The syllabus of the course is based on the students' selection of 5 or 6 books from the following list:

1910s & 1920s

G.B. Shaw: Pygmalion

Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse

D.H. Lawrence: Lady Chatterley’s Lover

1930s & 1940s

Aldous Huxley: Brave New World

Christopher Isherwood: Goodbye to Berlin

George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four

1950s

Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot; Endgame

Kingsley Amis: Lucky Jim

William Golding: Lord of the Flies

Graham Greene: The End of the Affair

John Osborne: Look Back in Anger

Iris Murdoch: Under the Net

Alan Sillitoe: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

1960s

John Fowles: The Collector

Anthony Burgess: Nothing Like the Sun

Harold Pinter: Homecoming

Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

B.S. Johnson: The Unfortunates

1970s

David Lodge: Changing Places

Ian McEwan: The Cement Garden

Angela Carter: The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

1980s

Peter Ackroyd: Hawksmoor

Jeanette Winterson: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Kazuo Ishiguro: An Artist of the Floating World

Martin Amis: London Fields

Julian Barnes: A History of the World in 10¹/₂ Chapters