English Lit 101: From Jane Austen to George Orwell and the Enlightenment to Realism, an essential guide to Britain's greatest writers and works
By Brian Boone
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About this ebook
From Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Charles Dickens' Tiny Tim to Jane Austen's Mr. Darcy and Shakespeare's Juliet, British authors have created some of the most compelling characters in all of literature. But too often, textbooks reduce these vibrant voices to boring summaries that would put even an English dean to sleep.
English Lit 101 is an engaging and comprehensive guide through the major players in American literature. From romanticism to modernism and every literary movement in between, this primer is packed with hundreds of entertaining tidbits and concepts, along with easy-to-understand explanations on why each author's work was important then and still relevant now. So whether you're looking for a refresher course on key English literature or want to learn about it for the first time, English Lit 101 has all the answers--even the ones you didn't know you were looking for.
Brian Boone
Brian Boone is an editor and writer for the bestselling Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader line of trivia and humor books. He wrote I Love Rock n’ Roll (Except When I Hate It) and coauthored American Inventions: Big Ideas That Changed Modern Life and How to Make Paper Airplanes. He has contributed to How Stuff Works, Barnes & Noble Reads, McSweeney’s, Splitsider, Someecards, The Onion, Adult Swim, and Funny or Die. He lives in Oregon with his family.
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English Lit 101 - Brian Boone
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English Lit 101
From Jane Austen to George Orwell and the Enlightenment to Realism, an essential guide to Britain’s greatest writers and works
Brian Boone
Adams Media logoAvon, Massachusetts
Copyright © 2017 Simon and Schuster
All rights reserved.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher; exceptions are made for brief excerpts used in published reviews.
Published by
Adams Media, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
57 Littlefield Street, Avon, MA 02322. U.S.A.
www.adamsmedia.com
ISBN 10: 1-4405-9971-8
ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-9971-2
eISBN 10: 1-4405-9972-6
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-9972-9
Cover design by Michelle Kelly
Cover images © iStockphoto.com/221A; traveller1116; ClaudioDivizia; borsvelka.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter 1: Old English
Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People: The First English Book
A People’s History
Moments in Time
Beowulf: A Monster of Early Literature
The Conquering Hero
The Age of Beowulf
Survival and Revival
The Vision of Piers Plowman: It Was All Just a Dream
Visions and Symbols
Alliteration and Illustration
Wycliffe’s Bible: Now Available in English
A Building Resentment
Give the People What They Want
Geoffrey Chaucer: The Birth of English Poetry
The Canterbury Tales
Stories in Poem Form
The King Arthur Legends: All Hail the King
A Welsh Tale
King Arthur, English Icon
National Treasure
Chapter 2: The Elizabethan Era
The King James Bible: A Transformative Translation
Building a Better Bible
The Good Book
The Book of Common Prayer: Uncommonly Original
By Official Decree
Following Along
John Donne: Metaphysical Poetry
Early Works
The Conceit
Christopher Marlowe: Drawing a Blank
Creating Blank Verse
The Faustian Bargain
Edmund Spenser: From Castle to Castle
Fit for a Queene
Politically Incorrect
Ben Jonson: Publish or Perish
Trying on Many Masques
Going to Print
William Shakespeare: The Bard
The Plays
From the Globe to All Around the Globe
The Sonnets
Chapter 3: The Restoration and Beyond
John Milton: Paradise Found
An Epic Journey
John Locke: Creating a New Age
Governmental Affairs
Toward a Greater Understanding
Changing the World
Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
A Novel Idea
Jonathan Swift: The Sultan of Satire
Making a Point
To Lilliput and Beyond
Alexander Pope: An Un-Enlightened Man
Emulating the Classics
The Mock of the Lock
Henry Fielding: King of Comedy
What a Farce
A Joke Made Serious
Samuel Johnson: Master of the Dictionary
Words, Words, Words
Legacy of a Language
Chapter 4: The Romantic Era
William Wordsworth: Emotional Accessibility
Man versus Mankind
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Rhymes and Rimes
Truly Divine
An Unreliable Memory
Saving Shakespeare
Jane Austen: Minding Manners
Not So Happily Ever After
Lord Byron: A Romantic Don Juan
A Heroic Act
Back to Basics
Don Juan
Isn’t It Romantic?
