A Short History of English Literature ( for BCS , ICS, PCS , WBCS)

                                   A Short History of English Literature

1.     Old English Period(450-1066)

2.     Middle English Period(1066-1500)

3.     Renaissance (1558- 1660 )

Elizabethan, Jacobean and Puritan Age

4.     Restoration Period ( 1660-1700)

5.     Neoclassical Age (1700-1750)

6.     Romantic Age (1798-1832)

7.     Victorian Age(1830-1890)

8.     Modern Age (1890-1960)

 Middle English Period (1066-1500)

·         Geoffrey Chaucer (1343 – 25 October 1400), known as the Father of English literature. Also known as Father of English Poetry.

·         The Hundred Years' War ( England vs. France) : 1337–1453 (116 years)

·          Magna  Carta Charter was signed in 1215

·         Father of English Essay : Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

Elizabethan Period (1558-1603)

Famous Literary Persons

• Ben Jonson
• Francis Bacon
• Thomas Lodge
• Christopher Marlowe
• William Painter
• William Shakespeare
• Sir Philip Sidney
• Edmund Spenser

University Wits:  Johm Lyle, George Peele, Thomas Kyd, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge, Thomas Nashe and Christopher Marlowe

William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptized) – 23 April 1616)

Spouse        : Anne Hathaway

·         Shakespeare wrote 38 plays, 154 sonnets and 2 other long narrative poems.

·         He was the part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men.

·         First play : Henry VI, Part 2

·         Last Play : The Two Noble Kinsmen

·         First and last sonnet : sonnet 1 and sonnet 154

Comedies	Tragedies	Romances
All's Well That Ends Well As You Like It The Comedy of Errors Love's Labor's Lost Measure for Measure The Merchant of Venice The Merry Wives of Windsor A Midsummer Night's Dream Much Ado About Nothing The Taming of the Shrew Twelfth Night The Two Gentlemen of Verona The Two Noble Kinsmen	Antony and Cleopatra Coriolanus Hamlet Julius Caesar King Lear Macbeth Othello Romeo and Juliet Timon of Athens Titus Andronicus Troilus and Cressida	Cymbeline Pericles The Tempest The Winter's Tale

Famous quotes from William Shakespeare

1.      To be, or not to be: that is the question. (Hamlet)

2.      Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. (Twelfth Night)

3.      Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once. (Julius Caesar)

4.      A man can die but once. (Henry IV, Part 2)

5.      I am one who loved not wisely but too well. (Othello)

6.      If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottage princes’ palaces. (The Merchant of Venice)

7.      We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep. (The Tempest)

8.      Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. (Macbeth)

9.      If music be the food of love play on. (Twelfth Night)

10.  All that glisters is not gold. (The Merchant of Venice)

11.  The course of true love never did run smooth. (A Midsummer Night’s Dream)

12.  Whoever loved that loved not at first sight? (As You Like It)

13.  There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. (Hamlet)

14.  Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? (Sonnet 18)

15.  Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. (Sonnet 116)

16.  This is very midsummer madness. (Twelfth Night)

17.  Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps. (Much Ado about Nothing)

18.  I cannot tell what the dickens his name is. (The Merry Wives of Windsor)

19.  We have seen better days. (Timon of Athens)

20.  What light through yonder window breaks? (Romeo and Juliet)

Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

Essays  : Of Truth, Of  Death , Of Unity in Religion/Of Religion, Of Revenge, Of Adversity , Of Simulation and Dissimulation ,Of Parents and Children ,Of Marriage and Single Life , Of Envy  , Of Love , Of Great Place , Of Boldness, Of Goodness and Goodness of Nature, Of Nobility , Of Seditions and Troubles Of Atheism ,  Of Superstition ,  Of Travel

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593):

Dramas:

a)      Dido, Queen of Carthage

b)      The Jew of Malta

c)      Edward the Second

d)     The Massacre at Paris

e)      The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus

f)       Tamburlaine the Great

Poem: Hero and Leander

Edmund Spenser (1552-1559)

Occupation        : Poet

a)      The Faerie Queene

b)      "Amoretti

c)      The Ruines of Time

d)     The Teares of the Muses

e)      Virgils Gnat

f)       Prosopopoia: or Mother Hubberds Tale

g)      The Ruines of Rome: by Bellay

h)      Muiopotmos: or The Fate of the Butterflie

i)        Visions of the Worlds Vanitie

j)        The Visions of Bellay

k)      The Visions of Petrarch

Ben Jonson (1572-1637)

Plays: Everyman in His Humour, Everyman Out of  His Humour , Volpone on the Fox, The Poetaster

Comedies: The Silent Woman, The Alchemist, A Tale of Tub

Jacobean Period ( 1603/1616-1625)

