English literature

The term **English literature** means literature written in the English language. English is a language known by many millions of people. They can read literary works from any country in an English translation.

English literature began in Old English with the epic poem Beowulf, which dates from sometime between the 8th to the 11th centuries. It is not written in language people can understand today, but there are several good translations into modern English. It is the most famous work in Old English, despite being set in Scandinavia. The poem is written with no rhymes but with alliteration. The next important landmark is the works of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400), especially _The Canterbury Tales_. That is in Middle English, from 1066 to the middle/late 1400s. Chaucer introduced into English poetry rhyme royal, which is a seven-line stanza rhymed ababbcc.

Modern English literature began in the 16th century. Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey wrote the first English sonnets. Howard also invented blank verse. Edmund Spenser wrote _The Faerie Queene_, a long epic poem, while Philip Sidney wrote a sequence of sonnets Astrophel _and Stella_.
The next stage is Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare and John Milton, sometimes described as Early Modern English (1470 to 1650).
Shakespeare is the author of the most famous sentence written in English: _To be, or not to be, that is the question_. It is the first line of Prince Hamlet's monologue from drama _The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark_ that was published in 1603.
The King James Version of the Bible was published in 1611. John Bunyan wrote _The Pilgrim's Progress_ which is one of the most popular books ever published.
In the 18th century, the first modern novels were written by Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne and Horace Walpole.
William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats,Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Ted Hughes are all important English writers in modern English.

T.S. Eliot was perhaps the most important poet in 20th century who wrote in English. His best known work is the poem _The Waste Land_ that was published in 1922. Another book by him was _The Four Quartets_. The poet himself regarded it as his best work.

Not all English literature was written by writers born in England. English literature includes all the varieties and dialects of English spoken around the world. Joseph Conrad was Polish, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, Hilaire Belloc was French, Emma Lazarus was Jewish, Salman Rushdie is Indian, V. S. Naipaul is Trinidadian, and Vladimir Nabokov was Russian. The greatest Portuguese poet of the 20th century, Fernando Pessoa wrote some poems in English, too.

