History of English Literature: From Old English Literature to 1660

Introduction: What is English Literature?

Old English (c. 700-1066)

 Important historical events

o Anglo-Saxon England (5th century-1066)
o Anglo-Saxons: Germanic peoples who came to England in the 5th and 6th centuries
o 1066: The Norman Conquest

 Features
o Language: Old English
o Oral tradition
o Epic poems
o Alliterative verse
o Use of highly figurative language (ex: “kenning”=> “whale-road” for “sea”; “life-house” for “body”, in Beowulf)

 Texts
o Hymn of Cædmon
o Beowulf
 3182 alliterative long lines
 Nowell Codex
 Between the 8th and the early 11th centuries
 Beowulf, a hero of the Geats, battles three antagonists: Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and a dragon.
o The Battle of Maldon
o The Dream of the Rood
o Advent Lyrics
o Elegies: The Seafarer, The Wanderer

Middle English literature (11th century-1485)

 Important historical events

o 1485 – Henry VII (Tudor dynasty), king of England.

 Features
o Languages
 Middle English, Chancery English
 John Gower wrote in Latin, Middle English and Anglo-Norman
 Middle English Bible translations, notably Wycliffe’s Bible, helped to establish English as a literary language.
 The printing press regularized the language.

o Categories of Middle English Literature

 Religious
 Courtly love
 Arthurian

 Authors and texts

o William Langland’s Piers Plowman (c. 1377)
o Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c. 1387)
o Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (most likely by the Pearl Poet)
o The Owl and the Nightingale (late 12th c.): animal characters / allegory / medieval debate tradition
o Julian of Norwich: mysticism / visionary writings (mainly, by women)
o Margery Kempe: The Book of Margery Kempe (1430): pilgrimage / autobiography / travel writing
o Thomas Malory: Morte Darthur (1485: published by Caxton)

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Tudor Literature (1485-1603) – Early modern or Renaissance literature

 Important historical events

o Introduction of a printing press into England by William Caxton in 1476vernacular literature flourished.
o The Reformation in the 16th centuryvernacular liturgyBook of Common Prayer [direct reading of the Bible: silent
reading]
o Strengthening of English language parallel to strengthening of English (centralized) state (Tudor dynasty)

 Features of literature in the Elizabethan Age

o Flourishing of literature, esp. drama
o Influence of the Italian Renaissance
o Most outstanding figure: William Shakespeare
o Patronage system (court)

 HUMANISM: Individual self-assertion / man as measure of all things / emphasis on education

 Authors and texts
o Thomas More, Utopia (1516)
o William Shakespeare: plays and sonnets
o Thomas Wyatt: introduced the sonnet
o Christopher Marlowe: introduced Dr. Faustus to England
o Edmund Spencer
o Sir Philip Sidney

The 17th century (1603-1660)

 Important historical / cultural events

o 1603 1625 – Jacobean Age (King James I)
o 1649 – Execution of Charles I (1625-1649)
o 1653 – Oliver Cromwell (1653-1658), Lord Protector
o 1660 – Charles II - Restoration of the monarchy
o The King James Bible (1604 – 1611)

 Authors and texts in the Jacobean Age

o John Donne and the other Metaphysical poets (vs. Cavalier poets: Ben Jonson)
 Influenced by continental Baroque
 Took as his subject matter both Christian mysticism and eroticism
 Use of unconventional or “unpoetic” figures, such as a compass or a mosquito, to reach surprise effects.
o Ben Jonson, poet and dramatist: Volpone
o Revenge plays: John Webster and Thomas Kyd

 Caroline and Cromwellian literature (1625-1649; 1653-1658)

o Features
 Flourishing of political literature in English
 Pamphlets written by sympathizers of every faction in the English civil wars (1642-46, 1648-49)
 Closure of the theatres at the start of the English Civil War in 1642
o Authors and texts
 Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan
 Precursors to the British newspaper
 Samuel Pepys: Diary (Account of London in the 1660s: the Great Plague of London, the Great Fire of London,
etc.)
 Poets:
 Andrew Marvell
 John Milton: Paradise Lost (1667; written 10 years earlier)

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 History of English Literature: From 1660 to the 21st century

Restoration literature and the 18th century (1660-1780)

 Important historical events

o 1660 – Restoration of the monarchy
o 1688 – Glorious Revolution (end of Stuart Dynasty): limitation of powers of the Crown by Parliament
o 1776 – Independence of the American colonies

