Literary London

About

This module introduces you to the life and literature of London from the 18th century to the present.

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.

We will consider the aestheticisation of London and how being a Londoner, especially a ‘cockney’, and the contestation of ‘immigrant-as-Londoner’ is reflected and shaped by the city’s cultural and literary life.

We will look at how early 20th-century literature troubles and unsettles the confidence of the waning imperial seat of power, and how contemporary literature intersects with, reimagines, and rearranges the geographies of the postcolonial, multiracial city.

We will consider theoretical ideas of place and identity, applying the ideas of psychogeography and walking to our texts.

As we read some of London’s greatest poems, short stories and novels, we will walk the streets of London, visiting major landmarks and museums, and looking into its lesser-known histories, ‘reading’ the enduring and vibrant literary history of London.

Week one: London: Aesthetic Imaginary in Poetry
Jonathan Swift: ‘A Description of a City Shower’ (1710); ‘A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed’
John Gay: Trivia: or The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
William Blake: ‘London’ (1794)
John Keats ‘On Seeing the Elgin Marbles’ (1794) and other poems
Mary Robinson: ‘London’s Summer Morning’ (1800)
Oscar Wilde: ‘The Harlot’s House’ (1882)
T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land (1922)
Louis MacNeice ‘The British Museum Reading Room’ (1940)
Jo Shapcott St. Bride’s (2009)
Walks: Treasures of British Museum, Keats’ House and Hampstead Heath, The Waste Land walk

Week two: Literary London – Becoming a Londoner and Construction of Identity
Fanny Burney: Evelina (1778)
Charles Dickens: Oliver Twist (1838) and Stories by Boz (1836)
Augusta Webster: ‘A Castaway’ (1870)
Margaret Harkness: In Darkest London (1889)
Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
Walks: Regency London, Dickens’ Museum, Foundling Hospital, Dickens’ London

Week three: 20th and 21st Century London: Desolation and Postcolonial Reimagining
Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Sam Selvon: The Lonely Londoners (1956)
Jean Rhys: ‘Let Them Call it Jazz’ (1962)
Iain Sinclair: Lights Out for the Territory (2003)
Zadie Smith NW
Bernadine Evaristo: Mr. Loverman (2013)
Walks: Virginia Woolf walk

Course leader

Sarah Chambré

Course aim

This module aims to:

- Give you a broad historical and literary awareness of how London has changed as a city from the early 18th century to the present day, with a particular focus on what it was to be a Londoner during its dramatic rise to become the most important city in the world in 1900, and an appreciation of its subsequent post-colonial reframing.
- Provide opportunities to engage with particular literary texts at a rigorous and analytical level with consideration of forms and styles and a number of theoretical frameworks.
- Enable you to connect larger narratives and individual stories with your experience of living in and engaging with the city, and to explore London’s social, historical and architectural foundations and their continuing relationships with literature and literary form.

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