Fiction Literature Courses
Study online & in London

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?

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.

For many Irish writers, the short story has proven the perfect vehicle to engage swiftly and forensically with a changing society, facilitating experiments with form, voice and subject matter. Aided by a thriving literary journal scene and a rich history of short-story writing, writers such as Sally Rooney, Colin Barrett, Claire Keegan and Kevin Barry have demonstrated again and again the form’s flexibility and capacity for mystery and provocation. This course will explore a range of the most prominent voices in contemporary Irish Short Fiction.

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.

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.

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 think about the ghost stories we read.

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.

What does it mean to be a millennial? This lively five-week course explores contemporary literature and culture through two key novels: Candice Carty-Williams's Queenie (2019) and Sally Rooney's Normal People (2018). We will explore how these texts represent relationships, mental health and the pressures of contemporary adulthood, alongside selected work by Natasha Brown, Michaela Coel, Gwendoline Riley, Taylor Swift and Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

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.

From the garden to the prairie and the shoreline to the mountain, Antiguan author Jamaica Kincaid’s writing of nature is some of her most inspired to date. Looking at her recent non-fiction through to her earlier novels, this in-college course will examine the place of nature in Kincaid’s repertoire and provide ecofeminist and postcolonial readings of her work.

Indulge in the pleasures and provocations of queer speculative literature. Across different genres, queer writers use speculative elements as ways of imagining alternative ways of organising bodies and societies, and as a means of capturing experiences of being the ‘other’. This course introduces and explores a selection of contemporary novellas to consider how, in different ways, they tease apart what Harry Josephine Giles has called ‘the ideaexperimentinvention of home’.

Jess Wright is interested in how we work with the legacies and histories available to us. They hold a PhD in Classics from Princeton University, where they also gained a graduate certificate in History of Science and held a fellowship in the Centre for Culture, Society, and Religion. Their publications include The Care of the Brain in Early Christianity (UC Press, 2022) and Psychiatry: Antiquity and Its Legacy (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), as well as essays, poems, and fiction. These days, Jess's work is more creative than academic (they have recently finished working toward an MLitt in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow), exploring and undertaking queer and feminist engagements with Mediterranean antiquity. Jess has taught in community spaces, universities, prisons, and schools; currently, they teach across a range of subjects and levels of study in the Lifelong Learning Centre at the University of Leeds.

This short literature course will explore Henry James’s novel ‘A Portrait of a Lady’ (1881), a complex representation of female agency, responsibility, secrets, manipulation and marriage through the characters of Isabel Archer and Gilbert Osmond (among others). We also consider James’s distinctive literary style and his views on fiction writing itself.

Explore and discover extraordinary short stories from renowned women writers of the 1940s and 50s, which present an insight into a time of great change in Britain, when domestic situations were rewritten, social customs challenged and new freedoms embraced. Authors include Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Penelope Mortimer, Elizabeth Taylor and Daphne du Maurier.

An introduction to Bulgakov's great novel, read as a serious work of philosophical, theological, and political reflection under conditions of rapid change and real danger.

In this online literature course we will explore how emigrants have been portrayed in literature over three centuries, in classic works by Willa Cather, W. G. Sebald and Mohsin Hamid.

This short literature course is an opportunity to read and discuss ‘Bleak House’ (1853), Charles Dickens’s famously sprawling and multi-faceted novel: a scathing satire of the law courts, a commentary on Victorian England’s social injustices, and a detective story of dark secrets.

We’ll study its themes, plots and characters, and we’ll also explore the historical and publication contexts of this unique novel.