English literature
English
literature, the body of written works produced
in the English language by inhabitants of the British Isles (including Ireland) from the 7th century to the
present day. The major literatures written in English outside the British Isles
are treated separately under American literature, Australian literature, Canadian literature, and New Zealand literature.
English literature has sometimes
been stigmatized as insular. It can be argued that no single English novel attains
the universality of the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy’s War
and Peace or the French writer Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Yet in the Middle Ages the Old English literature of the subjugated Saxons was leavened by the Latinand Anglo-Norman writings, eminently foreign in origin, in which the churchmen and
the Norman conquerors expressed themselves. From this combination emerged a flexible
and subtle linguistic instrument exploited by Geoffrey Chaucer and brought to supreme application by William Shakespeare. During the Renaissance the renewed interest in Classical learning and values
had an important effect on English literature, as on all the arts; and ideas of
Augustan literary propriety in the 18th century and reverence in the 19th
century for a less specific, though still selectively viewed, Classical
antiquity continued to shape the literature. All three of these impulses
derived from a foreign source, namely the Mediterranean basin. The Decadents of the late 19th century and the Modernists of the
early 20th looked to continental European individuals and movements for
inspiration. Nor was attraction toward European intellectualism dead in the
late 20th century, for by the mid-1980s the approach known as structuralism, a
phenomenon predominantly French and German in origin, infused the very study of
English literature itself in a host of published critical studies and university
departments. Additional influence was exercised by deconstructionist analysis,
based largely on the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida.
Further, Britain’s past imperial activities around the globe continued to
inspire literature—in some cases wistful, in other cases hostile. Finally, English literature has
enjoyed a certain diffusion abroad, not only in predominantly English-speaking
countries but also in all those others where English is the first choice of
study as a second language.
English literature is therefore not
so much insular as detached from the continental European tradition across the
Channel. It is strong in all the conventional categories of the bookseller’s
list: in Shakespeare it has a dramatist of world renown; in poetry,
a genre notoriously resistant to adequate translation and
therefore difficult to compare with the poetry of other literatures, it is so
peculiarly rich as to merit inclusion in the front rank; English literature’s
humour has been found as hard to convey to foreigners as poetry, if not more
so—a fact at any rate permitting bestowal of the label “idiosyncratic”; English
literature’s remarkable body of travel writings constitutes another counterthrust to the charge of insularity; in
autobiography, biography, and historical writing, English literature compares with
the best of any culture; and children’s literature, fantasy, essays, and journals, which tend to be considered minor genres, are all fields of exceptional achievement as regards
English literature. Even in philosophical writings, popularly thought of as
hard to combine with literary value, thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, and Bertrand Russell stand comparison for lucidity and grace with the best
of the French philosophers and the masters of Classical antiquity.
Some of English literature’s most
distinguished practitioners in the 20th century—from Joseph Conrad at its beginning to V.S. Naipaul and Tom Stoppard at its end—were born outside the British Isles. What
is more, none of the aforementioned had as much in common with his adoptive
country as did, for instance, Doris Lessing and Peter Porter (two other distinguished writer-immigrants to
Britain), both having been born into a British family and having been brought
up on British Commonwealth soil.
On the other hand, during the same
period in the 20th century, many notable practitioners of English literature
left the British Isles to live abroad: James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Robert Graves, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, and Anthony Burgess. In one case, that of Samuel Beckett, this process was carried to the extent of writing works
first in French and then translating them into English.
Even English literature considered
purely as a product of the British Isles is extraordinarily heterogeneous, however. Literature actually written in those Celtic
tongues once prevalent in Cornwall, Ireland, Scotland,
and Wales—called the “Celtic Fringe”—is treated separately (see Celtic literature). Yet Irish, Scots, and Welsh writers have contributed
enormously to English literature even when they have written in dialect, as the 18th-century poet Robert Burns and the 20th-century Scots writer Alasdair Gray have done. In the latter half of the 20th century,
interest began also to focus on writings in English or English dialect by
recent settlers in Britain, such as Afro-Caribbeans and people from Africa
proper, the Indian subcontinent, and East Asia.
