Though largely unrecognised as such at the time, the Victorian period was full of writers addressing what we now consider themes of ‘queer’ sexuality and gender. Literature by authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Wilkie Collins and Oscar Wilde emphasize kinship, desire, matrimony, and domesticity, acting as a rich resource for analyses of same-sex desire, gendered and sexual subjectivities, and closeting and homophobia.

We will explore the power, allure, contradiction, and mystery of this ancient approach to writing poetry. We will read everything from classics of ekphrasis by John Keats and WH Auden to recent work by contemporary poets like Sarah Howe and Diane Seuss. We will take inspiration from these writers to create our own ekphrastic poems in response to the beautiful works of art—real and imagined—that we will explore together in Bath and beyond!

The course will involve readings and regular viewings of a rich range of UK comedy, fostering debate on what cultural, historical, and social factors have contributed to the UK comedic sensibility and tracing how UK comedy exploded across the globe. We will ask what makes people laugh, and probe the nature of humour itself: the role it plays in society, media, and government; and what makes it so essential to the human experience.

In this course, we will first consider how numerous influential British authors turned to nature to express their thoughts on religion, imagination, and social order. We will then cross the Atlantic to see how nature writing was cultivated in the ‘New World’, analysing how race and gender inform our perceptions of nature, before returning to England to explore the impact of climate change and the burgeoning sub-genre of ‘cli-fi’.

We will write weird stories: transgressive stories that defy genre convention; stories that navigate the slipstream between horror, fantasy, science fiction and ‘literature’; stories that might contain monsters or ghosts, or at the very least threaten our sense of what is real.