Unreal City

Who is this course for?

Anyone with an interest in London history. No previous skills or knowledge required, but curiosity and an appetite for reading will be helpful. No advance reading is required as this is a general survey course, with reading lists and recommendations supplied for future exploration in the student’s free time.

What does this course cover?

Session 1: The late-18​th​ century to the mid-1830s Romantic London – Wordsworth, Blake, Thomas De Quincey. Regency London – bucks, bruisers, dandies, men-about-town. The Newgate Novel – amoral tales of villains.

Session 2: The mid-19​th​ century Dickens, crime, policing and detection. The slums of St Giles. Edgar Allan Poe. Dostoevsky in Haymarket.

Session 3: The late 19​th ​century. Slum fiction, disaster/dystopian fiction, science fiction

Session 4: The Inter-War Years: the Roaring Twenties, Evelyn Waugh, Virginia Woolf. The Depression of the Thirties, Patrick Hamilton, Simon Blumenfeld, Pamela Hansford Johnson.

Session 5: War and postwar. Horror, science fiction, post-modernism, social upheaval and mass migration. Colin MacInnes, Nigel Kneal, Nell Dunn, Sam Selvon, Margaret Drabble, BS Johnson.

Session 6: 1980 to Today. London during the Thatcher years, multiculturalism, new-Victorianism, thrillers, crime writing.

You will learn:

- To identify the major fictional portraits of London from 200 years of history.

- To define key moments in London’s social history.

- To identify some of the literary trends / shifts in style across 200 years of fiction writing.

- To pursue further reading on these subjects, with a detailed bibliography/secondary reading list for each session.