 Features
o The Age of Reason or the Enlightenment
 rational and scientific approach to religious, social, political, and economic issues (“scientific revolution”:
1662: chartering of the Royal Society)
 secular view of the world
 a general sense of progress and perfectibility
 inspired by the discoveries of the previous century (Newton)
 inspired by the writings of Descartes, Locke and Bacon
 influenced by Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie (1751-1772)
o Important genres
 Satire
 Christian religious writing
 Beginnings of journalism
 Beginnings of fiction
o Periods
 Restoration
 Augustan Literature (1689-1750)

 Authors and texts

o John Locke
 Empiricism
 two Treatises on Government (1689)
o John Bunyan: The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)
o Aphra Behn: Oroonoko (1688)
o Drama
 John Dryden
 William Congreve: The Way of the World (1700)
 John Gay: The Beggar’s Opera
o Poetry
 Alexander Pope
 Features: neo-classical approach, mock-heroic poems
 Works: The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad
o Periodical essay
 Joseph Addison: The Spectator (1711-)
 Richard Steel: The Tatler (1709-)
o Lexicography
 Samuel Johnson: Dictionary of the English Language (1755)
o The novel
 Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe (1719)
 Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
 Samuel Johnson: Rasselas
 Henry Fielding: Tom Jones
 Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy
 Samuel Richardson: Pamela, Clarissa

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The 19th century: Romanticism (1780-1830)

 Important historical events

o Depopulation of the countryside as a result of the enclosures, or privatization of pasturesexpansion of the city

o Beginnings of industrialization:
 poor condition of workers
 new class-conflicts
 pollution of the environment
 reactions to urbanism and machines

 Romantic fiction

o Gothic fiction
 Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto (1764)
 Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
 Matthew Lewis: The Monk (1796)
 Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (1818)

o The historical romance: Sir Walter Scott: Ivanhoe, Waverley, Rob Roy

o Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Persuasion and Emma

o Novel of purpose (social / political)

 William Godwin: Caleb Williams (1794)

 Romantic poetry

o Features: “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads” (Wordsworth and Coleridge)

o First generation
 William Blake
 Lake District Poets
 William Wordsworth: “Daffodils”
 Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Rime of the Ancient Mariner

o Second generation
 Lord Byron
 Percy Bysshe Shelley: “Ode to the West Wind”
 John Keats: “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

 American writers

o Essays and poetry: Ralph Waldo Emerson

o Poetry: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson

o Novelists and short-story writers:

 Edgar Allan Poe
 Washington Irving
 Herman Melville: Moby Dick

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The 19th century: Victorian literature (1837–1901)

 Important historical events

o Queen Victoria (1837-1901) [more urban economy / rising industrialism / imperial expansion]

 Main features

o Writers try to meet the tastes of the middle classes

o Importance of the novel
o Victorian “morals and manners”

 The novel

o The Brontë sisters

 Charlotte’s Jane Eyre (1847)
 Emily’s Wuthering Heights (1847)
 Anne’s Agnes Grey were released (1847)
o Charles Dickens: Hard Times
o William Makepeace Thackeray: Vanity Fair
o George Eliot: Middlemarch,
o Thomas Hardy: Jude the Obscure
o Elizabeth Gaskell: North and South (1854)
o Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone (1868), first detective novel
o Bram Stoker: Dracula (1897)
o H.G. Wells: science fiction
o Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Sherlock Holmes, a fictional detective
o Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness (1899)

 Poetry

o Alfred Tennyson
o Robert Browning
o Elizabeth Barrett Browning
o Dante Gabriel Rossetti
o Christina Rossetti

 Literature for children

o Lewis Carroll: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

o Robert Louis Stevenson: Treasure Island (1883)
o Beatrix Potter: The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902)

 Drama

o Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)

o Bernard Shaw: Pygmalion (1912)

 Some American writers in the 2nd half of the 19th century

o Mark Twain: Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer
o Henry James
o Stephen Crane
o Charlotte P. Gilman
o Kate Chopin: “Story of an Hour”

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English literature since 1900

 Before 1945

o Important historical events

 First World War (1914-1918)

 Second World War (1939-1945)

o Modernism

 Features

 Disillusionment with Victorian era attitudes of certainty, conservatism, and objective truth
 Influenced by Romanticism, Karl Marx’s political writings and Sigmund Freud’s theory of
subconscious
 Art for art’s sake, formal experimentation
 Greater interest in the inner world of the characters

