The largest body of literature written in a modern language, English literature has developed continuously over 15 centuries from the Anglo-Saxon period to modern times. The introduction (c.1476) of printing to England by William \TCaxton\t exercised a stabilizing influence on the language. Caxton's press, unlike those of other European printers, produced books in the vernacular for the general reader, so laying the foundation of a literary language that survives fundamentally unchanged to the present day and gives English literature a greater degree of coherence than other national literatures. \TAmerican literature\t, \TAustralian literature\t, \TCanadian literature\t in English, and \TAfrican literature\t in English are discussed in separate articles. THE ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD England's oldest literature grew out of the confluence of two traditions: the paganism of the Anglo-Saxons, who invaded the island in the 5th and 6th centuries, and the Christian culture introduced to Northumbria by the Irish missionary Aidan and to Kent (in 597) by \TAugustine of Canterbury\t. The invaders' Teutonic heritage stressed the love of battle, fidelity to one's lord, and the implacability of fate. The Christian influence tended to soften this heroic outlook. Both influences are evident in \TBeowulf\t, the first English \Tepic\t. Although probably composed in Northumbria sometime during the 8th century, the poem is set in 6th-century Scandinavia. No other Old English epic has survived, but a brief 7th-century poem, "Widsith," recounts the travels of a scop--the name given to the professional singers who recited heroic verse to a lord and his retainers while they sat feasting in the mead hall. Accompanying themselves on harps, scops also sang elegiac lyrics such as "The Wife's Lament," "Deor," "The Ruin," "The Seafarer," and the "The Wanderer," of which all but the first are preserved in the \TExeter Book\t. Anglo-Saxon heroic and elegiac verse was characterized by regular stress, free rhythm, end-stopped and unrhymed lines, abundant alliteration, and the use of conventional figures of speech known as kennings. Much of the 7th-century poet \TCaedmon\t's famous "Hymn," for example, is a series of kennings for the word God. Like Anglo-Saxon religious poetry of later centuries as well, it suggests both the pagan heritage and the strong devotional tenor of a recently converted people. Only the fragmentary "Hymn" can be attributed to Caedmon with certainty, but on its strength alone he has been called the father of English song. Various other works have been attributed to him, including the paraphrastic poems Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel. The same is true of the 9th-century poet \TCynewulf\t, who may have come from Mercia. Although the evidence is inconclusive, he has been credited with writing not only Andreas--the "Christian Beowulf"--but also "The Dream of the Rood," a beautifully imaginative lyrical meditation that anticipates Middle English dream visions. Cynewulf's masterpiece, signed by him, is the saint's life Elene, which includes an account of the discovery of the cross. Before the reign of Alfred the Great (871-99) prose writers, working in Latin, produced numerous homilies and chronicles. Aldhelm (c.640-709) wrote a number of Latin \Triddles\t, later translated into Old English and found today in the Exeter Book. A generation later, \TBede\t, the greatest Anglo-Saxon scholar, wrote about 40 books, the most famous of which is the Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731). After Alfred became (871) King of Wessex, he encouraged learning, employed court scholars, and translated several books into English. It has been said that he thus founded English prose; certainly his versions of Pope Gregory I's Pastoral Care, Saint Augustine's Soliloquies, and Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy increased the prestige and use of the vernacular. Alfred's reign also saw the beginning of a major national historical record, The \TAnglo-Saxon Chronicle\t, which includes such stirring set-pieces as the poem "The Battle of Brunanburh." A century after Alfred, as an outcome of the 10th-century monastic revival, English prose was developed stylistically in the copious writings of the churchmen \TAElfric\t, surnamed "the Grammarian," and Wulfstan (d. 1023). Aelfric's prose in particular has an ease and clarity not achieved again in English until the age of Dryden. THE ANGLO-NORMAN PERIOD The Norman victory in 1066 at the Battle of Hastings paved the way for the expansion in England of a continental influence that had already begun to make itself felt under Edward the Confessor, who had been raised at the Norman court. But the administrative consolidation and resulting cultural fusion between the Anglo-Saxons and their conquerors was not always evident linguistically: the court continued to speak French, the clerical language remained Latin, and the people continued to speak English. Great achievements were made in Latin prose. At Peterborough, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was continued in English to the year 1154. But William of Malmesbury (c.1090-c.1143) chose to write his history of the English kings in Latin, and that language was the preeminent one for historians. It was used to greatest effect by the Welsh cleric \TGeoffrey of Monmouth\t. Geoffrey's partly legendary History of the Kings of Britain (1135), which helped to popularize the Arthurian legends (see \TArthur and Arthurian legend\t), was adapted into French verse by the historians Geoffrey Gaimar and Robert Wace of Jersey. Wace's account was then retold in English by the priest \TLayamon\t. His poem The Brut (c.1205) is the first truly English version of the story of Arthur, signifying a nationalistic trend also evident in the anonymous metrical romances King Horn (c.1250) and Havelock the Dane (c.1310). Both are based on Norman sources but celebrate the deeds of native English heroes. Not all Anglo-Norman writers favored the growth of romance. The anonymous author of the English Cursor Mundi (c.1300) condemns such secular works and proposes scriptural instruction rather than entertainment as the appropriate burden of poetry. Didactic writings did indeed flourish at this time, from the metrical homilies of Orm and Robert Mannyng to the anonymous guides The Pricke of Conscience (14th century) and The Ancrene Riwle. The latter work, composed in the early 13th century as a devotional manual for nuns, expresses the stern asceticism as