Literature opens up new worlds, voices and ways of seeing. From classic novels to contemporary fiction, poetry to memoir, our literature courses explore a wide range of genres, themes and authors, inviting you to read more closely and think more deeply about the stories that shape our culture.
Across the courses, you can engage with different literary movements, discover new writers, revisit well-known texts, and explore how language, form and context influence meaning. Many courses are discussion-led, creating space to share interpretations and enjoy thoughtful conversation in a welcoming setting. We also offer film studies courses, examining cinema as a powerful storytelling medium and exploring how film connects with literature, culture and society.
Whether you’re a lifelong reader or simply looking to rediscover the pleasure of reading and watching with fresh insight, these courses offer an inspiring and accessible way to engage with literature and film.
We will explore various themes related to insanity and altered states of consciousness by examining a number of 19th-century works of fiction.
This course is for anyone with an interest in reading novels that test the boundaries of the genre and the limits of the printed page. No previous experience in these areas is necessary, just an appetite for the strange and new in fiction.
‘Why should I let the toad work / Squat on my life?’ asked Philip Larkin. Why indeed? Still, at least you can spend your lunch break discussing classic poems in a friendly group with guidance from an expert tutor.
In this online taster course we will read some classic ghost stories from M.R. James, Rudyard Kipling and Edith Wharton.
This course explores some of the radical reading materials that Black and Asian activists read, shared and learned from in Britain in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.
Exotic and familiar, Eastern and Western, experimental and conventional, Japanese fiction offers every kind of reading pleasure. On this course we will study a selection from the wonderful Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories.
This course explores Charles Booth’s landmark survey, Life & Labour of the People in London (1889-1903) and the accompanying Poverty Map.
Explore the history of literature, empire, the Atlantic Ocean, and the connections between them.
Who were considered the ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ in 1983, and what became of them? What do their styles and topics reveal about the decade, looking back 40 years on? Read extracts by all 20 writers plus classic novels by Pat Barker and Graham Swift.
This online course explores two subgenres of supernatural fiction: the weird and the eerie.
Is film noir a genre? Why did it emerge in the United States? We will look at twelve classic American films of the 1940s and 1950s to explore these and other questions about film noir, and some of the stories on which they were based.
Fiction writers are often the first to identify and analyse a social phenomenon. We will examine two centuries of London history through the eyes of novelists and poets, from William Blake to Zadie Smith. In this way, London’s social and economic history will be revealed through imaginative writers’ eyes.
Servants were everywhere in eighteenth-century Europe: cleaning houses, cooking food, running errands, and caring for children. Today, service work of all kinds is still crucial to maintain families and societies around the world. This course pairs a historical text with a modern film each week, in order to ask: How have writers and filmmakers grappled with the conflicts, rivalries, and hidden complicities of masters and servants? How have artists used servants to understand and reimagine society? And how different does our culture look if we put servants and service at the centre?
This course is open to anyone interested in post-apocalyptic fiction; you do not need to have read any of the writers before or have any prior knowledge of this genre.
What makes a prize-winning book in the twenty-first century? And why have prizes become such an important influence on the books we read and buy? On this course we will study four of Britain’s most significant literary prizes and read a representative winner of each from the last twenty years, including books by Anna Burns, Ali Smith and Don Paterson.
In this course we will explore the afterlives of empire in Britain, using a postcolonial and antiracist lens to learn how race, migration and empire have shaped modern and contemporary Britain. The course is interdisciplinary, spanning across History and Literature to give us a fuller picture of modern, postcolonial Britain.
Exploring East London history via some of the vividly realised fiction written about its various districts in the years between 1820 and 1920. We will think about how imaginative fiction and historical fact intertwine to create local legend.
Akira Kurosawa’s Rashōmon is one of the most acclaimed films of all time. But did you know it is adapted from two short stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa? On this course we will read these and discuss their transformation into film, along with more short fictions that became movies by outstanding Japanese authors including Haruki Murakami.
In this course we’ll explore this unsettling and subversive novel by Emily Brontë.