Highlights of the British literature

Highlights of British Literature: Genres, Famous Writers

Old English

English, as we know it, descends from the language spoken by the north Germanic tribes who settled in England from the 5th century A.D. onwards. They had no writing (except runes, used as charms) until they learned the Latin alphabet from Roman missionaries. The earliest written works in Old English (as their language is now known to scholars) were probably composed orally at first, and may have been passed on from speaker to speaker before being written. We know the names of some of the later writers (Cædmon, Ælfric and King Alfred) but most writing is anonymous. Old English literature is mostly chronicle and poetry - lyric, descriptive but chiefly narrative or epic. Epic poems  were thus very popular, and many, including  Beowulf , have survived to the present day in the rich corpus of  Anglo-Sax on literature .

Beowulf ( /ˈbeɪ.ɵwʊlf/ ; in  Old English   [ˈbeːəwʊlf ] ) is the conventional title of an  Old English   heroic   epic poem consisting of 3182  alliterative long lines , set in  Scandinavia , commonly cited as one of the most important works of  Anglo-Saxon literature . Its composition by an anonymous  Anglo-Saxon  poet is dated between the 8th and the early 11th century.

From 1066 onwards, the language is known to scholars as Middle English. Ideas and themes from French and Celtic literature appear in English writing at about this time, but the first great name in English literature is that of Geoffrey Chaucer (?1343-1400). 

Слайд с фото Geoffrey Chaucer 

The most significant Middle English author was  Geoffrey Chaucer  who was active in the late 14th century. Often regarded as the father of English literature, Chaucer is widely credited as the first author to demonstrate the artistic legitimacy of the  vernacular   English language , rather than French or Latin.  The Canterbury Tales  was Chaucer's  magnum opus , and a towering achievement of  Western culture . The first recorded association of Valentine's Day  with  romantic love  is in Chaucer's  Parlement of Foules  1382.

Middle English

Tudor lyric poetry

Modern lyric poetry in English begins in the early 16th century with the work of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547).

Слайд с Sir Thomas Wyatt 

Wyatt, who is greatly influenced by the Italian, Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) introduces the sonnet and a range of short lyrics to English, while Surrey (as he is known) develops unrhymed pentameters (or blank verse) thus inventing the verse form which will be of great use to contemporary dramatists.

Elizabethan and Jacobean eras

The English playwrights were intrigued by Italian model: a conspicuous community of Italian actors had settled in London and  Giovanni Florio  had brought much of the  Italian language and culture to England. It is also true that the Elizabethan Era was a very violent age and that the high incidence of political assassinations in  Renaissance  Italy (embodied by  Niccolò Machiavelli 's  The Prince ) did little to calm fears of popish plots. As a result, representing that kind of violence on the stage was probably more cathartic for the Elizabethan spectator. 

William Shakespeare   stands out in this period as a  poet  and  playwright  as yet unsurpassed.

Shakespeare was not a man of letters by profession, and probably had only some grammar school education. He was neither a lawyer, nor an aristocrat as the "university wits" that had monopolised the English stage when he started writing. But he was very gifted and incredibly versatile, and he surpassed "professionals" as  Robert Greene  who mocked this "shake-scene" of low origins. Though most dramas met with great success, it is in his later years (marked by the early reign of  James I ) that he wrote what have been considered his greatest plays:  Hamlet ,  Romeo and Juliet ,  Othello ,  King Lear ,  Macbeth ,  Antony and Cleopatra , and  The Tempest , a tragicomedy  that inscribes within the main drama a brilliant pageant to the new king. Shakespeare also popularized the  English sonnet  which made significant changes to  Petrarch 's model.

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 . Others who followed Jonson's style include  Beaumont and Fletcher , who wrote the brilliant comedy,  The Knight of the Burning Pestle . In the story, a couple of grocers wrangle with professional actors to have their illiterate son play a leading role in a drama. He becomes a knight-errant wearing, appropriately, a burning pestle on his shield. Seeking to win a princess' heart, the young man is ridiculed much in the way  Don Quixote  was.

