Distance learning is the ideal solution for anyone wanting to train as a news journalist, features writer, freelance writer or creative writer without having to juggle an existing career or other commitments. Simply by studying at home and corresponding regularly with your tutor you can set yourself on the path to knowledge and success - all while working at your own pace.

The English Literature Course is a broad based course which is equivalent to “A” level standard.   It is designed to be enjoyable and pleasantly non-academic, and provides an ideal starting-point for anyone who feels that their knowledge of literature is perhaps not as extensive as they would like it to be. It includes a fair amount of essay-writing, and therefore ample opportunity to improve your writing style, but that is not its main purpose. It you would like to extend your knowledge of English literature, then I think you would find it an entertaining and stimulating course.

The course is a journey in time, as well as in space. You will go back many hundreds of years, you will explore new countries, you will find out how people, wildly different from yourself, felt and thought and acted. With your mind you will enter other minds, and be made free of their experience and their imagination. You will make friends that cannot change, and cannot fail you.

The Beginnings of English
Chaucer’s Tales. The Bible. The same Biblical passage is given in five different versions from the early Sixteenth Century to the present day.

The Renaissance (I)
The many sides of the great wave of energy that swept over Europe. The teachers, the poets, the history of the English theatre; Shakespeare

The Renaissance (II)
This lesson examines Shakespeare’s other work, follows the course of the sonnet, and deals with the dramatists who came after Shakespeare until the Puritans shut down every theatre in England.

The Age Of Reason
This lesson deals with standards. The influence of France. Satire. Dryden, Butler, Pope.  The diarists, Evelyn and Pepys. The mighty figure of Dr. Johnson.

The Novel
How the novel grew from Defoe and Fielding to its peak in the first half of Victoria’s reign, with Dickens and Thackeray.

The Romantic Movement
The second, smaller Renaissance that followed the French Revolution. The attempt to bring poetry back to popular speech. Wordsworth and Coleridge. Political Idealism. The extraordinary career of Byron. The later Romantics: Shelley and Keats.

The Theatre
From the Restoration onwards, this lesson deals with the Court playwrights of Charles II; with Goldsmith and Sheridan who forsook the theatre for the House of Commons and ends with Wilde and Bernard Shaw.  

The Victorians
This lesson relates the Victorian writers to the intellectual and social problems of their time and includes figures as far apart as Carlyle the prophet, George Eliot the novelist, Charles Kingsley and the poets Tennyson, Browning and Swinburne.

The Literature of our Time
An appendix to the main course. The period of change, from the death of Browning to the Angry Young Men. The response to Housman. Through W.B. Yeats and Hopkins to the poets of the First World War. Narrative verse. Renaissance of the Thirties in English poetry. New metaphysicals and Nostalgia. Sixty years of the novel. Somerset Maugham to Graham Greene. Women writers. Plays from Shaw to Fry and Pinter. The flourishing of criticism. Biographers and satirists.