 Authors and texts

 James Joyce: Dubliners (“Eveline”), Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake
 Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s Own, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Three Guineas, “The
Legacy”, “Professions for Women”…
 Katherine Mansfield
 E.M. Forster
 Rudyard Kipling

 American modernists

 T.S. Eliot
 William Carlos Williams
 Ezra Pound
 Gertrude Stein: “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”
 William Faulkner
 Ernest Hemingway
 Robert Frost
 e.e. cummings

o War poets (WWI)

 Wilfred Owen
 Siegfried Sassoon
 Wilfred Gibson
 Herbert Read

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 After 1945

o Important historical events

 Right after WWII

 Establishment of the post-war Welfare State.

 Education Act of 1944 made secondary education compulsory for all.
 The India Independence Act of 1947 began the process of final withdrawal from imperial and
colonial responsibilities that marked the succeeding decades.
 Immediate post-war years were a time of austerity
 Accession of Queen Elizabeth in 1952.
 The “Iron Curtain” between the East-European Communist bloc and the Western democracies (end:
1989, fall of the Berlin Wall)
 Report on Homosexual Offences: It prepared the way for legalization of homosexual practices
between consenting adults.
 The setting up of new universities less committed to traditional English educational thinking. (red-
brick universities vs. Oxbridge)
 The transformation of the UK into a multi-racial society by the vastly increased rate of immigration
from the coloured Commonwealth [re-thinking of national identity]

 After the 1960s

 Independence granted to numerous former imperial territories

 Expansion of computerisation
 Growth of pop culture
 Legalization of adult homosexual practices
 Acceptance of the contraceptive pill
 Disturbances between the Unionist and the Republican populations in Northern Ireland
 Margaret Thatcher (1979-1983 & 1983-1987)
 Mass unemployment: unoccupied young people, many of them coloured a threat in the inner cities
 1985: the menace of AIDS
 1990s: fewer racial conflicts
 September 11th, 2001: Attack against the Twin Towers (New York)
 July 7th, 2005: Attacks on the London underground

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o Main literary trends and authors

 Social Realism
o Poetry: The Movement (Philip Larkin)
o Theatre
 The Absurd (Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot)
 The Angry Young Men (John Osborne)
 Willy Russell: Educating Rita (1983)
o Novel
 Working-class novel
 Campus novel: Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (1953); David Lodge, Changing Places (1975)

 Postmodernism
 Features:
 J.F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (1979): master narratives are revised
 Mistrust of “History” (his, not hers; Western, etc.)
 Revision, deconstruction, intertextuality, pastiche, mixture of genres, the popular and the
classic…
 Authors: Salman Rushdie, Angela Carter…

 Gender Studies, Queer Studies, feminist fiction

 Fay Weldon, Jeanette Winterson, Suniti Namjoshi…

 Postcolonial Studies, Diaspora literature, New Literatures in English, Black British Literature, World
Literature
 Black British writers: Grace Nichols, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Andrea Levy, Zadie Smith,
John Agard, Sam Selvon, Kazuo Ishiguro…
 Postcolonial writers: Rudy Wiebe (Canada), Margaret Atwood (Canada), Patricia Grace
(New Zealand), R.K. Narayan (India), Wole Soyinka (Nigeria), Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Kenya),
Peter Carey (Australia), J.M. Coetzee (South Africa), V.S. Naipaul (Trinidad), Jamaica Kincaid
(Antigua)…

 Other 20th century classics

o George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm
o Agatha Christie: Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, And Then There Were None
o C. S. Lewis: The Chronicles of Narnia
o J. R. R. Tolkien: The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings
o Ian Fleming: James Bond 007
o Roald Dahl
o Arthur C. Clarke: 2001: A Space Odyssey (science fiction)
o William Golding: Lord of the Flies (1954)
o Ian McEwan: Atonement (2001)

 Some American writers in the 2nd half of the 20th century

o Playwrights
o Novelists  Eugene O’Neill
 Vladimir Nabokov  Tennesee Williams
 Kurt Vonnegut  Arthur Miller
 Philip Roth  Edward Albee
 John Updike  Sam Shepard
 Toni Morrison o Poets
 Alice Walker  Allen Ginsberg
 Joyce Carol Oates  Jack Kerouac
 Rita Dove
 Adrienne Rich
 Anne Sexton
 Sylvia Plath