1 option
A history of English literature / Michael Alexander.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Alexander, Michael, 1941-2023.
- Series:
- Foundations (St. Martin's Press)
- Foundations
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- English literature--History and criticism.
- English literature.
- Physical Description:
- xii, 387 pages : illustrations, maps ; 26 cm.
- Place of Publication:
- New York : St. Martin's Press, 2000.
- Summary:
- "A History of English Literature" provides a comprehensive survey of one of the richest and oldest literatures in the world. Presented as a narrative, and usable as a work of reference, this text offers an account of literature from the beginnings of English until the present day. The author begins by examining the scope of such a history in terms of time, place, and the meaning of "English." The classical status of any particular work is open to challenge, and the notion of classical status itself is explored. The text is unrivalled in its use of pedagogical features and exhibits, offering invaluable insights into particular works, authors' biographies, and literary periods.
- Contents:
- Literary history 1
- What's included? 2
- Tradition or canon? 2
- Priorities 3
- What is literature? 4
- Language change 4
- Other literatures in English 5
- Is drama literature? 6
- Qualities and quantities 6
- Texts 7
- Primary text 7
- Secondary texts 7
- Part 1 Medieval
- 1 Old English Literature: to 1100 11
- Orientations 11
- Britain, England, English 11
- Oral origins and conversion 13
- Aldhelm, Bede, Caedmon 15
- Northumbria and The Dream of the Rood 20
- Heroic poetry 22
- Christian literature 23
- Alfred 25
- Beowulf 27
- Elegies 30
- Battle poetry 31
- The harvest of literacy 32
- 2 Middle English Literature: 1066-1500 34
- The new writing 34
- Handwriting and printing 34
- The impact of French 35
- Scribal practice 35
- Dialect and language change 36
- Literary consciousness 37
- New fashions: French and Latin 38
- Epic and romance 39
- Courtly literature 40
- Medieval institutions 42
- Authority 43
- Lyrics 44
- English prose 46
- The fourteenth century 47
- Spiritual writing 47
- Julian of Norwich 47
- Secular prose 48
- Ricardian poetry 49
- Piers Plowman 50
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 52
- John Gower 53
- Geoffrey Chaucer 55
- The Parlement of Fowls 56
- Troilus and Criseyde 58
- The Canterbury Tales 59
- The fifteenth century 62
- Drama 63
- Mystery plays 63
- Morality plays 65
- Religious lyric 65
- Deaths of Arthur 66
- The arrival of printing 68
- Scottish poetry 69
- Robert Henryson 70
- William Dunbar 70
- Gavin Douglas 71
- Part 2 Tudor and Stuart
- 3 Tudor Literature: 1500-1603 75
- Renaissance and Reformation 75
- The Renaissance 75
- Expectations 76
- Investigations 77
- England's place in the world 77
- The Reformation 78
- Sir Thomas More 79
- The Courtier 80
- Sir Thomas Wyatt 81
- The Earl of Surrey 83
- Religious prose 84
- Bible translation 84
- Instructive prose 86
- Drama 87
- Elizabethan literature 89
- Verse 89
- Sir Philip Sidney 89
- Edmund Spenser 93
- Sir Walter Ralegh 97
- The 'Jacobethans' 99
- Christopher Marlowe 100
- Song 101
- Thomas Campion 101
- Prose 102
- John Lyly 102
- Thomas Nashe 102
- Richard Hooker 103
- 4 Shakespeare and the Drama 104
- William Shakespeare 104
- Shakespeare's life 104
- The plays preserved 106
- Luck and fame 107
- The drama 108
- The commercial theatre 108
- Predecessors 109
- Christopher Marlowe 110
- The order of the plays 111
- Histories 112
- Richard II 113
- Henry IV 114
- Henry V 115
- Comedy 116
- A Midsummer Night's Dream 117
- Twelfth Night 119
- The poems 120
- Tragedy 122
- Hamlet 123
- King Lear 124
- Romances 126
- The Tempest 127
- Shakespeare's achievement 128
- His supposed point of view 129
- Ben Jonson 129
- The Alchemist 130
- Volpone 131
- 5 Stuart Literature: to 1700 132
- The Stuart century 132
- Drama to 1642 134
- Comedy 134
- Tragedy 134
- John Donne 136
- Prose to 1642 139
- Sir Francis Bacon 140
- Lancelot Andrewes 140
- Robert Burton 141
- Sir Thomas Browne 141
- Poetry to Milton 142
- Ben Jonson 142
- Metaphysical poets 143
- Devotional poets 144
- Cavalier poets 145
- John Milton 148
- Paradise Lost 150
- The Restoration 154
- The Earl of Rochester 157
- John Bunyan 158
- Samuel Pepys 159
- The theatres 159
- Restoration comedy 160
- John Dryden 161
- Satire 163
- Prose 166
- John Locke 168
- Women writers 168
- William Congreve 169
- Part 3 Augustan and Romantic
- 6 Augustan Literature: to 1790 173
- The eighteenth century 173
- The Enlightenment 174
- Sense and Sensibility 176
- Alexander Pope and 18th-century civilization 176
- Joseph Addison 176
- Jonathan Swift 177
- Alexander Pope 181
- Translation as tradition 183
- The Rape of the Lock 184
- Mature verse 186
- John Gay 188
- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu 189
- The novel 189