Augustan literature

The term   Augustan literature  derives from authors of the 1720s and 1730s themselves, who responded to a term that  George I of England  preferred for himself. The literature of the period is overtly political and thoroughly aware of critical dictates for literature. It is an age of exuberance and scandal, of enormous energy and inventiveness and outrage, that reflected an era when English, Scottish, and Irish people found themselves in the midst of an expanding economy, lowering barriers to education, and the stirrings of the  Industrial Revolution .

The most known writer from Augustan literature was   Jonathan Swift  

Renaissance drama

The first great English dramatist is Marlowe.

Слайд с картинкой Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)

Before the 16th century English drama meant the amateur performances of Bible stories by craft guilds on public holidays. Marlowe's plays (Tamburlaine; Dr. Faustus; Edward II and The Jew of Malta) use the five act structure and the medium of blank verse, which Shakespeare finds so productive.

Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745) was an  Irish [2]   satirist ,  essayist , political  pamphleteer  (first for the  Whigs , then for the  Tories ), poet and cleric who became  Dean  of  St . Patrick's Cathedral , Dublin .

He is remembered for works such as  Gulliver's Travels ,  A Modest Proposal ,  A Journal to Stella ,  Drapier's Letters ,  The Battle of the Books ,  An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity , and  A Tale of a Tub . Swift is probably the foremost prose satirist in the  English language , and is less well known for his  poetry . Swift originally published all of his works under  pseudonyms —such as  Lemuel Gulliver , Isaac Bickerstaff ,  M.B. Drapier —or anonymously. He is also known for being a master of two styles of satire: the  Horatian  and  Juvenalian styles.

Romanticism

The generation of Romantic poets includes  Lord Byron ,  Percy Bysshe Shelley  and  John Keats . Byron, however, was still influenced by 18th-century satirists and was, perhaps the least 'romantic' of the three. 

Interesting fact from period of Romanticism – was created one of the most well-known nowadays genres.

The vampire genre .

Polidori's  The Vampyre  was published in 1819, creating the literary  vampire genre .

English language literature since 1900

The major lyric poet of the first decades of the 20th century was  Thomas Hardy . The author of the classic novels Tess of the d'Urbervilles  and  Far from the Madding Crowd , Hardy concentrated on poetry after the harsh response to his last novel,  Jude the Obscure .

From the early 1930s to late 1940s, an informal  literary  discussion group associated with the English faculty at the University of Oxford, were the " Inklings ". Its leading members were the major  fantasy  novelists;  C. S. Lewis and  J. R. R. Tolkien .

Lewis is known for his fiction, especially  The Screwtape Letters  1942,  The Chronicles of Narnia  and  The Space Trilogy ,

while Tolkien is best known as the author of  The Hobbit  1937,  The Lord of the Rings , and  The Silmarillion .

Nowadays literature

The most known writers are:

Helen Fielding 's  Bridget Jones's Diary  1996, and its sequel  Bridget Jones : The Edge of Reason  1999, chronicle the life of  Bridget Jones , a thirtysomething single woman in London. Alex Garland 's works include  The Beach  1996,  Giles Foden  wrote the  Last King of Scotland  1998, and  Joanne Harris 's most notable work is  Chocolat  1999.  Anthony Horowitz 's  Alex Riderseries , begins with  Stormbreaker  2000.

And of course the most famous among all the British writer at present - J. K. Rowling

J. K. Rowling 's  Harry Potter  fantasy series, is a collection of seven fantasy novels that chronicle the adventures of the adolescent  wizard   Harry Potter , the idea for which Rowling conceived whilst she was on a train trip from Manchester to London in 1990. The series begins with  Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone  1997, and ends with the seventh and final book  Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows  2007.

Nowadays as we see, British literature continues to live! And we hope it will live forever !