well as the mysticism of the age. In spite of such writings and the spread of the somewhat didactic \Tmystery\t and \Lmiracle play\ls from the 13th century, nonreligious works were also popular. The 13th-century songs "Sumer is icumen in" and the "Cuckoo Song" suggest the attention to seasonal change that is characteristic of the vernacular lyrics of the period; "Alysoun" (c.1300) is among the best of the contemporary love lyrics. The late-13th-century beast \Tfable\t The Fox and the Wolf and the early-14th-century \Tfabliau\t The Land of Cockaygne anticipate Chaucer in their satirical attitude toward social ills. The poem of debate, best represented by the charming The Owl and the Nightingale (c.1200), mirrors the growth of Norman legal disputation. The Norman hegemony thus ensured the deepening of the religious impulse in English writing, while adding to Anglo-Saxon heroic thought the conventions and sentiments of continental romance. Even the so-called alliterative revival of the second half of the 14th century did not arrest the gradual replacement of stressed verse by regularly rhymed, syllabic verse. Two writers of genius, William \TLangland\t and the Gawain poet, chose the traditional unrhymed, alliterative line for their poetry. But because they lived in the north or west, away from London, their influence was limited. Langland's apocalyptic dream vision, \TPiers Plowman\t, includes moving accounts of the wretched life of the 14th-century poor. The anonymous Gawain poet takes his name from the chivalric romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, set in the time of King Arthur, but he also wrote the religious poems \TPearl\t, Purity, and Patience. THE AGE OF CHAUCER Langland and the Gawain poet were major writers, but their work marked the end, not the continuation, of a tradition, for neither their language nor their alliterative verse form were destined to survive. It was Geoffrey \TChaucer\t, writing in a London dialect in rhymed, syllabic verse, who determined the future course of English poetry. Despite the changes in grammar, inflection, and orthography of the language that have occurred since Chaucer's time, the educated modern reader has little difficulty in understanding his work. Chaucer, a courtier and civil servant, possessed an extraordinary breadth of vision. His \TCanterbury Tales\t, begun c.1387, portray a wide range of humanity and present a vivid and detailed picture of the England that he knew, depicting not types but individuals. His long narrative poem Troilus and Criseyde shows a rare grasp of human character, often cynical and ribald, yet tenderly humorous and sympathetic. Though rarely read today, John \TGower\t influenced 15th-century verse almost as much as did his contemporary, Chaucer. Gower's long, formal, didactic poem, the Confessio Amantis (1390), was imitated in various ways by Chaucer's London disciples Thomas \THoccleve\t and John \TLydgate\t, as well as by the Scottish Chaucerians, William \TDunbar\t and Robert \THenryson\t. The 15th century also marked the high point in English medieval drama, with mystery cycles such as the Towneley or Wakefield Plays and morality plays such as \TEveryman\t. The last medieval chronicler of the Arthurian legends, Sir Thomas \TMalory\t, is thought to have written his prose romance \TMorte Darthur\t while in prison; he may have died there, a victim of the Wars of the Roses that raged from 1455 to 1485. During the 16th century, the Renaissance, already well established in Italy and France, gradually reached English shores. Henry VIII was a cultivated sovereign; among his courtiers were Sir Thomas \TWyatt\t, who introduced the sonnet to England, and Henry Howard, Earl of \TSurrey\t. Another poet of the reign was John \TSkelton\t, a vigorous satirist and sometimes a delightful lyricist. Thomas \TMore\t, the statesman, humanist, and scholar, also wrote poetry but is far better remembered for his history, Richard III (1513); several religious works, notably A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation, written about 1534 and published in 1553; and \TUtopia\t, whose title has passed into the language as an everyday word. THE ELIZABETHAN AGE Although King Henry's daughter, Elizabeth I, ascended the throne in 1558, the literary revival that bears her name did not definitely take shape until she was a middle-aged woman. Drama became the chief medium that Elizabethan writers chose, but the earliest English blank-verse play, Gorboduc (1561), had little lasting effect. The poetic drama in England was first successfully launched by a group of brilliant and well-educated young men called the \TUniversity Wits\t--Robert \TGreene\t, Thomas \TLodge\t, Thomas \TNashe\t, and George \LPeel\le. Since the Wits were learned men, their attitude toward the primitive conditions of the English stage was often somewhat condescending. Thomas \TKyd\t, however, had a natural sense of the theater, and his play The Spanish Tragedy continued to fascinate audiences for decades following its production (c.1587). During that same year Christopher \TMarlowe\t composed \TTamburlaine the Great\t, a resoundingly poetic historical melodrama. It was succeeded by his masterpiece \TDoctor Faustus\t and by The Jew of Malta and Edward the Second. What Ben Jonson called "Marlowe's mighty line" transformed Elizabethan drama, and an aspiring newcomer who learned from his example was William \TShakespeare\t. Shakespeare Shakespeare's Olympian genius defies brief description. His life as professional dramatist and, subsequently, as actor-manager lasted from about 1592 until 1616 and moved through four stages: the period of his early historical plays, from Henry VI to Richard III, and his first comedies, such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The \TTaming of the Shrew\t; the period between 1594 and 1599, during which he wrote \TJulius Caesar\t, \TRomeo and Juliet\t, A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S \TDream\t, The \TMerchant of Venice\t, and his series of later historical dramas; the epoch of his greatest tragedies, \THamlet\t, \TOthello\t, \TKing Lear\t, \TMacbeth\t, and some of his most successful comedies; and his last phase, from 1608 to 1616, during which his dramatic method and his attitude toward existence underwent a subtle change. Then, like Prospero in The \TTempest\t, he seems to have "drowned his book" and bidden his art farewell. It was a triumphant record. Shakespeare revolutionized the drama, enlarging the audience's vision of human life and enriching the language. His plays, then as now, appealed to a wide audience. They reveal both a thorough knowledge of literature and a profound sympathy with the language and behavior of the common man. The shrewd commercial dramatist and the supremely gifted artist cannot be separated. Shakespeare's Contemporaries and Successors Ben \TJonson\t, Shakespeare's friendly rival, was a far more erudite poet, chiefly remembered for his brilliant \TVolpone\t, Every Man in His Humour, and The Alchemist. His Roman tragedies, Sejanus and Catiline, suffer from a comparison with those of Shakespeare. Playwrights of the 17th century, such as George \TChapman\t, John \TFord\t, Cyril \TTourneur\t, and John \TWebster\t, carried on the grand Shakespearean tradition but sought to achieve more violent effects. Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, for example, explores the tragic consequences of incestuous passion. Besides Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, the era is noted for its lyric poets, among them such exquisite songwriters as Thomas \Tcampion\t and the famous courtier-poet Sir Walter Raleigh, and writers of moving and mellifluous sonnets, such as Samuel \TDaniel\t, Michael \TDrayton\t, Philip \TSidney\t, and Edmund \TSpenser\t. A major poet, Edmund Spenser is best known for his masterpiece, The \TFaerie Queene\t, a complex allegorical romance dedicated to Queen Elizabeth. Spenser's allegories are labyrinthine, but they form a richly decorative pattern. Elizabethan Prose The Elizabethans loved eloquence; whether learned and sententious, or satirical and popular, their prose writings reflect this taste. In 1597, Francis \Tbacon\t, a lawyer, politician, and philosopher who announced that he had "taken all knowledge to be my province," published his pithy epigrammatic Essays. A more elaborate stylist was Richard \THooker\t, the author of a majestic treatise, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, which attempted in weighty but finely balanced phrases to justify "the eternal law of God." Prominent among the satirists and pamphleteers were Thomas \TDekker\t and Stephen Gosson. Both were accomplished journalists, and the contemporary public enjoyed their fierce invective and their gift for picturesque description. Historians also flourished. Raleigh launched a History of the World that he did not live to complete; the works of Raphael \THolinshed\t became important source material for Shakespeare's history plays. THE 17TH CENTURY The Elizabethan Age was characterized by pride and self-confidence; the 17th century was haunted by doubt and dissension, and, between 1642 and 1649, torn by bitter civil strife. Few periods, however, have had so various a literary output. It produced a host of poets, religious and profane, and a large array of prose writers, some primarily imaginative artists, others important contributors to the history of ideas. Early Jacobean prose is seen at its best in the Authorized Version of the Old and New Testaments (1611), the joint work of 47 scholars, which was not only the mainstay of the Protestant faith but a rich resource from which innumerable Englishmen have learned to use their native language. The Metaphysical Poets The career of John \TDonne\t, a particularly gifted poet, spans the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. During his youth he wrote a series of strikingly original love poems. During middle age, however, he renounced the pleasures of the world, wrote magnificent religious sonnets, and, having joined the Anglican church, became a powerful preacher. Donne was the most famous of the \Tmetaphysical\t \Lpoet\ls, a group that included Abraham \TCowley\t, Richard \TCrashaw\t, Andrew \TMarvell\t, Henry \TVaughan\t, and Henry King. Poets of ideas, attracted by the achievements of philosophy and science, the metaphysical poets sought to probe deeply into the origins of human feelings. They employed complex allusive images that struck 18th-century critics as absurdly farfetched, but their work has had considerable impact on modern poetry. More simple and direct were the devotional poems of George \THerbert\t, the pastoral lyrics of Robert \THerrick\t, and the courtly verses of two cavalier poets, Richard \TLovelace\t and Sir John \TSuckling\t. Prose Modern English prose did not begin to develop until the second half of the 17th century. In earlier prose writing, the Elizabethan tradition had not yet completely lost its hold. Erudite information was compiled for its own sake. Robert \TBurton\t produced The \TAnatomy of Melancholy\t, a vast encyclopedia of fact and fantasy, with lengthy quotations from earlier writers and a wealth of picturesque tales. Izaak \TWalton\t also compiled what pretended to be a learned treatise, The Compleat Angler; or, the Contemplative Man's Recreation. It is, however, far more literary than scientific, including numerous decorative digressions woven around its central theme. The greatest prose writer of the epoch undoubtedly was Sir Thomas \TBrowne\t, a cultured physician and master of verbal music and the author of Religio Medici (1642). Browne's prose style has a symphonic beauty; its cadences are invariably melodious; and his main subject, his personal view of a humanistic Christian faith, is extended to embrace the whole universe. Browne was at once a prose poet and a natural mystic. "Life is a pure flame," he wrote in a later work, The Garden of Cyrus, "and we live by an invisible Sun within us." A very different conception of Christianity inspired John \TBunyan\t. His famous allegory The \TPilgrim's Progress\t (1678) was one of over 50 works he issued; from a 20th-century point of view, his spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding (1666), has an even stronger interest. Bunyan's style is plain, with few pretensions to elegance, and, in this sense, it is modern. The same impression of modernity is given by John \TAubrey\t, an inimitable anecdotalist and author of unforgettable portrait sketches, and by philosophers and theorists such as Thomas \THobbes\t and John \TLocke\t. The diarists John \TEvelyn\t and Samuel \TPepys\t also strike an altogether modern note. Each was a member of the newly founded Royal Society and took a keen interest in the scientific experiments conducted there. Restoration Literature For English writers who lived on into the second half of the 17th century, the civil wars had been a tragic interlude, dividing them from, in John Dryden's phrase, the "giant race before the flood." Nonetheless, one great poet, John \TMilton\t, who had published