## Outline

- Old English
    - Beowulf
    - Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
    - The Battle of Maldon
    - The Wanderer
    - The Seafarer
- Middle English
    - Ormulum
    - Layamon's Brut
    - Pearl (poem)
    - Patience (poem)
    - Cleanness
    - Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
    - Piers Plowman
    - Kildare Poems
    - The Canterbury Tales
- English Renaissance (1500–1660)
    - Elizabethan period (1558–1603)
        - Poetry
            - Edmund Spenser: The Faerie Queene
            - Sir Philip Sidney: Astrophel and Stella, The Defence of Poetry, and The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia.
            - John Donne
        - Drama
            - Thomas Kyd: _The Spanish Tragedy_ (1592)
            - Sackville and Norton: _Gorboduc_ (1561)
            - William Shakespeare
            - Christopher Marlowe
            - Ben Jonson
            - Thomas Dekker
            - John Fletcher
            - Francis Beaumont
    - Jacobean period (1603–1625)
        - Drama
            - Ben Jonson (1572–1637): _Volpone_ (1605 or 1606) and _Bartholomew Fair_ (1614).
            - Beaumont and Fletcher: _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_.
            - John Webster (c. 1580 – c. 1632): The White Devil (1612) and The Duchess of Malfi (1613).
            - Thomas Middleton and William Rowley: The Changeling
        - Poetry
            - George Chapman (c. 1559 – c. 1634): Translated Homer's Iliad and Odyssey into English verse.
            - Shakespeare's sonnets
            - Metaphysical poets: John Donne (1572–1631), George Herbert (1593–1633), Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, and Richard Crashaw.
        - Prose
            - The most important prose work of the early 17th century was the King James Bible.
    - Late Renaissance (1625–1660)
        - Poetry
        - Second generation of Metaphysical poets: Richard Crashaw (1613–1649), Andrew Marvell (1621–1678), Thomas Traherne (1636 or 1637–1674) and Henry Vaughan (1622–1695).
        - The Cavalier poets: Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace, Thomas Carew and Sir John Suckling.
        - John Milton (1608–1674): L'Allegro (1631), Il Penseroso (1634), the masque Comus (1638) and Lycidas (1638).
- Restoration Age (1660–1700)
    - Poetry
        - John Milton: _Paradise Lost_ (1667).
        - John Dryden (1631–1700): _MacFlecknoe_ (1682).
        - Alexander Pope (1688–1744).
    - Prose
        - John Bunyan: _The Pilgrim's Progress_.
        - Aphra Behn: _Oroonoko_ (1688).
    - Drama
        - John Dryden, William Wycherley, and George Etherege
        - William Congreve: The Way of the World (1700)
        - John Vanbrugh's The Relapse (1696)
        - The Provoked Wife (1697)
- 18th century
    - Augustan literature (1700–1745)
        - Poetry
            - James Thomson: The Seasons (1728–30)
            - Edward Young (1681–1765): Night Thoughts (1742)
            - Alexander Pope (1688–1744): Rape of the Lock (1712–17) and The Dunciad (1728–43)
        - Drama
            - George Lillo and Richard Steele
            - Colley Cibber and John Rich
            - John Gay: The Beggar's Opera
        - Prose
            - Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe (1719).
            - Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's Travels
            - Henry Fielding (1707–1754)
            - Samuel Richardson (1689–1761): Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740)
            - Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews (1742) and Shamela (1741).
            - Tobias Smollett: Roderick Random (1748) and Peregrine Pickle (1751).
    - Age of Sensibility (1745–1798)
        - Samuel Johnson (1709–1784): _A Dictionary of the English Language_
        - Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774): _The Vicar of Wakefield_ (1766), _The Deserted Village_ (1770), _The Good-Natur'd Man_ (1768) and _She Stoops to Conquer_ (1773)
        - Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816): The Rivals (1775) and The School for Scandal
        - Laurence Sterne (1713–1768): _Tristram Shandy_
        - Frances Burney (1752–1840): _Evelina_.
        - Graveyard poets:
            - Thomas Gray (1716–1771): _Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard_ (1751)
            - Edward Young (1683–1765), The Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (1742–45)
        - James Thomson (1700–1748)
        - James Macpherson (1736–1796)
        - Edmund Burke: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)
        - Gothic fiction:
            - Horace Walpole: _The Castle of Otranto_ (1764)
            - Ann Radcliffe: _The Mysteries of Udolpho_ (1795) is frequently cited as the archetypal Gothic novel.
            - Mary Shelley (1797–1851): _Frankenstein_ (1818)
- Romanticism (1798–1837)
    - Poetry
        - First generation:
            - William Blake: _Songs of Innocence_ (1789) and _Songs of Experience_ (1794).
            - Lake Poets:
                - William Wordsworth: _Lyrical Ballads_ (1798)
                - Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
                - Robert Southey (1774–1843)
                - Thomas de Quincey (1785–1859): _Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_ (1821)
            - Walter Scott (1771–1832).
        - Second generation:
            - Lord Byron (1788–1824)
            - Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822): Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, Adonais, Queen Mab
            - Felicia Hemans (1793–1835)
            - John Keats (1795–1821): "Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode on a Grecian Urn", and "To Autumn".
    - Novel
        - Sir Walter Scott: Waverley
        - Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Emma (1815).
- Victorian literature (1837–1901)
    - Novel
        - Benjamin Disraeli: Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845)
        - Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke (1849)
        - Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
        - William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863): Vanity Fair (1847).
        - The Brontë sisters, Emily, Charlotte and Anne:
            - Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë
            - Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
            - The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë
        - Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–1865)
        - Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)
        - George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann Evans: Middlemarch (1871–72)
        - George Meredith (1828–1909): The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), and The Egoist (1879)
        - Thomas Hardy (1840–1928),: The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), and Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891).
        - George Gissing (1857–1903): New Grub Street (1891).
        - John Ruskin: The King of the Golden River (1841)
        - George MacDonald (1824–1905): The Princess and the Goblin and Phantastes (1858)
        - William Morris (1834–1896)]
        - Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone (1868).
        - Robert Louis Stevenson: Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and Kidnapped (1886).
        - Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936): Plain Tales from the Hills, The Phantom 'Rickshaw and Other Tales, Soldiers Three, and Barrack-Room Ballads.
        - H. G. Wells's (1866–1946): The Time Machine (1895), The War of the Worlds (1898) and Kipps (1905).
    - Genre fiction
        - Sheridan Le Fanu: Uncle Silas (1865), and Carmilla (1872)
        - Bram Stoker: Dracula (1897)
        - Arthur Conan Doyle: Sherlock Holmes
        - H. Rider Haggard: King Solomon's Mines, in 1885. Contemporary European politics and diplomatic maneuverings informed *** Anthony Hope: The Prisoner of Zenda (1894)
    - Children's literature
        - Lewis Carroll: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass
        - Robert Louis Stevenson: Treasure Island (1883).
        - Rudyard Kipling: The Jungle Book, The Second Jungle Book, Kim and Captains Courageous.
        - Beatrix Potter: The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902)
    - Poetry
        - Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892)
        - Robert Browning (1812–1889)
        - Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–61)
        - Matthew Arnold (1822–1888).
        - Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), who founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais.
        - Arthur Clough (1819–1861)
        - George Meredith (1828–1909)
        - Yellow Book poets: Algernon Charles Swinburne, Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons
        - Rhymers' Club group: Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson and Irishman William Butler Yeats
        - A.E. Housman: 'A Shropshire Lad_ (1896)
        - W.S. Gilbert (1836–1911) and Sir Arthur Sullivan: H.M.S. Pinafore, and The Pirates of Penzance.
        - Gerard Manley Hopkins: (1844–1889) _Poems_
    - Drama
        - James Planché
        - Thomas William Robertson
        - Gilbert and Sullivan: _H.M.S. Pinafore_ (1878)
        - Alfred Cellier and B.C. Stephenson 'Dorothy_ (1886)
        - George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
        - Oscar Wilde: _The Importance of Being Earnest_ (1895)
        - Harold Pinter

## Bibliography

- Hippolyte Adolphe Taine, _Introduction to the History of English Literature_ (1863).

## Other websites

- A Website of the Romantic Movement in English Literature
- Luminarium: Anthology of Middle English Literature (1350-1485)
- Luminarium: 16th Century Renaissance English Literature (1485-1603)
- Luminarium: Seventeenth Century English Literature (1603-1660)
- BritishLit.com
- Norton Anthology of English Literature
- A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism and Philology  Ed. José Ángel García Landa, (University of Zaragoza, Spain)
- Groves of Academe A literary theory and criticism discussion board