top of page

How old is english literature

VISIT WEBSITE >>>>> http://gg.gg/y83ws?1504015 <<<<<<






Imagination became the main source of poetry. The Victorian Literature was marked with Victorian poetry and novels in the 19th century. The major poets of this period were Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson. Due to increased adult literacy in the 19th-century novels were introduced. The greatest English novelist of the 19th century Charles Dickens who varied tones and used irony in most of his works.

Modern literature that expresses the loss of faith, uncertainty and suffering emerged in the twentieth century as a result of political changes and the two world wars that destroyed the sense of confidence in the Victorian literature.

Bernard Shaw with plays that are inspired by social criticism is considered the best twentieth-century dramatist. Major literary figures include Samuel Beckett in drama, W. H Auden and Dylan Thomas in poetry.

Login Order now. Call Now! Order now. Search for:. Order now! Get Custom Essay from:. Free essay sample on the given topic "Advantages Of Studying Locally". Johnson started a paper named The Rambler. His Autobiography contains valuable material concerning his life. Edmund Burke is one of the masters of English prose. He was a great orator also.

His speech On American Taxation is very famous. The English novel proper was born about the middle of the eighteenth century. Samuel Richardson is considered as the father of English novel. He published his first novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded in This novel is written in the form of letters. The character Pamela is a poor and virtuous woman who marries a wicked man and afterwards reforms her husband.

Clarissa is the beautiful daughter of a severe father who wants her to marry against her will. Clarissa is a very long novel. Henry Fielding is another important novelist. He published Joseph Andrews in His greatest novel is Tom Jones. Laurence Sterne is now remembered for his masterpiece Tristram Shandy which was published in These novels are unique in English literature. Sterne blends humour and pathos in his works. Horace Walpole is famous both as a letter writer and novelist.

His one and only novel The Castle of Otranto deals with the horrific and supernatural theme. The main stream of poetry in the eighteenth century had been orderly and polished, without much feeling for nature. The publication of the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads in came as a shock. They together with Southey are known as the Lake Poets, because they liked the Lake district in England and lived in it.

William Wordsworth was the poet of nature. In the preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth set out his theory of poetry. His views on poetical style are the most revolutionary. The Prelude is the record of his development as a poet. It is a philosophical poem. Tintern Abbey is one of the greatest poems of Wordsworth.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the most noteworthy. Biographia Literaria is his most valuable prose work. Don Juan ranks as one of the greatest of satirical poems. The Vision of Judgment is a fine political satire in English.

PB Shelley was a revolutionary figure of Romantic period. When Shelley was studying at Oxford, he wrote the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism which caused his expulsion from the university.

Prometheus Unbound is a combination of the lyric and the drama. Of his many odes, the most remarkable is Ode to the West Wind.

Adonais is an elegy on the death of John Keats. John Keats is another great Romantic poet who wrote some excellent poems in his short period of life. The Eve of St Agnes is regarded as his finest narrative poem.

His Letters give give a clear insight into his mind and artistic development. Robert Southey is a minor Romantic poet. Alfred Lord Tennyson is a chief figure of later nineteenth century poetry.

In Memoriam caused a great stir when it first appeared. In Memoriam is the most deeply emotional, and probably the greatest poetry he ever produced. Maud and Other Poems was received with amazement by the public.

Idylls of the King, Enoch Arden, Harold etc. Robert Browning is an English poet and playwright whose mastery of dramatic monologues made him one of the foremost Victorian poets. He married Elizabeth Barrett, another famous poet during the Victorian period. Matthew Arnold was an English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of Rugby School.

Arnold valued natural scenery for its peace and permanence in contrast with the ceaseless change of human things. His descriptions are often picturesque, and marked by striking similes. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator in the late nineteenth century England.

Rossetti wrote about nature with his eyes on it. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, wife of Robert Browning wrote some excellent poems in her volume of Sonnets from the Portuguese. Rudyard Kipling and Francis Thompson also wrote some good poems during the later nineteenth century.

Jane Austen is one of the greatest novelists of nineteenth century English literature. Her first novel Pride and Prejudice deals with the life of middle class people. The style is smooth and charming. Her second novel Sense and Sensibility followed the same general lines of Pride and Prejudice. Her characters are developed with minuteness and accuracy. Charles Dickens is considered as one of the greatest English novelists.

