Bring Shakespeare’s words to life by performing them. This practical course combines acting workshops and rehearsals of scenes and soliloquies, helping you deepen your understanding of Shakespeare’s craft and develop confidence on stage.
Literature, creative writing and film
Literature, creative writing and film
Explore Middle-earth as Tolkien’s true protagonist. Learn how real landscapes, languages, and history shaped his world, and how place drives story. Guided by an expert, this course uncovers how geography and imagination create a living literary landscape.
Explore eco-feminist dystopias and utopias that challenge how we live and imagine galvanizing visions of the future. Themes such as spirituality, indigenous writing, separatism and apocalypse will be considered.
The Brontë sisters wrote passionate otherworldly novels that nevertheless addressed contemporary issues for Victorian women. Discover how they interwove 'Gothic' and 'Realism' making them crucial figures in the development of the novel genre.
Uncover how the myths of the British Isles, shaped by landscape and legend, continue to haunt modern culture through text, film and drama – from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to The Wicker Man.
The figure of the Victorian detective remains hugely popular in literature and media. This course will examine why, looking at the rationality, reliability and remoteness of this intriguing character by exploring three classic Victorian detective novels.
From Tolkien's chief sources to Elvish mythology, this course offers a masterclass in world-building and the meaning of 'The Silmarillion'. Led by a world-class Tolkien expert at the university where Middle-earth was created.
Spanning several thousand years of European and anglophone drama, novels and film, this course searches for an answer to the questions 'why are comedies enjoyable?' and 'why do we laugh?'
The Victorian author Thomas Hardy was sensitive to the patterns of the past and to the tragic inevitabilities of human nature. By studying his poetry and prose, this course examines Hardy’s philosophy and belief in the roles of men and women.
Exploring Latin America through the literary works of Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Isabel Allende. Journey into the political, social and magical fabric of the region, where reality and fantasy intertwine seamlessly.
An interactive, discursive course exploring the history and traditions of folktales and folklore. Exercises in class combine creative writing, research, storytelling and literature.
Troubled by a range of concerns, fin-de-siècle novelists wrote about moral decay, degeneration and narcotised escapism. This course examines the physical embodiment of these fears in the form of vampires, New Women and debauched aesthetes.
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