Glossary

ACT: A major division in a play. Often, individual acts are divided into smaller units ("scenes") that all take place in a specific location.

Allegory, a figurative narrative or description, conveying a veiled moral meaning, an extended metaphor. As C.S. Lewis argues in The Allegory of Love, the medieval mind tended to think naturally in allegorical terms. Allegorical works of great vitality continued to be produces ranging from Spenser’s Fairee Queene and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, both of which use personifications of abstract qualities, to Dryden’s political allegory Absalom and Achitophel, which conceals real identities.

Alliterative revival, a collective term for a group of alliterative poems written in the second half of the fourteenth century, in which alliteration, which had been the formal basis Of Old English Poetry, was again used in the poetry of the first importance (such as Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) as a serious alternative to the continental form, syllabic rhyming verse. Most of these poems are also linked by a serious interest in contemporary politics and ethics.

Alliterative verse, the native Germanic tradition of English poetry and the standard form in Old English up to the 11^th century, also recurring in Middle English. The Old English line was normally unrhymed and made up of two distinct half-lines with a pause (caesura) in the middle. Each half-line contained two stressed syllables. The alliteration was always on the first stress of the second half-line, which alliterated with either or both of the stressed syllables of the first half-line; e.g.:

Heald pu nu, hruse, nu haeleth ne mostan

Hold them now, Earth, now hand of man cannot

Or: Sceal se hearda helm hyrsted golde Also the hard helmet hammered with gold

(Beowulf, The Last Survivor’s Speech)

ALLUSION: A casual reference in literature to a person, place, event, or another passage of literature, often without explicit identification. Allusions can originate in mythology, biblical references, historical events, legends, geography, or earlier literary works. Authors often use allusion to establish a tone, create an implied association, contrast two objects or people, make an unusual juxtaposition of references, or bring the reader into a world of experience outside the limitations of the story itself. Authors assume that the readers will recognize the original sources and relate their meaning to the new context. For instance, if a teacher were to refer to his class as a horde of Mongols, the students will have no idea if they are being praised or vilified unless they know what the Mongol horde was and what activities it participated in historically. This historical allusion assumes a certain level of education or awareness in the audience, so it should normally be taken as a compliment rather than an insult or an attempt at obscurity.

ALTER EGO: A literary character or narrator who is a thinly disguised representation of the author, poet, or playwright creating a work. Some scholars suggest that J. Alfred Prufrock is an alter ego for T. S. Eliot in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," or that the wizard Prospero giving up his magic in A Midsummer Night's Dream is an alter ego of Shakespeare saying farewell to the magic of the stage.

Augustan Age, a term derived from the period of literary eminence under the Roman emperor Augustus(27 BC-AD 14), during which Virgil, Horace and Ovid flourished. In English literature it refers to the early and mid-18^th century. Augustan writers (Pope, Swift, Addison, Steele) greatly admired their Roman counterparts, imitated their work, and frequently drew parallels between the two ages. See also NEO-Classicism.

BALLAD: In common parlance, song hits, folk music, and folktales or any song that tells a story are loosely called ballads. In more exact literary terminology, a ballad is a narrative poem consisting of quatrains of iambic tetrameter alternating with iambic trimeter. Common traits of the ballad are that (a) the beginning is often abrupt, (b) the story is told through dialogue and action (c) the language is simple or "folksy," (d) the theme is often tragic--though comic ballads do exist, and (e) the ballad contains a refrain repeated several times. One of the most important anthologies of ballads is F. J. Child's The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Famous medieval and Renaissance examples include "Chevy Chase," "The Elfin Knights," "Lord Randal," and "The Demon Lover." A number of Robin Hood ballads also exist. More recent ballads from the 18th century and the Scottish borderlands include "Sir Patrick Spens," "Tam Lin," and "Thomas the Rhymer."

BALLAD OPERA: An eighteenth-century comic drama featuring lyrics set to existing popular tunes. The term originated to describe John Gay's The Beggar's Opera of 1728.

BARD (Welsh Bardd, Irish Bard): (1) An ancient Celtic poet, singer and harpist who recited heroic poems by memory. These bards were the oral historians, political critics, eulogizers, and entertainers of their ancient societies. They were responsible for celebrating national events such as heroic actions and victories. (2) The word in modern usage has become a synonym for any poet. Shakespeare in particular is often referred to as "the Bard" or "the Bard of Avon" in spite of the fact he wrote in the Renaissance, long after the heyday of Celtic bards.

Baroque, a term imported into literary study from the history of art and applied by analogy. In literary context, the word Baroque is loosely used to describe highly ornamented verse or prose, abounding in extravagant conceits.

BEAST FABLE: A short, simple narrative with speaking animals as characters designed to teach a moral or social truth. Examples include the fables of Aesop and Marie de France, Kipling's Jungle Books and Just So Stories, George Orwell's Animal Farm, Richard Adams' Watership Down, and Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, and Chaucer's "Nun's Priest's Tale."

BIOGRAPHY (Greek, bios+graphe "life writing"): A non-fictional account of a person's life--usually a celebrity, an important historical figure, or a writer. If a writer uses his or her own life as the basis of a biography, the work is called an autobiography.

Blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter, until the recent advent of free verse, it was the only unrhymed measure to achieve general popularity in English. During the sixteenth century blank verse was largely dramatic in character; Paradise Lost was one of the first non-dramatic poems to use it. But Milton’s authority and success were so great, that it came to be used for a great variety of discursive, descriptive and philosophical poems, remaining the standard metrical form for epics. Thompson’s Seasons, Wordsworth’s Prelude and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King are all written in blank verse.

Burlesque, from the Italian burla, ridicule, mockery, a literary composition or dramatic presentation which aims at exciting laughter by the comical treatment of a serious subject or the caricature of the spirit of a serious work. Notable examples of burlesque in English literature are Butler’s Hudibras, the Tale of Sir Topas from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Burlesque contributed to the development of the novel. During the nineteenth century, when formal drama tended to be stagy and melodramatic, a vigorous burlesque stage flourished in England, making fun of the classics.

Caesura, a break or pause in the line of poetry, usually in the middle of a line.

CATHARSIS: An emotional discharge that brings about a moral or spiritual renewal or welcome relief from tension and anxiety. According to Aristotle, catharsis is the marking feature and ultimate end of any tragic artistic work.

