ENGLISH LITERATURE

the body of written works produced in the English language by inhabitants of the British Isles (including Ireland) from the 7th century to the present day. The major literatures written in English outside the British Isles are treated separately under American literature, Australian literature, Canadian literature, and New Zealand literature. English literature has sometimes been stigmatized as insular. It can be argued that no single English novel attains the universality of the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace or the French writer Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Yet in the Middle Ages the Old English literature of the subjugated Saxons was leavened by the Latin and Anglo-Norman French writings, eminently foreign in origin, in which the churchmen and the Norman conquerors expressed themselves. From this combination emerged a flexible and subtle linguistic instrument exploited by Geoffrey Chaucer and brought to supreme application by William Shakespeare. During the Renaissance the renewed interest in classical learning and values had an important effect on English literature, as on all of the arts; and ideas of Augustan literary propriety in the 18th century and reverence in the 19th century for a less specific, though still selectively viewed, classical antiquity continued to shape the literature. All three of these impulses derived from a foreign source, namely the Mediterranean basin. The Decadents of the late 19th century and modernists of the early 20th looked to continental European individuals and movements for inspiration. Nor was attraction toward European intellectualism dead in the late 20th century, for by the mid-1980s the approach known as structuralism, a phenomenon predominantly French and German in origin, infused the very study of English literature itself in a host of published critical studies and university departments. Further, Britain's past imperial glories around the globe, particularly those that were connected with the Indian subcontinent, continued to inspire literaturein some cases wistful, in other cases hostile. Finally, English literature has enjoyed a certain diffusion abroad, not only in predominantly English-speaking countries but also in all those others where English is the first choice of study as a second language. English literature is therefore not so much insular as detached from the continental European tradition across the Channel. It is strong in all the conventional categories of the bookseller's list: in Shakespeare it has a dramatist of world renown; in poetry, a genre notoriously resistant to adequate translation and therefore difficult to compare with the poetry of other literatures, it is so peculiarly rich as to merit inclusion in the front rank; English literature's humour has been found as hard to convey to foreigners as poetry, if not more soa fact at any rate permitting bestowal of the label idiosyncratic; English literature's remarkable body of travel writings constitutes another counterthrust to the charge of insularity; in autobiography, biography, and historical writing English literature compares with the best of any culture; and children's literature, fantasy, essays, and journals, which tend to be considered minor genres, are all fields of exceptional achievement as regards English literature. Even in philosophical writings, popularly thought of as hard to combine with literary value, thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, and Bertrand Russell stand comparison for lucidity and grace with the best of the French philosophers and the masters of classical antiquity. Some of English literature's most distinguished practitioners in the 20th centuryfrom Henry James and Joseph Conrad at its beginning to V.S. Naipaul and Tom Stoppard more recentlywere of foreign origin. What is more, none of the aforementioned had as much in common with his adoptive country as did, for instance, Doris Lessing and Peter Porter (two other distinguished writer-immigrants to Britain) by virtue both of having been born into a British family and of having been brought up on British Commonwealth soil. On the other hand, during the same period in the 20th century, many notable practitioners of English literature left Britain to live abroad: James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Robert Graves, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, Anthony Burgess, and Sir Angus Wilson. In one case, that of Samuel Beckett, this process was carried to the extent of writing works first in French and then translating them into English. Even English literature considered purely as a product of the British Isles is extraordinarily heterogeneous, however. Literature actually written in those Celtic tongues once prevalent in Cornwall, Ireland, Scotland, and Walescalled the Celtic Fringeis treated separately (see Celtic literature). Yet Irish, Scots, and Welsh writers have contributed enormously to English literature even when they have written in dialect, as the 18th-century poet Robert Burns and the 20th-century Scots writer Alasdair Gray have done. In the latter half of the 20th century interest began also to focus on writings in English or English dialect by recent settlers in Britain, such