ENGLISH LITERATURE: MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE

Modern English literature: the 20th century From 1900 to 1945 The Edwardians The 20th century opened with great hope but also with some apprehension, for the new century marked the onset of a new millennium. For many, mankind was entering upon an unprecedented era. H.G. Wells's utopian studies, the aptly titled Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1901) and A Modern Utopia (1905), both captured and qualified this optimistic mood and gave expression to a common conviction that science and technology would transform the world in the century ahead. To achieve such transformation, outmoded institutions and ideals had to be replaced by ones more suited to the growth and liberation of the human spirit. The death of Queen Victoria in 1901 and the accession of Edward VII seemed to confirm that a franker, less inhibited era had begun. Many writers of the Edwardian period, drawing widely upon the realistic and naturalistic conventions of the 19th century (upon Ibsen in drama and Balzac, Turgenev, Flaubert, Zola, Eliot, and Dickens in fiction) and in tune with the anti-Aestheticism unleashed by the trial of the archetypal Aesthete, Oscar Wilde, saw their task in the new century to be an unashamedly didactic one. In a series of wittily iconoclastic plays, of which Man and Superman (performed 1905, published 1903) and Major Barbara (performed 1905, published 1907) are the most substantial, George Bernard Shaw turned the Edwardian theatre into an arena for debate upon the principal concerns of the day: the question of political organization, the morality of armaments and war, the function of class and of the professions, the validity of the family and of marriage, and the issue of female emancipation. Nor was he alone in this, even if he was alone in the brilliance of his comedy. John Galsworthy made use of the theatre in Strife (1909) to explore the conflict between capital and labour, and in Justice (1910) he lent his support to reform of the penal system, while Harley Granville-Barker, whose revolutionary approach to stage direction did much to change theatrical production in the period, dissected in The Voysey Inheritance (performed 1905, published 1909) and Waste (performed 1907, published 1909) the hypocrisies and deceit of upper-class and professional life. Many Edwardian novelists were similarly eager to explore the shortcomings of English social life. Wellsin Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900); Kipps (1905); Ann Veronica (1909), his pro-suffragist novel; and The History of Mr. Polly (1910)captured the frustrations of lower- and middle-class existence, even though he relieved his accounts with many comic touches. In Anna of the Five Towns (1902) Arnold Bennett detailed the constrictions of provincial life among the self-made business classes in the area of England known as the Potteries; in The Man of Property (1906), the first volume of The Forsyte Saga, Galsworthy described the destructive possessiveness of the professional bourgeoisie; and in Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and The Longest Journey (1907) E.M. Forster portrayed with irony the insensitivity, self-repression, and philistinism of the English middle classes. These novelists, however, wrote more memorably when they allowed themselves a larger perspective. In The Old Wives' Tale (1908) Bennett showed the destructive effects of time on the lives of individuals and communities and evoked a quality of pathos that he never matched in his other fiction; in Tono-Bungay (1909) Wells showed the ominous consequences of the uncontrolled developments taking place within a British society still dependent upon the institutions of a long-defunct landed aristocracy; and in Howards End (1910) Forster showed how little the rootless and self-important world of contemporary commerce cared for the more rooted world of culture, although he acknowledged that commerce was a necessary evil. Nevertheless, even as they perceived the difficulties of the present, most Edwardian novelists, like their counterparts in the theatre, held firmly to the belief not only that constructive change was possible but also that this change could in some measure be advanced by their writing. Other writers, including Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling, who had established their reputations during the previous century, and Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, and Edward Thomas, who established their reputations in the first decade of the new century, were less confident about the future and sought to revive the traditional formsthe ballad, the narrative poem, the satire, the fantasy, the topographical poem, and the essaythat in their view preserved traditional sentiments and perceptions. The revival of traditional forms in the late 19th and early 20th century was not a unique event. There have been many such revivals during the 20th century, and the traditional poetry of A.E. Housman (whose book A Shropshire Lad, originally published in 1896, enjoyed huge