British literature

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

British literature refers to literature associated with the United Kingdom, Isle of
Man and Channel
Islands.
This
includes
literatures
from
England, Northern
Ireland, Scotland andWales. By far the largest part of British literature has been written in the
English language, with English literature developing into a global phenomenon, because of its
use in the former colonies of Britain. In addition the story of British literature involves writings
in Anglo-Norman, Anglo-Saxon, Cornish, Guernsiais, Jrriais, Latin, Manx, Scots, Scottish
Gaelic, Welsh and other languages. Literature in Northern Ireland includes writings in
English, Irish and Ulster Scots. Irish writers have played an important part in the development of
literature in England and Scotland, but though the whole of Ireland was politically part of
the United Kingdom between January 1801 and December 1922, it is controversial to
describe Irish literature as British. For some this includes works by authors from Northern Ireland.
Contents

1British identity

2Old British and late medieval literature: 4491500

o

2.1Latin literature

2.2Early Celtic literature

2.3Old Norse literature

2.4Old English literature: c.6581100

2.5Late medieval literature: 11001500

3The Renaissance: 15001660

o

3.1Latin literature

3.2Elizabethan and Jacobean eras: 15581625

3.3The Reformation and vernacular literature

3.4The late Renaissance or Caroline period: 16251660

4Neoclassicism: 16601798
o

4.1The Restoration: 16601700

4.2The Augustan age: 17001750

4.2.1The "invention of British literature"

4.2.2Prose, including the novel

4.2.3Drama in the Augustan age

4.2.4Poetry in the Augustan age

4.3The roots of Romanticism: 17501798

519th-century literature
o

5.1Romanticism: 17981837

5.2Victorian literature: 18371901

5.2.1Victorian fiction

5.2.1.1The novel

5.2.1.2The short story

5.2.1.3Genre fiction

5.2.2Victorian poetry

5.2.3Victorian drama

620th century
6.1Modernism and cultural revivals: 19011945

6.1.1First World War

6.1.2Poetry: 19011945

6.1.3The challenge of the modernist novel

6.1.4British drama: 190145

6.1.5Early 20th-century genre literature

6.1.6Second World War

6.2Late modernism: 19462000

6.2.1Drama after World War Two

6.2.2Poetry after World War Two

6.2.3Late 20th-century genre literature

6.2.3.1Science fiction

6.2.3.2Literature for children and young adults

6.2.3.3Fantasy and horror

721st century literature

British identity
Definitions of 'British literature' are bound up with historical shifts of British identity. Changing
consciousness of English national identity, Scottish national identity, Welsh nationalism, and the
effects of British imperialism have altered interpretations of how the literatures of Britain have
interacted. In addition the impact of Irish nationalism, that led to the partition of the island of
Ireland in 1921, means that literature of the Republic of Ireland is not British, although the identity
of literature from Northern Ireland, as part of the literature of the United Kingdom, may fall within
the overlapping identities of Irish and British literature, where "the naming of the territory has
always been, in literary, geographical or historical contexts, a politically charged activity". [1]
Welsh literature in English (previously called Anglo-Welsh literature) is the works written in the
English language by Welsh writers, especially if their subject matter relates to Wales. It has been
recognised as a distinctive entity only since the 20th century. The need for a separate identity for
this kind of writing arose because of the parallel development of modern Welsh-language
literature.[2]
The use of the label Celtic fringe as applied to non-English, or traditionally non-English-speaking
areas, has been criticized as a colonial attitude to marginalise these cultures, and the literatures
of Ireland, Scotland and Wales is being studied through the methodology of postcolonialism.
[3]
However, Britain's legacy survives around the world, as a shared history of British presence
and cultural influence in the Commonwealth of Nations has produced a substantial body of
writing in English and many other languages.[4][5]