CHARACTERIZATION: An author or poet's use of description, dialogue, dialect, and action to create in the reader an emotional or intellectual reaction to a character or to make the character more vivid and realistic. Careful readers note each character's attitude and thoughts, actions and reaction, as well as any language that reveals geographic, social, or cultural background.

Climax, LITERARY (From Greek word for "ladder"): The moment in a play, novel, short story, or narrative poem at which the crisis reaches its point of greatest intensity and is thereafter resolved. It is also the peak of emotional response from a reader or spectator and usually the turning point in the action. The climax usually follows or overlaps with the crisis of a story, though some critics use the two terms synonymously. (Contrast with anticlimax, crisis, and denouement.)

CLOWN: (1) A fool or rural bumpkin in Shakespearean vocabulary. Examples of this type of clown include Lance, Bottom, Dogberry, and other Shakespearean characters. (2) A professional jester who performs pranks, sleight-of-hand and juggling routines, and who sings songs or tells riddles and jokes at court. By convention, such jesters were given considerable leeway to speak on nearly any topic (even criticizing court policy) as long as the criticism was veiled in riddles and wordplay. Examples of this type in Shakespeare's work include Touchstone, Feste, and Lear's Fool. Cf. fool.

COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS: In twentieth-century Jungian Psychology, this term refers to a shared group of archetypes (atavistic and universal images, cultural symbols, and recurring situations dealing with the fundamental facts of human life) passed along to each generation to the next in folklore and stories or generated anew by the way must face similar problems to those our ancestors faced. Within a culture, the collective unconscious forms a treasury of powerful shared images and symbols found in our dreams, art stories, myths, and religious icons.

COMEDY (from Greek: komos, "songs of merrimakers"): In the original meaning of the word, comedy referred to a genre of drama during the Dionysia festivals of ancient Athens. The first comedies were loud and boisterous drunken affairs, as the word's etymology suggests. Later, in medieval and Renaissance use, the word comedy came to mean any play or narrative poem in which the main characters manage to avert an impending disaster and have a happy ending. The comedy did not necessarily have to be funny, and indeed, many comedies are serious in tone. It is only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that comedy's exclusive connotations of humor arose.

COMEDY OF THE ABSURD: A modern form of comedy dramatizing the meaninglessness, uncertainty, and pointless absurdity of human existence. A famous example is Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

COMEDY OF HUMORS: A Renaissance drama in which numerous characters appear as the embodiment of stereotypical "types" of people, each character having the physiological and behavioral traits associated with a specific humor in the human body. The majority of the cast consists of such stock characters. (See "humors, bodily" for more information.) Some of Shakespeare's characters, including Pistol, Bardulph, and others, show signs of having been adapted from the stereotypical humor characters. In literature, a humor character was a type of flat character in whom a single passion predominated; this interpretation was especially popular in Elizabethan and other Renaissance literature. See also stock character.

COMEDY OF MANNERS: A form of comedy consisting of five or three acts in which the attitudes and customs of a society are critiqued and satirized according to high standards of intellect and morality. The dialogue is usually clever and sophisticated, but often risqué. Characters are valued according to their linguistic and intellectual prowess.

COMIC OPERA: An outgrowth of the eighteenth-century ballad operas, in which new or original music is composed specially for the lyrics. (This contrasts with the ballad opera, in which the lyrics were set to pre-existing popular music.)

Conceit, an elaborate metaphor comparing two apparently dissimilar objects or emotions, often with the effect of shock or surprise, a far-fetched and ingenious comparison.. the Italian poet Petrarch popularized a great number of conceits handy for use in love poetry, and readily adopted by his English imitators. (e.g. comparing love to a warrior, developing the themes of the lady’s stony heart, incendiary glances and so forth). The Metaphysical conceit, as used by Donne and his followers, was a more intellectualized, many-leveled comparison, giving a strong sense of the poet’s ingenuity and wit. (e.g. Donne’s famous comparison of two lovers to a pair of compasses.)

CONFLICT: The opposition between two characters (such as a protagonist and an antagonist), between two large groups of people, or between the protagonist and a larger problem such as forces of nature, ideas, public mores, and so on. Conflict may also be completely internal, such as the protagonist struggling with his psychological tendencies (drug addiction, self-destructive behavior, and so on); William Faulkner famously claimed that the most important literature deals with the subject of "the human heart in conflict with itself." Conflict is the engine that drives a plot. In complex works of literature, multiple conflicts may occur at once. For instance, in Shakespeare's Othello, one level of conflict is the unseen struggle between Othello and the machinations of Iago, who seeks to destroy him. Another level of conflict is Othello's struggle with his own jealous insecurities and his suspicions that Desdemona is cheating on him.

CONVENTION: A common feature that has become traditional or expected within a specific genre (category) of literature or film. The wandering knight-errant who travels from place to place, seeking adventure while suffering from the effects of hunger and the elements, is a convention in medieval romances. It is a convention for an English sonnet to have fourteen lines with a specific rhyme scheme, abab, cdcd, efef, gg, and so on. The use of a chorus and the unities are dramatic conventions of Greek tragedy, while, the aside, and the soliloquy are conventions in Elizabethan tragedy. Conventions are often referred to as poetic, literary, or dramatic, depending upon whether the convention appears in a poem, short story or novel, or a play.

COUPLET: Two lines--the second line immediately following the first--of the same metrical length that end in a rhyme to form a complete unit. Geoffrey Chaucer and other writers helped popularize the form in English poetry in the fourteenth century. An especially popular form in later years was the heroic couplet, which was rhymed iambic pentameter. It was popular from the 1600s through the late 1700s.

COURTLY LOVE (Medieval French: fin amour or amour courtois): Possibly a cultural trope in the late twelfth-century, or possibly a literary convention that captured popular imagination, courtly love refers to a code of behavior that gave rise to modern ideas of chivalrous romance. The term itself was popularized by C. S. Lewis' and Gaston Paris' scholarly studies, but its historical existence remains contested in critical circles. The conventions of courtly love are that a knight of noble blood would adore and worship a young noble-woman from afar, seeking to protect her honor and win her favor by valorous deeds. He typically falls ill with love-sickness, while the woman chastely or scornfully rejects or refuses his advances in public but privately encourages him. Courtly love was associated with (A) nobility, since no peasants can engage in "fine love"; (B) secrecy; (C) adultery, since often the one or both participants were married to another noble who was unloved; and (D) paradoxically with chastity, since the passion should never be consummated due to social circumstances, thus it was a "higher love" unsullied by selfish carnal desires or political concerns of arranged marriages. In spite of this ideal of chastity, the knightly characters in literature usually end up giving in to their passions with tragic results--such as Lancelot and Guenevere's fate, or that of Tristan and Iseult.

