Online Fiction Literature Courses

This online literature course explores George Orwell’s classic Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Sandra Newman’s acclaimed novel Julia (2023).

This course critically explores how Agatha Christie helped to shape the detective genre in the twentieth century, the publishing history of some of her most celebrated works, and how Christie navigated themes of class, gender, morality and justice. Through selected readings, discussions and analysis, we will explore the literary significance and enduring appeal of the Queen of Crime.

The coming of the Second World War loomed large in the imagination of many writers in 1939. We explore how this crisis was represented in a selection of novels published that year by Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley and Jean Rhys. Each novel is set in a different part of the world - Berlin, California and Paris - and refracts the personal and political anxieties of the period.

Justice, violence, morality, and sensation: these are the key issues at play in the three French novels we will discuss in this course. Focusing on The Last Day of a Condemned Man by Victor Hugo (1829), Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans (1884), and La Bête Humaine by Émile Zola (1890), we’ll focus on how these novels explore the inner life of their characters and the moral questions of this period.

We'll explore the evolution of French literary style and social mores over the course of the 19th Century, thinking about representations of crime, punishment, decadence and betrayal along the way.

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.

On this course we will study the development of Japanese literature in the first half of the 20th century through four great novels: Natsume Soseki’s Kokoro, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s Kappa, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters and Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country.

In celebration of Black History Month, we’re exploring the life and works of Booker Prize-winner, novelist, poet, essayist and editor, Bernadine Evaristo. From her early literature to critically-acclaimed, ‘Girl, Woman, Other’, we’ll uncover her unique narrative voice, blend of poetry and prose and how she gives visibility to a cast of diverse characters.

This course will introduce and discuss a selection of short stories by Katherine Mansfield. Noting, ‘the mind I love most must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind’, Mansfield’s approach to art is to embrace hidden depths, to seek untamed and unhindered aspects lurking in the shadows, writing with a wild surmise in an attempt to find new literary vistas. Similarly, describing herself as ‘an alien’, we will consider her self-asserted feeling of strangeness as an outsider, and how this might manifest itself in her fictional work.

This course will introduce and discuss the fiction of distinguished British author, Pat Barker, delving into her first novel and a later work as a means of considering her premise that ‘looking straight at the world is part of your duty as a writer’. Hailing from the Northeast of England, Barker unflinchingly depicts situations and characters that pull no punches as she looks the world straight in the eye. In doing so, she offers readers who wish to accompany her, at times, a mirror reflecting what polite society’s gaze often evades or a window into a bleaker outlook.

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.

Explore how Japanese literature responded to societal change in the post-World War 2 era and beyond, through novels and stories by Yukio Mishima, Banana Yoshimoto, Haruki Murakami and more.

Seduction, alienation, political turmoil, and a woman’s place within society: these are the key issues at play in the three French novels we will discuss on this course. Focusing on The Vagabond by Colette (1910), A Spy in the House of Love by Anaïs Nin (1954), and The Country of Others by Leïla Slimani (2020), we will examine the development of women’s writing across this century and the last. Through a focus on these extraordinary works, we will map the ways in which womanhood, sexuality, identity and self-determination have been written by these bold, inventive novelists.

Both Edith Wharton and Henry James had a keen eye for a well-designed and tastefully decorated house and both brought us depictions of splendid interiors in their novels set in ‘the Gilded Age’. On this course we will look at The Decoration of Houses, a book on interior design that Edith Wharton wrote with her friend and architect Ogden Codman, Jr., published in 1897. We will compare descriptions found in her novel The House of Mirth. We’ll also see how Henry James describes the ideal English country house in the opening scenes of A Portrait of a Lady, and his less complimentary opinions in The Spoils of Poynton.

Explore the extraordinary artistic quality, emotional power and imaginative energy of Palestinian writing over more than half a century, a great modern literature born out of a calamitous history. From the eye of the storm in Gaza and Israel to exile and the wider diaspora, read and discuss seminal works by many of the leading figures across the generations, including Ghassan Kanafani, the two Darwishes, Zaqtan, Adania Shibli and the younger Mosab Abu Toha and Batool Abu Akleen.