Dickens has contributed some evergreen characters to English literature. He was a busy successful novelist during his lifetime. The Pickwick Papers and Sketches by Boz are two early novels. No English novelists excel Dickens in the multiplicity of his characters and situations. He creates a whole world people for the readers. He sketched both lower and middle class people in London.

William Makepeace Thackeray was born in Calcutta and sent to England for education. William Thackeray is now chiefly remembered for his novel The Vanity Fair. While Dickens was in full tide of his success, Thackeray was struggling through neglect and contempt to recognition. He protested against the feeble characters of his time.

Jane Eyre is her greatest novel. This was followed by Shirley and Villette. Her plots are overcharged and she is largely restricted to her own experiments.

Her one and only novel Wuthering Heights is unique in English literature. It is the passionate love story of Heathcliff and Catherine. George Eliot is the pen-name of Mary Ann Evans. Adam Bede was her first novel. Her next novel, The Mill on the Floss is partly autobiographical.

Silas Marner is a shorter novel which gives excellent pictures of village life. Thomas Hardy published his first work Desperate Remedies anonymously. Under the Greenwood Tree, one of the lightest and most appealing of his novels established him as a writer.

It was set in the rural area he was soon to make famous as Wessex. Far From the Madding Crowd is a tragi-comedy set in Wessex. The rural background of the story is an integral part of the novel, which reveals the emotional depths which underlie rustic life. The Mayor of Casterbridge also deals with the theme of Man versus Destiny.

The outcry with the publication of Jude the Obscure led Hardy in disgust to abandon novel writing. Mary Shelley , the wife of Romantic poet PB Shelley is now remembered as a writer of her famous novel of terror, Frankestein.

Frankestein can be regarded as the first attempt at science fiction. Edgar Allan Poe was a master of Mystery stories. He was too haste in writing novels and this led to the careless, imperfect stories.

He has a great place in the field of historical novels. His earliest novel was The Naval Officer. All his best books deal with the sea. Marryat has a considerable gift for plain narrative and his humour is entertaining.

Charles Lamb is one of the greatest essayists of nineteenth century. Lamb started his career as a poet but is now remembered for his well-known Essays of Elia. His essays are unequal in English.

He is so sensitive and so strong. His wife, Mary Lamb also wrote some significant essays. It is written in the manner of dreams. Thomas Carlyle is another prose writer of nineteenth century.

His works consisted of translations, essays, and biographies. Thomas Macaulay Lord Macaulay wrote extensively. His History of England is filled with numerous and picturesque details. Charles Darwin is one of the greatest names in modern science. He devoted almost wholly to biological and allied studies. His longest book is Modern Painters. Unto this Last is a series of articles on political economy. Samuel Butler , the grandson of Dr.

Samuel Butler was inspired by the Darwinian theory of evolution. He was an acute and original thinker. He exposed all kinds of reliogious, political, and social shams and hypocrisies of his period. Besides being a great poet, Mathew Arnold also excelled as an essayist. His prose works are large in bulk and wide in range.

Of them all his critical essays are probably of the greatest value. Ever since its publication, this novel continues to be popular among both the children and adult readers. The long reign of Queen Victoria ended in There was a sweeping social reform and unprecedented progress. The reawakening of a social conscience was found its expression in the literature produced during this period. Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay but soon moved to Lahore.

He worked as a news reporter in Lahore. Kipling was a prolific and versatile writer. His insistent proclamation of the superiority of the white races, his support for colonization, his belief in the progress and the value of the machine etc.

He is now chiefly remembered for his greatest work, The Jungle Book. M Forster wrote five novels in his life time. After his wife's death, Donne underwent a serious religious conversion, and wrote much fine devotional verse.

The best known of the other metaphysicals are George Herbert , Andrew Marvell and Henry Vaughan John Milton who was Cromwell's secretary, set out to write a great biblical epic, unsure whether to write in Latin or English, but settling for the latter in Paradise Lost. John Dryden also wrote epic poetry, on classical and biblical subjects. Though Dryden's work is little read today it leads to a comic parody of the epic form, or mock-heroic.

The best poetry of the mid 18th century is the comic writing of Alexander Pope Pope is the best-regarded comic writer and satirist of English poetry.

