BRITISH LITERATURE
AN OUTLINE
(up to 18th cent.)
• I. OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE
(5th century – 1066)
• II. MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE
(1066 – 1st half of 16th century)
• III. MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
(2nd half of 16th century – now)
I. OLD ENGLISH
(ANGLO-SAXON) LITERATURE
• epic poems
Beowulf
• chronicles
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
Beowulf
• a young Viking – a hero
x
• a monster Grendel
• Grendel´s mother
• a dragon
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
• during the reign of King Alfred the Great
(871 – 901)
II. MIDDLE ENGLISH
LITERATURE
• religious literature
John Wyckliffe: Middle English Bible
translation
• heroic literature
Sir Thomas Malory: Le Morte d´Arthur
ballads about Robin Hood
• Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
King Arthur
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a legendary British leader
the Knights of the Round Table
Merlin
Guinevere
Lancelot
Mordred
Excalibur
Tintagel, Camelot, Avalon
Robin Hood
• another popular folk figure – an outlaw
• Sherwood Forest
• Sheriff of Nottingham
The Canterbury Tales
• end of the 14th century
• a collection of stories
• a story-telling contest in a group of
pilgrims on their way to Canterbury
III. MODERN ENGLISH
LITERATURE
• 1558 – 1616
Elizabethan literature (English Renaissance)
• 17th cent.
Revolution and Restoration (Baroque)
• 1700 – 1745
Augustan literature (Classicism)
Elizabethan literature
(Renaissance)
• sonnets
(Thomas Wyatt, Edmund Spencer,
William Shakespeare)
• drama
• (William Shakespeare, Ben Johnson,
Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kid))
English sonnet
love poetry
3 quatrains and 1 couplet
rhyme scheme: abab cdcd efef gg
W.Shakespeare: Sonnet 116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds (a)
Admit impediments, love is not love (b)
Which alters when it alteration finds, (a)
Or bends with the remover to remove. (b)
O no, it is an ever fixéd mark (c)
That looks on tempests and is never shaken; (d)
It is the star to every wand'ring bark, (c)
Whose worth's unknown although his height be taken. (d)
Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks (e)
Within his bending sickle's compass come, (f)
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, (e)
But bears it out even to the edge of doom: (f)
If this be error and upon me proved, (g)
I never writ, nor no man ever loved. (g)
Elizabethan drama
• William Shakespeare
• comedies
• histories
• tragedies
Revolution and restoration
(Baroque)
• metaphysical poetry
(John Donne)
• philosophical literature
(Sir Francis Bacon)
• religious literature
(John Milton: Paradise Lost)
Augustan literature
(Classicism)
• religious literature (John Bunyan)
• philosophical literature (John Locke)
• poetry (Alexander Pope)
• first novel (Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe)
• political satire (Jonathan Swift: Gulliver´s
Travels)
• Gothic fiction (Horace Walpole: The Castle
of Otranto)
Alexander Pope
• translation of Homer
• satirical verse
- heroic couplet
Daniel Defoe
Robinson Crusoe
- the beginning of
realistic fiction as
a literary genre
Jonathan Swift
Gulliver´s Travels - a satire on human
nature
4 voyages
to different
fictional
countries
Horace Walpole
the beginning of
Gothic novel
(combination
of horror and
romance)
Scottish literature
• poetry (Robert Burns)
• historical novel (Sir Walter Scott)