English Literature Summer School - Detailed Outline

This page provides a detailed outline of the in-person English Literature Summer School, a five-day course for students aged 15–18 who are considering studying English Literature or related subjects at university. The programme below explains what students study on each day, covering a broad chronological and thematic range from Old English literature through to modern and contemporary texts.

The course is designed to reflect an undergraduate approach to English Literature, focusing on close reading, interpretation, and critical discussion rather than exam technique. Students engage with primary texts alongside key critical ideas, and are encouraged to develop their own analytical responses through structured seminar discussion.

Teaching takes place through small-group seminars, guided reading, and collaborative exploration of texts, giving students a clear sense of how English is studied at university level.

Prefer to view and download the PDF version of the English Literature Summer School outline? You can do so here.

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Day One – The Origins of English
Day Two – The Renaissance: Culture and History
Day Three – Literature and Social Change
Day Four – Brave New Worlds!
Day Five – Strange Bedfellows

Across the week, students study a range of literary periods, genres and critical approaches, including medieval literature, Renaissance prose and poetry, Romanticism, Victorian fiction, modernism, and contemporary narrative. The course also introduces a number of important critical frameworks, such as feminist criticism, New Historicism and narrative theory, showing how these approaches are used to interpret literary texts.

By the end of the course, students will have developed a clearer understanding of how to analyse literary texts, construct and support an argument, and engage critically with complex material in a way that reflects undergraduate-level study.

Please note that for some groups, sessions may run in a different order.

10.30 – 1.00 Introduction and Anglo-Saxon Literature

We begin with the earliest surviving literature in English, exploring Old English poetry as a distinctive literary culture with its own characteristic forms, sounds and concerns. The session introduces students to some of the main modes of Anglo-Saxon verse – including the riddle, the elegy, the heroic poem and the Christian poem – while also showing how Old English poetry works through alliteration, metre, half-lines and caesura. Along the way, students encounter some of the period’s central preoccupations, including transience, mortality, honour and suffering.

The session then turns to two major texts. An extract from Beowulf provides an entry point into the heroic code of Old English literature, with its emphasis on kingship, loyalty, fellowship and the values of warrior society. The Dream of the Rood opens up a rather different but related set of questions, bringing together Christian theology and heroic language in a poem that invites close attention to paradox, personification and variation in description. The session offers a first taste of the strangeness, richness and power of early English literature, while introducing some of its central themes – honour, suffering, transience and redemption.

1.00 – 2.00 Lunch

2.00 – 4.30 Middle English Authorship and the Role of Women

In the afternoon, we move into the Middle English period and consider both the changing shape of the English language and the place of women within medieval literary culture. Students begin by looking at the development of Middle English after the Norman Conquest, tracing the interaction of English, French and Latin and considering what it meant to write in the vernacular in a manuscript culture before print. This part of the session also raises broader questions about audience, prestige, authorship and the circulation of texts in medieval England.

The session then turns to feminism and feminist literary theory, applying these ideas to medieval texts in order to think about voice, authority and the shaping force of literary culture. Through writers such as Margery Kempe and Christine de Pizan, students explore questions of women’s education, religion and access to authorship; through texts by Gower and Malory, they consider wider medieval narratives about gender, sexuality, class and honour. Taken together, the session reveals a medieval literary world in which language is changing, authority is contested, and women struggle – sometimes against the grain of the culture itself – to claim a voice on the page.

10.30 – 1.00 From Rebirth to Other Worlds

The Renaissance appears here as a world of rebirth, upheaval and discovery – shaped by classical revival, religious conflict, imperial ambition and new ways of imagining both the world and the self. From there, the focus shifts to two of the period’s most fascinating prose forms: travel writing and utopian fiction. Students explore the strange, unstable world of Renaissance travel narratives, asking what these texts reveal not only about the places and peoples they describe, but also about the fears, fantasies and ambitions of the writers themselves.