Among www. Serious poetry of the period is well represented by the neo-classical Thomas Gray whose Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard virtually perfects the elegant style favoured at the time. Restoration comedy On the death of Oliver Cromwell in plays were no longer prohibited. A new kind of comic drama, dealing with issues of sexual politics among the wealthy and the bourgeois, arose.

This is Restoration Comedy, and the style developed well beyond the restoration period into the mid 18th century almost. The total number of plays performed is vast, and many lack real merit, but the best drama uses the restoration conventions for a serious examination of contemporary morality. Prose fiction and the novel Jonathan Swift , wrote satires in verse and prose.

He is best- known for the extended prose work Gulliver's Travels, in which a fantastic account of a series of travels is the vehicle for satirizing familiar English institutions, such as religion, politics and law.

Another writer who uses prose fiction, this time much more naturalistic, to explore other questions of politics or economics is Daniel Defoe , author of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders. The first English novel is generally accepted to be Pamela , by Samuel Richardson : this novel takes the form of a series of letters; Pamela, a virtuous housemaid resists the advances of her rich employer, www. After Fielding, the novel is dominated by the two great figures of Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen , who typify, respectively, the new regional, historical romanticism and the established, urbane classical views.

Novels depicting extreme behaviour, madness or cruelty, often in historically remote or exotic settings are called Gothic. They are ridiculed by Austen in Northanger Abbey but include one undisputed masterpiece, Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley Romanticism The rise of Romanticism A movement in philosophy but especially in literature, romanticism is the revolt of the senses or passions against the intellect and of the individual against the consensus.

The publication, in , by the poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge of a volume entitled Lyrical Ballads is a significant event in English literary history, though the poems were poorly received and few books sold. The elegant latinisms of Gray are dropped in favour of a kind of English closer to that spoken by real people supposedly.

Actually, the attempts to render the speech of ordinary people are not www. Robert Burns writes lyric verse in the dialect of lowland Scots a variety of English. Later Romanticism The work of the later romantics John Keats and his friend Percy Bysshe Shelley ; husband of Mary Shelley is marked by an attempt to make language beautiful, and by an interest in remote history and exotic places.

George Gordon, Lord Byron uses romantic themes, sometimes comically, to explain contemporary events. Romanticism begins as a revolt against established views, but eventually becomes the established outlook. Wordsworth becomes a kind of national monument, while the Victorians make what was at first revolutionary seem familiar, domestic and sentimental.

Both are prolific and varied, and their work defies easy classification. Tennyson makes extensive use of classical myth and Arthurian legend, and has been praised for the beautiful and musical qualities of his writing. Browning's chief interest is in people; he uses blank verse in writing dramatic monologues in which the speaker achieves a kind of self- portraiture: his subjects are both historical individuals Fra Lippo Lippi, Andrea del Sarto and representative types or caricatures Mr.

Sludge the Medium. Gerard Manley Hopkins is notable for his use of what he calls "sprung rhythm"; as in Old English verse syllables are not counted, but there is a pattern of stresses. Hopkins' work was not well-known until very long after his death. The Victorian novel The rise of the popular novel In the 19th century, adult literacy increases markedly: attempts to provide education by the state, and self-help schemes are partly the cause and partly the result of the popularity of the novel.

Publication in instalments means that works are affordable for people of modest means. The change in the reading public is reflected in a change in the subjects of novels: the high bourgeois world of Austen gives way to an interest in characters of humble origins. The great novelists write works which in some ways transcend their own period, but which in detail very much explore the preoccupations of their time.

The complexity of his best work, the variety of tone, the use of irony and caricature create surface problems for the modern reader, who may not readily persist in reading. Charlotte is notable for several good novels, among which her masterpiece is Jane Eyre, in which we see the heroine, after much adversity, achieve happiness on her own terms. Its concerns are more romantic, less contemporary than those of Jane Eyre - but its themes of obsessive love and self-destructive passion have proved popular with the 20th century reader.

The beginnings of American literature The early 19th century sees the emergence of American literature, with the stories of Edgar Allan Poe , the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne , Herman Melville , and Mark Twain Samuel Langhorne Clemens; , and the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson


Recent Posts

See All

Comments


bottom of page