Old British and late medieval literature: 4491500

Latin literature
Main article: Anglo-Latin literature
Chroniclers such as Bede (672/3735), with his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum,
and Gildas (c. 500570), with his De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, were figures in the
development of indigenous Latin literature, mostly ecclesiastical, in the centuries following the
withdrawal of the Roman Empire around the year 410.
Adomnn's (627/8704) most important work is the Vita Columbae, a hagiography of Columba,
and the most important surviving work written in early medieval Scotland. It is a vital source for
knowledge of the Picts, as well as an insight into the life of Iona Abbey and the early medieval
Gaelic monk. The vita of Columba contains a story that has been interpreted as the first
reference to the Loch Ness Monster.
Written just after or possibly contemporarily with Adomnn's Vita Columbae, the Vita Sancti
Cuthberti (c. 699705) is the first piece of Northumbrian Latin writing and the earliest piece of
English Latin hagiography.[6]
The Historia Brittonum composed in the 9th century is traditionally ascribed to Nennius. It is the
earliest source which presents King Arthur as a historical figure, and is the source of several
stories which were repeated and amplified by later authors.

Early Celtic literature

Gaelic language and literature from Ireland became established in the West of Scotland between
the 4th and 6th centuries. Until the development of Scottish Gaelic literature with a distinct
identity, there was a shared literary culture between Gaelic-speaking Ireland and Scotland. The
literary Gaelic language used in Scotland that was inherited from Irish is sometimes known
as Classical Gaelic. The Hiberno-Scottish mission from the 6th century spread Christianity and
established monasteries and centres of writing. Gaelic literature in Scotland includes a
celebration, attributed to the Irish monk Adomnn, of the Pictish King Bridei's (67193) victory
over the Northumbrians at the Battle of Dun Nechtain (685).Pictish, the now extinct Brythonic
language spoken in Scotland, has left no record of poetry, but poetry composed in Gaelic for

Pictish kings is known. By the 9th century, Gaelic speakers controlled Pictish territory and Gaelic
was spoken throughout Scotland and used as a literary language. However, there was great
cultural exchange between Scotland and Ireland, with Irish poets composing for Scottish or
Pictish patrons, and Scottish poets composing for Irish patrons. [7] The Book of Deer, a 10thcentury Latin Gospel Book with early-12th-century additions in Latin, Old Irish and Scottish
Gaelic, is noted for containing the earliest surviving Gaelic writing from Scotland.
In Medieval Welsh literature the period before 1100 is known as the period of Y Cynfeirdd ("The
earliest poets") or Yr Hengerdd ("The old poetry"). It roughly dates from the birth of the Welsh
language until the arrival of the Normans in Wales towards the end of the 11th century. Y
Gododdin is a medieval Welsh poem consisting of a series of elegies to the men of
the Britonnic kingdom of Gododdin and its allies who, according to the conventional
interpretation, died fighting the Angles of Deira and Bernicia at a place named Catraeth in c. AD
600. It is traditionally ascribed to the bard Aneirin, and survives only in one manuscript, known as
the Book of Aneirin. The poem is recorded in a manuscript of the second half of the 13th century,
and it has been dated to anywhere between the 7th and the early 11th centuries. The text is
partly written in Middle Welshorthography and partly in Old Welsh. The early date would place its
oral composition to soon after the battle, presumably in the Hen Ogledd ("Old North") in what
would have been the Cumbric variety of Brythonic.[8][9] Others consider it the work of a poet
in medieval Wales, composed in the 9th, 10th or 11th century. Even a 9th-century date would
make it one of the oldest surviving Welsh works of poetry.
The name Mabinogion is a convenient label for a collection eleven prose stories collated from
two medieval Welsh manuscripts known as theWhite book of Rhydderch (Llyfr Gwyn Rhydderch)
(c. 1350) and the Red Book of Hergest (Llyfr Coch Hergest) (13821410). They are written in
Middle Welsh, the common literary language between the end of the eleventh century and the
fourteenth century. They include the four tales that form Pedair Cainc y Mabinogi ("The Four
Branches of the Mabinogi"). The tales draw on pre-Christian Celtic mythology, international
folktale motifs, and early medieval historical traditions. While some details may hark back to
older Iron Age traditions, each of these tales is the product of a highly developed medieval Welsh
narrative tradition, both oral and written. Lady Charlotte Guest in the mid-19th century was the
first to publish English translations of the collection, popularising the name "Mabinogion" at the
same time.
No Cornish literature survives from the Primitive Cornish period (c. 600800 AD). The earliest
written record of the Cornish language, dating from the 9th century, is a gloss in a Latin
manuscript of the Consolation of Philosophy, which used the words ud rocashaas. The phrase
means "it (the mind) hated the gloomy places".[10][11]

