A Short Summary of English Literature from 1783-1965

Traditionally 'Literature' has been defined as "Literature is a term used to describe written and sometimes spoken material. Derived from the Latin word literature meaning "writing formed with letters," literature most commonly refers to works of the creative imagination, including poetry, drama, fiction, nonfiction, and in some instances, journalism, and song." (Esther Lombardi).

But there is another important dimension to Literature that seems almost more relevant today than the fact that literature relies upon Language. Culture is an important consideration when we consider "What is Literature?"

Culture is the multidimensional system by which we understand societies (and in turn ourselves as members of a society). How we dress, what we eat, how we meet other people, what we do for work, what Education instructs us to know, how we live in our homes, who we love, what we listen to for music, what we read about, what the broadcast news covers and how we interact with our family are just a few of the many many factors that combine in different ways to create Culture. 

By this definition we can include new media as part of literature and thereby continue the vast tradition of using language as a way of developing ourselves and the world around us. 

Simply put, literature represents the culture and tradition of a language or a people. The concept is difficult to precisely define, though many have tried; it's clear that the accepted definition of literature is constantly changing and evolving. For many, the word literature suggests a higher art form; merely putting words on a page doesn't necessarily equate to creating literature. A canon is the accepted body of works for a given author. Some works of literature are considered canonical, that is, culturally representative of a particular genre (poetry, prose, or drama). (Esther Lombardi).

The modern period is usually defined as beginning with the French Revolution that began with the Estates General of 1789 and ended with the formation of the French Consulate in November 1799. Many of its ideas are considered fundamental principles of liberal democracy today. 

The literature that dominated Europe at the time of the French Revolution, and for some decades after was generally termed Romanticism

Romanticism was a movement that began in literature but was taken up in almost all dimensions of culture and art. Five characteristics of romanticism were:

• The individual emotions, feelings, and expressions of artists.
• It rejected rigid forms and structures. Instead, it placed great stress on the individual, unique experience of an artist/writer.
• Romanticism gave great value to nature, and artists experience within nature. This was in stark contrast to the rapid industrialisation of society in the Nineteenth Century.
• Romanticism was considered idealistic – a belief in greater ideals than materialism and rationalism and the potential beauty of nature and mystical experience.
• Romanticism was influenced by the ideals of the French and American revolution, which sought to free man from a rigid autocratic society. Over time, it also became more associated with burgeoning nationalistic movements, e.g. movement for Italian independence

These characteristics can be seen in culture today and they are in fact basic principles in modern society. 

Some famous authors and poets who wrote in English from the Romantic period were:

William Blake (1757 –1827) Poet, artist, and mystic. Blake wrote Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, The Four Zoas, and Jerusalem. Blake is not considered a classical, romantic poet, but his new style of poetry and mystical experience of nature had a significant influence on the growth of romanticism. Blake's first collection of poems, Poetical Sketches, was printed around 1783.

Robert Burns (1759 – 1796) Scottish romantic poet who was influential in the development of romantic poetry. He wrote in both English and Scottish and also contributed to radical politics.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 –1834) English romantic poet and a member of the “Lakes Poets.” Coleridge’s famous poems included The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel and Kubla Khan. Coleridge helped to bring to England the concept of German idealism. (an important strand of Romanticism)

Lord Byron (1788 – 1824) English romantic poet, who led a flamboyant, extravagant lifestyle – travelling across Europe. His works included Don Juan, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and She Walks in Beauty.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 –1822) English romantic poet, and friend to John Keats. Famous works include Queen Mab, Prometheus Unbound and Adonais – his tribute to Keats. Shelley was also an atheist and radical political writer.

John Keats (1795 – 1821) English Romantic poet. One of his best-known works is Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1817). Famous poems include; A Thing of Beauty (Endymion), Bright Star, When I Have Fears, Ode To A Nightingale.

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Sir Walter Scott (1771 – 1832) Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet. Scott’s novels gained a global appeal, and he was an important romantic novelist. Notable works include Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, The Lady of the Lake, and Waverley.

Mary Shelley (1797 – 1851) English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, and travel writer. Shelley wrote Frankenstein (1818). Shelley was a political radical, expressing more support for greater social co-operation than typical of more individualistic romantics.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809 –  1849) American poet and author. Poe is considered an influential member of the American Romantic movement. He wrote fiction, poetry, essays and literary criticism.

Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892) American poet. Wrote Leaves of Grass, a groundbreaking new style of poetry. Whitman was a bridge between the movements of transcendentalism and realism.

Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886) American female poet. Led secluded lifestyle, and left a legacy of many, short vivid poems, often on themes of death and immortality.

The Victorian Era

Victorian literature refers to English literature during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901). The 19th century is widely considered to be the Golden Age of English Literature, especially for British novels. It was in the Victorian era that the novel became the leading literary genre in English.

While the Romantic period was a time of abstract expression and inward focus, essayists, poets, and novelists during the Victorian era began to reflect on realities of the day, including the dangers of factory work, the plight of the lower class, and the treatment of women and children. Prominent examples include poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and novelists Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. Barrett's works on child labour cemented her success in a male-dominated world where women writers often had to use masculine pseudonyms. Dickens employed humour and an approachable tone while addressing social problems such as wealth disparity. Hardy used his novels to question religion and social structures.

William Thackeray was Dickens' great rival in the first half of Queen Victoria's reign. With a similar style but a slightly more detached, acerbic and barbed satirical view of his characters, he also tended to depict a more middle class society than Dickens did. He is best known for his novel Vanity Fair (1848), subtitled A Novel without a Hero, which is an example of a form popular in Victorian literature: a historical novel in which recent history is depicted.

The Brontë sisters wrote fiction rather different from that common at the time.

Anne, Charlotte and Emily Brontë produced notable works of the period, although these were not immediately appreciated by Victorian critics. Wuthering Heights (1847), Emily's only work, is an example of Gothic Romanticism from a woman's point of view, which examines class, myth, and gender. Jane Eyre (1847), by her sister Charlotte, is another major 19th century novel that has gothic themes. Anne's second novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), written in realistic rather than romantic style, is mainly considered to be the first sustained feminist novel.

Later in this period George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), published The Mill on the Floss in 1860, and in 1872 her most famous work Middlemarch. Like the Brontës she published under a masculine pseudonym.

In the later decades of the Victorian era Thomas Hardy was an important novelist. His most notable works include Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). Renowned for his cynical yet idyllic portrayal of pastoral life in the English countryside, Hardy's work pushed back against widespread urbanisation that came to symbolise the Victorian age.

Significant novelists of this era were Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–1865), Anthony Trollope (1815–1882), George Meredith (1828–1909), and George Gissing (1857–1903).

Other Victorian writers

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–1861) Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) A. E. Housman (1859–1936) William Henry Giles Kingston (1814–1880) Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) Mary Louisa Molesworth (1839–1921)

R. D. Blackmore (1825 – 1900) George Moore (1852–1933) Walter Pater (1839–1894) Coventry Patmore (1823–1896) John Ruskin (1819–1900) John Millington Synge (1871-1909) Charlotte Mary Yonge (1823-1901) Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930)

Modernism 1901-1965

The beginning of the Twentieth Century in the Western Hemisphere was a time of dramatic change across all areas of society. The certainties of the Victorian Era were being questioned and a greater sense of individualism was beginning to dominate the imagination. Queen Victoria died on 22 January 1901, at half past six in the evening, at the age of 81. Between 11 October 1899 and 31 May 1902 the Second Boer War had raged in Southern Africa between the descendents of Dutch settlers and the British Imperial troops. This was significant as it was the first war within the Empire between white combatants. The ideal of the Empire as a civilising force could therefore not be applied as it had so often before and the crimes of the war (it was the source of the concentration camp, which would return to haunt Europe 40 years later) could not be fitted in with the 'civilising' mission it had been thought of through the 19th century when comitting genocide. The Empire was being exposed as a brutal for profit project. Meanwhile a young Indian lawyer by the name of Gandhi arrived in Durban aboard SS Safari in 1893. In no time, Gandhi would become a leader of the South African Indian community. On the 10 October 1903 the Women's Social and Political Union was formed by Emmeline Pankhurst in London to fight for women's rights in Britain. It was as if a corner had been turned regarding what it was to be a woman in Britain. The stage was set for a new literature that attempted to capture and represent a wold in ferment and a new type of individual in the middle of it. 

Modernism is both a philosophical movement and an art movement that arose from broad transformations in Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new forms of art, philosophy, and social organization which reflected the newly emerging industrial world, including features such as urbanization, new technologies, and war.

In literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a narrative mode or method that attempts "to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind" of a narrator. The term was coined by Alexander Bain in 1855 in the first edition of The Senses and the Intellect, when he wrote, "The concurrence of Sensations in one common stream of consciousness (on the same cerebral highway) enables those of different senses to be associated as readily as the sensations of the same sense" (p. 359). But it is commonly credited to William James who used it in 1890 in his The Principles of Psychology. In 1918, the novelist May Sinclair (1863–1946) first applied the term stream of consciousness, in a literary context, when discussing Dorothy Richardson's (1873–1957) novels. Pointed Roofs (1915), the first work in Richardson's series of 13 semi-autobiographical novels titled Pilgrimage, is the first complete stream-of-consciousness novel published in English. However, in 1934, Richardson comments that "Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf & D.R. ... were all using 'the new method', though very differently, simultaneously". There were, however, many earlier precursors and the technique is still used by contemporary writers.

The First World War or The Great War, which took place between 1914-1918, shook the very foundations of the Western world, causing a societal upheaval that left immediate and lasting impressions on every aspect of society and culture. Great Britain, as one of the primary belligerents of the conflict, was no exception; and experienced a wave of social and artistic change as a direct result of the war. One of the most heavily impacted cultural arenas to be touched by the war was literature. Literature during the Great War often reflects upon and bitingly criticizes the horrors of war, as well as the changes society was undergoing and provides a drastic transition between pre and post war work.

Between the wars (1918-1939) Europe was still in a time of great upheaval. A civil war in Spain (1936-1939) became a focus for the ideals of a generation that had been decimated by the First World War, a war where sides were taken between Royalists, Fascists, Anarchists, Socialists and Communists. It was like a concentration of all the great political philosophies of the entire previous century. Many writers, poets and artists participated and responded to the Spanish Civil War and the victory of the fascist forces under the leadership of General Franco led to a lot of literature that questioned the way the western world was developing. Books like George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) were responses to the radical changes that occurred in the 1930s and 40s in Europe. 

One particular modernist writer that should be mentioned (there are too many to mention them all) is Virginia Woolf (1882-1941). Woolf was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.

Virginia Woolf in 1902

Woolf was born into an affluent household in South Kensington, London, the seventh child of mother Julia Prinsep Jackson and father Leslie Stephen in a blended family of eight which included the modernist painter Vanessa Bell, and was home-schooled in English classics and Victorian literature from a young age. From 1897 to 1901, she attended the Ladies' Department of King's College London, where she studied classics and history and came into contact with early reformers of women's higher education and the women's rights movement.

Encouraged by her father, Woolf began writing professionally in 1900. Following her father's death in 1904, the Stephen family moved from Kensington to the more bohemian Bloomsbury, where, in conjunction with the brothers' intellectual friends, they formed the artistic and literary Bloomsbury Group. In 1912, she married Leonard Woolf, and in 1917, the couple founded the Hogarth Press, which published much of her work. They rented a home in Sussex and moved there permanently in 1940. Woolf also had romantic relationships with women, including Vita Sackville-West, who also published her books through Hogarth Press. Both women's literature became inspired by their relationship, which lasted until Woolf's death.

World War Two and Beyond

The Second World War was the first total war on an industrial scale that killed more civilians than it did soldiers Estimates for the total number of casualties in the war vary because many deaths went unrecorded. Most suggest that some 75 million people died in the war, including about 20 million military personnel and 40 million civilians. Many civilians died because of deliberate genocide, massacres, mass-bombings, disease, and starvation.

The Soviet Union lost around 27 million people during the war, including 8.7 million military and 19 million civilian deaths. The largest portion of military dead were 5.7 million ethnic Russians, followed by 1.3 million ethnic Ukrainians. A quarter of the people in the Soviet Union were wounded or killed. Germany sustained 5.3 million military losses, mostly on the Eastern Front and during the final battles in Germany.

The dropping of atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, which killed somewhere between 150,000 and 250,000 people and many more later as a result of radiation poisoning, caused many writers to question the entire nature of being a human being. The dawn of the nuclear age combined with the brutal industrial scale atrocities of the Second World War committed by a modern European state (Germany) against minorities, provided a rupture in the individualism that had concerned modernism for so long. This rupture or breakdown led indirectly to the next great step in the development of thought through language and literature; post-modernism. By 1965 the faith in the mind and the individual that had been so important for many modernist writers had become a source for questioning how we perceive events and experiences. 

In 1965 the poet Adrian Mitchell read "To Whom It May Concern" at the International Poetry Incarnation in Royal Albert Hall, London. The event was one of the first 'Happenings' that ushered in a new experience of art for many people in the west. The idea of Truth had become a concept, rather than a principle. People were angry and uncertain. The war in Vietnam had become a running sore where the west could not justify itself or its actions. What would later be defined as post-modernism was on the horizon as writers questioned the ability of language to speak truth.