Fiction Literature Courses
Study online & in London

In this literature course we will read, analyse and discuss a variety of contemporary fiction that give innovative representations of the body and its myriad forms of monstrosity. Since Mary Shelley’s seminal text Frankenstein, the unruly powers of non-conforming, hybrid bodies and identities have been a mainstay of women’s writing and queer literature, both within and beyond horror, science-fiction and fantasy genres. Through comparative analysis and class discussion we will focus on how representations of the body in contemporary fiction by female and queer authors from around the world surface new cultural anxieties and modes of resistance.

What makes a text “millennial”? Is it anxiety or cool detachment, phone addiction or casual sex, climate anxiety or financial insecurity - or something else entirely? This in-college taster session will give a flavour of how contemporary novelists represent the experiences, anxieties and aspirations associated with the millennial generation.

Holly Maguire is a London-based teacher and former Head of English. She is a former Associate Teacher at the English and Media Centre and an Associate English Tutor for Teach First. She received the 2019 Goldsmiths Grant for Teachers, completing research into ‘Closing the Gender Gap’ in Swedish Schools.

This in-person 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 class explores major voices from 19th Century French literature, discussing literary style, themes, and key contexts as a way of developing responses to celebrated French writers. From Hugo and Flaubert to Baudelaire and Verlaine, come discover French prose and poetry produced between the Revolution and the Great War.

For over half a century, the Booker Prize has been awarded each year (with various changes to eligibility) to the best novel in the English language. A few are barely remembered; some have maintained their reputations; just a few have emerged as true modern classics, admired for their innovation, originality or sheer unarguable quality.

In this course we’ll read the best of the best - five modern novels that won the Booker Prize which have become landmarks in modern fiction.

Explore and discuss the work of great 19th and 20thC writers such as Hawthorne. Melville, Poe, Emily Dickinson, Flannery O’Connor and Toni Morrison- and learn about the dark streak that runs through so much of the best American literature.

Come and study twenty-first century writing, from renowned authors and emerging voices. We’ll read three novels and a selection of short stories, to explore: What makes fiction ‘contemporary’? How does fiction, in different genres and forms, reflect and respond to the time in which it’s written? We’ll read Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage and short fiction including work by Natasha Brown and Thomas Morris.

This literature course focuses on the importance of science fiction writing as both a literary form and a mode of theorising the world we inhabit, which may radically transform our ways of interpreting it. We will read and discuss short stories and extracts from the work of eminent sci-fi writers from the 20th and 21st centuries - both well-known authors like Ursula Le Guin and Ted Chiang, as well as exciting new voices from more recent years. As well as the literary texts themselves, we’ll also consider literary theories of the fantastic and the kinds of contexts that sci-fi texts have been addressed to. Across six weeks we will explore how works of science fiction enrich psychic, social and cultural life and help us grapple with the complex politics of the present. For those who have taken the course before, the selection of texts will be different every time it runs - meaning that students can re-enrol and continue to expand their literary horizons.

What do plants reveal about human history? How do flowers like the rose and sunflower tell the intertwined stories of migration and colonialism? Looking at the non-fiction work of author Jamaica Kincaid, this in-college taster session will explore the issues of the modern world through the beauty of the garden.

This online literature course explores Jane Austen’s classic Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Jo Baker’s acclaimed novel Longbourn (2013).

This course is the second in a series about retelling classic novels. How does reading these two works together open up new interpretations and questions for us as readers?

Come and explore the origins and development of the short story form in America. Often claimed as the defining genre in American culture, we’ll explore how the short story form was used by writers, how the stories were disseminated, the ways in which the form is connected to developments in publishing technology, and how regional and democratic the form was to a nation forging its own national identity. Starting with great innovators of the genre, Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain, we’ll also look at a range of ground-breaking female writers such as Flannery O’Connor and Dorothy Parker.

In this course we take a deep dive into the writings of Sylvia Plath. As well as poetry from Ariel and the novel The Bell Jar, we will explore Plath's letters and journals. Reading across the categories of literature and life-writing, we will focus on Plath's conflicted relationship with motherhood, and the 'madness' that was possibly both a symptom of depression and a source of edgy creativity.