Even within England,
culturally and historically the dominant partner in the union of
territories comprising Britain, literature has been as enriched by strongly
provincial writers as by metropolitan ones. Another contrast more fruitful than
not for English letters has been that between social milieus, however much observers of Britain in their own writings
may have deplored the survival of class distinctions. As far back as medieval times, a courtly tradition in literature
cross-fertilized with an earthier demotic one. Shakespeare’s frequent juxtaposition of royalty in one scene with plebeians in the next
reflects a very British way of looking at society. This awareness of
differences between high life and low, a state of affairs fertile in creative
tensions, is observable throughout the history of English literature.
Poetry
The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who invaded Britain in the 5th and 6th centuries
brought with them the common Germanic metre; but of their earliest oral poetry,
probably used for panegyric, magic, and short narrative, little or none survives. For
nearly a century after the conversion of King Aethelberht I of
Kent to Christianity about 600, there is no evidence that the English wrote
poetry in their own language. But St. Bede the Venerable, in his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum(“Ecclesiastical History of the English People”), wrote that
in the late 7th century Caedmon, an illiterate Northumbrian cowherd, was inspired in a
dream to compose a short hymn in praise of the creation. Caedmon later composed
verses based on Scripture, which was expounded for him by monks at
Streaneshalch (now called Whitby), but only the “Hymn of Creation” survives.
Caedmon legitimized the native verse form by adapting it to Christian themes.
Others, following his example, gave England a body of vernacular poetry unparalleled in Europe before
the end of the 1st millennium.
Virtually all Old English poetry is
written in a single metre, a four-stress line with a syntactical break, or
caesura, between the second and third stresses, and with alliteration linking the two halves of the line; this pattern is
occasionally varied by six-stress lines. The poetry is formulaic, drawing on a
common set of stock phrases and phrase patterns, applying standard epithets to
various classes of characters, and depicting scenery with such recurring images
as the eagle and the wolf, which wait during battles to feast on carrion, and
ice and snow, which appear in the landscape to signal sorrow. In the best poems
such formulas, far from being tedious, give a strong impression of the richness
of the cultural fund from which poets could draw. Other standard devices of
this poetry are the kenning, a figurative name for a thing, usually expressed in
a compound noun (e.g., swan-road used to name the sea); and variation, the repeating of
a single idea in different words, with each repetition adding a new level of
meaning. That these verse techniques changed little during 400 years of
literary production suggests the extreme conservatism of Anglo-Saxon culture.
The major manuscripts
Most Old English poetry is preserved
in four manuscripts of the late 10th and early 11th centuries. The Beowulf
manuscript (British Library) contains Beowulf, Judith, and three prose tracts; the Exeter Book (Exeter Cathedral) is a miscellaneous gathering of
lyrics, riddles, didactic poems, and religious narratives; the Junius Manuscript (Bodleian
Library, Oxford)—also called the Caedmon Manuscript, even though its contents are no longer attributed to
Caedmon—contains biblical paraphrases; and the Vercelli Book (found in the cathedral library in Vercelli, Italy)
contains saints’ lives, several short religious poems, and prose homilies. In
addition to the poems in these books are historical poems in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; poetic renderings of Psalms 51–150; the 31 “Metres”
included in King Alfred the Great’s translation of Boethius’s De
consolatione philosophiae (Consolation of Philosophy); magical, didactic, elegiac, and heroic poems; and others,
miscellaneously interspersed with prose, jotted in margins, and even worked in
stone or metal.
Problems of dating
Few poems can be dated as closely as
Caedmon’s “Hymn.” King Alfred’s compositions fall into the late 9th century, and Bede composed his
“Death Song” within 50 days of his death on May 25, 735. Historical poems such
as “The Battle of
Brunanburh” (after 937) and “The Battle of Maldon” (after 991) are fixed by the dates of the events
they commemorate. A translation of one of Aldhelm’s riddles is found not only in the
Exeter Book but also in an early 9th-century manuscript at Leiden, Neth. And at
least a part of “The Dream of the
Rood” can be dated by an excerpt
carved on the 8th-century Ruthwell Cross (in Dumfriesshire, Scot.).
But in the absence of such indications, Old English poems are hard to date, and
the scholarly consensus that most were composed in the Midlands and the North
in the 8th and 9th centuries gave way to uncertainty during the last two
decades of the 20th century. Many now hold that “The Wanderer,” Beowulf, and other poems once assumed to have been written in the
8th century are of the 9th century or later. For most poems, there is no
scholarly consensus beyond the belief that they were written between the 8th
and the 11th centuries.