The second half of the session turns to utopian writing, looking at the Renaissance fascination with ideal or imagined societies. Through texts such as Thomas More’s Utopia, students consider how writers used imagined places to think about politics, labour, order, desire and social possibility. Running through the session is an introduction to New Historicism, an approach that encourages students to read literary texts alongside the wider culture that produced them. The result is a session that captures the Renaissance at its most expansive and disquieting – a world of voyages, strange encounters and imagined societies, in which discovery is never quite innocent and even the most perfect “other world” may have something unsettling at its heart.

1.00 – 2.00 Lunch

2.00 – 4.30 Sonneteers and Metaphysicals

In the afternoon, we turn to poetry and devotion – first secular, then spiritual, and finally political. The session begins with the emergence of the English sonnet, tracing its roots in courtly love and exploring how poets such as Wyatt and Sidney used the form to write about longing, discipline, desire and the figure of the suffering lover. What begins as a poetry of elegance and devotion, however, soon becomes more troubled, more self-conscious and more morally complex.

The session then moves to the metaphysical poets, especially Donne and Herbert, whose poetry reworks the language of love into something stranger, sharper and more inward. Here wit, argument and verbal ingenuity are brought to bear on questions of faith, doubt, sin and the soul’s relation to God. The session ends with Marvell, whose poetry carries these forms into a more explicitly political world. Taken together, the afternoon traces a remarkable movement in English verse – from the cultivated poise of the Renaissance sonnet to the intensity, ingenuity and spiritual restlessness of the seventeenth century.

10.30 – 1.00 Phenomenology – The Philosophy of Experience

This session explores one of the most powerful ideas in literary history: the Romantic elevation of the artist from skilled maker to visionary, genius and prophet. But with that new grandeur comes danger. Through texts such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, students consider the strange intimacy Romantic writers imagined between creativity, obsession, inspiration and ruin. Again and again, the act of making is figured as something intoxicating, transgressive and perilous – a reaching beyond ordinary human limits that brings with it both wonder and dread.

The session then traces the afterlife of this idea of the artist into later literary movements. Through the aestheticism of the fin de siècle and the Beat writing of the 1950s, students explore how Romanticism helped to create the enduring myth of the artist as a figure who must risk sanity, morality or ordinary social life in the pursuit of beauty or truth. This is a session about genius and self-destruction, inspiration and artifice, vision and excess – and about the extraordinary grip that Romantic ideas of creativity still exert on the modern imagination.

1.00 – 2.00 Lunch

2.00 – 4.30 Scandal in the City: The Rise of the Sensation Novel

In the afternoon, we move into the nineteenth century and the rise of the sensation novel: a form that brought shock, secrecy and melodrama into the heart of respectable domestic life. The session begins by setting sensation fiction alongside Victorian realism, before tracing its roots in Gothic writing and asking how the great terrors of earlier fiction were transformed in the modern city and the middle-class home. What emerges is a genre in which the uncanny is no longer safely remote or supernatural, but close at hand – hidden in marriage, family life, inheritance, respectability and the ordinary surfaces of everyday existence.

Using writers such as the Brontës, Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, students explore a world of guilty secrets, false identities, surveillance, domestic menace and moral ambiguity. The session also places the sensation novel in its broader historical moment, linking it to urbanisation, class anxiety, the popular press and the expansion of mass readership. What makes sensation fiction so gripping is not simply its talent for plot, but the way it makes familiar spaces feel newly unstable. It is, as one critic memorably puts it, an “everyday gothic” – a literature of scandal, suspense and revelation, in which the home itself may turn out to be the most disturbing place of all.

10.30 – 1.00 Make it New! Modernism

This session places literary modernism in its wider historical, cultural and artistic context, introducing students to a world marked by technological change, urban fragmentation, war, philosophical upheaval and a deep suspicion of inherited certainties. Modernism emerges here not as a single tidy movement, but as a restless, experimental response to modern life – one that asks how literature might represent a world in which truth seems fractured, consciousness unstable, and old forms no longer adequate.

