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English literature Article Media Additional Info Article Contents Introduction The Old English period Poetry Alliterative verse The major manuscripts Problems of dating Religious verse Elegiac and heroic verse Prose Early translations into English Late 10th- and 11th-century prose The early Middle English period Poetry Influence of French poetry Didactic poetry Verse romance The lyric Prose The later Middle English and early Renaissance periods Later Middle English poetry The revival of alliterative poetry Courtly poetry Chaucer and Gower Poetry after Chaucer and Gower Courtly poetry Popular and secular verse Political verse Later Middle English prose Religious prose Secular prose Middle English drama The transition from medieval to Renaissance The Renaissance period: 1550–1660 Literature and the age Social conditions Intellectual and religious revolution The race for cultural development Elizabethan poetry and prose Development of the English language Sidney and Spenser Elizabethan lyric The sonnet sequence Other poetic styles Prose styles, 1550–1600 Elizabethan and early Stuart drama Theatre and society Theatres in London and the provinces Professional playwrights Marlowe Shakespeare’s works The early histories The early comedies The tragedies Shakespeare’s later works Playwrights after Shakespeare Jonson Other Jacobean dramatists The last Renaissance dramatists Early Stuart poetry and prose The Metaphysical poets Donne Donne’s influence Jonson and the Cavalier poets Continued influence of Spenser Effect of religion and science on early Stuart prose Prose styles Milton The Restoration Literary reactions to the political climate The defeated republicans Writings of the Nonconformists Writings of the royalists Major genres and major authors of the period Locke Chroniclers Diarists The court wits Dryden Drama by Dryden and others The 18th century Publication of political literature Journalism Major political writers Pope Thomson, Prior, and Gay Swift Shaftesbury and others The novel The major novelists Defoe Richardson Fielding Smollett Sterne Other novelists Poets and poetry after Pope Burns Goldsmith Johnson’s poetry and prose The Romantic period The nature of Romanticism Poetry Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge Other poets of the early Romantic period The later Romantics: Shelley, Keats, and Byron Other poets of the later period The novel: from the Gothic novel to Austen and Scott Discursive prose Drama The post-Romantic and Victorian eras Early Victorian literature: the age of the novel Dickens Thackeray, Gaskell, and others The Brontës Early Victorian verse Tennyson Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning Arnold and Clough Early Victorian nonfiction prose Late Victorian literature The novel Verse The Victorian theatre Victorian literary comedy The 20th century From 1900 to 1945 The Edwardians The Modernist revolution Anglo-American Modernism: Pound, Lewis, Lawrence, and Eliot Celtic Modernism: Yeats, Joyce, Jones, and MacDiarmid The literature of World War I and the interwar period The 1930s The literature of World War II (1939–45) Literature after 1945 Fiction Poetry Drama The 21st century Home Literature Literatures of the World English literature Print print Print Please select which sections you would like to print: Table Of Contents Cite verified Cite While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. Select Citation Style MLA APA Chicago Manual of Style Copy Citation Share Share Share to social media Facebook Twitter URL https://www.britannica.com/art/English-literature More Give Feedback External Websites Feedback Corrections? Updates? Omissions? Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). Feedback Type Select a type (Required) Factual Correction Spelling/Grammar Correction Link Correction Additional Information Other Your Feedback Submit Feedback Thank you for your feedback Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. Join Britannica's Publishing Partner Program and our community of experts to gain a global audience for your work! External Websites History World - History of English literature IndiaNetzone - Indian Literature - Indian English Literature United States History - History of Anchorage, Alaska, United States Jewish Virtual Library - English Literature ILoveIndia.com - Indian English Literature Britannica Websites Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. English literature - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11) English literature - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up) WRITTEN BY Peter Kemp See All Contributors Book Review Fiction Editor, The Sunday Times, London. Author of H.G. Wells and the Culminating Ape and others. See Article History English literature, the body of written works produced in the English language by inhabitants of the British Isles (including Ireland) from the 7th century to the present day. The major literatures written in English outside the British Isles are treated separately under American literature, Australian literature, Canadian literature, and New Zealand literature. Britannica Quiz Poets and Poetry (Part Two) Quiz Do you know which ancient Roman poet wrote Metamorphoses? Who wrote poetry to a woman named Laura? Test the outer reaches of what you know about poets and their poetry with this quiz. English literature has sometimes been stigmatized as insular. It can be argued that no single English novel attains the universality of the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace or the French writer Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Yet in the Middle Ages the Old English literature of the subjugated Saxons was leavened by the Latin and Anglo-Norman writings, eminently foreign in origin, in which the churchmen and the Norman conquerors expressed themselves. From this combination emerged a flexible and subtle linguistic instrument exploited by Geoffrey Chaucer and brought to supreme application by William Shakespeare. During the Renaissance the renewed