Literature

William Shakespeare, often called the national poet of England.^[7]

At its formation, the United Kingdom immediately inherited the literary traditions of England and Scotland, including the earliest existing native literature written in the Celtic languages, Anglo-Saxon literature and more recent English literature including the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare and John Milton.

Robert Burns, widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland.^[8]

The early 18th century is known as the Augustan Age of English literature. The poetry of the time was highly formal, as exemplified by the works of Alexander Pope and the English novel became popular, with Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones and Samuel Richardson's Pamela.

From the late 18th century, the Romantic period showed a flowering of poetry comparable with the Renaissance two hundred years earlier and a revival of interest in vernacular literature. In Scotland the poetry of Robert Burns revived interest in Scots literature, and the Weaver Poets of Ulster were influenced by literature from Scotland. In Wales the late 18th century saw the revival of the eisteddfod tradition, inspired by Iolo Morganwg.

Charles Dickens

In the 19th century, major poets in English literature included William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alfred Lord Tennyson, John Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Percy Shelley and Lord Byron. The Victorian period was the golden age of the realistic English novel, represented by Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters (Charlotte, Emily and Anne), Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy.

World War I gave rise to British war poets and writers such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Rupert Brooke who wrote (often paradoxically), of their expectations of war, and/or their experiences in the trench.

Rudyard Kipling's If— (1895), often voted Britain's favourite poem.^[9][10]

The most widely popular writer of the early years of the 20th century was arguably Rudyard Kipling. To date the youngest ever recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Kipling's novels include The Jungle Book, The Man Who Would Be King and Kim, while his inspirational poem If— is a national favourite. Like William Ernest Henley's poem Invictus,^[11] it is a memorable evocation of Victorian stoicism, a traditional British virtue.^[12]

Notable Irish writers include; Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Bram Stoker, Jonathan Swift, George Bernard Shaw and W. B. Yeats. The Celtic Revival stimulated a new appreciation of traditional Irish literature. The Scottish Renaissance of the early 20th century brought modernism to Scottish literature as well as an interest in new forms in the literatures of Scottish Gaelic and Scots. The English novel developed in the 20th century into much greater variety and was greatly enriched by immigrant writers. It remains today the dominant English literary form.

Other globally well-known British novelists include; George Orwell, C. S. Lewis, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, D. H. Lawrence, Mary Shelley, Lewis Carroll, J. R. R. Tolkien, Virginia Woolf, Ian Fleming, Walter Scott, Agatha Christie, J. M. Barrie, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, Roald Dahl, Helen Fielding, Arthur C. Clarke, Alan Moore, Ian McEwan, Anthony Burgess, Evelyn Waugh, William Golding, Salman Rushdie, Douglas Adams, P. G. Wodehouse, Martin Amis, Anthony Trollope, Beatrix Potter, A. A. Milne, Philip Pullman, Terry Pratchett, H. Rider Haggard, Neil Gaiman and J. K. Rowling. Important British poets of the 20th century include Rudyard Kipling, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, John Betjeman and Dylan Thomas. In 2003 the BBC carried out a UK survey entitled The Big Read in order to find the "nation's best-loved novel" of all time, with works by English novelists Tolkien, Austen, Pullman, Adams and Rowling making up the top five on the list.^[13]