From there, the session turns to two of modernism’s most exciting developments. First comes Imagism, with Ezra Pound and his circle trying to strip poetry back to hardness, precision and immediacy. Then the focus shifts to modernist prose, especially Joyce and Woolf, as students explore new ways of writing thought itself – from interior monologue to stream of consciousness. What makes this session so distinctive is that it captures modernism both as a cultural revolt and as a formal adventure: a literature determined to break with the old, but also to find new shapes for perception, memory and the life of the mind.

1.00 – 2.00 Lunch

2.00 – 4.30 ‘Nothing is ever Certain’ – The Unreliable Narrator

In the afternoon, certainty begins to slip. This session turns to one of the most absorbing problems in fiction: what happens when the voice telling the story cannot quite be trusted. The session begins with some key ideas from narrative theory, encouraging students to question simple models of author, text and reader, and to think instead about implied authors, implied readers, and the instability of narrative authority itself. From there, the idea of the unreliable narrator comes into focus – not simply as a plot device, but as a way of making reading more uncertain, more active and more intellectually demanding.

The session then moves through a striking range of first-person voices: children, liars, the mentally ill, the dead, and narrators whose language or perspective reveals more than they themselves understand. Through texts including The Lovely Bones, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Elizabeth is Missing and Atonement, students explore why contemporary literature is so fascinated by partial knowledge, distorted perspective and the difficulty of telling the truth. It is a session haunted by partial knowledge, distorted perspective and the fear that storytelling itself may never be as stable – or as innocent – as it first appears.

10.30 – 1.00 Lost in translation? Literature and place

This session explores one of literature’s most elusive powers: its ability to conjure a place through language alone. Students begin by thinking about the relationship between language, atmosphere and location, before moving into the strange and compelling world of magical realism. Through writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie, they consider what happens when the real and the fantastic are given equal weight, and how apparently impossible events can become part of the ordinary texture of a place. The result is a way of writing that feels at once richly atmospheric and subtly destabilising, asking readers to inhabit worlds where history, emotion and landscape seem to pulse together.

The session then broadens into a study of atmosphere more generally, using writers such as Angela Carter, Arundhati Roy and Haruki Murakami to think about the intimate relationship between language and feeling. How do writers make a setting vivid, uncanny, sensuous or haunted? How does memory alter our experience of place? And what happens when a text crosses linguistic borders and is read in translation? Running through the session is a fascination with the mystery of language itself – its ability to carry not only meaning, but weather, colour, strangeness and emotional force. It is a fitting final-day session for English: one that invites students to think not only about what literature says, but how words can seem to summon a world into being.

1.00 – 2.00 Lunch

2.00 – 4.30  Adaptation and Intertextuality – from Homer to Holmes

The final session of the course turns to the afterlives of texts – the ways stories are retold, rewritten, parodied, translated and transformed across time. Students begin by exploring the idea of intertextuality itself, considering the many ways one text can speak to another: through allusion, quotation, parody, pastiche and reimagining. Through writers such as Carol Ann Duffy, Madeline Miller, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Hilary Mantel, the session asks what it means to “write back” to older texts, and how retellings can recover silenced voices, reshape familiar stories, or reveal more about the age of the adaptation than the age of the original.

The session then moves into fantasy and adaptation more broadly, looking at the hybrid medievalisms of writers such as Terry Pratchett and the intertextual world-building of Game of Thrones, before ending with modern screen adaptation through Sherlock Holmes. Throughout, students are encouraged to think about why old stories keep returning in new forms, and why literature so often seems to thrive on echo, revision and transformation. The course ends, appropriately, not with a final answer but with a sense of literature as an ongoing conversation across centuries – one in which texts are never entirely finished, and where each new retelling can make an old story strange, vivid and newly alive again.

This outline provides a detailed view of the themes, texts and ideas explored during the in-person English Literature Summer School. The programme is designed to introduce students to the ways literary texts are studied at university level, combining close reading with critical discussion and a range of interpretative approaches.

You can also return to the main in-person English Literature Summer School page for full details about the course and how to apply.