english literature has sometimes been stigmatized as insular. It can be argued that no individual English novel attains the universality of the russian writer Leo Tolstoy ’ s War and Peace or the french writer Gustave Flaubert ’ s Madame Bovary. Yet in the Middle Ages the Old English literature of the subjugate Saxons was leavened by the Latin and Anglo-Norman writings, eminently alien in origin, in which the churchmen and the Norman conquerors expressed themselves. From this combination emerged a compromising and insidious linguistic instrumental role exploited by Geoffrey Chaucer and brought to supreme application by William Shakespeare. During the Renaissance the renewed interest in Classical teach and values had an crucial effect on English literature, as on all the arts ; and ideas of Augustan literary propriety in the eighteenth century and reverence in the nineteenth century for a less specific, though distillery selectively viewed, classical ancientness continued to shape the literature. All three of these impulses derived from a foreign source, namely the Mediterranean washbasin. The Decadents of the late nineteenth century and the Modernists of the early twentieth looked to continental european individuals and movements for inspiration. Nor was attraction toward european intellectualism absolutely in the belated twentieth century, for by the mid-1980s the approach known as structuralism, a phenomenon predominantly French and German in beginning, infused the identical study of English literature itself in a host of published critical studies and university departments. extra influence was exercised by deconstructionist analysis, based largely on the work of french philosopher Jacques Derrida .
Britannica Quiz
The Life and Works of English Authors
You may be familiar with Alice in Wonderland and A Christmas Carol, but how much do you know about Virginia Woolf and Charles Dickens ? Test how literate you are in the biography and works of these english novelists .
further, Britain ’ s by imperial activities around the globe continued to inspire literature—in some cases pensive, in early cases hostile. ultimately, english literature has enjoyed a certain diffusion abroad, not only in predominantly english-speaking countries but besides in all those others where English is the first choice of study as a moment terminology. english literature is consequently not so much insular as detached from the continental european tradition across the Channel. It is strong in all the conventional categories of the bookseller ’ mho list : in Shakespeare it has a dramatist of earth fame ; in poetry, a genre notoriously resistant to adequate translation and consequently unmanageable to compare with the poetry of other literatures, it is so curiously rich as to merit inclusion body in the front rate ; english literature ’ s liquid body substance has been found as unvoiced to convey to foreigners as poetry, if not more so—a fact at any rate permitting bestowal of the label “ idiosyncratic ” ; english literature ’ sulfur remarkable body of travel writings constitutes another counterthrust to the charge of insulation ; in autobiography, biography, and diachronic write, english literature compares with the best of any culture ; and children ’ mho literature, fantasy, essays, and journals, which tend to be considered minor genres, are all fields of especial accomplishment as regards english literature. even in philosophical writings, popularly opinion of angstrom hard to combine with literary value, thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, and Bertrand Russell stand comparison for clarity and deck with the best of the french philosophers and the masters of classical antiquity.
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Some of english literature ’ s most identify practitioners in the twentieth century—from Joseph Conrad at its beginning to V.S. Naipaul and Tom Stoppard at its end—were born outside the british Isles. What is more, none of the aforesaid had a much in common with his adoptive nation as did, for example, Doris Lessing and Peter Porter ( two early distinguished writer-immigrants to Britain ), both having been born into a british syndicate and having been brought up on british Commonwealth dirty. On the other hand, during the like period in the twentieth century, many noteworthy practitioners of english literature left the british Isles to live abroad : James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Robert Graves, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, and Anthony Burgess. In one character, that of Samuel Beckett, this process was carried to the extent of writing works first base in French and then translating them into English. even english literature considered strictly as a product of the british Isles is inordinately heterogeneous, however. Literature actually written in those Celtic tongues once prevailing in Cornwall, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales—called the “ Celtic Fringe ” —is treated individually ( see Celtic literature ). Yet irish, Scots, and Welsh writers have contributed enormously to English literature tied when they have written in dialect, as the 18th-century poet Robert Burns and the 20th-century Scots writer Alasdair Gray have done. In the latter half of the twentieth hundred, pastime began besides to focus on writings in English or english dialect by recent settlers in Britain, such as Afro-Caribbeans and people from Africa proper, the indian subcontinent, and East Asia. even within England, culturally and historically the prevailing partner in the union of territories comprising Britain, literature has been as enriched by powerfully provincial writers as by metropolitan ones. Another contrast more fruitful than not for English letters has been that between social milieu, however much observers of Britain in their own writings may have deplored the survival of classify distinctions. As far back as medieval times, a courtly tradition in literature cross-fertilize with an earthier demotic one. Shakespeare ’ s frequent juxtaposition of royalty in one scene with plebeians in the future reflects a very british room of looking at society. This awareness of differences between senior high school biography and low, a submit of affairs fat in creative tensions, is discernible throughout the history of english literature.
