English Literature from the 19th Century Through Today

by Luebering, J. e.

• ISBN13: 9781615301171
• ISBN10: 1615301178
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-08-15
• Publisher: Britannica Educational Pub

Summary

As the British empire expanded ever outward, English writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries turned their gaze inward to matters of ethical and moral import. The social and psychological realities of the human condition were increasingly explored in the fiction and verse of writers such as Charles Dickens, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. Although the body of English literature became less cohesive as the empire declined, modern writers continue to examine British identity by reformulating and reinventing literary movements and devices introduced by their predecessors. Readers of this volume are invited to observe the progression of English literature and enjoy the stories behind some of the most seminal works in the world.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 8
The Post-Romantic and Victorian Eras	p. 17
Early Victorian Literature: The Age of the Novel	p. 19
Charles Dickens	p. 19
Thackeray, Gaskell and Others	p. 40
The Brontës	p. 41
Early Victorian Verse	p. 42
Alfred, Lord Tennyson	p. 43
Idyll	p. 50
Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning	p. 50
Dramatic Monologue	p. 54
Clough and Arnold	p. 54
Early Victorian Nonfiction Prose	p. 62
Thomas Carlyle	p. 63
John Ruskin	p. 69
Late Victorian Literature	p. 80
The Novel	p. 81
Anthony Trollope	p. 97
Verse	p. 111
Gerard Manley Hopkins	p. 122
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood	p. 129
The Victorian Theatre	p. 132
Oscar Wilde	p. 133
Arthur Wing Pinero	p. 138
Victorian Literary Comedy	p. 140
The 20th Century: From 1900 to 1945	p. 141
Edwardian Novelists	p. 141
G.K. Chesterton	p. 143
Writing for the New Century	p. 146
Joseph Conrad	p. 146
Edwardian Playwrights	p. 152
George Bernard Shaw	p. 152
Harley Granville-Barker	p. 162
Anglo-American Modernism: Pound, Lewis, Lawrence, and Eliot	p. 164
Celtic Modernism: Yeats, Joyce, Jones, and MacDiarmid	p. 168
Stream of Consciousness	p. 171
The Literature of World War I and the Interwar Period	p. 172
Brooke and Sassoon	p. 173
Aldous Huxley	p. 174
The Old and New Guard	p. 176
Noël Coward	p. 177
Virginia Woolf	p. 183
Bloomsbury Group	p. 184
Women and Modernism	p. 203
The 1930s	p. 205
W.H. Auden	p. 207
Elizabeth Bowen	p. 212
George Orwell	p. 213
The Literature of World War II (1939-45)	p. 220
T.S. Eliot	p. 221
Evelyn Waugh	p. 230
Literature After 1945	p. 233
Fiction	p. 234
Influential Fiction Writers of the Period	p. 242
Kingsley Amis	p. 243
Angry Young Men	p. 244
Martin Amis	p. 246
Julian Barnes	p. 247
A.S. Byatt	p. 248
William Golding	p. 249
Doris Lessing	p. 250
Ian McEwan	p. 252
Muriel Spark	p. 253
Poetry and Notable Poets	p. 255
John Betjeman	p. 259
Seamus Heaney	p. 260
Ted Hughes	p. 262
Philip Larkin	p. 264
Drama	p. 265
Theatre of the Absurd	p. 269
Harold Pinter	p. 270
Terence Rattigan	p. 273
Tom Stoppard	p. 274
Well-Made Play	p. 276
The 21st Century	p. 277
Zadie Smith	p. 278
Epilogue	p. 280
Glossary	p. 282
Bibliography	p. 284
Index	p. 287
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