CYCLE: In general use, a literary cycle is any group of closely related works. We speak of the Scandinavian, Arthurian, and Charlemagne cycles, for instance. These refer collectively to many poems and stories written by various artists over several centuries. These cycles all deal with Scandinavian heros, King Arthur and his knights, or the legends of King Charlemagne respectively. More specifically, a mystery cycle refers to the complete set of mystery plays performed during the Corpus Christi festival in medieval religious drama (typically 45 or so plays, each of which depicted a specific event in biblical history from the creation of the world to the last judgment). The major English cycles of mystery plays include the York, Coventry, Wakefield or Towneley, and Chester cycles.

Dramatic monologue, generally a poem, delivered as though by a single imagined person, frequently to an imagined auditor. The speaker is not to be identified with the poet, but is dramatized, usually ironically, through his or her own words. On of the most distinguished exponents was R. Browning. The form was also employed by Tennyson, Pound, Kipling, Hardy and others.

Epic, a poem that celebrates in the form of a continuous narrative the achievements of one or more heroic personages of history or tradition. In English literature, the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf is perhaps the only genuine epic, if an epic is defined as a long poem of a heroic age, based on anonymous lays and being objective and impersonal in its narrative. There are also ‘literary epics’, such as Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Epistolary, in the form of a series of letters.

Euphuism. Euphues, or The Anatomy of Wit is a prose romance by J.Lyly, published in 1578. It is famous for its peculiar style, to which it has given the name ‘Eupuism’. Its chief characteristics are the the excessive use of antithesis and alliteration and numerous allusions to historical and mythological personages. Lyly’s strange and affected way of writing set the fashion for a long period; the ‘euphuistic’ manner spread through almost all literature. Subsequently, the word euphuism lost is exact meaning and became synonymous with every kind of affectation and preciosity. The epithet was stretched to include the various artifices of Sidney, Shakespeare and Donne.

Fabliau, short tale in verse, almost invariably in octosyllabic couplets, dealing for the most part from a comic point of view with incidents of ordinary life. The fabliau was an important element in French poetry in the 12^th-13^th centuries.

Genre, an established literary form, such as stage comedy, the picaresque novel, the sonnet. Being a certain genre predisposes a work to represent certain characters and events and to seek certain effects

Gothic novel, tales of the macabre, fantastic and supernatural, usually set amid haunted castles, graveyards, ruins and wild picturesque landscapes. They reached the height of their fasion in the 1790-s and the early 19^th cent. The word ‘Gothic’ originally implied medieval, as in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. A Gothic Story (1764), generally accepted to be the first of the true Gothic novels.Later its meaning changed until the emphasis lay on the macabre, and the medieval element was sometimes wholly misregarded. The Gothic novels by C. Lewis, C. Reeve, A. Radcliffe, Ch. MAturin show exuberance of invention and produce moments of horror. Later practitioners include Mary Shelley, E.A. Poe. In the 20^th cent the genre flourished notably in popular horror fiction and films.

Heroic couplet, a pair of rhymed lines of iambic pentameter. The form was introduced into English by Chaucer, and widely used subsequently.

Morality Plays, medieval allegorical plays in which personified human qualities acted and disputed, mostly coming from the 15^th and 16^th cent. They had a considerable influence on the development of Elizabethan drama.

The Movement, a term coined in 1954 to describe a group of writers including Amis, Larkin, Wain, Conquest and others. Their anthologies of poetry illustrate the Movement’s predominantly anti-romantic, witty, rational, sardonic tone; its fictional heroes tended to be lower-middle-class scholarship boys. Definitions of its aims were negative and by 1957 its members began to disown it, claiming, in Wain’s words, ‘its work is done’.

Mystery Plays: form of popular medieval drama, biblical dramas popular in England from the 13th.to the late 16^th cent., take their name from the mestier (trade) of the performers. They were previously called ‘Miracle plays’ which, strictly, are enactments of the miracles performed by the saints. The Mysteries existed in cycles and enacted the events of the Bible from the Creation to the Last Judgement. They were acted on pageants (wagons) assigned to particular trade-guilds. Their great interest is as an early, popular form of theatre, manifesting energy, humor, and seriousness.

NEO-CLASSICISM: in literature, the practice of imitating the great authors of antiquity as a matter of aesthetic principle. The recovery of the previously neglected Poetics by Aristotle in the 16^th cent. Provoked an attempt to establish rules for the use of the ancient genres: the epic, eclogue, elegy, epigram, ode, satire, tragedy and comedy. New aesthetic treaties imprisoned imitation into a rigid framework of rules. The most famous of their inventions war the observation of dramatic unities of time, place and action. The usual excuse for the rules was that they helped writers to be true to nature. Implicit in this view was the assumption that ‘nature’ consisted in what was generally true.

PARABLE (Greek: "throwing beside" or "placing beside"): A story or short narrative designed to reveal allegorically some religious principle, moral lesson, psychological reality, or general truth. Rather than using abstract discussion, a parable always teaches by comparison with real or literal occurrences--especially "homey" everyday occurrences a wide number of people can relate to. Well-known examples of parables include those found in the synoptic Gospels, such as "The Prodigal Son" and "The Good Samaritan." Non-religious works can be parables as well. For example, Melville's Billy Budd demonstrates that absolute good--such as the impressionable, naive young sailor--may not co-exist with absolute evil--the villain Claggart.

PARODY (Greek: "beside, subsidiary, or mock song"): A parody imitates the serious manner and characteristic features of a particular literary work in order to make fun of those same features. The humorist achieves parody by exaggerating certain traits common to the work, much as a caricaturist creates a humorous depiction of a person by magnifying and calling attention to the person's most noticeable features. The term parody is often used synonymously with the more general term spoof, which makes fun of the general traits of a genre rather than one particular work or author. Often the subject-matter of a parody is comically inappropriate, such as using the elaborate, formal diction of an epic to describe something trivial like washing socks or cleaning a dusty attic.

