Fiction Literature Courses
Study online & in London

The short story has come to be seen as one of Irish Literature’s most celebrated forms of expression. From the early stories of George Moore and James Joyce, to modern classics by John McGahern, William Trevor and Claire Keegan, the short story has allowed Irish writers to pick apart the complexities of Irish society in powerful, precise and poetic terms. This course will explore some of the most iconic short stories of twentieth-century Irish literature.

Some poets begin their writing lives, and sometimes live much of them, outside the 'normal' modern urban lives many of us experience. They live at the margins and despite - or perhaps because of - their geographic, political or emotional isolation, they have become major poets. We will look at how, from the margins of their society, some great poets have achieved national and international success with their poetry.

Come and explore three pioneering comedies of the Jacobean period: Eastward Ho! (1606), The Roaring Girl (1611), and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613). With London at its centre, city comedy places gallant gentlemen and courtiers alongside upwardly mobile merchants, avaricious usurers, religious hypocrites, con-men, and swindlers. We’ll look at how these playwrights showed dramatic inventiveness, and creativity in capturing society in a state of flux. Hilarious, scathing and caustic by turns, city comedy became a modern satirical form populated by recognisable character types, outlandish behaviour, and social classes on a collision course that enthralled contemporary audiences.

In this short literature course, we will explore works that move beyond the conventions of human-centred narrative to include the voices animals, plants, landscapes, and other more-than-human entities. We will consider the renewed popularity of this literary form and how centring the perceptions of those being which are usually excluded from definitions of sentient life is becoming increasingly important in contemporary contexts.

Come and explore the development of the short story form in America in the latter part of the C20 and beyond. Often claimed as the defining genre in American culture, we’ll explore how the short story form has been used by writers, how the stories were disseminated, the ways in which the form is connected to historical developments in society and technology, and how the democracy of the form allowed writers to experiment with literary form and raise popular genres to the standards of great literary art.

This online literature course is the third in a series about novels that draw on classic works, focusing on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Caryl Phillips’s 2015 novel The Lost Child. How does reading these two works together open up new interpretations and questions for us as readers?

This course examines the intersections of race, gender, and identity in 19th-century French literature through three key texts: Ourika by Claire de Duras (1824), Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo (1831), and Georges by Alexandre Dumas (1843). Set against the backdrop of post-Revolutionary France and its colonial entanglements, these works explore figures marked as “other” within French society-whether through race, class, physical difference, or gender. Through close reading and critical analysis, we will consider how literature engages with exclusion, belonging, and the limits of social mobility during this period.

The weird and the eerie are two of the most intriguing sub-genres of supernatural fiction. The weird involves an invasion of the inside (the psyche, the domestic) by the outside (a meteorite or ancient astronauts). The eerie is also associated with the outside, but poses one of two troubling questions: Why is there something here when there should be nothing? Why is there nothing here when there should be something?

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.

As you leaf through a novel, do you ever wonder about its panoramic backdrops and vistas? Far from incidental, location is, on the contrary, a pertinent aspect of any literary work. We’ll examine the settings, landscapes and environments of a select body of fictional texts, considering the importance and function of landscape as providing more than decorative backdrop, but crucial to its themes and objectives.

On this short literature course, we’ll explore writing about solitude and islands, reading Amy Liptrot’s memoir The Outrun (2016) and Sam Taylor’s novel The Island at the End of the World (2009).

We’ll think about how solitude can be shaped by, among other things, recovery, a search for self-knowledge, refuge, difference and societal expectations. We’ll think too about islands, as real locations that can be nourishing as well as isolating, and as places of historical and mythical significance.

Kazuo Ishiguro is one of the leading writers of his generation, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. His approach to writing character, often through restrained, first-person prose, is a hallmark of his novelistic style. This one-day workshop explores the literary interpretations of several seminal texts and writing exercises that encourage you to experiment with Ishiguro’s approach to perspective and voice.

This three-week course explores the representation of parenting in novels ranging from the early 1800s to the present day. Focusing exclusively on extracts selected from both familiar and less familiar prose fiction, it looks at the emotional and material demands of child-rearing across time, and the complex power dynamic of the parent-child relationship.