Fiction Literature Courses
Study online & in London

Are you curious about reading contemporary global literature? Would you like to understand what the we mean by the ‘global novel’, reading across cultures and national borders? This in-college course will introduce you to the study of global literature through reading two brilliant 21st century global novels that focus on stories of migration: Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West and Julie Otsuka’s Buddha in the Attic. Through these two novels we’ll explore how movement, travel, migration, exile and displacement are represented in global literature in English.  

Come and explore the rewards of reading three modern American picaresque novels. We’ll read, analyse, and debate three novels which all reinvent the picaresque tradition in response to social issues: the posthumous Pulitzer Prize winning A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), by John Kennedy Toole, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973), and Percival Everett’s Erasure (2001). Relish in the outlandish humour, sharp satire, and playful irony as we follow the misadventures of three contemporary ‘rogue’ anti-heroes.

On this in-college literature course we will explore how British authors of the 1980s approached (and influenced) the emerging world of identity politics, through fiction by Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Alan Hollinghurst and Hanif Kureishi.

This in-the-college courselooks at a selection of novels that explore the events of the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, the displacements and conflicts it engendered, and the formation of new national identities in the aftermath of independence from colonial rule. IncludesThe Weary Generationsby Abdullah Hussein,The Women's Courtyardby Khadija Mastur andThe Clear Light of Dayby Anita Desai,Sunlight on a Broken Column by Attia Hosain andThe Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh.

Perhaps more so than any other nation, British culture has been captivated by ideas of the countryside – as a pastoral idyll, an arena of social conflict, a threatened Eden. This course will look at a range of books from the 19th and 20th centuries which tell more than everyday stories of country folk. Authors include Thomas Hardy and Bruce Chatwin. 

This six-week course offers an insight into the creativity, passion and intellect behind some of the most celebrated exponents of the modern/contemporary essay form. From Gore Vidal to Joan Didion; Zadie Smith to Teju Cole, learners will encounter an exciting and eclectic range of voices, approaches and subjects.

This online literature course studies recent fiction and memoir to explore representations and ideas of solitude. Reading twenty-first-century texts, we’ll consider stories told from different perspectives. We’ll think about how solitude is shaped by, among other things, technology, a search for self-knowledge, difference and societal expectations.

On this course we will read some classic ghost stories from M.R. James, Rudyard Kipling, Edith Wharton and others. Ghost stories achieve some of their effects through the presence of the strange within the familiar, or the eruption of the past in the present (the return of the repressed), which Sigmund Freud termed the uncanny. We will explore Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’ and use this psychoanalytic concept to shed light on the ghost stories we read.

Marriage, social mobility, empire and the development of the self: these are some of the key issues at play in the three French novels we will discuss on this course. Focusing on Zola's The Kill (1871), Maupassant's  Bel-Ami (1885) and Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856). We'll explore the evolution of French literary style and social mores over the course of the 19th Century, thinking about representations of class, wealth, revolution and the establishment along the way.

This course explores the development of the crime fiction genre in Korea from the early twentieth century to the present. We begin with some historical context on how and why the genre developed in Korea when it did, with reference to Japanese influence, and political, and other cultural contexts. The texts covered include The Old Woman with the Knife (2013) by Gu Byeong-Mo, The Investigation (2014) by J.M. Lee, and Seven Years of Darkness (2020) by You-Jeong Jeong. 

Explore representations of London in works of dystopian/science fiction, written between the 1890s and the 1970s. Our authors will include HG Wells, John Wyndham, George Orwell and Nigel Kneale.

This short literature course brings together work by perceptive observers of London life in the 1960s, including Muriel Spark, Margaret Drabble and Doris Lessing. These writers explore a city in flux, a place of shifting gender roles and social ambitions, where dramas of everyday life unfold in flats and offices, in pubs and parties. Reading Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye, Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone, and a selection of short stories by these and other writers, we’ll explore the social and psychological landscape of 1960s London.

Come and explore ethe rewards of reading Muriel Spark at her prime. We’ll read, analyse, and debate three of her greatest novellas, all written in the 1960s: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), The Public Image (1968), and The Driver’s Seat (written 1969, published 1970). Playful, witty, acerbic, profound, and at times, terrifying, Muriel Spark is regarded as one of the greatest British post-WWII writers. 

This one-day course introduces you to two Spanish-language literary classics: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes and The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende. As we read texts across centuries and national borders beyond the English-speaking world, you’ll gain a new appreciation and understanding of the world’s rich literary heritage in all its diversity and complexity.