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In this course we will discuss two of the great works of post-war American fiction. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is a novel that continues to scandalise and fascinate and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral is similarly uncompromising is its exploration of relations between the generations against the backdrop of political radicalism, race riots and the Vietnam War. Both texts explore the dark side of the USA at the apogee of its political and economic power and experiment boldly with narrative technique and structure without ever losing their narrative punch.…

In this course, we examine two great twentieth century novels that explore the everyday realities of life in the British Empire. E. M Forster’s novel is set in the 1920s Indian Raj and Doris Lessing’s traces the lives and shifting relationships of a Rhodesian farming community over decades. In both, racial conflict is never far from the surface, and explodes into violence and recrimination, yet relationships develop across racial divides. Characters are locked in a relationship with a natural environment…

In this course we will discuss two of the great works of post-war American fiction. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is a novel that continues to scandalise and fascinate and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral is similarly uncompromising is its exploration of relations between the generations against the backdrop of political radicalism, race riots and the Vietnam War. Both texts explore the dark side of the USA at the apogee of its political and economic power and experiment boldly with narrative technique and structure without ever losing their narrative punch.…

In this course we will discuss two of the great works of post-war American fiction. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is a novel that continues to scandalise and fascinate and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral is similarly uncompromising is its exploration of relations between the generations against the backdrop of political radicalism, race riots and the Vietnam War. Both texts explore the dark side of the USA at the apogee of its political and economic power and experiment boldly with narrative technique and structure without ever losing their narrative punch.…

T S Eliot’s, ‘The Waste Land’, published in 1922, is the most famous poem of the twentieth century and widely considered to be the great, but difficult masterpiece of modernist poetry. This short course aims to cut through some of those difficulties. We shall examine the poem closely and, as we do so, situate it in its historical and literary moment, and explore its themes, form and complex allusions. If you are keen to understand and appreciate ‘The Wasteland’ but…

T S Eliot’s, ‘The Waste Land’, published in 1922, is the most famous poem of the twentieth century and widely considered to be the great, but difficult masterpiece of modernist poetry. This short course aims to cut through some of those difficulties. We shall examine the poem closely and, as we do so, situate it in its historical and literary moment, and explore its themes, form and complex allusions. If you are keen to understand and appreciate ‘The Wasteland’ but…