interest in Classical learning and values had an important effect on English literature, as on all the arts; and ideas of Augustan literary propriety in the 18th century and reverence in the 19th century for a less specific, though still selectively viewed, Classical antiquity continued to shape the literature. All three of these impulses derived from a foreign source, namely the Mediterranean basin. The Decadents of the late 19th century and the Modernists of the early 20th looked to continental European individuals and movements for inspiration. Nor was attraction toward European intellectualism dead in the late 20th century, for by the mid-1980s the approach known as structuralism, a phenomenon predominantly French and German in origin, infused the very study of English literature itself in a host of published critical studies and university departments. Additional influence was exercised by deconstructionist analysis, based largely on the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Further, Britain’s past imperial activities around the globe continued to inspire literature—in some cases wistful, in other cases hostile. Finally, English literature has enjoyed a certain diffusion abroad, not only in predominantly English-speaking countries but also in all those others where English is the first choice of study as a second language. English literature is therefore not so much insular as detached from the continental European tradition across the Channel. It is strong in all the conventional categories of the bookseller’s list: in Shakespeare it has a dramatist of world renown; in poetry, a genre notoriously resistant to adequate translation and therefore difficult to compare with the poetry of other literatures, it is so peculiarly rich as to merit inclusion in the front rank; English literature’s humour has been found as hard to convey to foreigners as poetry, if not more so—a fact at any rate permitting bestowal of the label “idiosyncratic”; English literature’s remarkable body of travel writings constitutes another counterthrust to the charge of insularity; in autobiography, biography, and historical writing, English literature compares with the best of any culture; and children’s literature, fantasy, essays, and journals, which tend to be considered minor genres, are all fields of exceptional achievement as regards English literature. Even in philosophical writings, popularly thought of as hard to combine with literary value, thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, and Bertrand Russell stand comparison for lucidity and grace with the best of the French philosophers and the masters of Classical antiquity. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Subscribe Now Some of English literature’s most distinguished practitioners in the 20th century—from Joseph Conrad at its beginning to V.S. Naipaul and Tom Stoppard at its end—were born outside the British Isles. What is more, none of the aforementioned had as much in common with his adoptive country as did, for instance, Doris Lessing and Peter Porter (two other distinguished writer-immigrants to Britain), both having been born into a British family and having been brought up on British Commonwealth soil. On the other hand, during the same period in the 20th century, many notable practitioners of English literature left the British Isles to live abroad: James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Robert Graves, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, and Anthony Burgess. In one case, that of Samuel Beckett, this process was carried to the extent of writing works first in French and then translating them into English. Even English literature considered purely as a product of the British Isles is extraordinarily heterogeneous, however. Literature actually written in those Celtic tongues once prevalent in Cornwall, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales—called the “Celtic Fringe”—is treated separately (see Celtic literature). Yet Irish, Scots, and Welsh writers have contributed enormously to English literature even when they have written in dialect, as the 18th-century poet Robert Burns and the 20th-century Scots writer Alasdair Gray have done. In the latter half of the 20th century, interest began also to focus on writings in English or English dialect by recent settlers in Britain, such as Afro-Caribbeans and people from Africa proper, the Indian subcontinent, and East Asia. Even within England, culturally and historically the dominant partner in the union of territories comprising Britain, literature has been as enriched by strongly provincial writers as by metropolitan ones. Another contrast more fruitful than not for English letters has been that between social milieus, however much observers of Britain in their own writings may have deplored the survival of class distinctions. As far back as medieval times, a courtly tradition in literature cross-fertilized with an earthier demotic one. Shakespeare’s frequent juxtaposition of royalty in one scene with plebeians in the next reflects a very British way of looking at society. This awareness of differences between high life and low, a state of affairs fertile in creative tensions, is observable throughout the history of English literature. English literature key people David Walliams Simon Armitage Clemence Dane William Shakespeare John Milton Samuel Johnson Charles Dickens William Blake Winston Churchill Virginia Woolf related topics United Kingdom American literature England Canadian literature Literature Australian literature Western literature New Zealand literature Cornish literature Poet laureate Load Next Page Inspire your inbox – Sign up for daily fun facts about this day in history, updates, and special offers. Enter your email Subscribe By signing up for this email, you are agreeing to news, offers, and information from Encyclopaedia Britannica. Click here to view our Privacy Notice. Easy unsubscribe links are provided in every email. Thank you for subscribing! 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