PASTORAL (Latin pastor, "shepherd"): An artistic composition dealing with the life of shepherds or with a simple, rural existence. It usually idealized shepherds' lives in order to create an image of peaceful and uncorrupted existence. More generally, pastoral describes the simplicity, charm, and serenity attributed to country life, or any literary convention that places kindly, rural people in nature-centered activities.

PATHOS (Greek, "emotion"): In its rhetorical sense, pathos is a writer or speaker's attempt to inspire an emotional reaction in an audience--usually a deep feeling of suffering, but sometimes joy, pride, anger, humor, patriotism, or any of a dozen other emotions. In its critical sense, pathos signifies a scene or passage designed to evoke the feeling of pity or sympathetic sorrow in a reader or viewer.

PERIODIC ESSAY: The forefather of modern periodicals like magazines and literary journals, these publications contained essays appearing at regular intervals (monthly, quarterly, and so on). The subject-matter varied from current events, literary criticism, social commentary, fashion, geographic and architectural features of London, childhood memories, and whatever other reverie entered the author's head. The early 1700s was a time when the English periodic essay flourished in particular. This time was especially important in the development of the modern periodical and in the growing acceptance of the essay as a valid genre. Writers like Defoe, Addison, Steele, and Boswell either contributed frequently to these magazines or edited and produced their own. The Tatler (1709), the Spectator (1711), and the Guardian (1731), all established by Addison and Steele, became profoundly influential in shaping the writing habits and publication customs of the modern world.

PLAGIARISM: Accidental or intentional intellectual theft in which a writer, poet, artist, scholar, or student steals an original idea, phrase, or section of writing from someone else and presents this material as his or her own work without indicating the source via appropriate explanation or citation.

PLOT: The structure and relationship of actions and events in a work of fiction. In order for a plot to begin, some sort of catalyst is necessary. While the temporal order of events in the work constitutes the "story," we are speaking of plot rather than story as soon as we look at how these events relate to one another and how they are rendered and organized so as to achieve their particular effects. Note that, while it is most common for events to unfold chronologically, many stories structure the plot in such a way that the reader encounters happenings out of order. Some narratives involve several short episodic plots occurring one after the other (like chivalric romances), or they may involve multiple subplots taking place simultaneously with the main plot (as in many of Shakespeare's plays).

POETIC LICENSE: The freedom of a poet or other literary writer to depart from the norms of common discourse, literal reality, or historical truth in order to create a special effect in or for the reader. When applied to prose writers, the term is often called "artistic license."

Romance, Novel. Medieval romances are narratives of adventure, following a hero through the successive episodes of a quest toward his chosen or appointed goal. Novels are more or less realistic studies of social relationships, more tightly structured than romances, less given to the fabulous, and dealing generally with the middle strata of society.

Setting

Soliloquy, a speech in a play in which a character, usually alone on stage, tells the audience about his thoughts and feelings

Theme

Ackroyd, Peter (1949- novelist, biographer, poet and reviewer. His novels explore the relationship between the present and the historical past. Post-modernist. Major works: The House of Dr. Di, English Music, biographies of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and Ch. Dickens.

Addison, Joseph (1672-1719), dramatist, poet, journalist. Together with R.Steele published The Tatler and The Spectator. Attacked the coarseness of Restoration literature and introduced new, essentially middle-class, standards of taste and judgement.

Aesop (6^th cent. BC) – probably a legendary figure to whom tradition attributes the whole stock of Greek fables.

Aldington, Richard (1892-1962), novelist, poet and biographer. The author of the novel Death of a Hero, biography of D.H. Lawrence, tree books of poetry, many translations.

Alfred (the Great) (849-99): King of the West Saxons from 871 to his death, important in the history of literature for the revival of letters, the beginner of a tradition of English prose translation. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the systematic compilation of which began in 890, may represent in part his work or inspiration.

Amis, Sir Kingsley (1922-1995): Novelist and poet, achieved popular success with his first novel Lucky Jim, whose hero, Jim Dixon, was hailed as an “angry young man”. Best known for satiric comedy: One Fat Englishman, The Old Devil (Booker Prize 1986), Difficulties with Girls, etc. Also successfully attempted many other genres: The Riverside Villas Murder, an imitation of a classical detective story, The Green Man, a novel of the supernatural, and others.

Aristophanes (c.448-380 BC) – Athenian comic dramatist, set many canons for the dramatic genre of comedy.

Aristotle (384-322 BC) – Greek scholar, the author of Poetics, which contributed to the rise of Neo-classicism.

Arnold, Mathew (1822- 88) – Victorian poet, author of religious, literary and educational essays.

Arthur, King – a romantic legendary figure that might have some historical basis. There is mention of him in certain ancient poems.

Auden, Wystan Hugh (1907-73) – English poet and playwright. Already the first volume of poems in 1928 established him as the most talented voice of his generation. Britten set many of his poems to music. Auden was a master of verse form, and accommodated traditional patterns to a fresh, easy and contemporary language.

Austen, Jane (1775-1817) – English pre-Victorian novelist, the author of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814); Emma (1816), Persuasion and Northanger Abbey (both published posthumously in1818).Her stories are repetitive, with few changes; her characters middle-class country gentry whose most urgent preoccupation is to find a suitable partner for marriage. Jane Austin describes this provincial world with wit and subtle irony.

Bacon, Sir Francis (1561- 1626) – Bacon’s writings are of many different kinds, the largest and most influential body of his work being philosophical. His New Atlantis describes a Utopian community, the Essays is an assemblage of aphorism held together by a common subject. Some of the best-known English sayings come from the Essays.

Bacon, Roger (1210-after 1292) ‘Doctor Mirabilis’, philosopher. Wrote Latin treatises on sciences. His great work is Opus Magus. He has been described as the founder of English philosophy, but was also a practical scientist.

Balzac, Honore de (1799-1850) – French novelist, author of the great series of co-ordinated novels and stories known collectively as the Comedie Humaine. His work is am essential reference-point in the history of European novel.

