Literature Courses in London

Curious about studying Literature and nineteenth century novels? Join us for this in-person taster session where we explore aspects of two nineteenth century novels - Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.

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.

Come and join an introduction and exploration of the poetry of E E Cummings and Stevie Smith. We will read, discuss and enjoy a selection of their poetry and consider how the poets shape our responses.

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.

We will read and discuss three classic plays: William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy and Henrik Ibsen’s Rosmersholm. Focusing on aspects such as structure, language and tone, we will analyse how dramatists across time have explored themes such as family honour, sexual morality, gender politics and political leadership.

We explore how Baudelaire, Whitman, Laforgue and Eliot were the first poets to express in detail both the exciting opportunities and the emotional and spiritual damage of life in the modern city. We will look in particular how Baudelaire’s poems and Laforgue’s translations of Whitman into French influenced Eliot’s early poetry, culminating in The Waste Land (1922).

In this advanced literature course you will experience the rewards of close reading, analysing and debating groundbreaking novels and poetry from the 1920s and 30s that made an impact upon publication, be it through experiments with style or the topics the writers chose to explore. Novels and poetry include Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf (1922), Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), both by Nella Larsen, and poetry by T.S. Eliot and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Take a fresh look at Shakespeare, exploring selected plays in the company of an experienced theatre director. With performance in mind, we will examine the language and themes of two plays, and discuss the similarities and differences in their treatment of violence, guilt and pride.

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.

This course explores how critical and narrative theory can add insight to your reading and help you appreciate literature at a deeper interpretative level. Through our readings of modern fiction (Virginia Woolf, Ian McEwan, Michael Cunningham, F. Scott Fitzgerald), we will examine how feminist, postmodern, Marxist and narrative theory offer lenses that enrich our understandings of these works.

Are there distinct qualities to the literature of each nation of the United Kingdom? How did Welshness, (Northern) Irishness, Scottishness and Englishness manifest themselves in writing of the second half of the twentieth century? Find out through the novels, poems and plays of Dylan Thomas, John Fowles, Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel and Jackie Kay.