Literature Courses in London
We offer a wide range of literature courses at City Lit. From contemporary & classical literature, and novels to short stories, as well as our popular reading groups, you will find a course to suit your literary needs.
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Literature taster
Course Date: Sat 11 Jan 2020
Location on this date: KS - Keeley StreetDo you want to find out how to go about understanding a poem or how to do a close reading of a work of fiction? Come and find out what makes a literature class at City Lit so special.Full fee: £19.00Senior fee: £19.00Concession: £10.00 -
Classic drama
Course Date: Mon 13 Jan 2020
Location on this date: KS - Keeley StreetRead view and discuss three classic plays, including Othello by Shakespeare, Uncle Vanya by Chekhov,
Agamemnon from The Oresteia by Aeschylus in terms of themes, language, political, social and historical contexts and how they work as performance texts.Full fee: £199.00Senior fee: £159.00Concession: £88.00 -
"Beware, beware! his flashing eyes, his floating hair!": Romantic Poets 1789-1862
Course Date: Tue 14 Jan 2020
Location on this date: International HouseFrom Wordsworth to Christina Rossetti, we explore the impulses that created Romantic poetry – how honest expression of feeling became the measure of poetic inspiration and the problems this caused especially for women poets.Full fee: £159.00Senior fee: £159.00Concession: £70.00 -
The 'superfluous man' in 19th century literature
Course Date: Tue 14 Jan 2020
Location on this date: KS - Keeley StreetThis class explores the subject of the superfluous man in nineteenth-century literature, investigating the origins of the subject in the Romantic movement, its flourishing in masterpieces of nineteenth-century Russian literature, and variations on its character and ideas in European and American literature up to the turn of the twentieth century.Full fee: £179.00Senior fee: £143.00Concession: £79.00 -
Writing on the walls: London prose in the late 20th century 1989-2000
Course Date: Tue 14 Jan 2020
Location on this date: KS - Keeley StreetCentring on two of the most significant late twentieth-century London novels, Martin Amis’s London Fields (1989) and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), this course explores both their wider and more immediate contexts while considering their approach to characterisation, narrative and the on-going relevance of the novel form.Full fee: £119.00Senior fee: £119.00Concession: £52.00 -
Victorian visions
Course Date: Tue 14 Jan 2020
Location on this date: KS - Keeley Street“It was the best of times…it was the worst of times”
How did the Victorians see the world? They lived through one of the most dramatic periods in our history – and their literature reflects that. Victorian Visions looks at a wide variety of themes in Victorian culture: from the city to the home, from dreams to nightmares, from faith to doubt, from morality to decadence.Full fee: £199.00Senior fee: £159.00Concession: £88.00 -
Writing through the Harlem Renaissance: Cane & The Invisible Man
Course Date: Tue 14 Jan 2020
Location on this date: KS - Keeley StreetWeaving history, diverse traditions and a collage of voices, we will explore the struggle and celebration of black experience through Jean Toomer’s Cane and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, both growing out of the explosion of Black art during the Harlem Renaissance.Full fee: £149.00Senior fee: £119.00Concession: £66.00 -
"In the beginning was the Word": literature and the Bible
Course Date: Wed 15 Jan 2020
Location on this date: KS - Keeley StreetThe Bible has been a major source for literature and art, but we don’t often examine how such influence plays out. From the orthodox to the heretical, from the subtle to the absurd, this course will explore and analyse works that adapt and draw from scripture to surprising effect.Full fee: £179.00Senior fee: £143.00Concession: £79.00 -
Twentieth century world fiction
Course Date: Wed 15 Jan 2020
Location on this date: KS - Keeley StreetContinuing a popular occasional series of courses, we will be reading newly translated or freshly rediscovered works of fiction from Europe and Latin America, several of them published by Penguin Modern Classics, by great writers of the mid-twentieth century. Readings include The Beseiged City by Clarice Lispector (Brazil), Malina by Ingeborg Bachman (Austria), Three Summers by Margarita Liberaki (Greece), Springtime in a Broken Mirror by Mario Benedetti (Argentina), The Foolish Virgins by Ida Simon and The Birds by Tarjei Vesaas.Full fee: £179.00Senior fee: £143.00Concession: £79.00 -
British literature: 1950-2000
Course Date: Wed 15 Jan 2020
Location on this date: KS - Keeley StreetExplore the ways in which writers from Philip Larkin to Zadie Smith have expressed ‘being British’ in literature, during a period when the idea of Britishness itself was radically and rapidly changing.Full fee: £159.00Senior fee: £159.00Concession: £70.00 -
An introduction to literature: poetry and prose
Course Date: Thu 16 Jan 2020
Location on this date: KS - Keeley StreetDiscover the basic tools and techniques used to analyse poetry and prose. Come and enjoy reading and discussing a range of poetry and prose including short stories and the novel, 'A Passage to India' by E M Forster. Lots of lively discussion.Full fee: £199.00Senior fee: £159.00Concession: £88.00 -
William Blake: 'Eternity's sun rise'
Course Date: Sun 19 Jan 2020
Location on this date: KS - Keeley StreetExplore and discuss Blake’s epic attempt to encourage us to throw off our “mind-forg’d manacles”. A representative selection of his writings (and most potent images) – from the Songs to The Four Zoas – will be considered.Full fee: £59.00Senior fee: £47.00Concession: £30.00 -
Apocalypse London: the city in science fiction
Course Date: Mon 20 Jan 2020
Location on this date: KS - Keeley StreetWe explore representations of London in works of dystopian/science fiction, written between the 1890s and the 1970s.Full fee: £119.00Senior fee: £119.00Concession: £52.00 -
Jane Austen: 'The debt to pleasure'
Course Date: Sat 25 Jan 2020
Location on this date: KS - Keeley StreetToo often seen as mere costume drama, Jane Austen’s innovatory novels stimulate profound insights into our ethical quandaries. We shall explore how Austen achieves this in three major works – Northanger Abbey, Persuasion and Mansfield Park.Full fee: £59.00Senior fee: £47.00Concession: £30.00 -
19th Century American visionaries
Course Date: Sun 26 Jan 2020
Location on this date: KS - Keeley StreetExplore the key works of writers who together created American literary modernity out of the most disparate of backgrounds, beliefs and passions, reinventing the novel, epic and lyric poetry in their search for forms expressive of the entire human adventure, its heroic restlessness and its private terrors.Full fee: £59.00Senior fee: £47.00Concession: £30.00
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