Barnes, Julian (1946) – English post-modern novelist. His novels embrace an unusual blend of domestic realism and metaphysical speculation: England, England; The History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters; Flaubert’s Parrot.

Beckett, Samuel (1906-89): Irish-born novelist and dramatist. He wrote both in French and English. He is widely known for his plays, above all Waiting for Godot (in French 1953; in English 1955). Beckett is a leading dramatist of the Theatre of the Absurd. In 1969 he was awarded The Nobel Prize for literature.

Bede, the Venerable (673-735)

Behn, Aphra (1640-1689)

Bennet, Arnold (1867-1931)

Blake, William (1757-1827)

Boccaccio, Jiovanni (1313-75)

Bronte, Anne (1820-49)

Bronte, Charlotte (1816-55)

Bronte, Emily (1818-48)

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (1806-61)

Browning, Robert (1812-89)

Bunyan, John (1628-88)

Burgess, Anthony (1917-93)

Burns, Robert (1759-96)

Butler Samuel (1835-1902)

Byron, George Gordon (1788-1824) Romantic poet. His protagonist, a proud and self-reliant rebel, superior to and contemptuous of the common run of men, became the ruling personage of his age and had immense influence on European poetry, music, novel, painting and philosophy. Byron is also remembered for his romantic life and death in Greece while fighting with Turks for independence of Greece. Major Works: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812); The Bride of Abydos and The Giaour (1813); The Corsair and Lara (1814); Manfred (1817); Cain (1820); Don Juan (started in 1819, not finished).

Caedmon (late 7^th cent): According to Bede, Caedmon was an unlearned peasant who received suddenly, in a vision the power of song. The only work that can be attributed to him is the short Hymn of Creation, quoted by Bede.

Carroll, Lewis (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) (1832- 1198): English mathematician and writer. The author of fantastic tales in the genre of nonsense based on play upon words and inverted logic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865); Through the Looking-Glass (1871)

Carter, Angela (1940-92)

Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de (1669-1723): The great Spanish novelist and dramatist. His masterpiece Don Quixote (Pt I 1605; Pt II 1613) is a satirical romance.

Chaucer, Geoffrey (c.1343-1400)

Chekhov, Anton (1860-1902): Russian dramatist and short-story writer. His fame as a dramatist rests on his late four plays The Seagull (1895); Uncle Vanya (1900); Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1904). Chekhov’s success and influence in England has been immense. Chekhov’s work is characterized by its subtle blending of naturalism and symbolism, by sympathetic, humane, but acutely observed portraits , and above all by its unique combination of comedy, tragedy and pathos, and the sensitivity of its movement from one mode to another.

Chretien de Troyes (late 12^th cent): Regarded as the greatest of the writers of courtly romances, which he wrote in French. Four complete romances survive, among them Lancelot (1177-81). The lengthy Perceval, or Le Conte de Graal (1181-90) was left incomplete. His influence on all subsequent Arthurian literature is general, rather than particular.

Christie, Dame Agatha (1890-1976): Writer of detective fiction. Her first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), introduced Hercule Poirot, the Belgian detective who appeared in many subsequent novels (her other main detective being the elderly spinster Miss Marple). In the next 56 years, she wrote 66 detective novels. She also wrote several novels under a pseudonym, an Autobiography and several plays, including the Mousetrap, which has run continuously in London for more than 40 years. Her prodigious international success seems due to her matchless ingenuity in contriving plots, sustaining suspense and misdirecting the reader, to her ear for dialogue and brisk common sense and humour.

Churchill, Sir Winston Leonard Spenser (1874-1965): British Prime Minister in 1940-45 and 1951-55. He was awarded Nobel Prize for literature in 1953. Among his publications are: London to Ladysmyth via Pretoria (1900); Lord Randolph Churchill (1906-7); Liberalism and the Social Problem (1909); The World Crisis (4 vol. 1923-29); My Early Life (1930); The Second World War (6 vol. 1948-54) and A History of the English-speaking Peoples (4 vol. 1956-8)

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

Collins, Wilkie (1824-89)

Congreve, William (1670-1729)

Conrad, Joseph (1857-1924)

Cynewulf (8^th or 9^th cent): Probably a Northumbrian or Mercian poet. At one time a large number of Old English poems were attributed to him, but modern scholarship restricts attribution to the four poems in the Exeter Book which end with his name in runes. The poems are Juliana, Elene, The Fates of the Apostles, and Christ II.

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321): The great Italian poet. During the early period of his life he fell in love with a girl whom he celebrates under the name of Beatrice in his masterpiece the Divina Commedia. When she died in1290, Dante was grief-stricken and sought consolation in the study of philosophy. In the Vita Nuova (1290-94) Dante brings together 31 poems, most of them relating to his love for Beatrice. There is a translation by D.G. Rossetti (1861).

Darwin, Charles (1809-82): a world famous English scientist. His great work On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection appeared in 1859. Darwin argued for a natural, not divine, origin of species. In the survival of the fittest organic descent was achieved by natural selection. The reverberation of Darwin’s ideas can be seen throughout the literature of the second half of the nineteenth century.

Defoe, Daniel (1660-1731): One of the most prolific writers in English literature, Defoe produced some 560 books, pamphlets and journals, but the works for which he is best known belong to his later years: Robinson Crusoe (1719); Adventures of Captain Singleton (1720); Moll Flanders, A Journal of the Plague Year and Colonel Jack (1722) and others. Defoe’s influence on the evolution of the English novel was enormous, and many regard him as the first true novelist. He was a master of plain prose and powerful narrative, with a journalist’s curiosity and love of realistic detail; his peculiar gift made him one of the greatest reporters of his time s well as a great imaginative writer who in Robinson Crusoe created one of the most familiar and resonant myths of modern literature.