popular success during World War I), Walter de la Mare, John Masefield, Robert Graves, and Edmund Blunden represents an important and often neglected strand of English literature in the first half of the century. The most significant writing of the period, traditionalist or modern, was inspired by neither hope nor apprehension but by bleaker feelings that the new century would witness the collapse of a whole civilization. The new century had begun with Great Britain involved in the South African War (the Boer War; 18991902), and it seemed to some that the British Empire was as doomed to destruction, both from within and from without, as had been the Roman Empire. In his poems on the South African War, Hardy (whose achievement as a poet in the 20th century rivaled his achievement as a novelist in the 19th) questioned simply and sardonically the human cost of empire building and established a tone and style that many British poets were to use in the course of the century, while Kipling, who had done much to engender pride in empire, began to speak in his verse and short stories of the burden of empire and the tribulations it would bring. No one captured the sense of an imperial civilization in decline more fully or subtly than the expatriate American novelist Henry James. In The Portrait of a Lady (1881) he had briefly anatomized the fatal loss of energy of the English ruling class and in The Princess Casamassima (1886) had described more directly the various instabilities that threatened its paternalistic rule. He did so with regret: the patrician American admired in the English upper class its sense of moral obligation to the community. By the turn of the century, however, he had noted a disturbing change. In The Spoils of Poynton (1897) and What Maisie Knew (1897) members of the upper class no longer seem troubled by the means adopted to achieve their morally dubious ends. Great Britain had become indistinguishable from the other nations of the Old World, in which an ugly rapacity had never been far from the surface. James's dismay at this condition gave to his subtle and compressed late fiction, The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904), much of its gravity and air of disenchantment. James's awareness of crisis affected the very form and style of his writing, for he was no longer assured that the world about which he wrote was either coherent in itself or unambiguously intelligible to its inhabitants. His fiction still presented characters within an identifiable social world, but he found his characters and their world increasingly elusive and enigmatic and his own grasp upon them, as he made clear in The Sacred Fount (1901), the questionable consequence of artistic will. Another expatriate novelist, Joseph Conrad (pseudonym of Jzef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, born in the Ukraine of Polish parents), shared James's sense of crisis but attributed it less to the decline of a specific civilization than to the failings of mankind itself. Man was a solitary, romantic creature of will who at any cost imposed his meaning upon the world because he could not endure a world that did not reflect his central place within it. In Almayer's Folly (1895) and Lord Jim (1900) he had seemed to sympathize with this predicament; but in Heart of Darkness (1902), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911) he detailed such imposition, and the psychological pathologies he increasingly associated with it, without sympathy. He did so as a philosophical novelist whose concern with the mocking limits of human knowledge affected not only the content of his fiction but also its very structure. His writing itself is marked by gaps in the narrative, by narrators who do not fully grasp the significance of the events they are retelling, and by characters who are unable to make themselves understood. James and Conrad used many of the conventions of 19th-century realism but transformed them to express what are considered to be peculiarly 20th-century preoccupations and anxieties. The modernist revolution Anglo-American modernism: Pound, Lewis, Lawrence, and Eliot From 1908 to 1914 there was a remarkably productive period of innovation and experiment as novelists and poets undertook, in anthologies and magazines, to challenge the literary conventions not just of the recent past but of the entire Post-Romantic era. For a brief moment, London, which up to that point had been culturally one of the dullest of the European capitals, boasted an avant-garde to rival those of Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, even if its leading personality, Ezra Pound, and many of its most notable figures were American. The spirit of modernisma radical and utopian spirit stimulated by new ideas in anthropology, psychology, philosophy, political theory, and psychoanalysiswas in the air, expressed rather mutedly by the pastoral and often anti-modern poets of the Georgian movement (191222) and more authentically by the English and American poets of the Imagist movement, to which Pound first drew attention in Ripostes (1912), a