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2. English literature

3. members Guide teachers: Students: 1. 4. 2. 5. 3.

4. English Literature Literature is the artistic expression of profound thoughts, which is replete with spontaneous and intense passions, imaginative ideas and reflective viewpoints of the literary men. It is exposed in such an untechnical form as to make it more comprehensible, giving aesthetic pleasure and relief to the mind of the common man. It enhances our vision of life and we begin to look at nature with new eyes.

5. History of English literature

6. Old age The first works in English, written in Old English, appeared in the early Middle Ages (the oldest surviving text is Cædmon'sHymn). The oral tradition was very strong in the early English culture and most literary works were written to be performed. Epic poems were thus very popular and many, including Beowulf, have survived to the present day in the rich corpus of Anglo-Saxon literature that closely resemble today's Icelandic, Norwegian, North Frisian and the Northumbrian and Scots English dialects of modern English.

7. Middle English literature In the 12th century, a new form of English now known as Middle English evolved. This is the earliest form of English literature which is comprehensible to modern readers and listeners, though not easily. Middle English lasts up until the 1470s, when the Chancery Standard, a form of London-based English, became widespread and the printing press regularized the language.

8. Middle English literature There are three main categories of Middle English Literature: Religious, Courtly love, and Arthurian. William Langland’s Piers Plowman, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are considered as the great works of Middle English literature

9. Renaissance literature Following the introduction of a printing press into England by William Caxton in 1476, vernacular literature flourished. The Reformation inspired the production of vernacular liturgy which led to the Book of Common Prayer, a lasting influence on literary English language. The poetry, drama, and prose produced under both Queen Elizabeth I and King James I constitute what is today labelled as Early modern (or Renaissance).

10. Elizabeth era The Elizabethan era saw a great flourishing of literature, especially in the field of drama. The Italian Renaissance had rediscovered the ancient Greek and Roman theatre, and this was instrumental in the development of the new drama, which was then beginning to evolve apart from the old mystery and miracle plays of the Middle Ages. The Italians were inspired by Seneca and Plautus. The plays like Gorboduc by Sackville & Norton and The Spanish Tragedy by Kyd, of that time, provided much material for Hamlet, William Shakespeare who stands out to be a poet and playwright as yet unsurpassed.

11. Jacobean literature After Shakespeare's death, the poet and dramatist Ben Jonson was the leading literary figure of the Jacobean era (The reign of James I). However, Jonson's aesthetics hark back to the Middle Ages rather than to the Tudor Era: his characters embody the theory of humours. According to this contemporary medical theory, behavioral differences result from a prevalence of one of the body's four "humours" (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile) over the other three; these humours correspond with the four elements of the universe: air, water, fire, and earth. This leads Jonson to exemplify such differences to the point of creating types, or clichés.

12. Augustan literature Literary life in England flourishes so impressively in the early years of the 18th century that contemporaries draw parallels with the heyday of Virgil, Horace and Ovid at the time of the emperor Augustus. The new Augustan Age becomes identified with the reign of Queen Anne (1702-1714), though the spirit of the age extends well beyond her death.

13. Augustan literature The oldest of the Augustan authors, Jonathan Swift, first makes his mark in 1704 with The Battle of the Books and A Tale of a Tub. These two tracts, respectively about literary theory and religious discord, reveal that there is a new prose writer on the scene with lethal satirical powers

14. 18th century literature During the Age of Sensibility, literature reflected the worldview of the Age of Enlightenment (or Age of Reason) – a rational and scientific approach to religious, social, political, and economic issues that promoted a secular view of the world and a general sense of progress and perfectibility.

15. 18th century literature During the end of the 18th century, Horace Walpole's 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, created the Gothic fiction genre, that combines elements of horror and romance. The pioneering gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe introduced the brooding figure of the gothic villain which developed into the Byronic hero.

16. Victorian literature It was in the Victorian era (1837–1901) that the novel became the leading form of literature in English. Most writers were now more concerned to meet the tastes of a large middle class reading public than to please aristocratic patrons. The best known works of the era include the emotionally powerful works of the Brontë sisters; the satire Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray; and the realist novels of George Eliot;

17. Charles Dickens was one of the Victorian writers in literature. His famous works include The Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great Expectations (1961)

18. Romanticism Major political and social changes at the end of the 18th century, particularly the French Revolution, prompted a new breed of writing known as Romanticism.  William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge began the trend for bringing emotionalism and introspection to English literature, with a new concentration on the individual and the common man. The reaction to urbanism and industrialization prompted poets to explore nature, for example the Lake Poets.

19. Romanticism William Blake is considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age

20. romanticism William Blake's "The Tyger," published in his Songs of Innocence and of Experience is a work of Romanticism

21. English literature since 19th century The major lyric poet of the first decades of the 20th century was Thomas Hardy. Following the classic novels Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy then concentrated on poetry after the harsh response to his last novel, Jude the Obscure. The most widely popular writer of the early years of the 20th century was arguably Rudyard Kipling, a highly versatile writer of novels, short stories and poems.

22. Modern English literature Modernist literature is the literary expression of the tendencies of modernism, especially high modernism. Modernistic literature tends to revolve around the themes of individualism, mistrust of institutions (government, religion) and the disbelief in any absolute truths, and to involve a literary structure that departs from conventionality and realism. Modernism as a literary movement reached its height in Europe between 1900 and the middle 1920s. Modernist literature addressed aesthetic problems similar to those examined in non-literary forms of contemporaneous Modernist art, such as Modernist painting.

23. Modern English literature Modernist authors include Knut Hamsun, James Joyce, Mikhail Bulgakov, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, John Steinbeck, Dylan Thomas and many more. The best-selling works of the 20th century are estimated to be Quotations from Chairman Mao (1966, 900 million copies), Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997, 120 million copies), And Then There Were None (1939, 115 million copies) and The Lord of the Rings (1954/55, 100 million copies). The Lord of the Rings was also voted "book of the century" in various surveys.

24. Post-modern literature The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain tendencies in post-World War II literature. It is both a continuation of the experimentation championed by writers of the modernist periods and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature. Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, is difficult to define and there is little agreement on the exact characteristics, scope, and importance of postmodern literature.

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