Routledge History of Literature in English: Notes

The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland

Overview

The book is a textbook of British literary history for both British and foreign readers.
The second edition reflects changes in literary theory, cultural studies, and the literary canon.
It emphasizes accessibility, up-to-date information, and coverage of a wide range of figures and trends.

Endorsements of the First Edition

Hans Bertens (University of Utrecht): Praises the book's lucid writing and accessibility.
Bernardo Vasconcelos (University of Madeira): Recommends it for foreign literature students.
Sonia Zyngier (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro): Highlights its accessibility to students at all levels.
Prof. Susan Manning (University of Edinburgh): Notes its excellent background for students beginning literature courses.
Julia Müller (University of Amsterdam): Appreciates its up-to-date content.
Joser Devos (Gent University, Belgium): Highlights its organization and substantial content.
Prof. Jurgen Kamm (Passau University, Germany): Notes its reflection of recent developments in literary theory and cultural studies and the usefulness of the Language notes.
Prof. Yoshifumi Saito (University of Tokyo): Emphasizes the valuable support it provides to students, particularly its focus on the modern period and the Language notes.

Foreword by Malcolm Bradbury

Literary history is being created during a time of changing literary past.
Literary canons and national identity are shifting.
The nature of language, the evolution of books, and the idea of literary genre are changing.
Modern writing challenges traditional notions of literature as an instinctive product of tradition and nation.
Postmodern notions challenge ideas of author, tradition, genre, print culture, text, and reader.
There's a need to re-evaluate literature, considering that even modern writing is now historicized.
The book aims to cater to both British and international readers.
Readers wanted coverage of minor figures, key trends, societies, cultures, and language notes.
The book seeks to provide an accessible history of English-language literature from Anglo-Saxon times to the present.
English has become a lingua franca with a remarkable variety of international writers.
Literary histories are important because literature isn't random.
There are native traditions/heritages of literature that need to be properly told.
To understand literature, we need informed textbooks that present the history and context.
The book is designed to meet that need with up-to-date content, visual support, and clear presentation without critical jargon.
It explores the long history of writing in the British Isles, the growth of the English language, and the social and cultural history.
It emphasizes that the British Isles have always been a multilingual landscape.
English developed through the Celtic heritage, Viking invasion, Norman invasion, and the penetration of Latin.
Now English is the world’s first language, the modern lingua franca.
It's used in all six continents; over 300 million speak it as a mother tongue and another 300 million as a second language.
Writers write in English to describe worlds for which the language wasn't originally intended, leading to an expansion of the language.
There is a tradition to be remembered, including forms, myths, preoccupations, cultural debates, and literary and artistic trends.
The flowering of verse in Anglo-Saxon times and the flowering of drama in the Elizabethan age still has influence today.
The novel emerged as a popular form in Britain in the early eighteenth century which created an important literary genre.
Writers draw on the heritage of their forms, devices, cultural energies, and explored themes.
A literary language goes through a great range of adventures and experiments.
Forms and genres take shape like comedy, tragedy, odes, epics, novels, dramatic poems, blank verse, vers libre, and stream of consciousness.
Literary language moves between formality and vernacular ease.
Literature is a link with great humane and moral ideas, learning, and imaginative understanding.
The true tradition of literature is never simply national, as writers borrow from other traditions and tongues.
Every new writer shifts the tradition slightly, extending or upturning what has gone before.
Writing still needs the past/tradition to discover the present and prospect the future.
The book puts literature into context and guides the reader through major writers, trends, and eras.
The authors have been attentive to cultural and social change and the history of language.
The book is expansive, generous, and addresses both British and foreign readers.
Each chapter includes an introductory section with historical background, plot summaries and quotations.
There are glossaries of literary terms and useful summaries.
The book recognizes the importance of popular genres.
It explores the transformation of language and literary forms that came with the Modern movement and is especially strong on contemporary literature.
The aim of a good literary history is to guide readers back to important books and writers, signal their value, and place them in useful relation to each other.