volume of his own poetry, and in Des Imagistes (1914), an anthology. Prominent among the Imagists were the English poets T.E. Hulme, F.S. Flint, and Richard Aldington and the Americans Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and Amy Lowell. Reacting against what they considered to be an exhausted poetic tradition, the Imagists wanted to refine the language of poetry in order to make it a vehicle not for pastoral sentiment or imperialistic rhetoric but for the exact description and evocation of mood. To this end they experimented with free or irregular verse and made the image their principal instrument. In contrast to the leisurely Georgians, they worked with brief and economical forms. Meanwhile, painters and sculptors, grouped together by the painter and writer Wyndham Lewis under the banner of vorticism, combined the abstract art of the Cubists with the example of the Italian Futurists who conveyed in their painting, sculpture, and literature the new sensations of movement and scale associated with such modern developments as automobiles and airplanes. With the typographically arresting Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex (two editions, 1914 and 1915) vorticism found its polemical mouthpiece and in its editor, Wyndham Lewis, its most active propagandist and accomplished literary exponent. His experimental play Enemy of the Stars, published in Blast in 1914, and his experimental novel Tarr (1918) can still surprise with their violent exuberance. World War I brought this first period of the modernist revolution to an end and, while not destroying its radical and utopian impulse, made the Anglo-American modernists all too aware of the gulf between their ideals and the chaos of the present. Novelists and poets parodied received forms and styles, in their view made redundant by the immensity and horror of the war, but, as can be seen most clearly in Pound's angry and satirical Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), with a note of anguish and with the wish that writers might again make form and style the bearers of authentic meanings. In his two most innovative novels, The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920), D.H. Lawrence traced the sickness of modern civilizationa civilization in his view only too eager to participate in the mass slaughter of the warto the effects of industrialization upon the human psyche. Yet as he rejected the conventions of the fictional tradition, which he had used to brilliant effect in his deeply-felt autobiographical novel of working-class family life, Sons and Lovers (1913), he drew upon myth and symbol to hold out the hope that individual and collective rebirth could come through human intensity and passion. On the other hand, the poet and playwright T.S. Eliot, another American resident in London, in his most innovative poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) and The Waste Land (1922), traced the sickness of modern civilizationa civilization that, on the evidence of the war, preferred death or death-in-life to lifeto the spiritual emptiness and rootlessness of modern existence. As he rejected the conventions of the poetic tradition, Eliot, like Lawrence, drew upon myth and symbol to hold out the hope of individual and collective rebirth, but he differed sharply from Lawrence by supposing that rebirth could come through self-denial and self-abnegation. Even so, their satirical intensity, no less than the seriousness and scope of their analyses of the failings of a civilization that had voluntarily entered upon the first World War, ensured that Lawrence and Eliot became the leading and most authoritative figures of Anglo-American modernism in England in the whole of the postwar period. During the 1920s, Lawrence (who left England in 1919) and Eliot began to develop viewpoints at odds with the reputations they had established through their early work. In Kangaroo (1923) and The Plumed Serpent (1926) Lawrence revealed the attraction to him of charismatic, masculine leadership, while in For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (1928) Eliot (whose influence as a literary critic now rivaled his influence as a poet) announced that he was a classicist in literature, royalist in politics and anglo-catholic in religion and committed himself to hierarchy and order. Elitist and paternalistic, they did not, however, adopt the extreme positions of Pound (who left England in 1920 and settled permanently in Italy in 1925) or Lewis. Drawing upon the ideas of the left and of the right, Pound and Lewis dismissed democracy as a sham and argued that economic and ideological manipulation was the dominant factor. For some the antidemocratic views of the Anglo-American modernists simply made explicit the reactionary tendencies inherent in the movement from its beginning; for others they came from a tragic loss of balance occasioned by World War I. This issue is a complex one, and judgments upon the literary merit and political status of Pound's ambitious but immensely difficult imagist epic The Cantos (191770) and Lewis' powerful sequence of