A History of English Literature MICHAEL ALEXANDER
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A History of English Literature MICHAEL ALEXANDER [p. iv] © Michael Alexander 2000 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W 1 P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2000 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN 0-333-91397-3 hardcover ISBN 0-333-67226-7 paperback A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 O1 00 Typeset by Footnote Graphics, Warminster, Wilts Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wilts [p. v] Contents Acknowledgements The harvest of literacy Preface Further reading Abbreviations 2 Middle English Literature: 1066-1500 Introduction The new writing Literary history Handwriting and printing What’s included? The impact of French Tradition or canon? Scribal practice Priorities Dialect and language change What is literature? Literary consciousness Language change New fashions: French and Latin Other literatures in English Epic and romance Is drama literature? Courtly literature Qualities and quantities Medieval institutions Texts Authority Further reading Lyrics Primary texts English prose Secondary texts The fourteenth century PART 1: Spiritual writing Medieval Julian of Norwich 1 Old English Literature: to 1100 Secular prose Orientations Ricardian poetry Britain, England, English Piers Plowman Oral origins and conversion Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Aldhelm, Bede, Cædmon John Gower Northumbria and The Dream of the Rood Geoffrey Chaucer Heroic poetry The Parlement of Fowls Christian literature Troilus and Criseyde Alfred The Canterbury Tales Beowulf The fifteenth century Elegies Drama Battle poetry Mystery plays Morality plays Religious lyric Deaths of Arthur The arrival of printing Scottish poetry [p. vi] Robert Henryson The drama William Dunbar The commercial theatre Gavin Douglas Predecessors Further reading Christopher Marlowe Part 2 The order of the plays Tudor and Stuart Histories 3 Tudor Literature: 1500-1603 Richard II Renaissance and Reformation Henry IV The Renaissance Henry V Expectations Comedy Investigations A Midsurnrner Night's Dream England's place in the world Twelfth Night The Reformation The poems Sir Thomas More Tragedy The Courtier Hamlet Sir Thomas Wyatt King Lear The Earl of Surrey Romances Religious prose The Tempest Bible translation Conclusion Instructive prose Shakespeare's achievement Drama His supposed point of view Elizabethan literature Ben Jonson Verse The Alchemist Sir Philip Sidney Volpone Edmund Spenser Further reading Sir Walter Ralegh 5 Stuart Literature: to 1700 The ‘Jacobethans’ The Stuart century Christopher Marlowe Drama to 1642 Song Comedy Thomas Campion Tragedy Prose John Donne John Lyly Prose to 1642 Thomas Nashe Sir Francis Bacon Richard Hooker Lancelot Andrewes Further reading Robert Burton 4 Shakespeare and the Drama Sir Thomas Browne William Shakespeare Poetry to Milton Shakespeare's life Ben Jonson The plays preserved Metaphysical poets Luck and fame Devotional poets Cavalier poets John Milton Paradise Lost The Restoration The Earl of Rochester John Bunyan Samuel Pepys [p. vii] The theatres Non-fiction Restoration comedy Edward Gibbon John Dryden Edmund Burke Satire Oliver Goldsmith Prose Fanny Burney John Locke Richard Brinsley Sheridan Women writers Christopher Smart William Congreve William Cowper Further reading Robert Burns PART 3 Further reading Augustan and Romantic 7 The Romantics: 1790-1837 6 Augustan Literature: to 1790 The Romantic poets The eighteenth century Early Romantics The Enlightenment William Blake Sense and Sensibility Subjectivity Alexander Pope and 18th-century civilization Romanticism and Revolution Joseph Addison William Wordsworth Jonathan Swift Samuel Taylor Coleridge Alexander Pope Sir Walter Scott Translation as tradition Younger Romantics The Rape of the Lock Lord Byron Mature verse Percy Bysshe Shelley John Gay John Keats Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Romantic prose The novel Belles lettres Daniel Defoe Charles Lamb Cross-currents William Hazlitt Samuel Richardson Thomas De Quincey Henry Fielding Fiction Tobias Smollett Thomas Love Peacock Laurence Sterne Mary Shelley The emergence of Sensibility Maria Edgeworth Thomas Gray Sir Walter Scott Pre-Romantic sensibility: ‘Ossian’ Jane Austen Gothic fiction Towards Victoria The Age of Johnson Further reading Dr Samuel Johnson PART 4 The Dictionary Victorian Literature to 1880 Literary criticism 8 The Age and its Sages James Boswell The Victorian age [p. viii] Moral history Middlemarch Abundance Daniel Deronda Why sages? Nonsense prose and verse Thomas Carlyle Lewis Carroll John Stuart Mill Edward Lear John Ruskin Further reading John Henry Newman 11 Late Victorian