Live life more intensely. Be more passionate, fiery, tender. Achieve this, and your own life will be more meaningful, more full, more profound. This is the message of almost every novel, poem, and film. This course explores the following question: What does literature suggest an intensely lived life might be? What do books and films really know about life? This course explores how from the eighteenth century to the present the meanings of life itself have changed, and how literature, reflecting this, has changed also. We will look at how life has been represented, questioned and rethought in novels such as Robinson Crusoe, Jane Eyre and James Joyce’s Ulysses, and a series of poems, stories and films by Keats, Kafka, Jane Campion and more.