The Short Oxford History of English Literature is the most comprehensive and scholarly history of English literature on the market. It offers an introductory guide to the literature of the British Isles from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present day in eleven chapters covering all the major periods of English literature chronologically. Professor Sanders provides detailed analysis of the major writers and their works and examines the impact of British literature on contemporary political, social and intellectual developments. This third edition has been revised and updated for a 21st century reader, incorporating discussion of a greater number of female and contemporary authors.
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CONTENTS
ANoteon the Text................................................................. ix
Introduction: Poets' Corners: The Development of a Canon of English Literature............................... 1
1.Old EngLISH LitErature.................................................................................................... 16
Beowulf
The Battle of Maldon and the Elegies
The Biblical Poems and The Dream of the Rood
2.Medieval Literature 1066-1510........................................................... 28
The Church, Church Building, and Clerical Historians
Early Middle English Literature
Chivalry and 'Courtly' Love
English Romances and the Gawain-Poet
Fourteenth-Century England: Death, Disruption, and Change
Langland and Piers Plowman
Geoffrey Chaucer
Gower, Lydgate, and Hoccleve
Poetry in Scotland in the Fifteenth Century
Late Medieval Drama
Late Medieval Religious Writing
Malory and Caxton
3.Renaissance and Reformation: Literature 1510-1620....................................... 83
Poetry at the Court of Henry VIII An Educated Élite: More, Elyot, and Ascham The Literature of the English Reformation Early and Mid-Sixteenth-Century Drama
The Defence and the Practice of Poetry: Puttenham and the Sidneys
Sixteenth- and Early Seventeeth-Century Prose Fiction
This Island and the Wider World: History, Chorography, and Geography
Ralegh, Spenser, and the Cult of Elizabeth
Late Sixteenth-Century Verse
Marlowe and Shakespeare as non-Dramatic Poets
Theatre in the 1590s: Kyd and Marlowe
Shakespeare's Plays
Politics and History
Tragedy and Death
Women and Comedy Ben Jonson and the Comic Theatre Jonson and the High Roman Fashion 'Debauch'd and diversivolent': Men, Women, and Tragedy
4.REVOLUTION AND RESTORATION: LITERATURE 1620-1690............................................ 186
The Advancement of Learning: Francis Bacon and the Authorized Version Andrewes and Donne
'Metaphysical' Religious Poetry: Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan
Secular Verse: Courtiers and Cavaliers
Anatomies: Burton, Browne, and Hobbes
Political Prose of the Civil War Period
Milton
Marvell
Pepys, Evelyn, and Seventeenth-Century Autobiographical Writing Varieties of Religious Writing in the Restoration Period Private Histories and Public History: Aubrey, Sprat, and Clarendon The Poetry of the Restoration Period: Rochester and Dryden Women's Writing and Women Writing in the Restoration Period 'Restoration' Drama
5.Eighteenth-Century Literature 1690-1780............................. 273
Jonathan Swift
Pope and the Poetry of the Early Century
Thomson and Akenside: The Poetry of Nature and the Pleasures of the Imagination Other Pleasures of Imagination: Dennis, Addison, and Steele Gay and the Drama of the Early Eighteenth Century Defoe and the 'Rise' of the Novel
The Mid-Century Novel: Richardson, the Fieldings, Charlotte Lennox Smollett and Sterne
Sensibility, Sentimentality, Tears, and Graveyards The Ballad, the Gothic, the Gaelic, and the Davidic Goldsmith and Sheridan: The New 'Comedy of Manners' Johnson and his Circle
6.The Literature of the Romantic Period 1780-1830.......................................... 333
Paine, Godwin, and the 'Jacobin' Novelists
Gothic Fiction Smith and Burney Cowper, Blake, and Burns Wordsworth
Coleridge, Southey, and Crabbe Austen, the 'Regional' Novel, and Scott Byron, Shelley, and Keats The 'Romantic' Essayists Clare and Cobbett
7.High Victorian Literature 1830-1880.............................................. 398
'The Condition of England': Carlyle and Dickens 'Condition of England' Fiction Macaulay, Thackeray, and Trollope The Brontë Sisters
Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelite Poets The Brownings
The Drama, the Melodrama, and the 'Sensation' Novel
The New Fiction of the 1860s: Meredith and Eliot
The 'Strange Disease of Modern Life': Mill, Arnold, Clough, and Ruskin
The 'Second Spring' and Hopkins
Coda: Carroll and Lear
8.Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature 1880-1920............................................... 457
The 'Agnostic' Fiction of the Late Century 'The Letter Killeth': Hardy, Gissing, and Moore Mystery and History: Conan Doyle, Stoker, and Stevenson 'Our Colonial Expansion': Kipling and Conrad 'Our Theatre in the 90s': London and Dublin The Edwardian Age The Edwardian Novel The Poetry
9.Modernism and its Alternatives: Literature 1920-1945 ........................... 505
'Bloomsbury' and beyond: Strachey, Woolf, and Mansfield Richardson and Lawrence
Old and New Writing: Practitioners, Promoters, and the 'Little Magazines'
Eliot, Firbank, and the Sitwells
Joyce
Inter-War Drama: O'Casey, Coward, Priestley, and Sherriff
Retrospect and Historical Memory: Graves and Jones
'Society' and Society: The New Novelists of the 1920s and 1930s
Bright Young Things and Brave New Worlds: Wodehouse, Waugh, and Huxley
The Auden Circle
'Rotten Elements': MacDiarmid, Upward, Koestler, and Orwell Looking at Britain at War
10.Post- War and Post-Modern Literature........................... 577
Dividing and Ruling: Britain in the 1950s The New Theatre The New Novelists of the 1950s Poetry since 1950
The 'New Morality': The 1960s and 1970s
Female and Male Reformulations: Fiction in the 1960s and 1970s
Drama since the 1950s
Fin de siècle: Some Notes of Late-Century Fiction
CHRONOLOGY ...................... 641