William Blake: Burning Bright
Taking a Stand
Breaking Free
Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley, and Gothic Romanticism: Scary Monsters and Super Creeps
Downright Spooky
Horace Walpole
How to Make a Monster
Robert Burns: The Scottish Bard
The Toast of Scotland
A National Treasure
Chapter 5: The Victorian Era and the Industrial Revolution
Alfred, Lord Tennyson: It’s Good to Be the King
Good Knight
Idyll Hands
Charles Dickens: Voice of the People
Literature from Everyday Life
Becoming a Cultural and Literary Influence
George Eliot: Out in the Country
Getting Real
Mill and Marner
Glorifying the Normal
An Expanding Viewpoint
The Brontë Sisters: Moor Power
Life in a Northern Town
Pseudonym Success
A Not Very Plain Jane
To New Heights
Grey Days in the Hall
Tragic Endings
Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The First Couple of Poetry
Setting the Scene
A Man and a Woman of Letters
Unfortunate Inspiration
A Change Is Gonna Come
Lewis Carroll: Adventures in Absurdity
A Man of Many Talents
Down the Rabbit Hole
Split Personality
Robert Louis Stevenson: Set a Course for Adventure
Wanderlust
A Man of the World
Beware, Pirates
The Monster Within
For Children?
Take It Easy
Rudyard Kipling: Welcome to the Jungle
Early Life
From the Jungles of Vermont
What a Boer
Oscar Wilde: For Art’s Sake
Mentors and Modernism
Extremely Important
Gross Indecency
Thomas Hardy: Going Backward to Go Forward
An Architectural Approach
A Novel Approach
Chapter 6: The Modernist Movement
William Butler Yeats: The Diamond of the Emerald Isle
Ireland’s Poet
T.S. Eliot: Going to Waste
Heading East
Pulling from the Past
Thinking It Through
A Towering Achievement
Switching Gears
D.H. Lawrence: Love Gone Wrong
Art Imitates Life, Life Imitates Art
Courting Controversy
Forbidden Love
The Lover
E.M. Forster: Where Nature Meets Human Nature
Looking to Italy
A Broken System
Imperialism
Trudging Forward
Virginia Woolf: A Movement of One’s Own
Early Life
A Light Amongst the Darkness
Making Room
James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist
A Master of Languages
For Dublin
Up from the Ashes
A Day in the Life
In the Wake of Ulysses
Legacy
W.H. Auden: A New Classicist
To America
Dylan Thomas: The Clear Expression of Mixed Feelings
The Celebrity
Chapter 7: Contemporary English Literature
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: It’s Elementary
The Game Is Afoot
A Brief and Unfortunate Death
A Knight’s Tale
George Bernard Shaw: Ireland’s Shakespeare
Highly Theatrical
Getting Serious
Joseph Conrad: Into Darkness
Exiled
Life at Sea
Oh, the Horrors
The World Comes to England
William Golding: Lord of the Flies
Try, Try Again
Island of Misfit Boys
An Uncomfortable Reality
J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: Two Towers
Tolkien
Lewis
George Orwell: Big Brother Is Watching
Getting Experimental
An Unclear Future
Down on the Farm
Current Voices: The Widening Definition of Englishness
Zadie Smith
Hilary Mantel
Kazuo Ishiguro
Neil Gaiman
Nick Hornby
Harold Pinter
Martin Amis
J.K. Rowling
About the Author
To M.: I was made and meant to look for you and wait for you and become yours forever.
—Robert Browning
Introduction
English literature started when there was barely even an English language to use. Dating back a millennium or so, the epic Anglo-Saxon tale of Beowulf was the first thing written down in the very earliest version of what would become English. Various Anglo-Saxon groups migrated to the British Isles and brought with them different dialects that would eventually combine to form a single language. It would evolve to become a sophisticated language, and with it would evolve one of the world’s most important literary canons: English literature.
