New Courses 

This online course introduces a selection of fairy tales from the First Golden Age of Children’s Literature, occurring in the latter half of the 19th century until the early 20th century. We will focus upon L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1911), George McDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin (1872), and Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby (1863).

Explore seminal modern plays by three leading women playwrights – Caryl Churchill, Timberlake Wertenbaker and Moira Buffini – who are all known for groundbreaking and innovative dramatic work.



In the company of an experienced theatre director, examine the different theatrical visions of three exciting plays.

Explore the extraordinarily diverse world of writing about motherhood, looking at literary texts that have firmly rebuked any notions of motherhood as ‘merely’ domestic, and have instead made it the subject of serious literary writing, have explored major themes such as the body, trauma, gender, queerness, race and creativity, and have written diverse truths about the realities of motherhood. Writers include Toni Morrison, Adrienne Rich and Rachel Cusk, Maggie Nelson and Ayò¿bámi Adébáyò¿.

From the theory of evolution to quantum physics and artificial intelligence, modern science has upended our understanding of the world and our place in it. How have writers of fiction responded to these radical changes?



We consider a range of fiction, including Frankenstein by Mary shelley, Angles and Insects by AS Byatt, Copenhagen by Michael Frayn and Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro.

“It was the best of times…it was the worst of times.”



How did the Victorians see the world? They lived through one of the most dramatic periods in our history – and their literature reflects that. Victorian Visions looks at a wide variety of themes in Victorian culture: from the city to the home, from dreams to nightmares, from faith to doubt, from moralism to decadence, from ideology to empire.

On this in-college literature course we will explore what some of the most significant British authors of the period did and thought on their travels, real and imagined, in the decade leading up to World War II. Authors include Graham Greene, Christopher Isherwood, Jean Rhys and George Orwell.

Come and explore three pioneering tragedies of the early English Renaissance commercial stage (1585-1592): The Spanish Tragedy (1586), Arden of Faversham (1588-92), and Tamburlaine Part I (1587). These plays were to become the models setting the standard and blueprint for three influential sub-genres: Revenge Tragedy, Domestic Tragedy, and Heroic Tragedy. We’ll look at their dramatic inventiveness, creativity in handling sources, and why they enthralled contemporary audiences.

Mozart’s music has come to stand for the greatest and most beautiful aspects of the Western classical tradition. But who was he? And what exactly did he do? Come and discover more about this famous Vienese composer. break week 29 Oct 2025.

This online literature course explores representations of solitude in recent fiction and memoir. Reading twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts, we’ll consider experiences of solitude across rural and urban settings, from remote islands to crowded cities. How is solitude shaped by places, culture, gender, age and technology?

This course explores how dramatists use their position as commentators to reflect the societal and political issues affecting the nation. Drawing on texts by Laura Wade, Jez Butterworth, Roy Williams and others, we’ll discuss how issues such as class, national identity, queer and black lives, and activism have been interrogated by Britain’s finest contemporary playwrights.

From Roman society to the present day, from the memoirs of Equiano to the experimental poetics of Kwesi Johnson, Black British writers have significantly impacted British literature, despite limited recognition.



Through an exploration of social, political and historical contexts, this course examines how diasporic writers decolonised genres and mapped their own metaphors onto the literary landscape.