Literature: I Must Go Down to the Sea - Twentieth Century British Seaside Literature

When John Masefield wrote I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, he captured the very British fascination for the coast, its environs and the sea beyond. Our course will discover the excitement of childhood, the out of season quality of our resorts with their fading Victoriana, and the associations that the seaside discloses relating to class, identity and political beliefs.

We will see how writers’ responses to our coastline vacillate between celebration, desperation and memorialisation.

We will also discover how the seaside functions as the backdrop to widely differing forms of literature from the Gothic of Bram Stoker and Daphne Du Maurier, to the crime genres of Christie and the thrillers of Graham Greene. We will also have time to sample Dylan Thomas’ word extravaganzas recalling childhood at the seaside and Larkin’s more downbeat visions of lonely holidays. Importantly, we will also reflect the writings and meditations on the sea and seaside by those who live there and earn their livings from the seas.

The course aims to provide a comprehensive introduction to this fascinating element of British writing in the last two hundred years.