his earliest poems during the reign of Charles I and played an active political role during the time of the Commonwealth, wrote his noblest work, \TParadise Lost\t, after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. Never had a more ambitious epic poem been written in the English language; Milton's stated aim was to "justify the ways of God" by illustrating the history of man's relations with his maker. Both in glorious verse and in well-knit controversial prose, Milton towered over his contemporaries; even his mighty successor John \TDryden\t did not reach so high a level. Dryden was distinguished, however, by his amazing versatility. A master of prose and a grandly effective satirist, he was also an accomplished lyric poet and dramatist. Thomas \TOtway\t and Dryden were the last English playwrights to handle blank verse with Shakespearean strength and ease. Even as tragedy declined, however, a new type of comedy, the fashionable \Tcomedy\t \TOf\t MANNERS, emerged. Dramatists such as William \TCongreve\t, Sir George \TEtherege\t, Sir John \TVanbrugh\t, and William \TWycherley\t delighted Restoration playgoers, when the London theaters, closed by a Puritan government in 1642, were reopened under royal patronage. Though their subjects were frivolous, sometimes scandalous, the complicated plots and sparkling dialogue of the plays reflected the libertine tastes and pursuits of Charles II's rakish courtiers. THE AUGUSTANS The 18th century in English literature has been called the Augustan Age, the Neoclassical Age, and the Age of Reason. Its immediate roots, of course, were in the literature of the latter half of the 17th century, notably the works of Dryden. But when Dryden died in 1700, he left a vacant throne, and it remained vacant until Alexander \TPope\t boldly took his place. Alexander Pope Pope's life was a triumph of willpower. Despite his personal and social disadvantages, Pope combined imaginative genius with abundant nervous energy, and his rise was smooth and rapid. In 1711 he published Essay on Criticism, and in 1712, The Rape of the Lock, a brilliant mock-heroic poem. Next he translated the Iliad and the Odyssey, and, after concluding this formidable task, he embarked on The Dunciad, a ferocious literary satire, and set out to satirize society as a whole with a succession of poems called Moral Essays. In all these undertakings, Pope made a finely polished weapon of the heroic couplet. Although he was a classicist, his work at every stage shows traces of romantic feeling. Pope's Contemporaries and Successors Pope, like Dryden, dominated his own period and provided a model that his successors accepted, sometimes all too willingly. Nineteenth-century critics subsequently evaluated his influence as deadening. The Augustan Age, apart from Pope, was a period of minor poets--John \TGay\t, whose greatest achievement was the lively \TBeggar's Opera\t; James \TThomson\t (1834-82), author of The Seasons, a pleasing but conventional tribute to the beauties of the British landscape; William \TCollins\t and William \TCowper\t, who focused on quiet domestic themes. Only Thomas \TGray\t showed a touch of real genius. His methods of composition were so hesitant and tentative, however, that his \TElegy Written in a Country Churchyard\t took him eight years to complete. William Blake While Gay, Thomson, and the others were all much admired and widely read, William \TBlake\t, a poet, visionary, painter, and engraver, was writing and printing his "Prophetic Books" and his lyric poems. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), his greatest prophetic work, was preceded and followed by Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794). Blake stands alone; he bears little relation to the period in which he lived. The mythological system he created is so abstruse and complex that it is sometimes unintelligible, but the eccentric poet-artist's visions are imbued with a blazing originality. Blake was exceptional; he rebelled against his age, rejecting moral and aesthetic standards that, as a rule, 18th-century writers readily embraced. They believed that their age was one of steady progress, comparable to the most civilized period of the Roman Empire. 18th-Century Prose Poetry had declined since Pope's death, but prose flourished under many different guises. Daniel \TDefoe\t pioneered the realistic modern novel with \TRobinson Crusoe\t (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722), and Pope's friend and contemporary Jonathan \Tswift\t enchanted the world with \TGulliver's Travels\t (1726). Joseph \TAddison\t and Sir Richard \TSteele\t collaborated to improve the art of essay writing. Their tone was carefully light; Addison's aim, he said, was to bring philosophy out of the library and lead her to the tea table. The Novel In 1740 the 18th-century novel received a further impetus. The middle-aged printer Samuel \TRichardson\t achieved fame with the long novel Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, followed by the even longer Clarissa Harlowe (1747-48). His subjects were always women, their temptations, tragedies, and triumphs; his stories, told in the form of letters, are a remarkable blend of effusive emotionalism and acute psychological analysis. Laurence \TSterne\t, too, introduced not only a new impressionistic way of writing but a revolutionary mode of feeling. Under his influence the adjective sentimental became a term of high praise. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1760-67) is a picturesque medley of autobiographical details, cynical reflections on life, and sentimental and romantic musings. By comparison with Richardson and Sterne, Henry \TFielding\t, Tobias \TSmollett\t, and Oliver \TGoldsmith\t are straightforward storytellers. Fielding's greatest novel, \TTom Jones\t (1749), gives an exciting and frequently ludicrous account of a young man's progress through the world, enlivened by passages in which the novelist buttonholes his reader with digressions--a method that Sterne also used and that Thackeray would later adopt. Smollett's Peregrine Pickle (1751) and Humphrey Clinker (1771) also have peripatetic heroes who come into violent contact with innumerable odd, outrageous characters. Goldsmith's \TVicar of Wakefield\t, immensely popular in its own day, depicts the victory of domestic virtue over fashionable vice and therefore appears a little contrived to modern readers, but the easy simplicity of its prose style delighted the 18th-century public. Later 18th-Century Prose Excepting Blake's poetry, the