as Afro-Caribbeans and people from Africa proper, the Indian subcontinent, and East Asia. Even within England, culturally and historically the dominant partner in the union of territories comprising Britain, literature has been as enriched by strongly provincial writers as by metropolitan ones. Another contrast more fruitful than not for English letters has been that between social milieus, however much observers of Britain in their own writings may have deplored the survival of class distinctions. As far back as medieval times a courtly tradition in literature cross-fertilized with an earthier demotic one. Shakespeare's frequent juxtaposition of royalty in one scene with plebeians in the next reflects a very British way of looking at society. This awareness of differences between high life and low, a state of affairs fertile in creative tensions, is observable throughout the history of English literature. The Editors of the Encyclopdia Britannica the body of written works produced in the English language by inhabitants of the British Isles from the 7th century to the present day. The major literatures written in English outside the British Isles are treated separately under American literature, Australian literature, and Canadian literature. English literature is traditionally divided into the Old English, Middle English, Renaissance and Elizabethan, Jacobean, Restoration, 18th-century, Romantic, Victorian, and Modern periods. Literary traditions often overflow such categories, however, and diverse approaches have always coexisted. Old English and, to a lesser extent, Middle English appear to the modern reader to be foreign languages. Old English is the first recorded English literature. The alliterative verse of Caedmon was mentioned in the Venerable Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People) in the 8th century. Manuscripts from about AD 1000 contain the best-known Old English work, Beowulf, a heroic poem written about 700 to 750. Such poems were originally written to be sung, and the subject matter was generally religious or heroic. In prose there were plain-narrative historical chronicles such as The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Middle English arguably began with the Norman Conquest of 1066. This brought both the French language, which in time combined with the Germanic Anglo-Saxon to form the basis of modern English, and a French literary influence. The Arthurian cycle became the central myth for English literature, as seen in works such as Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight, an example of the alliterative revival of the 14th century, and Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur. Geoffrey Chaucer, master of the complex narrative and sometimes presented as the first modern English writer, occupies the central position in Middle English literature. He combined the classical epic and European philosophical influence in his Troilus and Criseyde but also gave the vernacular a solid basis in his comic Canterbury Tales. The European Renaissance had filtered into England by the 16th century and led to the questioning of the religious beliefs and assumptions of the Middle Ages. Literature began to look back beyond the medieval period to the classics for inspiration, and Neoplatonism, through Edmund Spenser and lyrical courtly poetry, became the dominant philosophical theme. Humanism emerged in Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesie (the beginnings of English literary criticism), in Francis Bacon's prose essays, and particularly in the plays of William Shakespeare. As the central figure of the English Renaissance, Shakespeare expresses both its conflicts and its glorious energy and provides the basis for its reputation as the golden age of English literature and of English drama in particular. Shakespeare's immediate forebear, Christopher Marlowe, established the use of blank verse in plays centring on the tragic ambitions of strong personalities. The political strife accompanying the accession of James I in 1603 produced a strain of cynicism manifested in the revenge tragedies of John Webster and the comedies of Ben Jonson and Francis Beaumont. There emerged also at this time the intellectual passion of Metaphysical poetrywith John Donne at its centrecontaining the conflicts between love, religion, and the individual. Robert Herrick and other Cavalier poets, by contrast, wrote elegant and playful love lyrics. The English Civil Wars led to the closure of all English theatres in 1642 and to Oliver Cromwell's Puritan regime. The dominant literary figure was John Milton, and his influential religious epic Paradise Lost (1667) provided a link between the Puritan era and the restoration of the monarchy. The return of Charles II in 1660 brought the courtly Restoration period, characterized by the witty, mannered comedies of William Congreve, the satirical poetry of Andrew Marvell, and the heroic drama and poetry of John Dryden. The diary and biography forms emerged as useful genres in the works of Samuel Pepys and Izaak Walton, and John Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), a popular Christian allegory. The 18th century contained two major literary currents. The first current was the Augustan Age, or Neoclassical