English Literature

In this nineteen-part course, Professor John McRae (University of Nottingham) explores Shakespeare’s Macbeth. We begin with a broad introduction to historical, political ...

In this course, we explore several aspects of one of Shakespeare’s later plays, The Winter’s Tale. In particular, we consider the political and theatrical context for the play, the importance of allegory and symbolism, the play’s peculiar...

In this course, Dr John Lennard explores Shakespeare's Hamlet. In the first module, we explore the idea of Hamlet as a revenge tragedy, and think about how Shakespeare has complicated the basic structure. In the second module, we consider the...

In this course, we explore several aspects of Antony and Cleopatra. We begin by thinking about why Shakespeare was interested in writing plays that were set in Ancient Rome, before looking at a number of aspects of the play and...

In this course, Professor Lisa Hopkins (Sheffield Hallam University) explores Christopher Marlowe's final play, Edward II. We begin by thinking about the theme of homosexuality in the play, arguing that while the relationship between Edward and...

In this course, we explore the Wife of Bath’s Tale and Prologue in Chaucer’s in Canterbury Tales. In the first module, we consider the presentation of the Wife of Bath in the General Prologue, thinking about the extent to which...

In this course we look at several aspects of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. In the first six sections, we focus on Romanticism and what it means to call Heathcliff a Romantic hero. In second six sections, we focus on individual...

In this course, Dr Sowon Park (Oxford University) explores two key themes in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. In the first module, we look at the narrative style of the novel - arguing that the narrative style in Mrs Dalloway represents...

In this course, we explore Philip Larkin’s 1964 collection of poetry, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’. Having introduced Larkin and his poetry in the first module, we then go through each poem in turn, reading it aloud and providing an in-depth,...

In this course, we explore The Revenger’s Tragedy, a play which was written in the early years of the seventeenth century, but whose author is unknown. In the first two modules, we think generally about the Early Modern stage, before...

In this course, Professor David Punter (University of Bristol) explores Bram Stoker’s 1897 Gothic horror novel, Dracula. As we move through the course, we think about the centrality of blood to the novel (both literally and figuratively), the...

In this course, we explore the poetry of Sylvia Plath: first, we think about what it means to describe Plath as a writer of Confessional Poetry; after that we look at the themes of motherhood and love in Plath’s poetry;...