Literature: Charles Darwin 1880-1900 Matthew Arnold Differentiation Further reading Thomas Hardy and Henry James 9 Poetry Aestheticism Victorian Romantic poetry Walter Pater Minor verse A revival of drama John Clare Oscar Wilde Alfred Tennyson George Bernard Shaw Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning Fiction Matthew Arnold Thomas Hardy Arthur Hugh Clough Tess of the d'Urbervilles Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti Minor fiction Algernon Charles Swinburne Samuel Butler Gerard Hopkins Robert Louis Stevenson Further reading Wilkie Collins 10 Fiction George Moore The triumph of the novel Poetry Two Brontë novels Aestheticism Jane Eyre A. E. Housman Wuthering Heights Rudyard Kipling Elizabeth Gaskell Further reading Charles Dickens PART 5 The Pickwick Papers The Twentieth Century David Copperfield 12 Ends and Beginnings: 1901-19 Bleak House The new century Our Mutual Friend Fiction Great Expectations Edwardian realists ‘The Inimitable’ Rudyard Kipling William Makepeace Thackeray John Galsworthy Vanity Fair Arnold Bennett Anthony Trollope H. G. Wells George Eliot Adam Bede The Mill on the Floss Silas Marner [p. ix] Joseph Conrad Fairy tales Heart of Darkness C. S. Lewis Nostromo J. R. R. Tolkien E. M. Forster Poetry Ford Madox Ford The Second World War Poetry Dylan Thomas Pre-war verse Drama Thomas Hardy Sean O'Casey War poetry and war poets Further reading Further reading 14 New Beginnings: 1955-80 13 From Post-War to Post-War: 1920-55 Drama Samuel Beckett ‘Modernism’: 1914-27 John Osborne D. H. Lawrence Harold Pinter The Rainbow Established protest James Joyce Novels galore Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man William Golding Ulysses Muriel Spark Ezra Pound: the London years Iris Murdoch T. S. Eliot Other writers The love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Poetry The Waste Land Philip Larkin Four Quartets Ted Hughes Eliot’s criticism Geoffrey Hill W. B. Yeats Tony Harrison Hugh MacDiarmid and David Jones Seamus Heaney Virginia Woolf Further reading To the Lighthouse Postscript on the Current Katherine Mansfield Internationalization Non-modernism: the Twenties and Thirties Postmodernism Modernism fails to catch on Novels The poetry of the Thirties Contemporary poetry Political camps Further reading W. H. Auden Index The novel Evelyn Waugh Graham Greene Anthony Powell George Orwell Elizabeth Bowen [p. x] Acknowledgements Having decided the scope of this history, and that it would be narrative but also critical, the task of selection imposed itself. In order to sharpen my focus, I then invited, at a preliminary stage, twenty university teachers of English literature each to send me a list of the twenty works which they believed would have to receive critical discussion in such a history. Some of those who replied evaded my rigour by including Collected Works in their list. But I thank them all. I have a much longer list of colleagues to thank for answering more scholarly queries. I name only Michael Herbert, George Jack, Christopher MacLachlan, Rhiannon Purdie and Michael Wheeler, who each read a chapter for me, as did Neil Rhodes, to whom I turned for advice more than once. Thanks also to Frances Arnold and Margaret Bartley at Macmillan, who invited me to write this book; I enjoyed the reading, and the rereading. Thanks to Houri Alavi, who has patiently shepherded the monster forward into the arena. Thanks most of all to my family, especially to Mary and Lucy for reading many pages, and for listening. The book itself is also a kind of thank you - to those who wrote what is now called English literature; to scholars, editors, critics; to the English teachers I had at school; to fellow-students of literature, especially at Stirling and St Andrews; to all from whom I have learned. I still have much to learn, and thank in advance any reader who draws to my attention any errors of fact. Illustrations AKG Photo, London, pp. 94, 110, 133, 150, 241; E.T.Archive, pp. 21, 28, 45, 207, 202; The British Library, p. 190; The British Museum, pp. 23, 27; J. Burrow and T. Turville-Petre, A Book of Middle English, Blackwell Publishers, p. 37; Camera Press, London, p. 349; Corbis Collection, p. 340; Corpus Christi College, Oxford, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library, p. 50; Courtauld Institute of Art, London, p. 138; Judy Daish Associates, p. 364; Norman Davies, The Isles, Macmillan, p. 12; The Dickens House Museum, London, p. 277; The Dorset Country Museum, p. 301; Edifice, pp. 170, 248; Mark Gerson, p. 367; The Hulton Getty Picture Collection Ltd, pp. 270, 317, 321, 347, 372; Image Select International, pp. 96, 139, 185, 335, 338; The National Portrait Gallery, pp. 98, 212, 223, 273, 374, 379; Nottingham County Library, The D.