A History of English Literature
MICHAEL ALEXANDER
[p. iv]
© Michael Alexander 2000
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[p. v]
Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
Abbreviations
Introduction
Literary history
What’s included?
Tradition or canon?
Priorities
What is literature?
Language change
Other literatures in English
Is drama literature?
Qualities and quantities
Texts
Further reading
Primary texts
Secondary texts
PART 1:
Medieval
1 Old English Literature: to 1100
Orientations
Britain, England, English Oral origins and conversion Aldhelm, Bede, Cædmon
Northumbria and The Dream of the Rood
Heroic poetry Christian literature Alfred
Beowulf
The harvest of literacy
Further reading
2 Middle English Literature: 1066-1500
The new writing
Handwriting and printing The impact of French Scribal practice
Dialect and language change Literary consciousness
New fashions: French and Latin Epic and romance
Courtly literature Medieval institutions Authority
Lyrics English prose
The fourteenth century
Spiritual writing
Julian of Norwich
Secular prose
Ricardian poetry
Piers Plowman
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
John Gower
Geoffrey Chaucer
The Parlement of Fowls
Troilus and Criseyde
The Canterbury Tales
The fifteenth century
Elegies |
Drama |
Battle poetry |
Mystery plays |
|
Morality plays |
|
Religious lyric |
|
Deaths of Arthur |
|
The arrival of printing |
|
Scottish poetry |
[p. vi] |
|
Robert Henryson |
The drama |
William Dunbar |
The commercial theatre |
Gavin Douglas |
Predecessors |
Further reading |
Christopher Marlowe |
Part 2 |
The order of the plays |
Tudor and Stuart |
Histories |
3 Tudor Literature: 1500-1603 |
Richard II |
Renaissance and Reformation |
Henry IV |
The Renaissance |
Henry V |
Expectations |
Comedy |
Investigations |
A Midsurnrner Night's Dream |
England's place in the world |
Twelfth Night |
The Reformation |
The poems |
Sir Thomas More |
Tragedy |
The Courtier |
Hamlet |
Sir Thomas Wyatt |
King Lear |
The Earl of Surrey |
Romances |
Religious prose |
The Tempest |
Bible translation |
Conclusion |
Instructive prose |
Shakespeare's achievement |
Drama |
His supposed point of view |
Elizabethan literature |
Ben Jonson |
Verse |
The Alchemist |
Sir Philip Sidney |
Volpone |
Edmund Spenser |
Further reading |
Sir Walter Ralegh |
5 Stuart Literature: to 1700 |
The ‘Jacobethans’ |
The Stuart century |
Christopher Marlowe |
Drama to 1642 |
Song |
Comedy |
Thomas Campion |
Tragedy |
Prose |
John Donne |
John Lyly |
Prose to 1642 |
Thomas Nashe |
Sir Francis Bacon |
Richard Hooker |
Lancelot Andrewes |
Further reading |
Robert Burton |
4 Shakespeare and the Drama |
Sir Thomas Browne |
William Shakespeare |
Poetry to Milton |
Shakespeare's life |
Ben Jonson |
The plays preserved |
Metaphysical poets |
Luck and fame |
Devotional poets |
|
Cavalier poets |
|
John Milton |
|
Paradise Lost |
|
The Restoration |
|
The Earl of Rochester |
|
John Bunyan |
|
Samuel Pepys |
[p. vii] |
|
The theatres |
Non-fiction |
Restoration comedy |
Edward Gibbon |
John Dryden |
Edmund Burke |
Satire |
Oliver Goldsmith |
Prose |
Fanny Burney |
John Locke |
Richard Brinsley Sheridan |
Women writers |
Christopher Smart |
William Congreve |
William Cowper |
Further reading |
Robert Burns |
PART 3 |
Further reading |
Augustan and Romantic |
7 The Romantics: 1790-1837 |
6 Augustan Literature: to 1790 |
The Romantic poets |
The eighteenth century |
Early Romantics |
The Enlightenment |
William Blake |
Sense and Sensibility |
Subjectivity |
Alexander Pope and 18th-century civilization |
Romanticism and Revolution |
Joseph Addison |
William Wordsworth |
Jonathan Swift |
Samuel Taylor Coleridge |
Alexander Pope |
Sir Walter Scott |
Translation as tradition |
Younger Romantics |
The Rape of the Lock |
Lord Byron |
Mature verse |
Percy Bysshe Shelley |
John Gay |
John Keats |
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu |
Romantic prose |
The novel |
Belles lettres |
Daniel Defoe |
Charles Lamb |
Cross-currents |
William Hazlitt |
Samuel Richardson |
Thomas De Quincey |
