This book intends to give the students and readers a general knowledge of the development of British literature since Anglo-Saxon period to the present day and a critical examination of the representative works of major English literary men and women. I call this book A History of British Literature instead of English Literature because it includes the literature of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland as well as of England. It was in 1920 that Ireland became partitioned from the United Kingdom when the southern twenty-six counties seceded from the country.
The Anglo-Saxon Period 449-1066
Introduction
The Venerable Bede and Caedmon
King Alfred the Great
Beowulf
The Exeter Book
The Medieval Period 1066-1485
Introduction
Medieval Romance
Folk Ballads
John Wycliffe and William Langland
Drama in the Middle Ages
Geoffrey Chaucer
The Elizabethan Age 1485-1625
Introduction
Thomas More
Sir Philip Sidney
Edmund Spenser
Christopher Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh
Minor Playwrights
William Shakespeare
Francis Bacon
King James Bible
The Seventeenth Century 1625-1700
Introdution
Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets
John Donne and the Metaphysical Poets
John Milton
John Bunyan
John Dryden
The Age of Neo-Classicism 1700-1764
Introduction
Alexander Pope
Jonathan Swift
Richard Steele and Joseph Addison
Samuel Johnson and James Boswell
The Novel of the Eighteenth Century
Daniel Defoe
Samuel Richardson
Henry Fielding
Tobias Smollett
Laurence Sterne
Oliver Goldsmith
Pre-Romantic Period 1764-1798
Introduction
Horace Walpole
Ann Radcliffe
Thomas Gray
Robert Burns
William Blake
The Romantic Age 1798-1837
Introduction
William Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
George Gordon Lord Byron
Percy Bysshe Shelley
John Keats
William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb
Mary Shelley
Sir Walter Scott
Jane Austen
The Victorian Age 1837-1901
Introdution
Alfred Tennyson
Robert Browning
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Charles Dickens
William Makepeace Thackeray
Matthew Arnold
The Bronte Sisters
Thomas Hardy
Oscar Wilde
The Modernist Age 1901-1945
Introdution
William Butler Yeats
T.S.Eliot
W.H.Auden
Joseph Conrad
James Joyce
The Postmodem Period 1945-Present
Introduction
Samuel Beckett
Harold Pinter
William Golding
Doris Lessing
Bibliography
Index