Literature Courses in London

In celebration of Windrush Day, join us for a lively celebration of Benjamin Zephaniah, one of Britain’s most dynamic poets! This short, interactive course explores his life, his fiery poetry and the themes which make his work resonant today. Through readings, discussion and performance, you’ll get a real sense of why Zephaniah’s words continue to inspire.

This course looks at freshly translated or newly rediscovered gems of international writing from the second half of the 20th century. Texts include The Way to Colonos by Kay Cicellis (Greece); God’s Bits of Wood by Sembene Ousmane (Senegal); Behind the Portrait by Siburapha (Thailand); and Woman in the Pillory by Brigitte Reimann (Germany).

This course covers the thematic concerns, dramatic styles and contextual influences of three plays from the 20th and 21st centuries: Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1944), David Hare’s The Judas Kiss (1998) and Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Sweat (2015). Drawing on the plays’ production histories, it considers how dramatists and theatre practitioners have represented the social, cultural and political worlds of specific times and places.

The last couple of decades have seen an explosion of a relatively new kind of writing - the memoir. Stories of abusive childhoods, extraordinary parents, and uncovered family secrets fill the shelves of bookshops. Some are mockingly dubbed misery memoirs, some even exposed as fakes. But among them are some masterpieces of modern writing - accounts of painful coming to maturity, or of the growth towards a deeper understanding of a world always taken for granted. We will read and consider a selection.

“What is now proved, was once only imagin’d” declared the visionary poet and artist William Blake in 1790. He was right: the Romantic revolution transformed Western culture in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and still shapes the way we think today. On the one hand, violent political change with revolutions in America and in France - “ Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very heaven”, wrote Wordsworth - on the other, a new way of looking at the world, in which imagination overthrew reason and the individual sensibility triumphed over social convention.

Explore and discuss novels, poems and short stories by seminal British authors including E. M. Forster, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Bowen, discovering how they responded to and illuminated the social, political and psychological upheavals of this period of British history.

This literature course centres on exploring the wild exhilarating landscapes of Byron and Shelley, Wordsworth and Coleridge, and the prose of Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley. We will look at earlier passages from the Renaissance and the philosophy of Longinus. We will question whether ‘the sublime’ is an intense state of mind, a physical force, or a mode of expression by relating these writers to the history of the concept.

We will explore how poets changed during the 20th century from writing in formal ‘poetic’ language and regular forms towards writing in more natural language, freer forms and with more direct expression of feelings. We will look at free verse, political poetry, the Beat Poets, confessional poetry and prose poetry.

Join us to explore three of Shakespeare’s great tragedies, Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear. We will consider how these plays explore questions of power, ambition, authority, and revenge; youth and old age; memory, grief, regret and madness; family, gender and sexuality.