politico-theological novels The Human Age (The Childermass, 1928; Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta, both 1955) are sharply divided. Additional reading General works A comprehensive reference source with emphasis on British authors and their writings is The Oxford Companion to English Literature; the 4th edition, compiled and ed. by Paul Harvey and rev. by Dorothy Eagle (1967, reprinted with corrections, 1981), and the 5th edition, ed. by Margaret Drabble (1985), have somewhat different approaches but overlapping coverage. F.P. Wilson et al. (eds.), The Oxford History of English Literature (1945 ), provides comprehensive coverage of each period; as do The Cambridge History of English Literature, ed. by A.W. Ward and A.R. Waller, 15 vol. (190727, reissued 1976); and Boris Ford (ed.), The New Pelican Guide to English Literature, rev. and expanded ed., 9 vol. (198288). Another useful source is Peter Conrad, The Everyman History of English Literature (1985). The Editors of the Encyclopdia Britannica The Old English and early Middle English periods Derek Pearsall, Old English and Middle English Poetry (1977), is a good critical survey of both periods. Stanley B. Greenfield and Fred C. Robinson, A Bibliography of Publications on Old English Literature to the End of 1972 (1980), lists more than 6,500 items. Stanley B. Greenfield, Daniel G. Calder, and Michael Lapidge, A New Critical History of Old English Literature (1986), serves as a good introductory survey. G.P. Krapp and E.V.K. Dobbie (eds.), The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 6 vol. (193153), is the standard edition of Old English poetry; and S.A.J. Bradley (trans. and ed.), Anglo-Saxon Poetry (1982, reissued 1991), anthologizes prose translations of Old English poems. R.M. Wilson, Early Middle English Literature, 3rd ed. (1968), critically surveys this period. J.B. Severs and A.E. Hartung (eds.), A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 10501500 (1967 ), contains commentaries on individual works and extensive bibliographies; while J.A.W. Bennett and G.V. Smithers (eds.), Early Middle English Verse and Prose, 2nd ed. (1968, reissued 1982), is an authoritative anthology, with a glossary. Peter S. Baker The later Middle English and early Renaissance periods A.S.G. Edwards (ed.), Middle English Prose: A Critical Guide to Major Authors and Genres (1984), includes bibliographies and surveys of scholarship. A.S.G. Edwards and Derek Pearsall (eds.), Middle English Prose: Essays on Bibliographical Problems (1981), is also of interest. A valuable source is Carl Joseph Stratman, Bibliography of Medieval Drama, 2nd ed., rev. and enlarged, 2 vol. (1972).Analytic studies include Piero Boitani, English Medieval Narrative in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (1982; originally published in Italian, 1980); J.A. Burrow, Ricardian Poetry: Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and the Gawain Poet (1971, reissued 1992); Pamela Gradon, Form and Style in Early English Literature (1971); Richard Firth Green, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (1980); David Lawton (ed.), Middle English Alliterative Poetry and Its Literary Background (1982); Charles Muscatine, Poetry and Crisis in the Age of Chaucer (1972); Robert Potter, The English Morality Play: Origins, History, and Influence of a Dramatic Tradition (1975); V.J. Scattergood, Politics and Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (1971); A.C. Spearing, Medieval Dream-Poetry (1976), and Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (1985); R.M. Wilson, The Lost Literature of Medieval England, 2nd ed., rev. (1970); George Kane, Middle English Literature (1951, reprinted 1979); Dorothy Everett, Essays on Middle English Literature (1955, reprinted 1978); C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (1936, reissued 1977); Dieter Mehl, The Middle English Romances of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (1969; originally published in German, 1967); Arthur K. Moore, The Secular Lyric in Middle English (1951, reissued 1970); Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (1968), and The English Mystery Plays (1972, reissued 1980); Roberto Weiss, Humanism in England During the Fifteenth Century, 3rd ed. (1967); M.J.C. Hodgart, The Ballads, 2nd ed. (1962); and Thorlac Turville-Petre, The Alliterative Revival (1977). Richard Beadle The Renaissance period, 15501660 Elizabethan poetry and prose Christopher Ricks (ed.), English Poetry and Prose, 15401674 (1970, reissued 1993), is a useful collection of essays. Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (1975, reissued 1993); John Buxton, Elizabethan Taste (1963, reissued 1983); and Louis B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (1935, reissued 1980), explore the backgrounds of literature. Specific topics are discussed in Hallett Smith, Elizabethan Poetry: A Study in Conventions, Meaning, and Expression (1952, reissued 1968); Paul J. Alpers (ed.), Elizabethan Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism (1967); Frank Kermode, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne: Renaissance Essays (1971; also published as Renaissance Essays: Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, 1973); Douglas L. Peterson, The English Lyric from Wyatt to Donne, 2nd ed. (1990); J.W. Lever, The Elizabethan Love Sonnet, 2nd ed. (1966, reprinted 1974); and Rosemond Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (1947, reissued 1972), on rhetoric. Anthologies include Norman Ault (compiler and ed.), Elizabethan Lyrics from the Original Texts, 4th ed. (1966); Nigel Alexander (ed.), Elizabethan Narrative Verse (1967); and Edward Lucie-Smith (ed.), The Penguin Book of Elizabethan Verse (1965, reprinted 1982). Elizabethan and early Stuart drama The theatrical background is surveyed in Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 15741642, 3rd ed. (1992); and Kenneth Muir and S. Schoenbaum (eds.), A New Companion to Shakespeare Studies (1971). Christopher Ricks (ed.), English Drama to 1710, rev. ed. (1987, reissued 1993), is a collection of essays. Surveys of the literature include Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama (1954, reissued 1972); M.C. Bradbrook, The Growth and Structure of Elizabethan Comedy, new ed. (1973); and Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions (1952, reissued 1970), on the companies of schoolboy actors. The following are special studies: J.M.R. Margeson, The Origins of English Tragedy (1967); David M. Bevington, From Mankind to Marlowe: Growth of Structure in the Popular Drama of Tudor England (1962); C.L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (1959, reissued 1972); E.M.W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (1944, reissued 1991); A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, 3rd ed. (1992); Brian Gibbons, Jacobean City Comedy, 2nd ed. (1980); Margot Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama Under the Early Stuarts (1980); J.W. Lever, The Tragedy of State (1971, reissued 1987); and Enid Welsford, The Court Masque: A Study in the Relationship Between Poetry & the Revels (1927, reissued 1962). Early Stuart poetry and prose Historical background is explored in Hiram Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance (1950, reprinted 1966); Alan Sinfield, Literature in Protestant England, 15601660 (1983); Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965, reprinted with corrections 1980), and The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (1972, reissued 1991); and Basil Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background: Studies in the Thought of the Age in Relation to Poetry and Religion (1934, reissued 1979). Information on the court is found in D.J. Gordon, The Renaissance Imagination (1975). Special topical studies include Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century, rev. ed. (1962, reissued 1978); Maren-Sofie Rstvig, The Happy Man: Studies in the Metamorphoses of a Classical Ideal, 2nd ed., 2 vol. (1962), on Cavalier poetry; C.A. Patrides and Raymond B. Waddington (eds.), The Age of Milton: Backgrounds to Seventeenth-Century Literature (1980); Brian Vickers (compiler), Essential Articles for the Study of Francis Bacon (1968); Joan Webber, The Eloquent I: Style and Self in Seventeenth-Century Prose (1968); and Stanley E. Fish (ed.), Seventeenth-Century Prose: Modern Essays in Criticism (1971). M.H. Butler The Restoration and the 18th century Helpful introductions include A.R. Humphreys, The Augustan World: Life and Letters in Eighteenth-Century England (1954, reprinted 1978); Maximillian E. Novak, Eighteenth-Century English Literature (1983); Pat Rogers, The Augustan Vision (1974); Pat Rogers (ed.), The Eighteenth Century (1978); Leslie Stephen, English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century (1904, reissued 1965); and Stephen Copley (ed.), Literature and the Social Order in Eighteenth-Century England (1984). Useful studies that focus on more restricted topics but cover the whole of the period include Howard Erskine-Hill, The Augustan Idea in English Literature (1983); Paul Fussell, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism: Ethics and Imagery from Swift to Burke (1965); Jean H. Hagstrum, Sex and Sensibility: Ideal and Erotic Love from Milton to Mozart (1980); Ian Jack, Augustan Satire: Intention and Idiom in English Poetry, 16601750 (1942, reissued 1978); James William Johnson, The Formation of English Neo-Classical Thought (1967, reprinted 1978); Martin Price, To the Palace of Wisdom: Studies in Order and Energy from Dryden to Blake (1964, reissued 1970); Eric Rothstein, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Poetry, 16601780 (1981); James Sutherland, A Preface to Eighteenth Century Poetry (1948, reprinted 1975); and Rachel Trickett, The Honest Muse: A Study in Augustan Verse (1967).Among important thematic or general studies with a narrower chronological range are John Barrell, English Literature in History, 173080 (1983); Walter Jackson Bate, From Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (1946, reissued 1961); Donald Davie, A Gathered Church: The Literature of the English