- Daniel Defoe 189
- Cross-currents 191
- Samuel Richardson 192
- Henry Fielding 193
- Tobias Smollett 194
- Laurence Sterne 195
- The emergence of Sensibility 197
- Thomas Gray 198
- Pre-Romantic sensibility: 'Ossian' 200
- Gothic fiction 202
- The Age of Johnson 202
- Dr Samuel Johnson 202
- The Dictionary 204
- Literary criticism 206
- James Boswell 208
- Non-fiction 209
- Edward Gibbon 209
- Edmund Burke 210
- Oliver Goldsmith 211
- Fanny Burney 212
- Richard Brinsley Sheridan 212
- Christopher Smart 214
- William Cowper 214
- Robert Burns 215
- 7 The Romantics: 1790-1837 218
- The Romantic poets 218
- Early Romantics 218
- William Blake 218
- Subjectivity 219
- Romanticism and Revolution 220
- William Wordsworth 221
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge 225
- Sir Walter Scott 227
- Younger Romantics 227
- Lord Byron 227
- Percy Bysshe Shelley 230
- John Keats 232
- Romantic prose 235
- Belles lettres 235
- Charles Lamb 236
- William Hazlitt 236
- Thomas De Quincey 237
- Fiction 237
- Thomas Love Peacock 237
- Mary Shelley 237
- Maria Edgeworth 238
- Sir Walter Scott 239
- Jane Austen 240
- Towards Victoria 243
- Part 4 Victorian Literature to 1880
- 8 The Age and its Sages 247
- The Victorian age 247
- Moral history 248
- Abundance 251
- Why sages? 252
- Thomas Carlyle 253
- John Stuart Mill 254
- John Ruskin 254
- John Henry Newman 257
- Charles Darwin 259
- Matthew Arnold 259
- 9 Poetry 261
- Victorian Romantic poetry 261
- Minor verse 261
- John Clare 261
- Alfred Tennyson 262
- Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning 265
- Matthew Arnold 266
- Arthur Hugh Clough 268
- Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti 268
- Algernon Charles Swinburne 269
- Gerard Hopkins 269
- 10 Fiction 272
- The triumph of the novel 272
- Two Bronte novels 273
- Jane Eyre 273
- Wuthering Heights 274
- Elizabeth Gaskell 275
- Charles Dickens 275
- The Pickwick Papers 276
- David Copperfield 278
- Bleak House 278
- Our Mutual Friend 279
- Great Expectations 280
- 'The Inimitable' 281
- William Makepeace Thackeray 281
- Vanity Fair 281
- Anthony Trollope 283
- George Eliot 285
- Adam Bede 286
- The Mill on the Floss 287
- Silas Marner 288
- Middlemarch 288
- Daniel Deronda 290
- Nonsense prose and verse 291
- Lewis Carroll 291
- Edward Lear 292
- 11 Late Victorian Literature: 1880-1900 293
- Differentiation 293
- Thomas Hardy and Henry James 293
- Aestheticism 296
- Walter Pater 296
- A revival of drama 297
- Oscar Wilde 297
- George Bernard Shaw 300
- Fiction 301
- Thomas Hardy 301
- Tess of the d'Urbervilles 302
- Minor fiction 304
- Samuel Butler 304
- Robert Louis Stevenson 304
- Wilkie Collins 304
- George Moore 304
- Poetry 305
- Aestheticism 305
- A. E. Housman 305
- Rudyard Kipling 306
- Part 5 The Twentieth Century
- 12 Ends and Beginnings: 1901-19 311
- The new century 311
- Fiction 313
- Edwardian realists 313
- Rudyard Kipling 313
- John Galsworthy 313
- Arnold Bennett 313
- H. G. Wells 313
- Joseph Conrad 314
- Heart of Darkness 314
- Nostromo 315
- E. M. Forster 316
- Ford Madox Ford 317
- Poetry 318
- Pre-war verse 318
- Thomas Hardy 319
- War poetry and war poets 320
- 13 From Post-War to Post-War: 1920-55 323
- 'Modernism': 1914-27 323
- D. H. Lawrence 324
- The Rainbow 326
- James Joyce 327
- Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 327
- Ulysses 329
- Ezra Pound: the London years 331
- T. S. Eliot 332
- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 333
- The Waste Land 333
- Four Quartets 336
- Eliot's criticism 337
- W. B. Yeats 337
- Hugh MacDiarmid and David Jones 339
- Virginia Woolf 339
- To the Lighthouse 341
- Katherine Mansfield 343
- Non-modernism: the Twenties and Thirties 343
- Modernism fails to catch on 346
- The poetry of the Thirties 346
- Political camps 346
- W. H.
- Auden 346
- The novel 349
- Evelyn Waugh 349
- Grahame Greene 350
- Anthony Powell 351
- George Orwell 352
- Elizabeth Bowen 352
- Fairy tales 354
- C. S. Lewis 354
- J. R. R. Tolkien 354
- Poetry 354
- The Second World War 354
- Dylan Thomas 355
- Drama 355
- Sean O'Casey 356
- 14 New Beginnings: 1955-80 358
- Drama 360
- Samuel Beckett 360
- John Osborne 363
- Harold Pinter 364
- Established protest 365
- Novels galore 366
- William Golding 366
- Muriel Spark 368
- Iris Murdoch 368
- Other writers 369
- Poetry 370
- Philip Larkin 371
- Ted Hughes 372
- Geoffrey Hill 373
- Tony Harrison 373
- Seamus Heaney 374
- Postscript on the Current 376
- Internationalization 376
- Postmodernism 376
- Novels 377
- Contemporary poetry 380.
- Notes:
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- ISBN:
- 0333913973
- 0333672267
- OCLC:
- 44172985
The Penn Libraries is committed to describing library materials using current, accurate, and responsible language. If you discover outdated or inaccurate language, please fill out this feedback form to report it and suggest alternative language.