Foreword
Chapter 1 The Old English (Anglo-Saxon)Period·Beowulf·The
Middle English Period Beowulf·The Middle English Period
Chapter 2 Chaucer·The Pre Elizabethan Period·More
Chapter 3 The Elizabethan Age·Spenser·Sidney·Marlowe
Chapter 4 Shakespeare·Bacon·Jonson·King James'' Bible
Chapter 5 The 17th Century·Donne·Milton·Dryden·Bunyan·The
Restoration Theater
Chapter 6 The Classic
Age·Pope·Johnson·Gray·Goldsmith·Sheridan
Chapter 7 Movement toward
Romanticism·Thomson·Young·Cowper, Crabbe·Blake·Bums
Chapter 8 18th-Century
Fiction·Swift·Defoe·Richardson·Fielding·Sterne·Smollett
Chapter 9 The Romantic
Period·Wordsworth·Coleridge·Scott·Austen
Chapter 10 Byron·Shelley·Keats
Chapter 11 The Victorian Period·Victorian
Prose·Carlyle·Mill·Newman
Chapter 12 Victorian Fiction·Dickens·Thackeray
Chapter 13 Charlotte and Emily Bronte·Meredith
Chapter 14 George Eliot·Trollope·Butler
Chapter 15 Hardy·Gissing·Moore·Wilde·Stevenson
Chapter 16 Victorian Poetry·Tennyson·Browning·Arnold
Chapter 17 Clough·Hopkins·Edward Fitzgerald''s Rubaiyat·The
Aesthetic Movement
Chapter 18 Victorian Drama·Shaw·Wilde
Chapter 19 The Early 20th Century·The Edwardians·The
Georgians·The War Poets
Chapter 20 The 1920s·Woolf·Joyce
Chapter 21 Lawrence·Yeats·Imagism·T. S. Eliot
Chapter 22 Poetry of the 1930s·Auden·The Audenic
Group·Thomas·Empson
Chapter 23 Fiction of the
1930s·Huxley·OrweU·Waugh·Greene·Isherwood
Chapter 24 Postwar Poetry
Chapter 25 Postwar Fiction
Chapter 26 Postwar Drama
Notes and References
Index
內容試閱:
Medieval Literature: A Brief Introduction4
The date that even a child of three in England is
supposed to know is 1066, the year of the conquest of England by
the French-speaking Normans. It was the year in which the Normans
came under William the Conqueror, and the last Anglo-Saxon King
Harold died with an arrow shot through his eye at the battle of
Hastings. It was also the year that marked the beginning of the
Middle English or Anglo-Norman period 1066-1400. The Norman line
of kings sat on the throne for some 90 years and gave place to the
Angevin kings or the Plantangenets in 1154. King Henry II and his
descendants stayed in power for 245 years until they were
superseded by the House of Lancaster in 1399 when the last of the
Plantangenets, Richard II, was dethroned. This happened just one
year before Chaucer died. Regarding this period there are a few
occurrences of historic magnitude that should be kept in mind:
1 The Establishment of the Feudal System:
William the Conqueror did this effectively within a short space of
time. He grabbed Anglo-Saxon land by force and gave it to his
nobles and followers. These became lords of manors demanding
allegiance from their Anglo-Saxon serfs and owed it to their
immediate superiors. The hierarchy was a multi-tiered degradation
with the king at the top keeping all the power in his hands. The
relative peace that followed brought power and wealth and made the
milieu congenial to the growth of art and literature.
2 The 1381 Peasant Uprising:
Within the system the nobles and the aristocrats had
all the power and privileges while the serfs remained as wretched
as ever. The widespread disaffection led eventually to the peasants
revolt in 1381 which was led by Wat Tyler of Kent and Jack Straw of
Essex. 100,000 people marched on London, destroyed manor-houses,
burnt court papers—records of their bondage, and demanded the
abolition of serf slavery and a general pardon. Though it was
eventually put down, serfdom died out gradually.
3 The Completion of the Domesday Book
1086: Though undertaken as a tax-book or rent-roll to provide the
king with an estimate of his resources, the Domesday Book serves
also as a historical record of Anglo-Saxon institutions, customs,
and way of life which would have otherwise been lost to time.