De Quincey, Thomas (1785-1859): English Romantic, journalist and novelist. Eclectic learning, pungent black humour, a stately but singular style distinguish all his writings. His impressionistic reminiscences on his literary contemporaries are memorably vivid. He had great influence on writers, such as Poe and Baudelaire and on ordinary readers. The Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822)

Dickens, Charles (1812-70)

Disraeli, Benjamin (1804-81)

Donne, John, (1572-1631)

Dostoevsky, Fyodor (1823-81): Russian prose writer. The series of brilliant works on which his reputation is based are Crime and Punishment (1866); The Idiot (1868); The Devils (1872); An Adolescent (1875); The Brothers Karamazov (1880). In these Dostoevsky reveals extraordinary powers of characters analysis and a gift of narrative tension, considers profound religious and political ideas. During the 20^th cent Dostoevsky became the Russian writer most widely read and influential in England.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan (1859-1930)

Dryden, John (1631-1700)

Eliot, George (1819-80)

Eliot, Thomas Stearns (1888-1965)

Elizabeth, Queen

Erasmus, Desiderius (1467-1536)

Farquhar, George (1678-1707): comic dramatist of the Restoration period. He produced The Constant Couple (1699); The Twin Rivals (1702), The Stage Coach (1704) ; The Recruiting Officer (1706); The Beaux Stratagem (1707). The last two are considered his best plays, marked by an atmosphere of reality and good humour.

Fielding, Henry (1707-54): dramatist and novelist. Fielding is generally agreed to be an innovating master of the highest originality. He devised a new province of writing that he himself described as ‘a comic epic in prose’: The Adventures of Joseph Andrews and His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams (1742); The History of Tom Jones (1749). In effect, those were the first modern novels in English, leading straight to the works of Dickens and Thackeray.

Forster, Edward Morgan (1879-1970): novelist, a member of the Bloomsbury group. Forster traveled widely, which reflected itself in his novels A Room with a View (1908); A Passage to India (1924); Howards End (1910). In his novels, written primarily in a realistic mode, British culture is contrasted with foreign traditions.

Fowles, John Robert (1926-2002 ): novelist. His first novel, The Collector (1963), a psychological thriller, was followed by Magus (1966, revised edition 1971), a novel with great narrative complexity and mythological dimensions faintly suggestive of Magic Realism, and The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), a semi-historical novel, an exploration of the Victorian age and Victorian novel.

Freud, Sigmund (1856-1939): Austrian psychologist, the creator of psychoanalysis, a science that has had an incalculable effect both on literature and on literary theory. Many of his concepts have become familiar in a vulgarized form, such as the Oedipus complex, the death wish, phallic symbolism, the division between the Id, the Ego and the Superego, etc. His works, the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (24 vol., 1953-73) were made available in English by James Strachey. The works reveal Freud himself as a writer of great distinction.

Galsworthy, John (1867-1833): novelist, poet and dramatist. The Nobel Prize for literature in 1932.

Gaskell, Mrs. Elizabeth Cleghorn (1810-65): Victorian novelist, the author of social novels of provincial life: Mary Barton (1848); North and South (1855); Wives and Daughters (1866). She also wrote the first and the most celebrated biography of Ch. Bronte. Mrs. Gaskell was an active humanitarian, and the message of her novels was the need for social reconciliation, for better understanding between employers and workers. She was a keen observer of human behavior and speech.

Gay, John (1685 -1732): satirical poet and dramatist, the author of ballads and opera librettos. His masterpiece is The Beggar’s Opera (1729), which contain many of his best-known ballads.

Geoffrey of Monmouth (d.1159): probably a Benedictine monk of Monmouth. In his Historia Regum Britanniae (History of British Kings) (c.1136) he purports to give an account of kings who dwelt in Britain since before the incarnation of Christ, especially king Arthur. His writing contributed considerably to the popularity of Arthurian legends.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749-1832): the great German poet. In the field of literature his most famous work was the poetic drama Faust . The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), a semi-biographical epistolary novel, caused a sensation throughout Europe. Goethe’s achievement in literature covers an astonishing range of forms.

Golding, Sir William (1911-93): novelist who worked for many years as a teacher before achieving an instant success with his first novel, Lord of the Flies (1954). At the heart of many of Golding’s novels is the intrinsic cruelty of man. He often presents isolated individuals or small groups in extreme situations dealing with man in his basic condition, creating the quality of a fable. The Pyramid (1967); The Rites of Passage (1980, Booker Prize), Paper Man (1984), Close Quarters (1987) and others. Golding was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1983 and knighted in 1988.

Goldsmith, Oliver (1728-74) novelist, poet and dramatist, exponent of the literature of sentiment. His best-known poem is The Deserted Village (1770), She Stoops to Conquer (1773) is a witty comedy, still popular on English stage, and his novel The Vicar of Wakesfield(1766) became one of the most popular works of fiction in the language.

Gray, Thomas (1716-71): poet of the Graveyard school, author of the famous Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard (1751).

Greene, Graham (1904-91): novelist and playwright. His first novel Stamboul Train (1932) was followed by many increasingly successful novels, short stories, books of reportage and travel, plays, etc. His novels include The Heart of the Matter (1948), The Quiet American (1955), A Burnt-Out Case (1961), The Human Factor (1978). Other works of fiction he classed as ‘entertainments’: Loser Takes All (1955), Our Man in Havana (1958) and others. Greene’s preoccupation with moral dilemma (personal, religious, political) gave his work a distinctive and recognizable quality.

Greene, Robert (1558-92): dramatist and essayist, one of the University Wits. Grene’s 37 publications progress from moral dialogues to prose romances, romantic plays and finally realistic accounts of underworld life. Greene is now best-known for his attack on Shakespeare in the Groatsworth of Witte (autobiographical prose tract, 1592), which is the first reference to Shakespeare as a London dramatist.

Grimm, Jacob Ludwig (1785-1863) and Wilhelm Carl (1786-1859): German brothers who pioneered the study of German philology, mythology and folklore. They are chiefly known in England for their collection of fairy-tales.

Guttenberg, Johann (c.1400- 68?): traditionally considered the inventor of printing with movable types.

Haggard, Sir Henry Rider (1856-1925): exponent of the literature of action, author of 34 adventure novels, set in exotic countries. His most celebrated novels are King Solomon’s Mines (1886) and She (1887).

Hardy, Thomas (1840-1928): Novelist and poet. He was born near Dorchester, which he made the centre of Wessex, the fictional country of his novels. Wrote a series of highly successful novels, such as Far from the Madding Crowd (1874); The Return of the Native (1878); Tess of the D’Urbevilles (1891); Jude the Obscure (1895). His major themes were the unpredictability of man’s fate and a tragic fatalism in the face of the force of nature.

