UECE 2009

Imaginative works have been written in English for over a thousand years, and, in historical terms, most of them are primarily the heritage of England. As with the language itself, such literature can be divided into Old, Middle, and Modern periods, the modern phase subdividing conveniently into compartments whose labels relate to monarchs (Tudor, Elizabethan, Jacobean, Victorian), cultural phases and assumptions (Augustan, Romantic, Modernist, etc.), and, most recently, varieties (American Literature, Indian English Literature, etc.).

Texts from Anglo-Saxon times survive in the late manuscript form; their composition can seldom be certainly dated and their authorship is often unknown. They are among the oldest specimens of literature in a European vernacular. The longest and finest work, the heroic poem Beowulf, is known only in a manuscript of c.1000, and tells in alliterative verse a story concerning Germanic speakers of the Baltic, where the earliest forms of English originated. Like much other Old English poetry, it contains traces of oral creation. The heroic tradition includes The Battle of Maldon, written soon after the battle against the Danes (991) which it celebrates. There are also elegiac and reflective poems, including ‘The Wanderer’ and the ‘The Seafarer’, that may date from the 7c.

Old English prose consisted of translations from Latin and such records as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle begun in 890 under the direction of King Alfred of Wessex and continuing until 1154. It records the principal events of contemporary history, and is an important witness to the development of English over the period. Most extant Old English Literature is in West Saxon; few traces remain from the earlier Northumbrian, except such short pieces as the ‘Hymn of Caedmon’ c(670). After the Norman Conquest (1066), English was subordinate to Latin as the language of learning and religion and the Norman French of court and government. Surviving manuscripts show that poems were being written in English from the 12c onwards; many are fragmentary, but there are lyrics and verse romances that attest to a vigorous culture, embodying the pre-Conquest history and legends, as in the 13c poem ‘Havelok the Dane’. Gradual changes in the language, and the adoption of rhymed metrical verse in place of the Old English alliterative measure, can be traced through the early medieval period.

In the 14c, English emerged as a new language with few inflections and a strong admixture of French vocabulary. Chaucer moved from a close imitation of French and Italian poetry to write the Canterbury Tales (c.1387), whose styles often vary according to the teller of tale. He wrote in the East Midland dialect, which in due course became the standard literary language. In the West Midland dialect, there was a revival of alliterative verse: Langland (14c) wrote Piers Plowman, a long moral and political allegory with glimpses of contemporary life; and an unknown poet or poets produced the allegorical Pearl and the romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. At the same time, vernacular prose was developing: mainly the 14c homiletic and theological work of Richard Rolle, John Wycliffe, and others.

Drama appeared in the mystery plays, whose extant cycles come mainly from the Midlands and the North of England, and provide evidence of the speech of the period. The Arthurian legends that had inspired many lays and romances were collected by Thomas Malory (15c) in Morte D’Arthur, whose prose style varies with the sources from which he draws but reflects a sense of assurance. The mystery plays continued to be acted into the 16c, but a new type, the allegorical morality play, in which characters are personified virtues and vices, was a precursor of later secular drama.

In early Tudor England, the influence of the Italian Renaissance showed in the poetry of Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, including the use of the sonnet. A rougher, more satirical native tradition was carried on by John Skelton (c.1460-1529), who praised and sometimes imitated earlier writers, while recognizing that their language was old fashioned, at the same time regarding contemporary English as unstable and inadequate for a poet.

The printer William Caxton shared this concern. He was aware that printing made a standard literary language preferable and it was largely through the efforts of printers that written English had by the 17c become more uniform. In the later 16c, English came to be more fully accepted as a medium in which the traditional genres could be written, but many scholars distrusted its stability and continued to use Latin for their treatises. The vitality of Elizabethan writing owed much to both free borrowings from ancient and modern tongues.

The supreme achievement of the late 16c and early 17c was drama performed by an organized profession in permanent theatres. The primacy of William Shakespeare should not overshadow the work of his contemporaries: pioneers of a new type of dramatic tragedy that used neither Biblical nor classical subjects included Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe (1564—93). The drama showed that literary English could be spoken effectively for public purposes, in blank verse and in prose.

In the first half of the 17c, a time of struggle between Parliament and King, lyrics in the classical manner of Jonson were written by Cavalier (Royalist) poets. A distinctive new kind of poetry was labeled metaphysical by Samuel Johnson from its concern with philosophical and theological issues. It is characterized by elaborate use of language with unexpected images and quaint conceits: elaborate and extended metaphors or similes. The leading metaphysical poet was John Donne, powerful in erotic and devotional poetry and using similar language and figures for both.

John Milton, regarded by many as the greatest poet of the century, was both Puritan and Parliamentarian, his early poetry (lyrical, pastoral, and elegiac) veiling his austerity in delicate, even sensuous language. His greatest work was the Christian epic Paradise Lost (1671).

The beginnings of the novel can be seen in the narratives of Aphra Behn and Daniel Defoe. John Bunyan in Pilgrims’s Progress (1678, 1684) combined narrative allegory with Biblical themes and cadences. The old open-air theatres, closed through Puritan pressures in 1642, were reopened with indoor stages, presenting mainly witty and satirical comedies of manners, in prose that remained elegant even when its content was coarse and scurrilous.

For over a century after the Restoration, the heroic couplet was the dominant poetic form, which Dryden and Pope used to write largely satirical and polemical works. Because of its attention to classical principles and the craft of verse, the period has been called neo-classical or Augustan. However, the most important literary development of the 18c was neither poetical nor classical. Within a few decades, the novel was fully established, with the work of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollet, and Laurence Stern. Continuous narrative, divided into long chapters and paragraphs, incorporated representations of speech from different registers, classes, and dialects, bringing the full resources of the language into literary use.

Literary works written in English are said to be part of the most ancient texts registered in a