Writing London
In Spring 2014, I convened the second half of Birkbeck's undergraduate core module, "Writing London," which is taught in the first year of the BA English degree. The module is team-taught by several of Birkbeck's academic staff and is designed to introduce students to fictions about London. We look at seven novels and three plays, seeking to read them in their historical contexts. The course begins with a contemporary novel of London, then progresses chronologically from Shakespeare to the present.
Course Overview:
Post-Millennial London (Dr Joe Brooker): Ian McEwan, Saturday (2005)
Shakespeare’s London (Professor Sue Wiseman): William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1
City Comedy (Dr Gill Woods): Thomas Middleton, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613)
London and the Rise of the Novel (Dr Nicola Bown): Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (1722)
Dickensian London (Dr Nicola Bown): Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (1837)
Late-Victorian Gothic London (Dr David McAllister): Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and other Tales (1886)
Modernist London (Dr Caroline Edwards): Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Postcolonial London (Dr Caroline Edwards): Samuel Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (1956)
London in Postwar Theatre (Dr Louise Owen): Harold Pinter, The Caretaker (1960)
Contemporary London (Dr Caroline Edwards): Zadie Smith, NW (2012)
Image by _dChris under a CC BY license.
Dr Caroline Edwards is Senior Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research and teaching specialisms are in 21st century literature and critical theory, science fiction and post-apocalyptic narratives, Marxist aesthetics, and utopianism.
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