Hazlitt, William (1778-1830): essayist, Romantic poet and critic. Hazlitt was an ardent supporter of the French revolution and Napoleon, and was deeply concerned with the social ills of his own country. He was derided by Lockhart, the editor of Blackwood’s Magazine as one of the members of the Cockney School of poetry. He published The Spirit of the Age (1825), Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819), and abundant other work. His merits as a critic are not always agreed, yet even his detractors concede the great range of his reading and his achievement as a critical historian at a time when no history of English literature existed.

Henry VIII (1491-1547): King of England from 1521. He broke with Rome and established The Church of England. Henry was an accomplished poet and musician, his lyrics dealing with courtly and chivalric themes. Henry’s private life became the subject of many dramas and he remains legendary on account of his six wives.

Herbert, George (1593-1633): Metaphysical poet. His poems are religious; he described them as ‘a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed betwixt God and my soul, before I could subject mine to the will of Jesus my Master’. Their simple piety was much admired in the 17^th cent. Modern critics have noted the subtlety, rather than the simplicity of his poems, seeing them as an attempt to express the ultimately ineffable complications of the spiritual life.

Hill, Susan (1942-): novelist, children’s writer and radio playwright. Her novels include: Gentlemen and Ladies (1968); A Change for the Better (1969); The Birds of Night (1972, The Whitbread Award). A collection of short stories, The Albatross, appeared in 1971.

Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679)

Homer (8^th cent. BC)

Horace (65-8 BC)

Hume, David (1711-76)

Hunt, Leigh (1784-1859)

Huxley, Aldous (1894-1963)

Ibsen, Henrik (1828-1906)

James, Henry (1843-1916): American born English novelist. His main theme was the impact of the older civilization of Europe on American life: Roderick Hudson (1876); The American (1877); Portrait of a Lady (1881); The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Golden Bowl (1904). He also explored English character with great subtlety

James I, (1566-1625): King of the United Kingdom (reigned 1603-1625). He is reputedly the author of The Law of Free Monarchies (1598). He also wrote metrical verse in Scots, Latin and English, theological works, and a poetic treatise. Patron of drama.

Jerome, Jerome Klapka (1859-1927): achieved lasting fame with Three Men in a Boat (1889).his other works include collections of light essays, an autobiographical novel and several plays.

Johnson, Samuel (1709-84): Critic, poet and dictionary writer, one of the most eminent literary figures of his day. His reputation was firmly established by his Dictionary, which was published in 1755 after nine years of labour. His crowning work is The Lives of English Poets (1779-81)

Jonson, Ben (1572-1637): English dramatist, poet, and literary critic. The first poet laureate, though not formally appointed. As a dramatist, he created the type of comic drama known as comedy of humours, where a ‘humour’ is an embodiment of some individual passion or propensity.

Joyce, James (1882-1941): Irish novelist, modernist. His novel Ulysses (1922) revolutionized the form and structure of the novel, decisively influenced the development of the ‘stream of consciousness’ and pushed language and linguistic experiment to the extreme limits of communication. His other works are Dubliners (1904); A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man (1914); Finnegan’s Wake (1939).

Lawrence, David Herbert (1885-1930): Novelist, short-story writer, poet and critic. He had working class origin. Sons and Lovers (1913), an emotionally faithful autobiographical account of his early years, was followed by The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1916); Lady Chatterly’s Lover

Lear, Edward (1812-88) – versatile, gifted nonsense poet. He popularized the limerick form and wrote nonsense poems for children, which he accompanied by characteristic simple, witty line drawings. Lear’s verse was published as A Book of Nonsense (1846), A Book of Nonsense and More Nonsense (1862), Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and Alphabets (1871)

Orwell, George (Eric Blair) (1903-1950): journalist, essayist and novelist. He always reacted critically to current political and social issues. His most popular works are political satires Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1948), in which he denounced totalitarianism.

Osborn, John (1929-94) – Dramatist. His play Look Back in Anger (1956) was seen as a revolution in English drama and established him as the leader of the Angry Young Men.

Pater, Walter

Pepys, Samuel

Petrarch, Francesco (1304-74): Italian poet and humanist, the most popular Italian poet of the English Renaissance. He calls the woman who inspired his love poetry, Laura, her true identity is unknown. Petrarch is best known today for his Rime Sparse, the collection of Italian lyrics, which include the long series of poems in praise of Laura. Petrarch is justly regarded as the father of Italian humanism and the initiator of the revived study of Greek and Latin literature.

Pinter, Harold (1930) – British novelist and dramatist. He is best-known for plays which show the estrangement of ordinary lives and family relationships, such as The Caretaker (1960), The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1965). He often works as a film-script writer.

Pope, Alexander

Pound, Ezra

Priestley, John Boyton

Shaw, George Bernard (1856-1950) Irish dramatist, critic and social thinker. His plays are usually based on political and social ideas, e.g. Widower’s Houses (1892), Heartbreak House (1914) , Saint Joan (1924), Pygmalion (1913)

Sillitoe, Alan (1928- ) Novelist and poet, one of the Angry Young Men generation. His best-known novel is Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958).

Trollope, Anthony (1815-82)

Turgenev, Ivan (1818-83): Russian novelist, the first Russian writer to find success in Europe. His novels include The Nest of Gentlefolk (1859), On the Eve (1860), Fathers and Sons (1862), in which he created a Nihilist hero, Bazarov.

Turner, William (1775-1851): major English landscape painter, whose mature works convey a profoundly Romantic vision of the magnificence of nature and the violence of the elements. His works were frequently inspired by poetry, and many of his paintings are accompanied by quotations. He also illustrated books by Milton, Byron, W. Scott and others. His great works exerted a major influence on the Romantic imagination.

Udall, or Uverdale, Nicholas (1504-56): Dramatist and scholar, the author of the first known English comedy, Ralph Roister Doister. He also wrote Latin plays on sacred subjects.

University Wits: Name given to a group of Elizabethan playwrights and pamphleteers, of whom Nashe, R. Greene, Lyly, and T. Lodge were the chief.

Vanbrugh, Sir John (1664-1726): dramatist and architect. He wrote three successful comedies, The Relapse, or Virtue in Danger (1696), The Provoked Wife (1697), Confederacy (1705). His characters are distinct, the tone of the plays was rather coarse, bright and partly a reflection of the upper-class society of his time.

