Literary London UCL

Overview

You will read a wide range of authors including John Keats, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf, through to contemporary writers such as Sam Selvon, Zadie Smith and Bernadine Evaristo.

In this period London became a global hub to which people flocked for work and culture. It dominated as the heart of Empire and the industrial revolution, creating an uneasy, complicated yet dynamic post-colonial legacy.

Learning outcomes

By the end of the Literary London course from UCL Summer School, students will have:

• Become confident and able to discuss, close read and write about poetry, short stories, novels, and art.

• Produced and delivered oral presentations on an aspect of the course that has particularly engaged them.

• Produced a 2,000-word essay on one or more texts and how they describe and create a feature or aspect of London and Londoners.

• Gained a strong sense of how London as a European city has grown, developed and changed over the last 300 years.

• Visited and physically experienced London in a way that is informed by this growing awareness of the past and the constantly shifting permutations of life in the metropolis.

• Become aware of how literature and particular literary forms have developed to relate these shifts and indeed to influence the urban imaginary.