Table of Contents

List of illustrations Foreword by Malcolm Bradbury THE BEGINNINGS OF ENGLISH: OLD AND MIDDLE ENGLISH 600-1485 Contexts and conditions Personal and religious voices Language note: The earliest figurative language Long poems French influence and English affirmation Language and dialect Language note: The expanding lexicon - Chaucer and Middle English From anonymity to individualism Women's voices Fantasy Travel Geoffrey Chaucer Langland, Gower and Lydgate The Scottish Chaucerians Medieval drama Malory and Skelton Language note: Prose and sentence structure THE RENAISSANCE: 1485-1660 Contexts and conditions Language note: Expanding world: expanding lexicon Renaissance poetry Language note: Puttenham's Social Poetics Drama before Shakespeare From the street to the building - the Elizabethan theatre Language note: The further expanding lexicon Renaissance prose Translations of the Bible Language note: The Language of the Bible Shakespeare The plays The sonnets Language note: Shakespeare's language The Metaphysical poets The Cavalier poets Jacobean drama - to the closure of the theatres, 1642 Ben Jonson Masques Other dramatists of the early seventeenth century City comedy The end of the Renaissance theatre RESTORATION TO ROMANTICISM: 1660-1789 Contexts and conditions Early Milton Restoration drama Rochester Dryden Pope Journalism Scottish Enlightenment, diarists and Gibbon The novel Criticism Language note: The expanding lexicon - standards of English' Johnson Sterne, Smollett and Scottish voices Drama after 1737 Poetry after Pope Language note: Metrical patterns Melancholy, madness and nature The Gothic and the sublime Language note: Point of view THE ROMANTIC PERIOD: 1789 - 1832 Contexts and conditions Language note: William Cobbett, grammar and politics Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge Language note: Reading Wordsworth Language note: The 'real' language of men Keats Shelley Byron Rights and voices in poetry Clare Romantic prose The novel in the Romantic period Jane Austen Language note: Jane Austen's English Scott From Gothic to Frankenstein The Scottish regional novel THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Contexts and conditions Dickens Language note: Reading Dickens Victorian thought and Victorian novels The Brontes and Eliot Other lady novelists Late Victorian novels Wilde and Aestheticism Hardy and James Language note: Dialect and character in Hardy Victorian poetry Language note: The developing uses of dialects in literature Victorian drama Language note: Reading the language of theatre and drama THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: 1900-45 Contexts and conditions Modern poetry to 1945 Language note: Reading Hardy Later Hardy Language note: The fragmenting lexicon Georgian and Imagist poetry First World War poetry Irish writing W.B. Yeats T.S. Eliot Language note: Modernist poetic syntax Popular poets Thirties poets Language note: Reading Auden Scottish and Welsh poetry Modern Drama to 1945 Irish drama D.H. Lawrence Popular and poetic drama Language note: Literature about language The novel to 1945 Subjectivity: the popular tradition The Kailyard School Provincial novels Social concerns Light novels Genre fiction Modernism and the novel Forster, Conrad and Ford Language note: Metaphor and metonymy D.H. Lawrence Woolf and Joyce Language note: Irish English, nationality and literature Novels of the First World War Aldous Huxley Rooms of their own Ireland Early Greene and Waugh Thirties novelists THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: 1945 TO THE PRESENT Contexts and conditions Drama since 1945 Language note: Drama and everyday language Poetry of the Second World War Poetry since 1945 Martians and gorgons The novel since 1945 Writing for younger children - so-called children's literature Later Greene Post-war Waugh Orwell Dialogue novels Language note: Discourse, titles and dialogism The mid-century novel Amis, father and son Language note: City slang Language note: Common speech Golding Fowles and Frayn Novel sequences The campus novel Excellent women Muriel Spark and o

About the Author

Ronald Carter is Professor of Modern English Language in the School of English Studies at the University of Nottingham. He has published widely in the fields of English Language and Literary Studies. John McRae is Special Professor of Language in Literature Studies at the University of Nottingham and has been a Visiting Professor and Lecturer in more than twenty countries.

Reviews

'The Routledge History of Literature in English is, as its title implies, an enormously ambitious and wide-ranging work. It offers judicious thumb-nail sketches of significant individual writers, and also valuable portraits of literary movements. Students of writing are bound to be indebted to it - and it has a clarity of structure and analysis that everyone will welcome.- Andrew Motion