English Literature Summer School, 2-22 July 2017, University of Oxford, UK

Programme details

Timetable

Please check the seminar timetables carefully to ensure that your first and second choice courses do not run at the same time.

Seminar options

Graduate courses

Anglo-Saxon Literature and Culture

The Anglo-Saxon period has been seen as a dark age, full of superstition and ignorance, but this course will argue the opposite; that the Anglo-Saxons were imaginative and sophisticated, able to create literature and artworks that can still stimulate the imagination over a millennium later. We shall explore such seminal works as the epic Beowulf, elegies, riddles, and religious poems. Alongside these texts with their evocative descriptions of lively court life and rich religious activity, we shall scrutinise works of art, including the Sutton Hoo treasures, Ruthwell Cross, and illuminated manuscripts such as the Lindisfarne Gospels. Setting the literature against its complex backdrop will allow deeper insights into the many layers of meaning.

Tutor: Dr Janina Ramirez is Course Director for the Undergraduate Certificate and Diploma in the History of Art at Oxford University Department for Continuing Education. She also writes and presents documentaries for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

Shakespeare and Politics: Then and Now

All of Shakespeare’s plays are bound up in the politics of their time, but at given points in history some have seemed more obviously ‘political’ than others. In this seminar we shall discuss plays that had a particular political dimension in the early modern period - notably Richard II, Richard III and Macbeth - and speculate on Shakespeare’s contribution to Sir Thomas More. We shall then consider the titles that can have political dimensions today, such as Henry V, The Taming of the Shrewand The Merchant of Venice.

Tutor: Dr John O’Connor is Visiting Senior Lecturer at Cornell University, USA, and was formerly Principal Lecturer in English at Westminster College, Oxford. He has also taught at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon.

The English Romantic Poets

The ‘Romantic’ period saw one of the great flowerings of creativity in England, particularly in poetry, alongside a great radicalisation of politics. This course will consider the major poets of the period in their intellectual context, exploring their formal innovations and interests in older traditions, and their new ideas of selfhood and politics. We shall focus on the works of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, and John Keats, with opportunities to explore the works of Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Robinson, John Clare, and others.

Tutor: Dr Tom MacFaul is Lecturer in English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.

The Public and Private Jane Austen

This course spans Austen’s whole authorial career, from her earliest childhood works through her published novels, culminating in her final manuscripts. It looks at texts unpublished in her lifetime alongside the celebrated fiction in order to appreciate her parallel authorial lives at home and abroad. Much of Austen’s writing was devised for a circle of intimates to whose eyes it was meant to be confined. By comparing what she wrote for friends and relatives with the novels written for a general audience, we will be able to examine Austen’s evolving conceptions of authorship, character, history, style, landscape, and narrative voice.

Tutor: Dr Freya Johnston is a Fellow and Lecturer in English at St Anne’s College, Oxford, and Director of Graduate Studies in the Faculty of English. She has recently co-edited, with Professor Kathryn Sutherland, a new text of Jane Austen’s Teenage Writings for Oxford World’s Classics (2017).

Victorian Fiction

The great Victorian novelists produced searching analyses of their society, exploring with pathos, passion and humour its often contradictory values - social aspiration, romantic yearning, moral fervour and religious doubt. Dealing with such issues in compelling narratives, Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy showed how the lives of individuals were enmeshed in the cultural forces of the age. On this course we shall examine three of their masterpieces: Great Expectations, The Mill on the Floss and Tess of the d’Urbervilles. As well as discussing the books’ central themes, the course will pay close attention to their structure and use of language.

Tutor: Dr David Grylls is a tutor for Oxford University Department for Continuing Education and Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford. His publications include books on Charles Dickens, George Gissing and Victorian parent-child relationships. He reviews contemporary fiction for The Sunday Times and critical books for the Times Literary Supplement.

Modernist Fiction

The broad range of novels and stories produced in the Modernist era was pivotal in introducing fundamental ideals of innovation and retrenchment into English fiction. Authors as diverse as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield shared a commitment to challenging prevailing narrative techniques, while at the same time seeking to realign their work with literary traditions as they found them. By examining some key prose fiction - Mrs Dalloway, Dubliners and Collected Stories- within the wider framework of their authors’ other books, and those of their contemporaries, this course aims to demonstrate the major premises motivating the Modernists’ endeavour, showing how they differed from their predecessors, and what effect their writing has had on fiction of the succeeding century.

Tutor: Dr John Ballam is Director of the Undergraduate Diploma in Creative Writing at Oxford University Department for Continuing Education. His research specialism is in the late-Victorian and Modernist periods.

Contemporary Literature

This course will explore the vitality and variety of twenty-first century British and Irish writing. The course will take in fiction, short stories, poetry and drama to consider a range of themes, including the relationship between narrative and truth-telling, formal experimentation, themes of loss and recovery, and mediation between the past and the future. A selection of challenging and provocative works will be discussed, to include Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending, Kazuo Ishiguro's Nocturnes, Ian McEwan's Solar, Seamus Heaney's District and Circle, Christopher Reid's A Scattering, and Caryl Churchill's A Number.

Tutor: Dr Tara Stubbs is Associate Professor in English Literature and Creative Writing at Oxford University Department for Continuing Education, and Director of the English Literature Summer School. She is the author of a range of publications on modernist poetry and fiction, with a focus on Irish and American literature.