Dissenting Interest, 17001930 (1978); Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (1984); Earl Miner, The Restoration Mode from Milton to Dryden (1974); Samuel Holt Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (1935, reissued 1960); Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse: Newton's Opticks and the Eighteenth Century Poets (1946, reprinted 1979), and Science and Imagination (1956, reissued 1976); Ronald Paulson, Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (1967); John Preston, The Created Self: The Reader's Role in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (1970); John J. Richetti, Popular Fiction Before Richardson: Narrative Patterns, 17001739 (1969, reissued 1992); Pat Rogers, Hacks and Dunces: Pope, Swift, and Grub Street (1980); Patricia Meyer Spacks, Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (1976), and The Poetry of Vision: Five Eighteenth-Century Poets (1967); Geoffrey Tillotson, Augustan Poetic Diction (1964); Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (1957, reissued 1987); Basil Willey, The Eighteenth Century Background: Studies on the Idea of Nature in the Thought of the Period (1940, reissued 1986); and John Harold Wilson, The Court Wits of the Restoration (1948, reissued 1967).Interesting explorations of individual major writers include Maximillian E. Novak, Defoe and the Nature of Man (1963); G.A. Starr, Defoe & Spiritual Autobiography (1965, reissued 1971); C.J. Rawson, Henry Fielding and the Augustan Ideal Under Stress (1972, reprinted 1991); W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson (1977); Reuben A. Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (1959, reissued 1986); Maynard Mack, The Garden and the City: Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetry of Pope, 17311743 (1969); Aubrey L. Williams, Pope's Dunciad: A Study of Its Meaning (1955, reprinted 1968); Margaret Anne Doody, A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson (1974); David M. Vieth, Attribution in Restoration Poetry: A Study of Rochester's Poems of 1680 (1963); and Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age, 3 vol. (196283).Theatrical history is chronicled in Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (1976, reissued 1990); Peter Holland, The Ornament of Action: Text and Performance in Restoration Comedy (1979); Richard Bevis, The Laughing Tradition: Stage Comedy in Garrick's Day (1980); and Arthur Sherbo, English Sentimental Drama (1957). Among collections and anthologies are Donald Davie (ed.), Augustan Lyric (1974); H.T. Dickinson (ed.), Politics and Literature in the Eighteenth Century (1974); Scott Elledge (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Critical Essays, 2 vol. (1961); H.J.C. Grierson and G. Bullough (compilers), The Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse (1934, reprinted 1981); David W. Lindsay (ed.), English Poetry, 17001780: Contemporaries of Swift and Johnson (1974); George Def. Lord et al. (eds.), Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 16601714, 7 vol. (196375); Harold Love (ed.), The Penguin Book of Restoration Verse (1968, reissued 1979); George H. Nettleton and Arthur E. Case (eds.), British Dramatists from Dryden to Sheridan (1939, reprinted 1975); David Nichol Smith (ed.), Characters from the Histories & Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century (1918, reissued 1967), and Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (1963); David Nichol Smith (compiler), The Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse (1926, reprinted 1971); Roger Lonsdale (compiler and ed.), The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse (1984, reissued 1994); Charles Peake (compiler), Poetry of the Landscape and the Night: Two Eighteenth-Century Traditions (1967); Francis Venables (ed.), The Early Augustans (1972); and Timothy Webb (ed.), English Romantic Hellenism, 17001824 (1982). Michael Cordner The Romantic period The general literary history is presented in R.A. Foakes, The Romantic Assertion: A Study in the Language of Nineteenth Century Poetry (1958, reissued 1971); John O. Hayden (ed.), Romantic Bards and British Reviewers: A Selected Edition of the Contemporary Reviews of the Works of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, and Shelley (1971); and Theodore Redpath (compiler), The Young Romantics and Critical Opinion, 18071824: Poetry of Byron, Shelley, and Keats as Seen by Their Contemporary Critics (1973). The social and intellectual background of the period is the subject of numerous works: Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 17801950 (1958, reissued 1987), chapters 13; M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953, reissued 1971), and Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (1971); Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975, reissued 1990), and Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background, 17601830 (1981); H.W. Piper, The Active Universe: Pantheism and the Concept of Imagination in the English Romantic Poets (1962); Carl Woodring, Politics in English