Acknowledgements

Malcolm Bradbury and Richard Walker were generous and constructive with their help and advice.
Alan Durant and Helen Phillips provided painstaking and detailed suggestions.
Carole Hough, David Parsons, Miquel Berga, Werner Delanoy, Hans Bertens, Angela Smallwood, and Kathryn Sutherland gave valuable insights and comments.
Revisions were assisted by colleagues in the School of English Studies, University of Nottingham, particularly Macdonald Daly, Janette Dillon, and Josephine Guy.
The authors alone are responsible for what remains.
The authors responded to the interest taken in the book by non-native teachers of English worldwide and comments from readers who had adopted the first edition.
The book now offers a distinctive and broader language focus and more detailed treatment of the twentieth century.
Louisa Semlyen, Moira Taylor, and Katharine Jacobson of Routledge have seen the project through with dedication.
Jeremy Hunter was almost a co-author.

The Beginnings of English: Old and Middle English 600–1485

Contexts and Conditions

Literature is as old as human language and is found in various media.
The first literature in any culture is oral.
Early English oral literature focused on religion, war, and daily life.
A vast expanse of time exists before the Norman Conquest in 1066, from which literary texts remain.
Centuries before 1066 are largely dark due to the destruction of unwritten and written works.
Motivations for literature include comfort, reflection, and reinforcement of social, political, and ideological standpoints.
- Example: "Beowulf, the Dane, dear king of his people" (Beowulf).

The Spread of English

The spread of English was significant in moulding a national identity.
Multiple cultural and linguistic influences contributed to the Anglo-Saxon melting pot.

Personal and Religious Voices

Caedmon’s Hymn: The first fragment of literature dating from the late seventh century (around 670); the first song of praise and Christian religious poem in English.
Christian monks and nuns were the guardians of culture and preserved native English culture.
Caedmon’s Hymn, Deor’s Lament, and The Seafarer reflect ordinary human experience.
Conventions include first-person speakers and intertextual references to religious texts.
Deor’s Lament: Recounts day-to-day trials of life with a chorus of hope; the first poem about unemployment.
The Exeter Book: Preserved The Seafarer and The Wanderer, elegiac poems of solitude, exile, and suffering.
Theme: The solitary outcast longing for the past with hope for the future.
The church preserved texts in Old English, nurturing a linguistic and cultural identity.
Genres: history, devotional works, and philosophical traditions.
Translations of the Bible were made to strengthen Christian faith and assert local identity.
The Dream of the Rood: A Christian text found on the Ruthwell Cross, featuring various images of Christ and his cross.
Anglo-Saxon literature is full of images and representational rather than simply referential.
All texts in the oral tradition are poetry, using a double line with a break (caesura) and alliteration.
- Example: The speaker in The Seafarer rejects land for the sea.

Language Note: The Earliest Figurative Language

Old English poetry employs kennings and conventional poetic diction.
Kennings are compound words or phrases used to describe things indirectly.
- Examples: hronrad (whale-road) or swanrad (swan-road) meaning ‘the sea’; banhus (bone-house) meaning the ‘human body’.
Conventional poetic diction uses alternative words for key concepts.
Beowulf uses figurative language extensively, with many kennings.
Kennings are a way of knowing and expressing meanings, found in later poetry, especially Modernist texts.
Cynewulf, another Northumbrian poet, wrote poems on religious themes.

Long Poems

Beowulf: An epic poem about a hero who defeats monsters and saves a territory;
- The themes are power, battles, transience, and mortality.
- It is a poem of praise, a tragedy, and an elegy.
- The poem looks to the future with a message that the world is for the young.
- It can be read as myth, territorial history, or forward-looking reassurance.
Beowulf shows what a hero is and emphasizes the hero's importance as a focus of public attention and admiration.
Modern translations by Edwin Morgan and Seamus Heaney have brought Beowulf to a new audience.
The Battle of Maldon: A poem documenting a defeat stresses bloodshed and loss, commemorating a battle in 991. It may be a realistic depiction of the necessity of victory with a celebration of honor and bravery.
Different approaches to war emerge at the same time, reflecting different authorial points of view.
Most Old English poetry is anonymous, but texts may have undergone changes with individual scops or bards.
The concept of an author comes later; Cynewulf signed his works.
Alfred the Great translated Cura Pastoralis and launched a translation program into the vernacular, impacting the shift from Latin to English.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was inspired by him.
Alfred's influence marks the beginning of long traditions of literature in English.

