At the end of the 1400s, the world changed. Two key dates can mark the beginning of modern times. In 1485, the Wars of the Roses came to an end, and, following the invention of...

The Restoration did not so much restore as replace. In restoring the monarchy with King Charles II, it replaced Cromwell’s Commonwealth and its Puritan ethos with an almost powerless monarch whose tastes had been formed...

Beowulf stands out as a poem which makes extensive use of this kind of figurative language. There are over one thousand compounds in the poem, totalling one-third of all the words in the text. Many...

Revolution was the great nightmare of eighteenth-century British society, and when first the American Revolution of 1776, then the French Revolution of 1789 overturned the accepted order, the United Kingdom exercised all its power so...

There is a remarkable degree of consistency in the way mediaeval literature affirms humanity. With all its faults, humanity emerges as more realistic than heavenly ideals…….Because the mediaeval period is seen from our own times...

As a novelist, Scott’s influence was immense: his creation of a wide range of characters from all levels of society was immediately likened to Shakespeare’s; the use of historical settings became a mainstay of Victorian...

Old English poetry is characterised by a number of poetic tropes which enable a writer to describe things indirectly and which require a reader imaginatively to construct their meaning. The most widespread of these figurative...

Dryden was a highly prolific literary figure, a professional writer who was at the centre of all the greatest debates of his time: the end of the Commonwealth, the return of the monarch, the political...

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. In their entirely separate ways,...

In the humanist world following Erasmus, man is at the centre of the universe. Man becomes largely responsible for his own destiny, behaviour and future. This is the new current of thought which finds its...

Few poets better convey the uneasy transition from Victorianism to Modernism than Thomas Hardy. His novels, written between 1870 and 1895, made him not only the recorder of his distinctive region of ‘Wessex’, but the...

It is the voice of everyday people, rather than of a self-conscious ‘artist’, that we hear in Caedmon’s Hymn, and in such texts as Deor’s Lament (also known simply as Deor) or The Seafarer. These...

Milton argued, in 1649, after the execution of Charles I, that a people ‘free by nature’ had a right to overthrow a tyrant; a subject that recalls vividly the questions examined by Shakespeare in his...

The Romantic journey was usually a solitary one. Although the Romantic poets were closely connected with one another, and some collaborated in their work, they each had a strong individual vision. Romantic poets could not...

One of the first books of travel, giving European readers some insight into the unfamiliar world of the Orient, was published in 1356-67 in Anglo-Norman French. Called simply Travels, it was said to be by...

The beliefs and behaviour of the Restoration reflect the theories of society put forward by Thomas Hobbes in The Leviathan, which was written in exile in Paris and published in 1651. Like many texts of...

Writers in what we now call the Middle English period (late twelfth century to 1485) did not necessarily always write in English. The language was in a state of flux: attempts were made to assert...

The ruinous deeds of the ravaging foe(Beowulf)The best-known long text in Old English is the epic poem Beowulf. Beowulf himself is a classic hero, who comes from afar. He has defeated the mortal enemy of...

In the eighteenth century, the Scottish Enlightenment focused attention on Glasgow and Edinburgh as centres of intellectual activity. The Scottish Enlightenment was an intellectual movement which originated in Glasgow in the early eighteenth century, and...

The fairy or fantastic world replaces the classical Hades (or Hell) in Sir Orfeo, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight takes this fantasy element to new heights. Sir Gawain is one of the Knights...

In terms of literary history, the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 is seen as a landmark. The volume contains many of the best-known Romantic poems. The second edition in 1800 contained a Preface in...

Alongside the development of theatres came the growth of an acting culture; in essence it was the birth of the acting profession. Plays had generally been performed by amateurs – often men from craft guilds....

John Milton has, since his own lifetime, always been one of the major figures in English literature, but his reputation has changed constantly. He has been seen as a political opportunist, an advocate of ‘immorality’...

Pearl introduces an original story, in a form which was to become one of the most frequent in mediaeval literature, the dream-vision. Authors like Chaucer and Langland use this form, in which the narrator describes...

Later, Hobbes will stress the notion central to Augustan thinking, the binary of passion and reason:The Passions that encline men to Peace, are Fear of Death; Desire of such things as are necessary to commodious...

Literature before the Renaissance had frequently offered ideal patterns for living which were dominated by the ethos of the church, but after the Reformation the search for individual expression and meaning took over. Institutions were...

There is a degree of emotional impact in the nature poetry of the eighteenth century which marks a shift in sensibility towards what came to be called ‘the sublime’. The concept, from classical Greek, came...

The range and variety of Chaucer’s English did much to establish English as a national language. Chaucer also contributed much to the formation of a standard English based on the dialect of the East Midlands...

The character and the play of Hamlet are central to any discussion of Shakespeare’s work. Hamlet has been described as melancholic and neurotic, as having an Oedipus complex, as being a failure and indecisive, as...

Old English poetry also contained a wide range of conventional poetic diction, many of the words being created to allow alliterative patterns to be made. There are therefore numerous alternatives for key words like battle,...

The language of Shakespeare is the first and lasting affirmation of the great changes that took place in the sixteenth century, leaving the Middle English of Chaucer far behind. In many ways, the language has...

Christian monks and nuns were, in effect, the guardians of culture, as they were virtually the only people who could read and write before the fourteenth century. It is interesting therefore that most of the...

Henry Fielding, a highly successful satiric dramatist until the introduction of censorship in 1737, began his novel-writing career with Shamela, a pastiche of Pamela, which humorously attacked the hypocritical morality which that novel displayed. Joseph...

All Renaissance drama, especially the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare, is profoundly concerned with shifting power relations within society. The individual was a new force in relation to the state. The threat of rebellion, of...

THE METAPHYSICAL POETSHad we but world enough, and time,This coyness, lady, were no crime(Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress)While theatre was the most public literary form of the period, poetry tended to be more personal,...

As we have seen, French culture and language interacted with native English culture for several generations after the Norman Conquest. A common word such as ‘castle’ is a French loan word, for example; and the...

Richardson, however, remains a vital figure in the history of the novel, and of ideology. He initiates a discourse on sexual roles which, in all its ambiguities, is as relevant to today’s society as it...

Chaucer’s world in The Canterbury Tales brings together, for the first time, a diversity of characters, social levels, attitudes, and ways of life. The tales themselves make use of a similarly wide range of forms...

Shakespeare’s plays do not present easy solutions. The audience has to decide for itself. King Lear is perhaps the most disturbing in this respect. One of the key words of the whole play is ‘Nothing’....

The concept of an author, the single creative person who gives the text ‘authority’, only comes later in this period. Most Old English poetry is anonymous, even though names which are in no way comparable,...

The novels of Daniel Defoe are fundamental to eighteenth-century ways of thinking. They range from the quasi-factual A Journal of the Plague Year, an almost journalistic (but fictional) account of London between 1664 and 1665...

The Renaissance did not break completely with mediaeval history and values. Sir Philip Sidney is often considered the model of the perfect Renaissance gentleman. He embodied the mediaeval virtues of the knight (the noble warrior),...

Johnson’s later life, from 1763, is among the best documented of all literary lives. James Boswell gave himself the enormous task, after Johnson’s death in 1784, of producing what is now held to be a...

There is a vast expanse of time before the Norman Conquest in 1066, from which fragments of literary texts remain, although these fragments make quite a substantial body of work. If we consider that the...

In the eighteenth century, with the growth of publishing and with the intellectual climate of the Enlightenment, there was a great demand for new historical writing. The greatest product of this was The Decline and...