The Routledge History of Literature in English ‘Wide-ranging, very accessible . highly attentive to cultural and social change and, above all, to the changing history of the language. An expansive, generous and varied textbook of British literary history . addressed equally to the British and the foreign reader.’ MALCOLM BRADBURY, novelist and critic ‘The writing is lucid and eminently accessible while still allowing for a substantial degree of sophistication. The book wears its learning lightly, conveying a wealth of information without visible effort.’ HANS BERTENS, University of Utrecht This new guide to the main developments in the history of British and Irish literature uniquely charts some of the principal features of literary language development and highlights key language topics. Clearly structured and highly readable, it spans over a thousand years of literary history from AD 600 to the present day. It emphasises the growth of literary writing, its traditions, conventions and changing characteristics, and also includes literature from the margins, both geographical and cultural. Key features of the book are: • An up-to-date guide to the major periods of literature in English in Britain and Ireland • Extensive coverage of post-1945 literature • Language notes spanning AD 600 to the present • Extensive quotations from poetry, prose and drama • A timeline of important historical, political and cultural events • A foreword by novelist and critic Malcolm Bradbury RONALD CARTER is Professor of Modern English Language in the Department of English Studies at the University of Nottingham. He is editor of the Routledge Interface series in language and literary studies. JOHN MCRAE is Special Professor of Language in Literature Studies at the University of Nottingham and has been Visiting Professor and Lecturer in more than twenty countries. The Routledge History of Literature in English Britain and Ireland Ronald Carter and John McRae with a foreword by Malcolm Bradbury London and New York First published 1997 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1997 Ronald Carter and John McRae All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Carter, Ronald. The Routledge history of literature in English: Britain and Ireland / Ronald Carter and John McRae: with a foreword by Malcolm Bradbury. p. cm. Includes index. 1. English literature—History and criticism. 2. Great Britain—Intellectual life. 3. Ireland—Intellectual life. 4. English language—History. I. McRae, John. II. Title. PR83.C28 1997 820.9—dc20 96-41221 ISBN 0-415-12342-9 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-12343-7 (pbk) ISBN 0-203-13767-1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-17878-5 (Glassbook Format) Dedicated to Alex and Jean McRae and Lilian and Kenneth Carter What he wanted was not his accumulation of notes but an absence of notes: what he wanted was transparency. He was aware that scholarship – the acquisition of knowledge – brought with it a terrible anxiety. How much was enough? How much more was there? Was there any end to it? If one did not possess enough knowledge how could one be sure of possessing more? And if one called a halt to the process how could one not die of shame? Thus with his love for his books went a certain obscure desire to have done with them, or rather not to have been an officious midwife to small thoughts about great masterpieces. Anita Brookner, Lewis Percy (1989) Contents List of illustrations xiii Foreword by Malcolm Bradbury xv THE BEGINNINGS OF ENGLISH: OLD AND MIDDLE ENGLISH 600–1485 Contexts and conditions 3 Personal and religious voices 7 Language note: The earliest figurative language 11 Long poems 12 French influence and English affirmation 15 Language and dialect 20 Language note: The expanding lexicon – Chaucer and Middle English 23 From anonymity to individualism 25 Women’s voices 28 Fantasy 30 Travel 31 Geoffrey Chaucer 32 Langland, Gower and Lydgate 40 The Scottish Chaucerians 44 Mediaeval drama 46 Malory and Skelton 49 Language note: Prose and sentence structure 51 THE RENAISSANCE: 1485–1660 Contexts and conditions 57 Language note: Expanding world: expanding lexicon 62 Renaissance poetry 64 viii Contents Drama before Shakespeare 69 From the street to a building – the Elizabethan theatre 75 Language note: The further expanding lexicon 77 Renaissance prose 78 Translations of the Bible 85 Language note: The language of the Bible 86 Shakespeare 89 The plays 90 The sonnets 100 Language note: Changing patterns of ‘thou’ and ‘you’ 103 The Metaphysical poets 104 The Cavalier poets 111 Jacobean drama – to the closure of the theatres, 1642 112 Ben Jonson 112 Masques 114 Other dramatists of the early seventeenth century 116 City comedy 123 The end of the Renaissance theatre 125 RESTORATION TO ROMANTICISM: 