Explore Culture, History & Humanities Courses

We 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.

What 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.

Explore 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’?

Join us to explore two of Shakespeare’s greatest plays, his tragedy King Lear, and his late ‘romance’, The Tempest. We’ll consider the connections – and differences - between these works, thinking about Shakespeare’s use of genre and language, the historical contexts, changing critical perspectives, and aspects of the plays in performance.



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

Take a fresh look at Shakespeare, exploring selected plays in the company of an experienced theatre director. With performance in mind, we will examine the language and themes of two plays and discuss the extraordinary variety to be found within Shakespeare’s work.

This 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.

Greed, ambition, social mobility, and complexity of family structures: these are the key issues at play in the three French novels we will discuss in this course. Focusing on Stendhal's The Red and the Black (1830), Balzac's La Cousine Bette (1846) and Flaubert's Sentimental Education (1869). We'll explore the evolution of French literary style and social mores over the course of the 19th Century, thinking about representations of gender, marriage, social class and wealth along the way.



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

This online course will introduce and discuss a selection of novels depicting British society from the Victorian period to the 1920s. This allows us to make links between literary texts and social context to consider how fiction might be influenced by and influencing the real world beyond its covers. As we explore each novel, we will consider the characters as outliers in relation to social pressures and stigmas, as perceived through these literary and social perspectives.



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