Henry Fielding |
Fiction |
Tobias Smollett |
Thomas Love Peacock |
Laurence Sterne |
Mary Shelley |
The emergence of Sensibility |
Maria Edgeworth |
Thomas Gray |
Sir Walter Scott |
Pre-Romantic sensibility: ‘Ossian’ |
Jane Austen |
Gothic fiction |
Towards Victoria |
The Age of Johnson |
Further reading |
Dr Samuel Johnson |
PART 4 |
The Dictionary |
Victorian Literature to 1880 |
Literary criticism |
8 The Age and its Sages |
James Boswell |
The Victorian age |
[p. viii] |
|
Moral history |
Middlemarch |
Abundance |
Daniel Deronda |
Why sages? |
Nonsense prose and verse |
Thomas Carlyle |
Lewis Carroll |
John Stuart Mill |
Edward Lear |
John Ruskin |
Further reading |
John Henry Newman |
11 Late Victorian Literature: |
Charles Darwin |
1880-1900 |
Matthew Arnold |
Differentiation |
Further reading |
Thomas Hardy and Henry James |
9 Poetry |
Aestheticism |
Victorian Romantic poetry |
Walter Pater |
Minor verse |
A revival of drama |
John Clare |
Oscar Wilde |
Alfred Tennyson |
George Bernard Shaw |
Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning |
Fiction |
Matthew Arnold |
Thomas Hardy |
Arthur Hugh Clough |
Tess of the d'Urbervilles |
Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti |
Minor fiction |
Algernon Charles Swinburne |
Samuel Butler |
Gerard Hopkins |
Robert Louis Stevenson |
Further reading |
Wilkie Collins |
10 Fiction |
George Moore |
The triumph of the novel |
Poetry |
Two Brontë novels |
Aestheticism |
Jane Eyre |
A. E. Housman |
Wuthering Heights |
Rudyard Kipling |
Elizabeth Gaskell |
Further reading |
Charles Dickens |
PART 5 |
The Pickwick Papers |
The Twentieth Century |
David Copperfield |
12 Ends and Beginnings: 1901-19 |
Bleak House |
The new century |
Our Mutual Friend |
Fiction |
Great Expectations |
Edwardian realists |
‘The Inimitable’ |
Rudyard Kipling |
William Makepeace Thackeray |
John Galsworthy |
Vanity Fair |
Arnold Bennett |
Anthony Trollope |
H. G. Wells |
George Eliot |
|
Adam Bede |
|
The Mill on the Floss |
|
Silas Marner |
|
[p. ix] |
|
Joseph Conrad |
Fairy tales |
Heart of Darkness |
C. S. Lewis |
Nostromo |
J. R. R. Tolkien |
E. M. Forster |
Poetry |
Ford Madox Ford |
The Second World War |
Poetry |
Dylan Thomas |
Pre-war verse |
Drama |
Thomas Hardy |
Sean O'Casey |
War poetry and war poets |
Further reading |
Further reading |
14 New Beginnings: 1955-80 |
13 From Post-War to Post-War: 1920-55 |
Drama |
|
Samuel Beckett |
‘Modernism’: 1914-27 |
John Osborne |
D. H. Lawrence |
Harold Pinter |
The Rainbow |
Established protest |
James Joyce |
Novels galore |
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man |
William Golding |
Ulysses |
Muriel Spark |
Ezra Pound: the London years |
Iris Murdoch |
T. S. Eliot |
Other writers |
The love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock |
Poetry |
The Waste Land |
Philip Larkin |
Four Quartets |
Ted Hughes |
Eliot’s criticism |
Geoffrey Hill |
W. B. Yeats |
Tony Harrison |
Hugh MacDiarmid and David Jones |
Seamus Heaney |
Virginia Woolf |
Further reading |
To the Lighthouse |
Postscript on the Current |
Katherine Mansfield |
Internationalization |
Non-modernism: the Twenties and Thirties |
Postmodernism |
Modernism fails to catch on |
Novels |
The poetry of the Thirties |
Contemporary poetry |
Political camps |
Further reading |
W. H. Auden |
Index |
The novel |
|
Evelyn Waugh |
|
Graham Greene |
|
Anthony Powell |
|
George Orwell |
|
Elizabeth Bowen |
|
[p. x] |
|
Acknowledgements |
|
Having decided the scope of this history, and that it would be narrative but also critical, the task of selection imposed itself. In order to sharpen my focus, I then invited, at a preliminary stage, twenty university teachers of English literature each to send me a list of the twenty works which they believed would have to receive critical discussion in such a history. Some of those who replied evaded my rigour by including Collected Works in their list. But I thank them all. I have a much longer list of colleagues to thank for answering more scholarly queries. I name only Michael Herbert, George Jack, Christopher