period, exemplified by the satires of Alexander Pope, the pamphleteering and allegory of Jonathan Swift (perhaps the greatest satirist in the language), and the criticism of Samuel Johnson. Journalism and the prose essay flourished, both influencing and being nurtured by this movement, as seen in Joseph Addison's periodical The Spectator. Of great importance was the rise of the novel as an independent literary form in the works of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollett. The novelist-playwright Oliver Goldsmith, the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Johnson's biographer, James Boswell, closed out the Augustan Age late in the century. The second literary current to appear in the 18th century was Romanticism, which was in part a reaction against the elitism and self-imposed classical limitations of the Augustans. It began with William Blake's poetry of rebellion against convention and a new conception of the imagination as a creative force. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were central to the movement, producing a manifesto of Romantic beliefs in the preface to their joint Lyrical Ballads (1798). These poets concentrated on the redeeming power of nature and the destructive influence of increasing industrialization. The second generation of English Romanticism included John Keats, whose vivid, sensuous lyrics trace beauty and its passing; Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose works combine lyricism with political radicalism; and Lord Byron, who invented the romantic antihero in his ironic verse satires. The 19th century was the great age of the English novel. Early in the century this form gathered strength in the fantasies of the Gothic novel and in the critical insight into polite society that was shown by Jane Austen. The historical novel was established by Sir Walter Scott in the 1820s. Charles Dickens, the greatest of all English novelists, put his comic genius at the service of exploring the ills of society and the vagaries of human nature. Following Dickens were George Eliot's portrayals of 19th-century society and its moral dilemmas, William Thackeray's ironic studies of society, and Anthony Trollope's depictions of contemporary manners and mores. Thomas Hardy marked the end of the Victorian era, and the threshold of Modernism, in his agnosticism and determinism. The two most significant figures in Victorian poetry were Robert Browning, who created psychological portraits in poems called dramatic monologues, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who explored the intellectual and religious problems of the time in his verse. Other notable Victorian figures were the essayist Matthew Arnold and such poets as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne. The turn of the century saw the revival of English drama by Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, together with a new profusion of novelists, among them H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, E.M. Forster, and W. Somerset Maugham. The distinctive mood of the Modern age grew from the disillusionment and cynicism that followed World War I; it appeared notably as a sense of life's bleakness in the poetry of T.S. Eliot. Writers also became increasingly self-conscious about literary form and language, as is evident in the novels of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Other figures, in particular the poet W.H. Auden, turned to expressing left-wing political idealism in their work. Peripheral to the Modernist movement were D.H. Lawrence, whose novels examine the complexities of sexuality and the relationships between men and women, and the Irish poet W.B. Yeats, whose work moved from Symbolism to Modernism and who was a leading figure in the Irish literary renaissance. The novelists Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, and Graham Greene and the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas all emerged in the 1930s but wrote some of their most important works in the years after World War II. The second half of the 20th century was characterized by a wide variety of styles and movements. An especially vital movement was that of the Angry Young Men in the 1950s, whose members exhibited an uninhibited disdain for the traditional British establishment and class system. Drama branched out from carefully crafted and conventional plays to an emotionally raw kitchen-sink drama (best represented by John Osborne), the Theatre of the Absurd of Samuel Beckett, and the Theatre of Menace of Harold Pinter. Poetry showed strong regional roots as well as a deep receptivity to the way the contemporary world is underlain by strata of history. These preoccupations are imaginatively present in the work of Ted Hughes, a native of Yorkshire, and Seamus Heaney, from Northern Ireland. Fiction's many modes included the allegorical novels of William Golding, the stylized social comedies of Barbara Pym, and the satirical novels of Kingsley Amis. A major development toward the end of the century was the Postmodern novel, which made conscious use of such devices as myth, fairy tale, and fantasy. It especially served the purposes of feminist and postcolonial writers, including Angela Carter, V.S. Naipaul, and Salman Rushdie.