English literature
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Selected English-language writers:
Geoffrey Chaucer
,
William Shakespeare
,
Jane Austen
,
Mark
Twain
,
Virginia Woolf
,
T. S. Eliot
,
Vladimir Nabokov
,
Toni Morrison
,
Salman Rushdie
.
The focus of this article is on literature in the
English language
from anywhere, not just the
literature of
England
, so that it includes writers from
Scotland
, the whole of
Ireland
,
Wales
, as
well as literature in English from former
British colonies
, including the US. However, up until
the early 19th century, it deals with the literature written in English of
Britain
and
Ireland
.
English literature
is generally seen as beginning with the
epic poem
Beowulf
, that dates from
between the 8th to the 11th centuries, the most famous work in
Old English
, which has achieved
national epic
status in England, despite being set in
Scandinavia
. The next important landmark is
the works of the poet
Geoffrey Chaucer
(c. 1343–1400), especially
The Canterbury Tales
. Then
during The
Renaissance
, especially the late 16th and early 17th centuries, major drama and
poetry was written by
William Shakespeare
,
Ben Jonson
,
John Donne
and many others. Another
great poet, from later in the 17th century, was
John Milton
(1608–74) author of the
epic poem
Paradise Lost
(1667). The late 17th and the early 18th century are particularly associated with
satire
, especially in the poetry of
John Dryden
and
Alexander Pope
, and the prose works of
Jonathan Swift
. The 18th century also saw the first British novels in the works of
Daniel Defoe
,
Samuel Richardson
, and
Henry Fielding
, while the late 18th and early 19th century was the
period of the
Romantic poets
Wordsworth
,
Coleridge
,
Shelley
and
Keats
.
[
citation needed
]
It was in the
Victorian era
(1837–1901) that the novel became the leading
literary genre
in
English,
[1]
dominated especially by
Charles Dickens
, but there were many other significant
writers, including the
Brontë
sisters, and then
Thomas Hardy
, in the final decades of the 19th
century. Americans began to produce major writers in the 19th century, including novelist
Herman Melville
, author of
Moby Dick
(1851) and the poets
Walt Whitman
and
Emily
Dickinson
. Another American,
Henry James
, was a major novelist of the late 19th and early
twentieth century, while Polish-born
Joseph Conrad
was perhaps the most important British
novelist of the first two decades of the 20th century.
[
citation needed
]
Irish writers were especially important in the 20th century, including
James Joyce
, and later
Samuel Beckett
, both central figures in the
Modernist
movement. Americans, like poets
T. S.
Eliot
and
Ezra Pound
and novelist
William Faulkner
, were other important modernists. In the
mid 20th century major writers started to appear in the various countries of the British
Commonwealth
, several who have been
Nobel
-laureates. Many major writers in English in the
20th and 21st centuries have come from outside the
United Kingdom
. The term
Postmodern
literature is used to describe certain tendencies in post-World War II literature. It is both a