·         Ben Jonson

·         Middleton

·         John Webster

·         Heywood

Jacobean Plays are called Decadent Plays

John Webster (1580-1634)

Tragedies: The White Devil, The Duchess of Malfi

                   

                  Puritan Age (1603/1616- 1660)

Metaphysical Poets: Robert Southwell ,John Donne , George Herbert ,Richard Crashaw Abraham Cowley , Andrew Marvell , Henry Vaughan , Thomas Traherne

John Milton

Works: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonestes, Areopagitica

               Restoration Period (1660-1700)

·         Tudor was the father of King Henry VII

·         the Civil War between 1642-1649

·         Charles 1 was beheaded in 1649

·         Heroic couplet---two successive lines of verse, equal in length and with rhyme.

Poets:

                    i.            John Dryden

                  ii.            Samuel Butler ( poet)

                iii.            Alexander Pope

Dramatists:

        i.            John Dryden

      ii.            William Congreve

    iii.            Oliver Goldsmith

    iv.            George Etherege

John Dryden (1631-1700)

Works : The Way of the World, Absalom and Achitophel, Mac Flecknoe, The Hind and the          Panther, All for Love , The Conquest of Granada ,The Medal, Absalom and Achitophel

Samuel Butler (poet) 1613- 1680

Works : Hudibras

Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

Works: Essay on Criticism, Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad , Moral Essays, Essay on Man, Messiah, Ode on Solitude, Epistles to Dr. Arbuthnot

                 Neoclassical Age (1700-1750)

·         Richardson is considered as the first English novelist.

·         First English Dictionary was composed by Samuel Johnson.

·         Father of English Novel : Henry Fielding

·         Adam Smith is famous for his renowned book of Economics The Wealth of Nation in 1776

Famous Writers :

·         Joseph Adison

·         Steele

·         Jonathan Swift

·         Daniel Defoe

·         Dr. Samuel Johnson

·         Henry Fielding

·         Tobias Smollett

·         Edmund Burke

·         Oliver Goldsmith

·         Thomas Gray

·         William Blake

·         Adam Smith

·         Alexander Pope

·         Samuel Richardson

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)

Nationality: Irish

Works: Gulliver's Travels (4 parts), A Modest Proposal, A Journal to Stella, Drapier's Letters, The Battle of the Books, An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, Progress of Beauty and A Tale of a Tub

Daniel Defoe (1659–1660)

Novels: Robinson Crusoe, Captain Singleton, Memoirs of a Cavalier, A Journal of the Plague Year, Colonel Jack, Moll Flanders and Roxana

Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

Essays: Birmingham Journal, The Adventurer, The Patriot

Novels : Rasselas, The Rambler, The Idler, Preface to Shakespeare

Poems: Lives of Poets, London, Vanity of Human Wishes

Henry Fielding (1707-1754)

Novels : Joseph Andrews, Shamela, Amelia,

Samuel Richardson (1689-1761)

Novels: Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady (1748) and The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753).

William Blake( 1757-1827)

Literary movement : Romanticism

Notable works : Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The Four Zoas, Jerusalem, Milton, And did those feet in ancient time

                      Romantic Age (1798-1832)

·        French Revolution influenced the romantic Age

·        Another name : Return to Nature

·         French Revolution (1789-1799) and Louis XVI was executed

·         ‘Lyrical Ballads’ is written by Wordsworth and Coleridge.

·         Pantheism is a belief that God lives in nature or nature is God.  

·         Poet of Nature : William Wordsworth

·         Keats imitated Spenser

·         Myth maker : Shelley , Revolutionary Poet

Major Poets:

·         William Wordsworth

·         Samuel Taylor Coleridge

·         Lord Byron

·         Percy Bysshe Shelley

·         John Keats

Major Novelists:

·         Jane Austen

·         Sir Walter Scott

·         Maria Edgeworth

Prose Writers:

·         Charles Lamb

·         Thomas Dequincy

·         William Hazlitt

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

Poems: “Intimation of Immortality”, Lyrical Ballads, The Prelude, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, Tintern Abbey, Laodamia, "London, 1802, Ode to Duty,

Drama: The Borderers

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Poems : The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Christabel, The Watchman, Aids to Reflection

Critical Work : Biographic Literaria,

Lord Byron(1788-1824)

Major Works : Hours of Idleness, Don Juan (Mock Heroic Poem), Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, She Walks in Beauty" , Index of Titles, Index of First Lines

Drama : Manfred,

John Keats (1795-1821)

Poems: Endymion (1^st Poem), Hyperion, Ode to Psyche, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode to Autumn, Adonais (Elegy), 

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

Poems: Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, Music, When Soft Voices Die, The Cloud ,The Masque of Anarchy, Queen Mab, The Revolt of Islam, Adonaïs, The Defence of Poetry,

Drama : Prometheus Unbound, The Two Foscari

Jane Austen (1775-1817)

Novels: Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, Northanger Abbey, Love and Story

            Victorian Age (1830-1890)

·        Queen Victoria ascended the throne on 28 June 1838.

