num_pages: 784
description: The book surveys the lines of development that lead from the Anglo-Saxon poet, or scop, singing his work at his chieftain's hearth, to the modern poetry of Geoffrey Hill and Seamus Heaney. Each chapter provides an overview of styles and themes along with accounts of the major figures. The author examines Chaucer and his medieval contemporaries, Shakespeare and the golden age of drama, the progress of poetry from Donne through Milton to Dryden, the leading figures of nineteenth-century fiction: Dickens, Thackeray, Georges Eliot and the Brontës... A survey of 20th-century writers such as Yeats, Lawrence, Joyce and T.S. Eliot completes the book.
language: English
title: The Penguin Short History of English Literature
titlecomplete: The Penguin Short History of English Literature
genres: Nonfiction
ratings_count: 9
publisher: Penguin Books/Penguin Literary Criticism