Religious verse
If few poems can be dated
accurately, still fewer can be attributed to particular poets. The most
important author from whom a considerable body of work survives
is Cynewulf, who wove his runic signature into the epilogues of four
poems. Aside from his name, little is known of him; he probably lived in the
9th century in Mercia or Northumbria. His works include The Fates of the Apostles, a short martyrology; The Ascension (also called Christ II),
a homily and biblical narrative; Juliana, a
saint’s passion set in the reign of the Roman emperor Maximian (late 3rd
century AD); and Elene,
perhaps the best of his poems, which describes the mission of St. Helena, mother of the emperor Constantine, to recover Christ’s cross. Cynewulf’s work is lucid and
technically elegant; his theme is the continuing evangelical mission from the
time of Christ to the triumph of Christianity under Constantine. Several poems
not by Cynewulf are associated with him because of their subject matter. These
include two lives of St. Guthlac and Andreas; the latter, the apocryphal story of how St. Andrew fell into the hands of the
cannibalistic (and presumably mythical) Mermedonians, has stylistic affinities with Beowulf. Also in
the “Cynewulf group” are several poems with Christ as their subject, of which
the most important is “The Dream of the Rood,” in which the cross speaks of itself as Christ’s loyal
thane and yet the instrument of his death. This tragic paradox echoes a recurring theme of secular poetry and at the same time movingly expresses the religious paradoxes of Christ’s triumph in death and humankind’s
redemption from sin.
Several poems of the Junius
Manuscript are based on the Old Testament narratives Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel. Of these, Exodus is remarkable for its intricate diction and bold imagery. The fragmentary Judith of the Beowulf Manuscript stirringly embellishes the
story from the Apocrypha of the heroine who led the Jews to victory over the
Assyrians.
Elegiac and heroic verse
The term elegy is
used of Old English poems that lament the loss of worldly goods, glory, or
human companionship. “The Wanderer” is narrated by a man, deprived of lord and kinsmen,
whose journeys lead him to the realization that there is stability only in
heaven. “The Seafarer” is similar, but its journey motif more explicitly
symbolizes the speaker’s spiritual yearnings. Several others have similar
themes, and three elegies—“The Husband’s
Message,” “The Wife’s Lament,” and “Wulf
and Eadwacer”—describe what appears to be a conventional situation: the
separation of husband and wife by the husband’s exile.
“Deor” bridges the gap between the elegy and the heroic poem,
for in it a poet laments the loss of his position at court by alluding to sorrowful stories from Germanic legend. Beowulf itself
narrates the battles of Beowulf, a prince of the Geats (a tribe in what is now
southern Sweden), against the monstrous Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and a
fire-breathing dragon. The account contains some of the best elegiac verse in
the language, and, by setting marvelous tales against a historical background
in which victory is always temporary and strife is always renewed, the poet
gives the whole an elegiac cast. Beowulf also
is one of the best religious poems, not only because of its explicitly
Christian passages but also because Beowulf’s monstrous foes are depicted as
God’s enemies and Beowulf himself as God’s champion. Other heroic narratives
are fragmentary. Of “The Battle of Finnsburh” and “Waldere” only enough remains
to indicate that, when whole, they must have been fast-paced and stirring.
Of several poems dealing with
English history and preserved in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the most notable is “The Battle of
Brunanburh,” a panegyric on the occasion of
King Athelstan’s victory over a coalition of Norsemen and Scots in 937.
But the best historical poem is not from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. “The Battle of Maldon,” which describes the defeat of Aldorman Byrhtnoth and much
of his army at the hands of Viking invaders in 991, discovers in defeat an
occasion to celebrate the heroic ideal, contrasting the determination of many
of Byrhtnoth’s thanes to avenge his death or die in the attempt with the cowardice
of others who left the field. Minor poetic genres include catalogs (two sets of
“Maxims” and “Widsith,” a list of rulers, tribes, and notables in the heroic
age), dialogues, metrical prefaces and epilogues to prose works of the
Alfredian period, and liturgical poems associated with the Benedictine Office.