1660–1789 Contexts and conditions 129 Early Milton 133 Restoration drama 139 Rochester 151 Dryden 152 Pope 157 Journalism 159 Scottish Enlightenment, diarists and Gibbon 161 The novel 166 Criticism 181 Language note: The expanding lexicon – ‘standards of English’ 182 Johnson 183 Sterne, Smollett and Scottish voices 186 Drama after 1737 194 Poetry after Pope 196 Language note: Metrical patterns 202 Melancholy, madness and nature 203 Contents ix The Gothic and the sublime 208 Language note: Point of view 211 THE ROMANTIC PERIOD: 1789–1832 Contexts and conditions 217 Language note: William Cobbett, grammar and politics 223 Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge 224 Language note: The ‘real’ language of men 232 Keats 234 Shelley 239 Byron 243 Clare 248 Romantic prose 249 The novel in the Romantic period 253 Jane Austen 255 Language note: Jane Austen’s English 259 Scott 260 From Gothic to Frankenstein 265 The Scottish regional novel 266 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Contexts and conditions 271 Dickens 273 Victorian thought and Victorian novels 279 The Brontës and Eliot 289 Other lady novelists 294 Late Victorian novels 296 Wilde and Aestheticism 307 Hardy and James 310 Language note: Dialect and character in Hardy 313 Victorian poetry 319 Language note: The developing uses of dialects in literature 338 Victorian drama 340 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: 1900–45 Contexts and conditions 347 Modern poetry to 1945 351 x Contents Later Hardy 352 Language note: The fragmenting lexicon 355 Georgian and Imagist poetry 357 First World War poetry 359 Irish writing 363 W.B. Yeats 364 T.S. Eliot 366 Language note: Modernist poetic syntax 371 Popular poets 373 Thirties poets 374 Scottish and Welsh poetry 379 Modern drama to 1945 382 Irish drama 384 D.H. Lawrence 387 Popular and poetic drama 388 Language note: Literature about language 390 The novel to 1945 392 Subjectivity: the popular tradition 393 The Kailyard School 394 Provincial novels 395 Social concerns 396 Light novels 397 Genre fiction 398 Modernism and the novel 400 Forster, Conrad and Ford 401 Language note: Metaphor and metonymy 404 D.H. Lawrence 411 Woolf and Joyce 419 Language note: Irish English, nationality and literature 429 Novels of the First World War 431 Aldous Huxley 433 Women writers 434 Ireland 436 Early Greene and Waugh 438 Thirties novelists 440 Contents xi THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: 1945 TO THE PRESENT Contexts and conditions 447 Drama since 1945 451 Language note: Drama and everyday language 451 Poetry of the Second World War 469 Poetry since 1945 471 Martians and gorgons 483 Towards the twenty-first century 488 The novel since 1945 489 Language note: Discourse, titles and dialogism 490 Later Greene 492 Post-war Waugh 493 Orwell 496 Dialogue novels 499 The mid-century novel 502 Amis, father and son 505 Language note: City slang 507 Golding 509 Fowles and Frayn 511 Novel sequences 512 The campus novel 513 Excellent women 515 Muriel Spark and others 519 Margaret Drabble 521 Lessing, Hill and Weldon 522 Iris Murdoch 523 Internationalism 525 ‘Insiders’ from ‘outside’ 526 Language note: English, Scots and Scotland 532 The contemporary Scottish novel 534 The contemporary Irish novel 538 Endings and beginnings 539 TIMELINES Old and Middle English 543 The Renaissance 549 xii Contents Restoration to Romanticism 553 The Romantic period 555 The nineteenth century 556 The twentieth century: 1900–45 559 The twentieth century: 1945 to the present 561 British and Irish winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature 565 Acknowledgements 566 Select bibliography 570 Index 579 Illustrations Figure 1 Linguistic boundaries and external influences 4 Figure 2 English possessions in France 22 Figure 3 An Elizabethan playhouse. De Witt’s drawing of the Swan, c.1596 91 Figure 4 Illustration from Tristram Shandy 188 Foreword Malcolm Bradbury In our own time the writing of literary history has famously become a difficult activity. In a global age, we have moved away from the nineteenth-century notion that literature is chiefly the product of a nation, place and people. We have also begun to challenge those ‘great traditions’ in literature that assumed that the history of writing led effortlessly onward from one great genius to another: Chaucer handed the torch to Shakespeare, Shakespeare to Milton, Milton to Wordsworth, and so onward to the Olympic stadium of the present day. At the start of the twentieth century, the international ‘Modern Movement’, with its new forms, and its confident spirit of innovation, shook the foundations of the literary heritage. Now more recently ‘postmodern’ literary theory and cultural analysis have again questioned many of the traditional, monumental notions of author, genre.