French Influence and English Affirmation

The Norman Conquest of 1066 brought French language and culture.
The two centuries after the Conquest were a period of integration with widespread bilingualism.
After 1204, Norman conquerors developed an English identity and used the English language, which lead to more French words entering the English language as literacy developed
London established itself as the capital city, with northern influences on its dialect.
Anglo-Latin differed from Paris Latin, and Chancery English developed away from French.
French was rejected in 1415, when King Henry V affirmed English domination.
Authorship comes into English literature with Layamon, who wrote Brut, the first national epic in English.
Brut recounts tales of the Dark Ages, including the story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and traces the foundation of Britain back to Brutus.
The search for classical roots shows a wish for historical continuity and heroic antecedents.
National epics reinterpret the past in relation to the present.
Layamon wrote as England was seeking to establish its ‘Englishness’.
French influences brought new subjects for poets, mainly courtly love (love was an almost religious passion).
Concept of ideal love (chaste but passionate) gives rise to a huge amount of lyric poetry.
The worship of the Virgin Mary began to spread in the twelfth century in Europe.
Soldiers went on Holy Crusades, and women were expected to wait at home embodying ideal virtue.
The romantic notion of fidelity comes from classical origins like Penelope in Homer’s The Odyssey.
The rose symbolises the lady’s love and is from Le Roman de la Rose (The Romance of the Rose).
Le Roman de la Rose established a code of behaviour, a value on chastity, and a subordinate role for women.
War literature and religious literature united to foster the new theme of love; love literature upholds the new tradition.
French culture and language interacted with native English culture (e.g., the word ‘castle’).
Early Middle English saw the growth of songs and ballads celebrating the seasons, nature, and love.
The ballad told a story based on a character like Robin Hood, generally unhappy.
This is the beginning of a popular tradition of song, story, and ballad, often a voice of popular dissent.

Language and Dialect

Writers in the Middle English period did not always write in English.
There were attempts to assert French and Latin.
Robert Mannyng based his Handling Synne on a French source.
John Gower wrote Confessio Amantis in English but others in Latin and French.
Geoffrey Chaucer wrote wholly in English but drew inspiration from European sources.
European influences were channelled through London, which was geographically different from present-day Britain.
Writing gave London language its prominence, along with university cities of Oxford and Cambridge.
William Langland's, Piers Plowman is largely based in the countryside.
Provincial English dialects are found in literature, such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
The Alliterative Revival recalled Anglo-Saxon use of alliteration.
Most texts originated from an area north and west, far from London.
Layamon linked older historical traditions with modern Englishness.
Writers developed a more colloquial style, using idioms and proverbs.

Language Note: The Expanding Lexicon: Chaucer and Middle English

The Middle English period saw a rapid expansion in the number of words.
Words entered from Latin and French.
Middle English vocabulary has sets of words with different origins conveying similar meanings.
- Examples: ask/question/interrogate; kingly/royal/regal; holy/sacred/consecrated
Old English-derived words are more frequent and colloquial.
Latin words are more formal.
French words are more literary.
French words penetrated law, administration, heraldry, the arts, fashion, and hunting.
English and Scandinavian-derived words are more homely.
The language of the English court in the twelfth century was Parisian French.
Chaucer made extensive use of French and Latin-derived words for elevated praise.
Chaucer also used everyday colloquial speech with Old English-derived words.
The range and variety of Chaucer’s English helped establish English as a national language.
Chaucer contributed to a standard English based on the dialect of London.
Educated language of London became the standard form of written language.