greatest triumphs of the late 18th century were in prose writing. Biography, considered as an art, and history, treated at once as an art and as a learned discipline, had both come of age before the period ended. James \TBoswell\t claimed of his \TLife of Samuel Johnson\t, which he produced in 1791 after tremendous efforts, that "my mode of biography . . . is the most perfect that can be conceived." The claim was justified; his portrait of Samuel \TJohnson\t is the first full-scale modern biography. Earlier biographers tended to envisage their subjects from a historical or moral viewpoint; Boswell's attitude toward Johnson is intensely personal, passionately concerned with the man whom he describes--not only with his genius and moral worth, but also with his human errors. Had Boswell failed to complete his book, Johnson would be remembered for his dictionary, as a versifier and essayist, and as the author of two poems, "London" and "The Vanity of Human Wishes," and Lives of the Poets; but his fame would not have been worldwide. Meanwhile, Edward \Tgibbon\t, the founder of modern historiography, had launched his magnum opus, The \TDecline and Fall of the Roman Empire\t. The opening volume, published in 1776, found its way, the author informs us, to "every table" and "almost every toilette." The last volume did not appear until 1788. Although Gibbon's research as a historian has been largely superseded, he remains one of the most original English stylists who has applied his art to history. Among the Decline and Fall's keenest admirers was the Scottish philosopher David \THume\t, who, like Gibbon, was a cultivated agnostic and a brilliant stylist. Few philosophers are more consistently readable. He believed that philosophy was an important branch of literature and that the philosophic writer should address himself to the ordinary educated man or woman. His early Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1749), and his six-volume History of England (1754-61) are all distinguished by the same lucidity of diction and occasional ironic touches. Equally celebrated as prose writers were Adam \TSmith\t, whose Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations helped found the new science of political economy, and Edmund \TBurke\t, "the Demosthenes of England," statesman, pamphleteer, and master of rhetorical eloquence. Drama and Later Novels English literature during the latter half of the 18th century also had a less solemn aspect. Richard Brinsley \TSheridan\t revived the comedy of manners with The \TRivals\t and The \TSchool for Scandal\t. Horace \TWalpole\t produced an incomparable history of his own age under the guise of private letters that he required the recipients to send back, and his fantastic dream novel, The \TCastle of Otranto\t, was the precursor of the \TGothic romance\t. In a somewhat similar vein, William \TBeckford\t composed The History of the Caliph Vathek, a haunting Arabian fairy tale for sophisticated readers. Finally, Fanny \TBurney\t gave English fiction a delicately feminine turn. The earliest female novelist, Burney owed much of her immense success to the fact that, although a gentlewoman and the daughter of the famous musicologist Charles Burney, she had dared to write of low life. Her first and best novel, Evelina; or, a Young Lady's Entrance into the World (1778), is now appreciated mainly as an amusing period piece; but her record of her life at the gloomy Court of George III is a minor masterpiece. THE 19TH CENTURY The 19th century, like the 17th, was a period of change and conflict. Especially in 1848, the year of European revolutions, violent clashes between "the two nations," as Benjamin \TDisraeli\t had called the rich and the poor, frequently seemed close at hand. Industrial progress had altered the face of the country, and parliamentary reform shifted the balance of power; but new social problems had replaced the old. In literature a series of eloquent prophets, notably John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle, thundered against the purblind materialism of the money-mad Industrial Age. The Romantic Movement Meanwhile, \Tromanticism\t, already in evidence before the century began, had transfigured English literature. In 1798, Samuel Taylor \TColeridge\t and William \TWordsworth\t had issued a joint volume, \TLyrical Ballads\t. Coleridge contributed The \TRime of the Ancient Mariner\t, and Wordsworth wrote a series of poems on subjects "chosen from ordinary life," using the "real language" of ordinary people. Both rejected the pompous idiom of earlier 18th-century verse. As a young man, Wordsworth had been deeply stirred by a visit (1791-92) to revolutionary France. Human nature, he felt, had been reborn; to be young was "very Heaven." Although he became quickly disillusioned, it had proved a seminal experience. The keynotes of romantic poetry were its cult of youth and freedom, its reliance on the sovereign force of love, and its sense of a close relationship with nature, which the Augustans had tended to regard as merely a decorative background designed to set off the activities of man. For romantics, nature had a mysterious message that only a true poet could interpret and convey. Wordsworth and Coleridge were long lived, but their imaginative genius gradually declined. Wordsworth's \Tode\t: INTIMATIONS \TOf\t \Timmortality\t FROM RECOLLECTIONS \TOf\t \TEarly\t \LChild\lhood appeared in 1807; however, after The White Doe of Rylstone (1815), his verses lost their youthful fire. His masterpiece, The \Tprelude\t, the story of his poetic education, was never published in his lifetime. Coleridge's best-known poems, including KUBLA KHAN, were written before he had reached the age of 30. With the emergence of George Gordon, Lord \TByron\t, John \TKeats\t, and Percy Bysshe \TShelley\t, English romantic poetry regained its youthful zest. The triumphant publication in March 1812 of the first two cantos of Childe Harold established the 24-year-old Byron as the most dazzling poet of his era, and he remained an international celebrity until his death. The effects of his poetic qualities are difficult to separate from the aura of his personal legend. He certainly derived something of his fascination from the legend and from his readers' belief that in the melancholy, guilt-ridden Childe Harold they recognized a portrait of the artist. Byron had many faces, however. His favorite master was Pope. Besides the exuberant strength of feeling that characterized his earlier poems and that rose to a superb height in Childe Harold