Verne, Jules (1828-1905): French novelist, whose works combine adventure and popular science.

Virgil (70-19 BC): the greatest of Roman poets. His Aeneid served as a model for all Latin epics of the medieval period and then for the new classical epic.

Voltaire (1694-1778): French, satirist, novelist, historian, poet, dramatist, polemicist, moralist and critic. Voltaire was a universal genius of the Enlightenment. His literary principles were fundamentally neo-classical, and his political principles were essentially liberal. La Henriade (1723 and 1728) is an epic poem; Zaire (1732) is a heroic tragedy. His most characteristic works, however, were his philosophical tales, notably Candide (1759).

Wain, John (1924-95): novelist, poet and critic. His first novel, Hurry On Down (1953) has been seen as a manifestation of the spirit of the ‘angry young men’. His other novels include The Contenders (1958), The Young Visitors (1965), The Pardoner’s Tale (1978) and his Oxford trilogy: Where the Rivers Meet (1988), Comedies (1990) and Hungry Generations (1994). As a poet Wain was associated with the *Movement.

Walpole, Horace (1717-97): the author of the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764).

Waugh, Evelyn Arthur St. John (1903- 66): Novelist. His Vile Bodies (1930), A Handful of Dust (1934), Brideshead Revisited (1945) and others are works of high comedy and social satire which capture the brittle, cynical, determined frivolity of post war-generation; The Loved One (1948) – a macabre comedy about Californian funeral practices. Waugh also established himself as a journalist and travel writer.

Webster, John (1578-c.1632): Dramatist, exponent of the baroque literature. His reputation rests on two plays, The White Devil (pub. 1612) and The Dutchess of Malfi (pub. 1632). With these two tragedies Webster achieved recognition second only to Shakespeare. The 20^th cent saw a strong revival of interest in Webster as a moralist and satirist.

Wells, Herbert George (1866-1946): novelist, whose literary output was vast and extremely varied. As a novelist he is best remembered for his scientific romances, among the earliest product of the new genre of science fiction: The Time Machine (1895, a social allegory), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), The First Men on the Moon(1901), Men like Gods (1923) and others. Another group of his novels evokes in comic and realistic style the lower-middle-class life of his youth: Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900), The History of Mr. Polly (1910), etc. He also published several collections of short-stories, including the memorable The Door in the Wall (1911).

Wesker, Arnold (1932-): playwright. His use of the rhythms of working life was highly innovative and did much to stimulate the growth of the so-called ‘kitchen-sink drama’. Plays: Chicken Soup with Barley (1958), Roots (1959) and I’m Talking about Jerusalem (1960) (the three plays known collectively as Wesker plays), The Kitchen (1959), Chips with Everything (1962), The Merchant (1977) and others.

Wilde, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills (1854-1900): Irish, dramatist, essayist, poet and wit. He was an advocate of the Aesthetic Movement (Art for Art’s Sake). He produced books of children’s fairy stories, much in a melancholy and poetic style: The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), A House of Pomegranates (1891) and his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gary (1888), a Gothic melodrama, whose hero is an embodiment of the aesthetic way of life. Wilde achieved great theatrical success with his comedies Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and his masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). He spent two years in prison on charge with homosexual offenses.

Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-97): English writer who wrote in favour of social and educational rights for women. She was the author of Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), Mary (1788), a novel. Her most famous work is A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Married, William Godwin, the social philosopher, and died shortly after giving birth to her daughter, the future Mary Shelley.

Woolf, Virginia (1882-1941): Novelist and critic. She was born into the family of a literary critic. Her house became the centre of the Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. She is considered a leading exponent of modernism for her use of stream of consciousness, especially in the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928)

Wordsworth, William (1770-1850): one of the greatest English poets, the leader of the Romantic Movement in England. In his youth he was strongly influenced by the ideas of the French Revolution. Later in life he slowly settled into a role of patriotic conservative public man, became poet-laureate in 1843. Wordsworth is at his best in descriptions of natural scenery. His earlier work shows the poetic beauty of the commonplace, and is written in ‘a selection of language really used by men’: Idiot Boy, Margaret, Mad Mother, the mysterious cycle of Lucy poems. The Lyrical Ballads (1795, together with S. Coleridge) is considered a landmark in the history of English Romanticism. The Prelude (1805) is a long autobiographical poem. Poems in Two Volumes (1807) contains some of his most celebrated lyrics, such as Ode on Intimations of Immortality, Ode to Duty and a number of famous sonnets. Wordsworth is a deep, original thinker, who created a new poetic tradition.

Wyatt, Sir Thomas (1503-43): the poet, who introduced the genre of the sonnet to English literature.

Wycherley, William (1641-1715): dramatist of the Restoration period. His plays are highly regarded for their acute social criticism, particularly of sexual morality and the marriage conventions: Love in a Wood, or St. James’s Park (1671?), The Gentleman Dancing-Master (1671?), The Country Wife (175), The Plain-Dealer (1676?). The last two were successfully revived in the 20^th cent.

Wyclif, John (c.1330-84): English religious philosopher and the first translator of the Bible. Wyclif was condemned by the Pope for his constant attacks on the authority and abuses in the Church. He was a trained scholastic who lectured and wrote on logic. He was an extreme exponent of Realism. His followers were known as Lollards. His great significance lies in the Bible translations which he instigated.

Wyndham, John: the best-known pseudonym of John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris (1903-69), a successful writer principally of science-fiction. Works in this genre include The Day of the Triffids (1951), The Crysalids (1955), The Midwich Cuckoos (1957). Most of his works are distinguished by the contrast between a comfortable English background and the sudden invasion of catastrophe.

Yeats, William Butler (1865-1963): Irish poet and dramatist.

Young, Edward (1683-1765): Poet and Dramatist. Young’s most celebrated poem, The Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (1742-5) is a noted example of graveyard genre.

Zola, Emile (1840-1902): the leading figure in the French school of naturalistic fiction. Zola produces an extraordinary panorama of mid-19^th cent misery, poverty and the violence of human instinct. His principal work, La Rougon- Macquart, which he termed the ‘natural and social history of a family under the second Empire’, counts 20 volumes.

1 См., например, Веселовский. Избр. статьи. – Л., 1939. – С. 295.

2 John Gardner, The Life and Times of Chaucer, pp.390-400