Romantic Poetry (1970); H.G. Schenk, The Mind of the European Romantics: An Essay in Cultural History (1966, reissued 1979); Stephen Prickett (ed.), The Romantics (1981); Stephen Prickett, Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church (1976); and Lilian R. Furst, Romanticism in Perspective: A Comparative Study of Aspects of the Romantic Movements in England, France, and Germany, 2nd ed. (1979). Analytic studies of narrower topics include J.R. Watson, English Poetry of the Romantic Period, 17891830, 2nd ed. (1992), and Picturesque Landscape and English Romantic Poetry (1970); Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (1976, reissued 1986); Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation (1981), and Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (1969); Elizabeth Sewell, The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History (1960, reissued 1971); C.M. Bowra, The Romantic Imagination (1949, reissued 1984); Michael G. Cooke, The Romantic Will (1976); Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry, rev. and enlarged ed. (1971), and Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens (1976); Paul A. Cantor, Creature and Creator: Myth-Making and English Romanticism (1984); G. Wilson Knight, The Starlit Dome: Studies in the Poetry of Vision (1941, reissued 1971); David Morse, Perspectives on Romanticism: A Transformational Analysis (1981), and Romanticism: A Structural Analysis (1982); Albert S. Grard, English Romantic Poetry: Ethos, Structure, and Symbol in Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats (1968); and David Gwilym James, The Romantic Comedy (1948, reprinted 1980). Comprehensive collections are represented by H.S. Milford (compiler), The Oxford Book of Regency Verse, 17981837 (1928, reissued as The Oxford Book of English Verse of the Romantic Period, 17981830, 1974); Harold Bloom (ed.), English Romantic Poetry, expanded ed., 2 vol. (1963); and Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling (eds.), Romantic Poetry and Prose (1973). John Bernard Beer The Post-Romantic and Victorian eras Comprehensive studies of the period, introducing the literary background, include Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 18301870 (1957, reissued 1985); Jerome Hamilton Buckley, The Victorian Temper: A Study in Literary Culture (1951, reissued 1981); Basil Willey, Nineteenth Century Studies: Coleridge to Matthew Arnold (1949, reissued 1980); Arthur Pollard (ed.), The Victorians, rev. ed. (1987, reissued 1993); and G.K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature (1913, reissued 1966). Studies of special subjects are presented in George Levine and William Madden (eds.), The Art of Victorian Prose (1968), on nonfiction; Michael Wheeler, English Fiction of the Victorian Period: 18301890, 2nd ed. (1994); Kathleen Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (1954, reprinted 1983); Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (1957, reprinted 1985), on Victorian poetry; George Rowell, The Victorian Theatre, 17921914, 2nd ed. (1978); and Roger B. Henkle, Comedy and Culture, 18201900 (1980). Nicholas Shrimpton Modern English literature: the 20th century From 1900 to 1945 Malcolm Bradbury, The Social Context of Modern English Literature (1971), discusses the effects of modernization on the form and content of 20th-century English literature and on the role of the modern writer. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (eds.), Modernism: 18901930 (1976, reprinted 1991), collects essays focusing on the international context of Anglo-American modernism. Michael H. Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine, 19081922 (1984), is a meticulously detailed history of the modernist movement in England. Christopher Gillie, Movements in English Literature, 19001940 (1975), is a straightforward introduction to the fiction, poetry, and drama of the period. The historical background also is explored in Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s (1976, reissued 1992); and Robert Hewison, Under Siege: Literary Life in London, 193945, rev. ed. (1988). David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry, 2 vol. (197687), is a broad study stressing the interplay between British and American poetry. John Press, A Map of Modern English Verse (1969), analyzes traditional and modernist poetry from the 1900s to the 1950s. Literature after 1945 Historical and cultural context is provided in Robert Hewison, In Anger: Culture in the Cold War, 194560, rev. ed. (1988); and Bryan Appleyard, The Pleasures of Peace: Art and Imagination in Post-War Britain (1989). Informative general surveys of fiction, poetry, and drama include the following: Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel (1993); D.J. Taylor, After the War: The Novel and English Society Since 1945 (1993); Allan Massie, The Novel Today: A Critical Guide to the British Novel, 19701989 (1990); Neil Corcoran, English Poetry Since 1940 (1993); Anthony Thwaite, Poetry Today: A Critical Guide to British Poetry, 19601992 (1996); Martin Booth, British Poetry, 1964 