Which is to say British literature. Literature in the English language is among the most influential and vital in the world, spreading the mechanics of poetry, prose, film, and drama to every corner of the globe. But before there was American literature, or Australian literature, there was the written word of England. And that’s what English Lit 101 is all about. It’s a vast, thorough—but simplified and easy to understand—survey of England-based literature.
The authors, poets, and storytellers in the English canon have always tried to answer the big questions: What does it mean to be human? How can rational thought live comfortably with emotions and spirituality? What does it mean to be English?
Uniquely, English authors have approached those big questions by making them personal. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice may have been about one woman bristling against the confines of society, but it’s really just a story about fitting in while being true to oneself. Charles Dickens wrote books that resonated with his Victorian-era audience because they called attention to the social injustices of his day. Personal accounts, whether written in Middle English or delivered in rhythmic verse, reflect universal themes.
In English Lit 101, you’ll get a glimpse of how major literary forms were created, as well as how they’ve evolved . . . and amazingly, how they’ve remained unchanged. (Shakespeare pretty much nailed how a play should be written, and children’s authors of today still owe quite a debt to Lewis Carroll, for example.) Here you’ll learn how forms change to reflect the prevailing political opinions of their era—such as how poetry went from a way to tell stories and glorify a nation with much pomp and circumstance in the Elizabethan era to the simplified, bare-bones approach befitting the alienation widely felt after World War I. Or how the novel went from showcasing grand tales of adventure (Robinson Crusoe) to somber depictions of normal, real life (Middlemarch) to getting banned for being too real (here’s to you, D.H. Lawrence). And through it all, English authors explored, altered, refined, and transformed the English language itself so as to better express the human condition.
English literature is a huge topic that encompasses a lot of material, so here you’ll find it broken down by era, and then by each era’s major contributors. And with each entry you’ll find information on historical context, literary context, and specifically each author’s contribution to the canon and why he or she is so important. So whether you’re looking to fill in some holes in your knowledge, getting a refresher on what you learned in high school or college, or merely supplementing an English lit course you’re taking at this very moment, English Lit 101 has got you covered.
Chapter 1
Old English
To the modern-day reader of contemporary English literature, the earliest examples of English literature
may seem like they were written in an entirely foreign language . . . and they kind of were. The beginnings of the English language took shape in the seventh century after multiple tribes—collectively referred to as Anglo-Saxons—migrated from central Europe to the British Isles. Most spoke Germanic languages—and each tribe spoke its own Germanic language—and brought those languages with them. Eventually, those different dialects coalesced into a single language, one with wildly inconsistent spelling and grammar, but a single language nonetheless: Old English.
Old English literature runs concurrent with the Anglo-Saxon era, which comprises works from the seventh century up through to a few decades past the Norman Conquest of 1066. Old English was complex, ever changing, and adaptable. New words and rules became standardized over the centuries, eventually creating a language that was nearly universal across Britain. Language was a necessary tool for communication, and communication became a vital tool for evolving the common tongue.
Very little written material from the Old English era survived, and what documents did survive are primarily what those in power felt was necessary for scribes to record. This is especially true after the large-scale conversion to Christianity by invading Romans. The local church kept records and histories because the monks were the ones who were literate, and many of the Old English documents that we still have around include sermons, church writings translated from Latin, Anglo-Saxon histories, and legal documents. In addition, scribes and poets outside of the sphere of the church’s influence wrote down things that weren’t quite so dry, things that provide a window into the lives and thoughts of the people who lived in this era. Luckily, those myths, legends, and stories (many of which had been passed down orally for generations) were preserved.
Only about 400 manuscripts total from the Anglo-Saxon period even survive—the expulsion of the Roman-controlled church in the 1500s from England would lead to a lot of intentional document destruction, particularly by way of fire. But these manuscripts would be the basis for a language and a canon that would emerge as comparable, and often superior, to anything ever produced in Greek, Latin, or French.
Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People
The First English Book
Also known as St. Bede
or the Venerable Bede,
the monk named Bede (672–735) has additionally been called the father of English history.
