A Brief History of English Literature

by Peck, John; Coyle, Martin

• ISBN13: 9780333791776
• ISBN10: 0333791770
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-05-17
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

A Brief History of English Literature provides a lively introductory guide to English literature from Beowulf to the present day. The authors write in their characteristically lucid style which enables the reader to engage fully with the narrative and easily understand the texts in relation to the social, political and cultural contexts in which they were written. A masterpiece of clarity and compression, this book is a must have for anyone interested in the history of literature from the British Isles.

Author Biography

John Peck is Senior Lecturer in English at Cardiff University.

Martin Coyle is Senior Lecturer in English at Cardiff University.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Acknowledgements	xiii
Old English Literature	1	(13)
Beowulf	1	(6)
The Seafarer' and The Wanderer'	7	(3)
Battle Poems and The Dream of the Rood'	10	(2)
Old English Language	12	(2)
Middle English Literature	14	(20)
From the Norman Conquest to Chaucer	14	(3)
Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight	17	(5)
Geoffrey Chaucer, William Dunbar, Robert Henryson	22	(6)
William Langland, Medieval Drama, Thomas Malory	28	(6)
Sixteenth-Century Poetry and Prose	34	(19)
Sir Thomas Wyatt	34	(3)
Sixteenth-Century Prose and the Reformation	37	(5)
The Sonnet: Sir Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare	42	(6)
Edmund Spenser	48	(5)
Shakespeare	53	(20)
Shakespeare in Context	53	(2)
Shakespeare's Comedies and Histories	55	(7)
Shakespeare's Tragedies	62	(6)
Shakespeare's Late Plays	68	(5)
Renaissance and Restoration Drama	73	(18)
Renaissance Drama and Christopher Marlowe	73	(6)
Elizabethan and Jacobean Revenge Tragedy	79	(4)
Ben Jonson and the Masque	83	(4)
Restoration Drama	87	(4)
Seventeenth-Century Poetry and Prose	91	(23)
John Donne	91	(5)
From Ben Jonson to John Bunyan and Andrew Marvell	96	(10)
John Milton	106	(5)
John Dryden	111	(3)
The Eighteenth Century	114	(19)
Alexander Pope	114	(7)
The Augustan Age	121	(5)
Edward Gibbon, Samuel Johnson	126	(3)
Sensibility	129	(4)
The Novel: The First Hundred Years	133	(18)
Daniel Defoe	133	(4)
Aphra Behn, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Tobias Smollett	137	(6)
From Eliza Haywood to Mary Shelley	143	(4)
Walter Scott and Jane Austen	147	(4)
The Romantic Period	151	(18)
The Age of Revolution	151	(3)
William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge	154	(7)
Lord Byron, Perry Bysshe Shelley, John Keats	161	(4)
Radical Voices	165	(4)
Victorian Literature, 1837-1857	169	(19)
Charles Dickens	169	(4)
Charlotte and Emily Bronte	173	(6)
William Makepeace Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell	179	(4)
Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning	183	(5)
Victorian Literature, 1857-1876	188	(18)
Victorian Thinkers	188	(3)
George Eliot	191	(6)
Wilkie Collins and the Sensation Novel	197	(4)
Anthony Trollope, Christina Rossetti	201	(5)
Victorian Literature, 1876-1901	206	(18)
Thomas Hardy	206	(6)
George Gissing, George Moore, Samuel Butler, Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson	212	(5)
Rudyard Kipling	217	(2)
George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Late Victorian Poetry	219	(5)
The Twentieth Century: The Early Years	224	(22)
Joseph Conrad	224	(6)
Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield	230	(4)
D. H. Lawrence	234	(4)
Georgian Poetry, War Poetry, W. B. Yeats	238	(8)
The Twentieth Century: Between the Wars	246	(21)
T. S. Eliot	246	(5)
James Joyce	251	(6)
Virginia Woolf	257	(4)
The 1930s	261	(6)
The Twentieth Century: The Second World War to the End of the Millennium	267	(20)
Wartime and Post-War Britain	267	(4)
Drama	271	(6)
Novels	277	(5)
Poetry	282	(5)
Postscript	287	(6)
The Twenty-First Century	287	(6)
Periods of English Literature and Language	293	(2)
Chronology	295	(38)
Further reading	333	(2)
Index	335