III and IV, he possessed a vein of satirical and cynical humor that irradiated \TDon Juan\t, his long seriocomic narrative of a young man's life and loves. Whatever he wrote, it was his stormy flow of words and his vital energy that counted. Neither Shelley nor Keats lived long enough to enjoy the fame that they deserved. Shelley was ecstatic and visionary; Keats, who took little interest in public affairs, was a quiet, steadily creative spirit. Undeterred by the failure of his first volume, Poems (1817), and of \TEndymion\t (1818), Keats painfully practiced his art until he could publish (1820) his third volume, which contains the famous odes "The Eve of St. Agnes" and his unfinished masterpiece, "Hyperion." Shelley's most productive period was confined to the last three years of his life. In 1819 he wrote the verse tragedy The Cenci and the lyric drama \TPrometheus Unbound\t, in which the heroic giant represents the human soul victimized by tyranny and superstition. Although many of Shelley's passages display his soaring lyrical gifts, in others his stream of luminous imagery lacks true poetic form. The English romantic writers cannot be called a school. Byron, for example, liked Shelley as a man but had a low opinion of his writings. A poet he respected, however, was George \TCrabbe\t, "Nature's sternest painter, yet the best." Crabbe, a poet and storyteller combined, was a realistic, but unexpectedly romantic, chronicler of the bleak East Anglian landscapes where he had been born and raised. The 19th-Century Novel During the 18th century the novel had not ranked high as a form of literary expression; during the 19th century, thanks to the spread of circulating libraries and the growth of popular education, it became immensely powerful. Sir Walter \TScott\t, who had begun his career in verse in 1805 with The Lay of the Last Minstrel, occupied himself between 1814 and 1823 with the Waverley novels, a series of historical romances that continued from Waverley to Quentin Durward. His success was equaled only by Byron's. Besides having an imaginative sense of the past, Scott was a powerful storyteller; and the past, particularly the Gothic past, fascinated the early-19th-century reading public. Jane \TAusten\t appealed to very different tastes. Fanny Burney's Evelina had shown what a woman novelist could do; but Jane Austen's acuteness of observation and delicacy of literary delineation left her predecessor far behind. \TPride and Prejudice\t, Sense and Sensibility, and Northanger Abbey had all been written and put aside before the 18th century ended. Sense and Sensibility appeared only in 1811; Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park were published in 1813 and 1814; and \TEmma\t, which many critics consider her most accomplished work, appeared in 1816. Persuasion, the last of her completed novels, was published posthumously in 1818. Jane Austen's range of subjects was limited, but she made a virtue of her limitations. She confined her scope to the stratum of society that she had known and studied, the world of the minor landed gentry and their associates and dependents, exercising her critical acumen and a sparkling, though unobtrusive, wit. Jane Austen was largely unconcerned with the events and social problems of her day, but the British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli won distinction as a socially concerned writer. Although his first novel, Vivian Grey (1826), was an outrageously romantic tale, he produced a series of political narratives--Coningsby (1824), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)--in which he set forth an ambitious program of reform and exposed the evils and dangers of the contemporary social system. The constellation of great Victorian novelists, Charles \TDickens\t, Elizabeth Cleghorn \TGaskell\t, William Makepeace \TThackeray\t, and Anthony \TTrollope\t, were all, to some extent, committed writers and had a sense of grave responsibility for the welfare of their fellow human beings. Mrs. Gaskell, the wife of a Unitarian minister, undertook such themes as the condition of the modern industrial towns and the plight of unmarried mothers. Thackeray's more general attack on society satirized the selfishness of moneyed society. He remained primarily an artist or, at his worst, a clever journalist. Of his four major novels--\TVanity Fair\t, Pendennis, Henry Esmond, and The Newcomes--Vanity Fair, the skillfully executed portrait of a thoroughly amoral woman, is certainly the most enduring. Thackeray, always a less esteemed artist than his rival Dickens, used a comparatively plain and direct style. Dickens's method of storytelling, as in the opening passages of Bleak House, has a baroque extravagance. The London he describes is a haunted labyrinth through which fantastic personages wander. He had a moral purpose, and many of the evils to which he drew attention were ultimately swept away. In his descriptive poems and astonishing command of words and imagery, however, we feel the full force of his genius. Dickens was a prodigious worker. His most important novels, beginning with \TOliver Twist\t and Nicholas Nickleby and ending with \TGreat Expectations\t, Our Mutual Friend, and the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood, were written in the space of 27 years. Anthony Trollope was the least pretentious, and apparently the most prosaic, of all the great Victorian novelists. He treated storytelling not as an art but as a craft, and, unlike Dickens, he never beautified or grossly sentimentalized his characters. His object was merely to chronicle his age. This he did, first in the Barsetshire novels, which portrayed the busy inhabitants of an English cathedral city, and then in a series of political narratives that took his readers behind the scenes of aristocratic and government life. Although he deals with weighty public issues, Trollope's style is plain and free from dogmatic emphasis; his chief virtue, as Henry James said, was his acute "appreciation of the usual." Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope were Londoners. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne \TBronte\t sprang from a lonely Yorkshire parsonage. A deep devotion united the whole family, and Charlotte and Emily--Anne's talent was comparatively meager--no doubt helped to quicken one another's genius. Charlotte's \TJane Eyre\t is a bewildering blend of maturity and rawness. Villette, based on an unhappy love affair Charlotte had herself experienced, is a wholly satisfactory book. It falls far short, however, of Emily's \TWuthering Heights\t, one of the most remarkable novels and wildest love stories ever written by an Englishwoman. Even Charlotte found Emily's fantastic tale of "perverted passion and passionate perversity" disturbing. Over its pages, she declared, there brooded a "horror of great darkness." Charlotte and Emily Bronte were solitary figures, whereas Mary Ann Evans, who adopted the pseudonym George \TEliot\t, played an active part in the London intellectual world. She was concerned with political and moral questions and with the oppressive effect of the established social system on the men and women she described. After \TAdam Bede\t and The \TMill on the Floss\t, she produced her boldest work, \TMiddlemarch\t, a panoramic view of England in a period of rapid change. It does not lack absorbing characters, but among the subjects discussed are parliamentary reform, the growth of railways, female emancipation, marriage, economics, and the state of medicine. Again and again idealism is thwarted and good intentions are laid low. Other typical Victorian novelists were Charles \TKingsley\t, whose brand of Christian Socialism ruffled many 19th-century critics; George \TMeredith\t, author of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, his first success, and the originator of a writing style that endeavored to give modern prose the lyrical quality of great verse; and Robert Louis \TStevenson\t, storyteller par excellence, equally at home in \Lkidnapp\led, a rousing tale of adventure, and in \TDoctor\t JEKYLL AND MR. \THyde\t, his imaginative analysis of a split personality. The Victorian novelists include two rebels, Samuel \TButler\t and George Robert \TGissing\t. Butler's utopian \TErewhon\t, a revolutionary vision of the world as it ought to be, attracted little notice when it appeared in 1872. His posthumously published autobiographical novel, The \TWay of All Flesh\t, is more interesting from a sociological than from a literary point of view. Each novelist was recording his own experience--Butler, his early struggle against a tyrannical domestic background; Gissing, the grinding effects of poverty, as he recorded them in New Grub Street (1891) and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903). Victorian Essays Not all 19th-century writers were attracted to the novel. Walter Savage \TLandor\t, besides writing one or two unforgettable lyrics, poured out his views of the past and present in a series of literary dialogues, Imaginary Conversations. Charles \TLamb\t became an accomplished essayist in the Addisonian style, while William \THazlitt\t was a more penetrating essayist and critic. Thomas \TDe Quincey\t, a victim of the opium habit, published Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), an account of his lonely youth and of the sublime dreams and appalling nightmares that had haunted his existence. Thomas \TCarlyle\t is an example of the Victorian historian, both at his best and at his worst. A prejudiced theorist and an inveterate sermonist, he developed a half-biblical, half-Germanic style. He made his mark with Sartor Resartus (1833-35), in which he proclaimed his personal despair but enunciated a gospel of the "Everlasting Yea." He then embarked on The French Revolution (1837), in which he exercised his dramatic talents to the full, although his historical conclusions were often strangely biased. His later studies, Cromwell and Frederick the Great, are sadly ponderous and ill-digested works. Thomas Babington \TMacaulay\t, on the other hand, strove to make history simple and pleasant reading. He believed in modern progress, the supremacy of Whig ideals, and the virtues of parliamentary government. His History of England, which reached an enormous public, reflected a temperate optimism that possessed a strong appeal for the cultivated middle classes. John \TRuskin\t, one of the most eloquent of the Victorian prophets, combined a passionate interest in art with a no less passionate determination to reform society. His first book, Modern Painters, was an enthusiastic tribute to the genius of his favorite artist J. M. W. Turner. It was followed by Seven Lamps of Architecture, devoted to the Gothic cathedrals, and The Stones of Venice. Unto This Last (1862) was a fierce attack on the Victorian doctrine of laissez-faire as applied to the relations between the employer and his workers, and it aroused widespread indignation. From that moment the tone of his writings became more and more prophetic and increasingly diffuse, until his autobiography, Praeterita (1885-89), which showed all his former mastery of words. Victorian Poetry Later 19th-century poets carried on the tradition of their romantic predecessors; in 1846, Elizabeth Barrett and the relatively obscure poet Robert \TBrowning\t formed their celebrated partnership. Today, Elizabeth Barrett \TBrowning\t's fame has declined, and "the man who married Elizabeth Barrett" has completely overshadowed her. His two-volume work Men and Women (1855) reveals his talents at their highest point. An intellectual, speculative, and discursive poet who showed a novelist's preoccupation with the complexities of human character, he was also a fine lyric poet. Both his shorter poems and his lengthy verse novels reveal a wondrous range of gifts. Alfred \TTennyson\t succeeded Wordsworth as poet laureate in 1850, but by that time his finest work had been done. The spirit of pagan melancholy that breathes through his early poems, for example "The Lotos-Eaters" (1832), had largely disappeared, and the feelings of poignant personal sorrow that inspired In Memoriam had eventually been stilled. Tennyson's verses remained as musical as ever, but their imaginative content slowly dwindled. With Matthew \TArnold\t and the Pre-Raphaelite poets--Dante Gabriel \TRossetti\t, his sister Christina \TRossetti\t, William \TMorris\t, and Algernon Charles \TSwinburne\t--the English romantic movement reached a not inglorious close. Arnold had a distinguished career as a poet, during which he produced \TDover Beach\t and "The Scholar Gypsy," poignant lamentations over the plight of the faithless modern world; later, he became an influential modern critic. \TCulture and Anarchy\t is a brave defense of the standards he valued--beauty and reason, "sweetness and light"--against a new barbarian invasion. All the Pre-Raphaelite artists--and Rossetti was himself a painter--took their subjects from an imaginative vision of the Middle Ages, which Morris, an ardent socialist reformer, compared favorably with the modern