vincent Millay.

In the last 15 years, a new type of nature writing emerged in the UK. It was personal, engaging, and examined the natural world and the environment in fresh and interesting ways. It promised to reconnect a younger generation with the world outside, and to raise awareness of ecological issues in an emotionally resonant way. Includes novels, poetry and memoir by Seamus Heaney, W.G. Sebald, Alice Oswald, Helen Macdonald. Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Kathleen Jamie.



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

Japanese crime literature is reaching new audiences, with many classics being translated into English for the first time. This course explores a range of Japanese mysteries, detectives and their recurring themes, from ‘locked room’ classics to the dark side of human nature – with many murders along the way!



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

Discover and discuss a selection of novels set on desert islands. Why are adventure tales often set on islands? Are these islands paradises or purgatories? Who are civilised characters and who are savages? Why? Since Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), we have been spellbound by stories of shipwreck and survival, so we will explore this further in novels that come after Crusoe, known as 'Robinsonnades'.



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