The term
English literature
means
literature
written in the
English language
.
English literature began in
Old English
with the
epic poem
Beowulf
, which dates from sometime between the 8th to the 11th centuries. It is not written in language people can understand today, but there are several good translations into modern English. It is the most famous work in Old English, despite being set in
Scandinavia
. The poem is written with no
rhymes
but with
alliteration
.
[1]
The next important landmark is the works of the poet
Geoffrey Chaucer
(c. 1343?1400), especially
The Canterbury Tales
. That is in
Middle English
1066 to the middle/late 1400s. Chaucer introduced into English poetry
rhyme royal
that is a seven-line stanza rhymed ababbcc.
[2]
[3]
Modern English literature began in 16th century.
Thomas Wyatt
and
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
wrote first English
sonnets
.
[4]
The last-mentioned invented also
blank verse
.
[5]
Edmund Spenser wrote
The Faerie Queene
, a long epic poem while
Philip Sidney
wrote a sequence of sonnets Astrophel
and Stella
.
The next stage is
Thomas Kyd
,
Christopher Marlowe
,
Ben Jonson
,
Shakespeare
and
John Milton
, sometimes described as
Early Modern English
(1470 to 1650).
William Shakespeare is the author of the most famous sentence written in English:
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
. It is the first line of prince Hamlet's monologue from drama
The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
that was published in 1603.
King James Version of Bible was published in 1611.
[6]
John Bunyan
[7]
wrote
The Pilgrim's Progress
which is one of the most popular books ever published.
In 18th century first modern novels were written by
Daniel Defoe
,
Jonathan Swift
,
Laurence Sterne
and
Horace Walpole
.
William Wordsworth
,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
,
John Keats
,
Jane Austen
,
Emily Bronte
,
Charles Dickens
,
Robert Browning
,
George Eliot
, Thomas Hardy,
D.H. Lawrence
,
Virginia Woolf
and
Ted Hughes
are all important English writers in modern English.
T.S. Eliot
was perhaps the most important poet in 20th century who wrote in English. His best known work is the poem
The Waste Land
that was published in 1922.
[8]
Another book by him was
The Four Ouarters
. The poet himself regarded it as his best work.
[9]
Not all English literature was written by
writers
born in
England
.
Joseph Conrad
was Polish,
Robert Burns
was Scottish,
James Joyce
was Irish,
Dylan Thomas
was
Welsh
,
Edgar Allan Poe
was American,
Hilaire Belloc
was French,
Emma Lazarus
was Jewish,
Salman Rushdie
is Indian,
V. S. Naipaul
is
Trinidadian
, and
Vladimir Nabokov
was
Russian
. The greatest Portuguese poet of 20th century,
Fernando Pessoa
wrote some poems in English, too.
[10]
In other words, English literature includes all the varieties and dialects of English spoken around the world.
English is a language known by many million people. They can read literary works from any country in English translation.
- ↑
Alliterative verse at Encyclopaedia Britannica.
- ↑
James Wilson Bright, Raymond Durbin Miller, The Elements of English Versification, Boston 1910. s. 113.
- ↑
Rhyme royal at Encyclopaedia Britannica.
- ↑
Sonnet at Encyclopaedia Britannica.
- ↑
Blank Verse at Encyclopaedia Britannica.
- ↑
Christianity Today.
- ↑
John Bunyan at Christianity Today.
- ↑
T.S. Eliot at Biography.com.
- ↑
T.S. Eliot at Poetry Foundation.
- ↑
Fernando Pessoa at Poetry Foundation.
Hippolyte Adolphe Taine,
Introduction to the History of English Literature
(1863).