THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE By Andrew Sanders

CONTENTS
A Note on the Text ...................................................................................................................................................ix
Introduction: Poets’ Corners: The Development of a Canon of English Literature......................................................1
1. OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE.................................................................................................................................16
Beowulf
The Battle of Maldon and the Elegies
The Biblical Poems and The Dream of the Rood
2. MEDIEVAL LITERATURE 1066-1510.....................................................................................................................28
The Church, Church Building, and Clerical Historians
Early Middle English Literature
Chivalry and ‘Courtly’ Love
English Romances and the Gawain-Poet
Fourteenth-Century England: Death, Disruption, and Change
Langland and Piers Plowman
Geoffrey Chaucer
Gower, Lydgate, and Hoccleve
Poetry in Scotland in the Fifteenth Century
Late Medieval Drama
Late Medieval Religious Writing
Malory and Caxton
3. RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION: LITERATURE 1510-1620...............................................................................83
Poetry at the Court of Henry VIII
An Educated Élite: More, Elyot, and Ascham
The Literature of the English Reformation
Early and Mid-Sixteenth-Century Drama
The Defence and the Practice of Poetry: Puttenham and the Sidneys
Sixteenth- and Early Seventeeth-Century Prose Fiction
This Island and the Wider World: History, Chorography, and Geography
Ralegh, Spenser, and the Cult of Elizabeth
Late Sixteenth-Century Verse
Marlowe and Shakespeare as non-Dramatic Poets
Theatre in the 1590s: Kyd and Marlowe
Shakespeare’s Plays
Politics and History
Tragedy and Death
Women and Comedy
Ben Jonson and the Comic Theatre
Jonson and the High Roman Fashion
‘Debauch’d and diversivolent’: Men, Women, and Tragedy
4. REVOLUTION AND RESTORATION: LITERATURE 1620-1690...............................................................................186
The Advancement of Learning: Francis Bacon and the Authorized Version
Andrewes and Donne
‘Metaphysical’ Religious Poetry: Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan
Secular Verse: Courtiers and Cavaliers
Anatomies: Burton, Browne, and Hobbes
Political Prose of the Civil War Period
Milton
Marvell
Pepys, Evelyn, and Seventeenth-Century Autobiographical Writing
Varieties of Religious Writing in the Restoration Period
Private Histories and Public History: Aubrey, Sprat, and Clarendon
The Poetry of the Restoration Period: Rochester and Dryden
Women’s Writing and Women Writing in the Restoration Period
‘Restoration’ Drama
5. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE 1690-1780 ..............................................................................................273
Jonathan Swift
Pope and the Poetry of the Early Century
Thomson and Akenside: The Poetry of Nature and the Pleasures of the Imagination
Other Pleasures of Imagination: Dennis, Addison, and Steele
Gay and the Drama of the Early Eighteenth Century
Defoe and the ‘Rise’ of the Novel
The Mid-Century Novel: Richardson, the Fieldings, Charlotte Lennox
Smollett and Sterne
Sensibility, Sentimentality, Tears, and Graveyards
The Ballad, the Gothic, the Gaelic, and the Davidic
Goldsmith and Sheridan: The New ‘Comedy of Manners’
Johnson and his Circle
6. THE LITERATURE OF THE ROMANTIC PERIOD 1780-1830..................................................................................333
Paine, Godwin, and the ‘Jacobin’ Novelists
Gothic Fiction
Smith and Burney
Cowper, Blake, and Burns
Wordsworth
Coleridge, Southey, and Crabbe
Austen, the ‘Regional’ Novel, and Scott
Byron, Shelley, and Keats
The ‘Romantic’ Essayists
Clare and Cobbett
7. HIGH VICTORIAN LITERATURE 1830-1880 ........................................................................................................398
‘The Condition of England’: Carlyle and Dickens
‘Condition of England’ Fiction
Macaulay, Thackeray, and Trollope
The Brontë Sisters
Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelite Poets
The Brownings
The Drama, the Melodrama, and the ‘Sensation’ Novel
The New Fiction of the 1860s: Meredith and Eliot
The ‘Strange Disease of Modern Life’: Mill, Arnold, Clough, and Ruskin
The ‘Second Spring’ and Hopkins
Coda: Carroll and Lear
8. LATE VICTORIAN AND EDWARDIAN LITERATURE 1880-1920.............................................................................457
The ‘Agnostic’ Fiction of the Late Century
‘The Letter Killeth’: Hardy, Gissing, and Moore
Mystery and History: Conan Doyle, Stoker, and Stevenson
‘Our Colonial Expansion’: Kipling and Conrad
‘Our Theatre in the 90s’: London and Dublin
The Edwardian Age
The Edwardian Novel
The Poetry
9. MODERNISM AND ITS ALTERNATIVES: LITERATURE 1920-1945 ........................................................................505
‘Bloomsbury’ and beyond: Strachey, Woolf, and Mansfield
Richardson and Lawrence
Old and New Writing: Practitioners, Promoters, and the ‘Little Magazines’
Eliot, Firbank, and the Sitwells
Joyce
Inter-War Drama: O’Casey, Coward, Priestley, and Sherriff
Retrospect and Historical Memory: Graves and Jones
‘Society’ and Society: The New Novelists of the 1920s and 1930s
Bright Young Things and Brave New Worlds: Wodehouse, Waugh, and Huxley
The Auden Circle
‘Rotten Elements’: MacDiarmid, Upward, Koestler, and Orwell
Looking at Britain at War
10. POST- WAR AND POST-MODERN LITERATURE..................................................................................................577
Dividing and Ruling: Britain in the 1950s
The New Theatre
The New Novelists of the 1950s
Poetry since 1950
The ‘New Morality’: The 1960s and 1970s
Female and Male Reformulations: Fiction in the 1960s and 1970s
Drama since the 1950s
Fin de siècle: Some Notes of Late-Century Fiction
CHRONOLOGY ..................................................................................................................................................641