Old Norse literature

Main article: Old Norse literature
From the 8th to the 15th centuries, Vikings and Norse settlers and their descendents colonised
parts of what is now modern Scotland. Some Old Norse poetry survives relating to this period.
The Orkneyinga saga (also called the History of the Earls of Orkney) is a historical narrative of
the history of the Orkney Islands, from their capture by the Norwegian king in the ninth century
onwards until about 1200.[12] 20th-century poet George Mackay Brown was influenced by the
saga, notably for his 1973 novel Magnus. The IcelandicNjls saga includes actions taking place
in Orkney and Wales. Besides these Icelandic sagas a few examples, sometimes fragmentary, of
Norse poetry composed in Scotland survive. [13] Among the runic inscriptions at Maeshowe is a
text identified as irregular verse. [14] Scandinavian cultural contacts in the Danelaw also left
legacies in literature.Hfulausn or the "Head's Ransom" is a skaldic poem attributed to Egill
Skalla-Grmsson in praise of king Eirik Bloodaxe in the kingdom of Northumbria.

Old English literature: c.6581100

Main article: Old English literature
Old English literature, or Anglo-Saxon literature, encompasses the surviving literature written
in Old English in Anglo-Saxon England, in the period after the settlement of the Saxons and other
Germanic tribes in England, as the Jutes and the Angles, c.450, after the withdrawal of

the Romans, and "ending soon after the Norman Conquest" in 1066; that is, c. 110050. [15] These
works include genres such as epic poetry, hagiography,sermons, Bible translations, legal
works, chronicles, riddles, and others.[16] In all there are about 400 surviving manuscripts from the
period.[17]The earliest surviving work of literature in Old English is Cdmon's Hymn, which was
probably composed between 658-680.
Nearly all Anglo-Saxon authors are anonymous: [16] twelve are known by name from Medieval
sources, but only four of those are known by their vernacular works to us today with any
certainty: Cdmon, Bede, Alfred the Great, and Cynewulf. Cdmon is the earliest English poet
whose name is known. Cdmon's only known surviving work is Cdmon's Hymn, probably
dating from the late 7th century. The poem is one of the earliest attested examples of Old English
and is, with the runic Ruthwell Cross and Franks Casket inscriptions, one of three candidates for
the earliest attested example of Old English poetry. It is also one of the earliest recorded
examples of sustained poetry in a Germanic language. The Wanderer is an Old English poem
preserved only in an anthology known as the Exeter Book, a manuscript dating from the late 10th
century. It counts 115 lines of alliterative verse. As often the case in Anglo-Saxon verse, the
composer and compiler are anonymous, and within the manuscript the poem is untitled. The
Wanderer conveys the meditations of a solitary exile on his past glories as a warrior in his lord's
band of retainers, his present hardships and the values of forbearance and faith in the heavenly
Lord.
The epic poem Beowulf is the most famous work in Old English, and has achieved national
epic status in England, despite not being set in England. A hero of the Geats, Beowulf battles
three antagonists: Grendel, Grendel's mother, and a Dragon. The only surviving manuscript is
theNowell Codex. The precise date of the manuscript is debated, but most estimates place it
close to the year 1000.
Chronicles contained a range of historical and literary accounts; one notable example is
the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. This is a collection of annals in Old English chronicling the history of
the Anglo-Saxons. Nine manuscripts survive in whole or in part, though not all are of equal
historical value and none of them is the original version. The oldest seems to have been started
towards the end of Alfred's reign in the 9th century, while the most recent was written
at Peterborough Abbey in 1116. Almost all of the material in the Chronicleis in the form of annals,
by year; the earliest are dated at 60 BC (the annals' date for Caesar's invasions of Britain), and
historical material follows up to the year in which the chronicle was written, at which point
contemporary records begin. These manuscripts collectively are known as the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle.
Battle of Maldon is the name given to an Old English poem of uncertain date celebrating the
real Battle of Maldon of 991, at which the Anglo-Saxons failed to prevent a Vikinginvasion. Only
325 lines of the poem are extant; both the beginning and the ending are lost.
The Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity after their arrival in England. A popular
poem, The Dream of the Rood, was inscribed upon the Ruthwell Cross. Judith is a retelling of the
story found in the Latin Bible's Book of Judith of the beheader of the Assyrian general
Holofernes. The Old English Martyrology is a Mercian collection of hagiographies. lfric of
Eynsham was a prolific 10th-century writer of hagiographies and homilies.
Old English poetry falls broadly into two styles or fields of reference, the heroic Germanic and the
Christian. The most popular and well-known understanding of Old English poetry continues to
be alliterative verse. The system is based upon accent, alliteration, the quantity of vowels, and
patterns of syllabic accentuation. It consists of five permutations on a base verse scheme; any
one of the five types can be used in any verse. The system was inherited from and exists in one
form or another in all of the olderGermanic languages.
Several Old English poems are adaptations of late classical philosophical texts. The longest is a
10th-century translation of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy contained in theCotton
manuscript Otho A.vi.[18] The Metres of Boethius are a series of Old English alliterative poems
adapted from the Latin metra of the Consolation of Philosophy soon after the prose translation.