to 1984 (1985); Susan Rusinko, British Drama, 1950 to the Present (1989); John Russell Taylor, Anger and After: A Guide to the New British Drama, 2nd ed. rev. (1969, reissued 1977; also published as The Angry Theatre: New British Drama, 1969); and Michelene Wandor, Drama Today: A Critical Guide to British Drama, 19701990 (1993). Peter Kemp Hugh Alistair Davies The later Middle English and early Renaissance periods One of the most important factors in the nature and development of English literature between about 1350 and 1550 was the peculiar linguistic situation in England at the beginning of the period. Among the small minority of the population that could be regarded as literate, bilingualism and even trilingualism were common. Insofar as it was considered a serious literary medium at all, English was obliged to compete on uneven terms with Latin and with the Anglo-Norman dialect of French widely used in England at the time. Moreover, extreme dialectal diversity within English itself made it difficult for vernacular writings, irrespective of their literary pretensions, to circulate very far outside their immediate areas of composition, a disadvantage not suffered by writings in Anglo-Norman and Latin. Literary culture managed to survive and in fact to flourish in the face of such potentially crushing factors as the catastrophic mortality of the Black Death (134751), chronic external and internal military conflicts in the form of the Hundred Years' War and the Wars of the Roses, and serious social, political, and religious unrest, as evinced in the Peasants' Revolt (1381) and the rise of Lollardism (centred on the religious teachings of John Wycliffe). All the more remarkable then was the literary and linguistic revolution that took place in England between about 1350 and 1400 and that was slowly and soberly consolidated over the subsequent 150 years. Later Middle English poetry The revival of alliterative poetry The most puzzling episode in the development of later Middle English literature was the apparently sudden reappearance of unrhymed alliterative poetry in the mid-14th century. Debate continues as to whether the group of long, serious, and sometimes learned poems written between about 1350 and the first decade of the 15th century should be regarded as an alliterative revival or rather as the late flowering of a largely lost native tradition stretching back to the Old English period. The earliest examples of the phenomenon, William of Palerne and Winner and Waster, are both datable to the 1350s, but neither poem exhibits to the full all the characteristics of the slightly later poems central to the movement. William of Palerne, condescendingly commissioned by a nobleman for the benefit of them that know no French, is a homely paraphrase of a courtly continental romance, the only poem in the group to take love as its central theme. The poet's technical competence in handling the difficult syntax and diction of the alliterative style is not, however, to be compared with that of Winner and Waster's author, who exhibits full mastery of the form, particularly in brilliant descriptions of setting and spectacle. This poem's topical concern with social satire links it primarily with another, less formal body of alliterative verse, of which William Langland's Piers Plowman was the principal representative and exemplar. Indeed, Winner and Waster, with its sense of social commitment and occasional apocalyptic gesture, may well have served as a source of inspiration for Langland himself. The expression alliterative revival should not be taken to imply a return to the principles of classical Old English versification. The authors of the later 14th-century alliterative poems either inherited or developed their own conventions, which resemble those of the Old English tradition in only the most general way. The syntax and particularly the diction of later Middle English alliterative verse were also distinctive, and the search for alliterating phrases and constructions led to the extensive use of archaic, technical, and dialectal words. Hunts, feasts, battles, storms, and landscapes were described with a brilliant concretion of detail rarely paralleled since, while the abler poets also contrived subtle modulations of the staple verse-paragraph to accommodate dialogue, discourse, and argument. Among the poems central to the movement were three pieces dealing with the life and legends of Alexander, the massive Destruction of Troy, and the Siege of Jerusalem. The fact that all of these derived from various Latin sources suggests that the anonymous poets were likely to have been clerics with a strong, if bookish, historical sense of their romance matters. The matter of Britain was represented by an outstanding composition, the alliterative Morte Arthure, an epic portrayal of King Arthur's conquests in Europe and his eventual fall, combining a strong narrative thrust with considerable density and subtlety of diction. A gathering sense of inevitable transitoriness gradually tempers the virile realization of heroic idealism, and it is not surprising to find