·        The Pied Piper of Hamelin is written by Robert Browning

·        Oxford Movement began in 1833

·        Dramatic Monologue is a kind of poem in which a speaker speaks about his crisis to an audience real or imaginary.

·        Arnold’s poetry is called a “criticism of life”.

·         

Poets:

·         Lord Alfred Tennyson

·         Robert Browning

·         E.B. Browning

·         Mathew Arnold

Novelists:

·         Charlotte Bronte

·         Charles Dickens

·         Thomas Hardy

·         Emily Bronte

Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)

Poems: Nothing Will Die , All Things Will Die, The Dying Swan , The Kraken , Mariana , Lady Clara Vere de Vere , The Lotos-Eaters , Locksley Hall, Vision of Sin, The Two Voices , "Ulysses"

Robert Browning ( 1812-1889)

Poems : Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, Fra Lippo Lippi, Andrea Del Sarto, and My Last Duchess, Porphyria's Lover, How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix, the diptych Meeting at Night, Home Thoughts from Abroad, The Pied Piper of Hamelin. Men and Women, The Ring and the Book, Dramatis Personae, Dramatic Lyrics, Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, Asolando

Mathew Arnold (1822-1888)

Notable works : "Dover Beach", "The Scholar-Gipsy", "Thyrsis", Culture and Anarchy,

Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855)

Novels : Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette, The Professor

Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

Notable works      : The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations

Modern Age (1890-1960)

·        Boer war took place between 1899 -1902

·        Feminism is a 20 century movement for the freedom of women.

Novelist :

·        E.M. Foster

·        Joseph Conrad

·        D.H. Lawrence

·        James Joyce

Poets:

·        W.B. Yeats

·        Hopkins

·        T.S. Eliot

·        W.H. Auden

E.M. Foster (1879-1970)

Novels: Where Angels Fear to Tread, The Longest Journey, A Room with a View, Howards End, A Passage to India, Maurice

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

Nobel Prize : 1948

Poems: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", The Waste Land, "The Hollow Men”, "Ash Wednesday" and Four Quartets

Ernest Hemingway(1899-1961)

Novels : The Sun Also Rises, "Indian Camp" ,A Farewell to Arms ,Death in the Afternoon ,Green Hills of Africa ,For Whom the Bell Tolls ,The Old Man and the Sea

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) Irish

Poems: Maud Gonne, The Lake Issle of Innisfree, Easter 1916, The Second Coming, Sailing to Byzantium, Adam’s Curse, The Rose Tree, Song of the Old Mother, The Song of The Happy Shepherd, The Wanderings of Oisin

Edward Morgan Forster

Novels: Where Angels Fear to Tread, Aspects of the Novel, A Room with a View, "condition-of-England", A Passage to India, Maurice, The Longest Journey, Howards End

Samuel Butler (novelist) (1835-1902)

·        Butler translated the Iliad

Major works by Butler

a)     Erewhon, or Over the Range

b)    The Fair Haven

c)     The Odyssey of Homer

d)    The Way of All Flesh

W. Somerset Maugham

Notable works: Of Human Bondage, The Moon and Sixpence, Cakes and Ale, The Razor's Edge ,The Letter, The Circle, East of Suez

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)

Notable works: The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Typhoon, Nostromo , The Secret Agent , Under Western Eyes

                              

                                    American Poets

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Poems: Wild Nights Wild Nights, I Felt a Funeral in My Brain, I Taste a Liquor, A first Mute Coming, A Light exists in Spring

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

Poems: Franklin Evans, Leaves of Grass, Manly Health and Training, Drum-Taps, Democratic Vistas, Memoranda during the War, Specimen Days

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Poems: A Boy's Will, "After Apple-Picking", "The Death of the Hired Man", "Mending Wall", "Birches", "Out, Out", "The Oven Bird", "The Road Not Taken", "Fire and Ice", "Nothing Gold Can Stay", "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"

Langston Hughes

               American novelists

Earnest Hemingway

Notable works:  The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea,

Notable Awards:        Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1953)

                                         Nobel Prize in Literature (1954)

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

Novels: Fanshawe , The Scarlet Letter , The House of the Seven Gables , The Blithedale Romance , The Marble Faun

Short Stories: "Roger Malvin's Burial" , "My Kinsman, Major Molineux", "Young Goodman Brown"