From Anonymity to Individualism

Many texts from this period are described as ‘anonymous’ but ‘anon’ often has a distinctive voice.
Anonymous verse shows concerns that will preoccupy later writers.
The theme of nature becomes important in The Owl and the Nightingale, which uses the Latin genre of debate.
Winner and Waster uses debate to contrast wealth and carefree spending.
There is a growing awareness of an audience and a widening range of effects.
The audience had a wide range of cultural reference and widespread among lay people.
King Horn is the earliest verse romance in English and shows how English has assimilated French stories.
Religious, secular, moral, and political themes are becoming subjects for writing.
The Alliterative Revival expands the range of writing, and more manuscript copies are found.
Storytelling is a fundamental part of Middle English literature.
Patience retells the biblical story of Jonah and the whale, stressing man's smallness in relation to God.
Pearl introduces a dream-vision, comparing a heavenly paradise with the earthly human world.
Pearl examines human limitations and knowledge and anticipates literary examinations of man’s fall.
The most significant anonymous text is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a lay questioning heroism.
These later Middle English texts show optimism and high spirits.

Travel

One of the first books of travel published in 1356–67 in Anglo-Norman French. Called simply Travels, it was said to be by Sir John Mandeville.
It is highly entertaining to pilgrims in the Holy Land, taking as far as Tartary, Persia, India and Egypt, recounting more fantasy than fact.
It whetted the Western European reader’s appetite for the travel book.
Mandeville begins a long tradition of writings about faraway places which created the idea now called Orientalism
Such writings emphasize cultural strangeness and difference, and for many centuries they conditioned Western perceptions of the societies they purport to describe.

Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer used cultural references from throughout Europe in his writing but wrote almost exclusively in English.
He is the first major English writer and encompasses earlier traditions, genres, and subjects.
Chaucer was a professional courtier and civil servant.
Chaucer’s first work, The Book of the Duchess, is a dream-poem from Blanch, Duchess of Lancaster. It is modelled on French examples.
The House of Fame is another dream-poem influenced by Dante, where Chaucer becomes a participant in his own writing.
The subject of love is taken up again in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and The Legend of Good Women.
Troilus and Criseyde brings together the classical Trojan war story and the sixth-century philosophical work of Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy.
It reminds us of Chaucer’s descriptive capacity both in terms of character and scene.
In The Legend of Good Women, Chaucer attempts to redress the balance in women’s favour.
All Chaucer’s earlier writing can be seen to lead to his masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales.
The idea using a series of linked stories appears in In The Legend of Good Women, but the greatest innovation is to use the ‘here and now’
It brings together religious and secular and affirms the importance of drinking and conviviality in society.
Individual is more important than society.
The pilgrims are stereotypical characters with each telling a tale with their own characteristics.
Chaucer himself prefers not to take sides and does not judge the characters he presents.
Critics are still divided over the extent to which Chaucer treats his characters seriously or ironically.
One trend suggested that the the knight as a mercenary soldier ill at ease in the modern world but they are also seen as being a genuine gentle knight.
He examines and wants the reader to see the changes that society is undergoing (Questioned and affirmed).
It makes it clear that individual self-interest is more important than social shared interests.
There is a joyful sense of humour, of enjoyment of sensual pleasures, and of popular, earthy fun Serious and comic intentions go hand in hand and a new vision of a fast-developing richly textured world.
It is from Chaucer that later writers began to trace the history of English poetry

Langland, Gower and Lydgate

George Puttenham describes the major work of William Langland, Piers Plowman, as a ‘satire’.
The origin of English satire, looking back to the Latin of Juvenal, is usually credited to Joseph Hall.
Piers Plowman is an alliterative poem recounting a series of dreams.
Langland gives us a worldview where the church and man should be as one.
The poem is realistic and transcendent with human fallibility in relation to religious ideaslism (Concern for writers).
There is a remarkable degree of consistency in the way mediaeval literature affirms humanity.
John Gower uses this human element in Confessio Amantis (A Lover’s Confession) with a degree of irony.
The speaker has confessed all his sins, he announces that he will renounce love – but only because he is old.
Fear of death, is the most potent symbol of the transitory nature of human life.
John Lydgate consolidates rather than extends the multiplicity of styles.
His writing is from epic to politics & central to his times.
Major subjects were found in translation especially, The fall of Princes (1431-1438), which included a major contribution to the rendering of classical myth into English.
The most remarkable thing about it, the first version of the Latin epic to be produced in the British Isles, is that it was translated into Scots.