A historian and archivist at the monastery of Saint Peter in Monkwearmouth in what was at the time the kingdom of Northumbria, Bede was the first to document for the ages the already extensive history of the rapidly growing civilization of the British Isles. To Bede, this history largely meant the rise of Christianity, but this drive to convert the residents of early Britain happened at the same time as the development of the island, as well as the development of what would soon be a common tongue to unite the disparate tribes.
Bede deftly championed English pride as a way to bring about more converts to Christianity by making religious texts more available to Britons. Drawing on his monastery’s library of more than 200 volumes of early Catholic Church books, Bede compiled the story of the local church and made it more accessible. His most famous and lasting work is his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (731). While written in Latin rather than English, this five-book series is the first permanent work to be written in the British Isles. Ecclesiastical History of the English People, as it’s called in English, was written with the assistance of an abbot named Albinus, and it covers the history of England through the lens of the history of Christianity in Britain. Without Bede’s work, which relied on oral histories and interviews in addition to church texts, the details of the Roman invasion and settlement of Britain—really, the history of England itself to that point—would have been lost forever.
Entry-based history of English literature.Photo Credit: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
Illustration of the Venerable Bede,
author of Ecclesiastical History of the English People, as seen in the Nuremberg Chronicle.
A People’s History
Historia ecclesiastica depicts the religious and political history (which are more or less one and the same) of the Anglo-Saxons on the British Isles. This time period runs from the fifth century up to about A.D. 731, which is when Bede finished writing. This book isn’t so much literature as it is a methodically delivered historical survey, but this history book makes the history books because it’s the oldest text written in England.
Any good contemporary literature both reflects its time period and serves as a de facto historical document, and Historia ecclesiastica certainly qualifies. Bede includes an outline of Roman Britain’s geography, reports on significant disagreements between the two main local religious factions (Roman-influenced Christians and Celtic Christians in present-day Ireland and Scotland), and passages on the political uprisings of the 600s, even ones that aren’t expressly related to ecclesiastical history. And while books made in England were new, this book’s style was not—it was written to emulate the classical history style of the Greeks and Romans.
Bede took his research from those people who historically were the historians and record keepers—monasteries and government records—and he is hardly objective. Less a journalist and more of a storyteller, Bede has a distinct angle and bias: to bring in new Christians. (As Bede later became St. Bede,
that’s a telling indication of his aims.) That perspective affected the way he wrote: simply, plainly, and for maximum comprehension.
Literary Lessons
One other lasting effect of Historia ecclesiastica is that Bede solidified the way the West told time: The books popularized and universalized anno Domini as a form of marking years. Prior to this, governments and the church used various local systems, such as indictions, which noted the passage of time in fifteen-year cycles, and regnal years, a complicated system in which a year was indicated by where it fell inside of a particular monarch’s reign.
Moments in Time
Book I of Historia ecclesiastica begins in 55 B.C. with the moment Britain became a part of the rest of Europe: when Caesar invaded and brought it into the Roman Empire. The evolution of the Roman Empire into the Holy Roman Empire as it unfolded in Britain is covered, particularly Augustine’s A.D. 597 mission to the islands.
Book II concerns the evangelization of Northumbria, which is jeopardized when a pagan king named Penda kills Edwin, the chief missionary.
Book III covers the growth of Christianity under local kings as each is converted to the new religion, and Book IV’s main event is the consecration of Theodore, the first to hold the iconic post of the archbishop of Canterbury.
The fifth and final book takes things up to Bede’s present day (731), and particularly covers both the conflict between the Roman and British churches over the correct dating of Easter and how England forged its own identity (in terms of the church) once the Romans departed.
Now a nearly 1,300-year-old document, more than 160 manuscripts of Historia ecclesiastica are somehow still intact. That’s especially impressive as they were all handwritten and there were probably only ever about 200 copies overall. Bede wrote more than forty more books in his life, mostly biblical commentaries written in Latin, and few of those other manuscripts have survived.
Beowulf
A Monster of Early Literature
In 1066, William the Conqueror led troops in the Norman Conquest of