industrial civilization. Of this group, however, only Christina Rossetti and Swinburne made any lasting contribution to the art of English verse. Christina Rossetti was the finest religious poet to appear in England since the 17th century. Swinburne's Poems and Ballads (1866), a succession of wild, erotic dithyrambs, offended conventional piety with its outspoken sensuality and atheism. The most original poet of the late Victorian period, the Jesuit priest Gerard Manley \THopkins\t remained almost completely unknown until the second decade of the 20th century. He broke with the traditions of the past both in his vocabulary and in his peculiar rhythmic methods. Like a modern poet he sought to rarify and condense rather than diffuse and explicate his meaning. Although a deeply religious man, he was always tormented by doubt, and the background of many of his poems is "the Dark Night of the Soul." French literature was now exerting an important influence upon English literary circles. Ernest \TDowson\t and Arthur \TSymons\t were both followers of the "poete maudit" Paul \TVerlaine\t. Oscar \TWilde\t, who was almost as much at home in Paris as in London, preached the gospel of \Taestheticism\t, which he had absorbed from Walter \TPater\t. Of Wilde's fashionable comedies, the most brilliant was The \TImportance of Being Earnest\t (1895). THE 20TH CENTURY No sharp dividing line separates the 19th from the 20th century. Until the outbreak of World War I, fiction was still dominated by a group of novelists who had already achieved distinction during the Victorian Age--Thomas \THardy\t, the Anglo-American Henry \TJames\t, George \TMoore\t, Joseph \TConrad\t, Rudyard \TKipling\t, H. G. \TWells\t, John \TGalsworthy\t, and Arnold \TBennett\t. Except for Hardy, who had abandoned the novel in disgust, after the critics' unfriendly reception of \TJude the Obscure\t, all remained extremely active. Although James and Moore were literary perfectionists and had a somewhat limited appeal, all addressed themselves to the widest public they could reach. Their books were soundly constructed and often admirably written; none of these novelists found it necessary to indulge in technical experiments. Even E. M. \TForster\t, although his approach to his subject was new, gave his stories a conventional framework. In the drama George Bernard \TShaw\t and James \TBarrie\t continued to dominate the English stage. Shaw presented a coruscating flow of ideas, sometimes valuable, sometimes foolish and perverse. Barrie possessed a splendid command of stagecraft and richly sentimental gusto. The framework of the Victorian novel was finally disrupted by the Irish novelist James \TJoyce\t, whose revolutionary novel \TUlysses\t (1922) described the events of a single day and made bold use of the interior monologue. On a much smaller scale, Virginia \TWoolf\t adopted a similar technique. She tended to discard plot and incident, concentrating on the analysis of individual characters by resurrecting their secret memories and delving deep into their subconscious minds. Although D. H. \TLawrence\t's \TSons and Lovers\t (1913) gives a realistic picture of his own youth, he dwelt more and more on the subconscious aspects of the human personality. Lawrence had a mystic message to deliver, and preached the salvation of the modern world through a return to more primitive beliefs and feelings. A similar revolution occurred in poetry. The Georgian poets and their immediate predecessors, Robert \TBridges\t, A. E. \THousman\t, and, in his earlier works, William Butler \TYeats\t, all spoke in a language that Tennyson and Arnold might have understood. During the 1930s, however, they were eclipsed by the appearance of the Sitwell confraternity (see \TSitwell\t family), Osbert, Edith, and Sacheverell; by a group of new poets, W. H. \TAuden\t and his close friends Stephen \TSpender\t, C. Day \TLewis\t, and Louis \TMacNeice\t; and, finally, by the rise of Dylan \TThomas\t, a wild Welsh bard, whose displays of pyrotechnic word-spinning gained him extraordinary renown on both sides of the Atlantic. More recent English poets and novelists are still too much a part of the current scene to have found their proper place in history. Evelyn \TWaugh\t and Graham \TGreene\t, although undoubtedly among the most important novelists of the last 40-50 years, are by no means technical innovators but instead show a deep respect for literary tradition. Younger writers exhibit little enthusiasm for experiment--although some of the novels of William \TGolding\t, Doris \TLessing\t, and Anthony \TBurgess\t use science-fiction techniques to good effect. Other contemporary British writers who may well continue to be read 50 years hence include Kingsley \TAmis\t and Iris \TMurdoch\t, as well as playwright Tom \TStoppard\t and poets Seamus \THeaney\t, Ted \THughes\t, and Philip \TLarkin\t. Peter Quennel Bibliography: \Lhistori\les: Allen, Walter, The English Novel: A Short Critical History (1955); Baugh, Albert C., ed., A Literary History of England, 2d ed. (1967); Craig, Hardin, A History of English Literature (1950); Daiches, David, A Critical History of English Literature, 2d. ed. (1970) and ed., Penguin Companion to English Literature (1972); Drabble, Margaret, ed., The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 5th ed. (1985); Ford, Boris, ed., The Pelican Guide to English Literature, 7 vols. (1955-65), and The New Pelican Guide to English Literature (1984); Legouis, Emile, et al., A History of English Literature, rev. ed. (1972); Smallwood, P., A Concise Chronology of English Literature (1986); Spender, Stephen, ed., The Concise Encyclopedia of English and American Poets and Poetry (1963); Ward, A. W., and Waller, A. R., Cambridge History of English Literature, 15 vols. (1919-1930); Watson, George, ed., New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, 4 vols. (1969-72); Wilson, F. P., and Dobray, Bonamee, Oxford History of English Literature, 2d ed. (1962-). \Lguide\ls AND HANDBOOKS: Daiches, David, ed., Penguin Companion to English Literature (1972); Drabble, Margaret, ed., The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 5th ed. (1985); Ford, Boris, ed., The Pelican Guide to English Literature, 7 vols. (1955-65) and The New Pelican Guide to English Literature (1984); Harvey, Paul, Oxford Companion to English Literature, 4th ed. (1967); Spender, Stephen, ed., The Concise Encyclopedia of English and American Poets and Poetry (1963); Watson, George, ed., New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, 4 vols. (1969-72).