The Scottish Chaucerians

The group known as the Scottish Chaucerians gives us the most memorable writing between Chaucer’s death in 1400 and the Renaissance
The writings are quit different from their English contemporaries
King James I of Scotland, influenced by his imprisonment to write Kingis Quair (The King’s Book) in one of what were to become popular form(lyric).
English (or Inglis as it was spelled and pronounced) was by now the language of Scots who lived south of the Highlands. In the north, the dominant language of the Celts was Gaelic.
One of the earliest Scottish texts in English was a celebration of the hero, Robert the Bruce, titled “This Bruce” (1375-76)
The Bruce is the first text to celebrate Scottish nationalism!
*“A! freedom is a noble thing!”
Robert Henryson and William Dunbar take mediaeval traditions to new heights.
Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid treats Chaucer’s heroine most unromantically with a punishment to pervade Scotland (Jean Calvin Influence)
Henryson’s The Moral Fables of Aesop the Phrygian are moralities that show great sympathy of animals where a reader identifies and recognises human qualities.
In the poem made it to be the Lament for the Makers” is about poets that have reached ultimate death (Chauver et al).
Dunbar made consciousness in the the immortality to one of the major concern of renniasance (transatorty nature of all human achievement).
We are heading rapidly towards the new world of the Renaissance.
Gavin Douglas, was engaged on his major work, a translation of Virgil’s Aeneid.
There was a distinction made that he only was translating for just sots not for the Inglis.
He gets a lot out of Virgil than any other translator.
Most of his writings were published in the 1550’s to mark the begining of the English Rennaisance

Mediaeval Drama

From classical Greek times, and in many other cultures, theatre has maintained strong religious connections.
The origins of English theatre are religious with strong literary presention
English Drama and translations took a huge amount of efforts to create and display bible stories in simpler terms.
Earliest attempts for wider audane were miracles and mysteries
It has evolved though from 14-15th canturies to evolve outside of the church creating more holy days.
Each guild became responsive for displaying cycles bible episodes across areas
The best known are cycles comes from York, Wakefield and Chester.
The miller was known as The Herod.
They based it on miracles within plays and the bible also included religous sotry
Morality are allegorical representations of human life.
It is one of English version where they take a English/ Dutch origin and display it on the side(s.
God acknowledges that he had forsaken him
Life os a struggle series of challanges and sad disapointms
These were created to connect these plays to make there points which the audiance can see themselves in
However , only fifty years after Lindsay’s Three Estates was performed at the Scottish court, a whole new era of dramatic literature had begun in England.

Malory and Skelton

Two literary figures bridge the gap between the mediaeval age and the Renaissance.
They are Sir Thomas Malory, the author of Le Morte D’Arthur, and the first ‘poet-laureate’, John Skelton
Malory's prose version unites the romance of stories.
The facts were the book was outed in 1470 and published by caxton.It gives it a wide area for circulations in this new world
The le Morty are always clomaxing , emphasizting chivalry as a moral code of honor!!
Le Mortey infuclned reads to influenced years to come.
John Slketon- has a reputation suffered from George Puthemhaun
He doesn’t catgorized is hisoty since its in between periods from Medieval and rennasiince periods
He has a great set of experiment writers and one of funniest POets
His best court known best to the bowge and what’s better from low income life.one of this lovliest comes from the tunnying
He Was A outspoken satirist WHO also WRite , In ohili sparrow- one of of the most English ELEGI to a bird!!
Gib, was a sort cats name in the 15th and 16ty cantiry
Hess created a poem of the world and to say If it does what they expect from an individual
The rhythm of the peoples lives as they went alogn into new a new self conciousnes