Publisher's Synopsis
A comprehensive beginners guide to the literature of the British Isles from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present day in one volume.;This book is an established introduction to English literature, with separate chapters tracing the development from Beowulf to the post-modern fictions of Seamus Heaney and Angela Carter including a new section on late-20th-century prose and British and Irish poetry of the 1960s. The volume provides detailed discussion of Old and Middle English literature, the Renaissance, Shakespeare, the 17th and 18th centuries, the Romantics, Victorian and Edwardian literature, Modernism, and post-war writing. Discussions of key writers and works from Anselm and Chaucer to Spenser and Bunyan, and from Swift and Johnson to Dickens and D.H. Lawrence, are combined with analysis of the impact on literature of contemporary political, social, and intellectual developments. The book includes Scottish, Irish, and Welsh writers, and it asks about the future of the canon in the light of the fragmented condition of British writing in the post-imperial period.