Late medieval literature: 11001500

Main articles: Anglo-Norman literature, Middle English literature, Scottish literature in the Middle
Ages and Medieval Welsh literature
The linguistic diversity of the islands in the medieval period, with each of the languages
producing literatures at various times which contributed to the rich variety of artistic production,
made British literature distinctive and innovative.[19]
Latin literature circulated among the educated classes. Gerald of Wales's most distinguished
works are those dealing with Wales and Ireland, with his two late-12th-century books in Latin on
his beloved Wales the most important: Itinerarium Cambriae and Descriptio Cambriae which tell
us much about Welsh history and geography.
Following the Norman Conquest of 1066, the development of Anglo-Norman literature in the
Anglo-Norman realm introduced literary trends from Continental Europe such as the chanson de
geste. However, the indigenous development of Anglo-Norman literature was precocious in
comparison to continental Ol literature: Geoffrey Gaimar produced the earliest rhymed chronicle;
Benedeit, the earliest adventure narrative inspired by Celtic sources; Jordan Fantosme, the
earliest eyewitness historiography; Philippe de Thaun, the earliest scientific literature.[19]
Religious literature continued to enjoy popularity. Hagiographies continued to be written, adapted
and translated: for example, The Life of Saint Audrey, Eadmer's contemporary biography
of Anselm of Canterbury, and the South English Legendary.
The Roman de Fergus was the earliest piece of non-Celtic vernacular literature to come from
Scotland. As the Norman nobles of Scotland assimilated to indigenous culture they
commissioned Scots versions of popular continental romances, for example: Launcelot o the
Laik andThe Buik o Alexander.
While chroniclers such as William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon attempted to weave
such historical information they had access to into coherent narratives, other writers took more
creative approaches to their material.[20]
Geoffrey of Monmouth was one of the major figures in the development of British history and the
popularity for the tales of King Arthur. He is best known for his chronicle Historia Regum
Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain) of 1136, which spread Celtic motifs to a wider
audience, including accounts of Arthur's father Uther Pendragon, wizard Merlin, and sword
Caliburnus (named as Excalibur in some manuscripts of Wace).
Culhwch and Olwen is a Welsh tale about a hero connected with Arthur and his warriors, and is
the longest of the surviving Welsh prose tales. It is perhaps the earliest extant Arthurian tale and
one of Wales' earliest extant prose texts.
The 12th-century poet Wace (c. 1110[21] after 1174[22]), who was born in Jersey and brought up in
mainland Normandy, is considered the founder of Jersey literature and contributed to the
development of the Arthurian legend in British literature. His Brut showed the interest of Norman
patrons in the mythologising of the new English territories of the Anglo-Norman realm by building
on Geoffrey of Monmouth's History, and introduced King Arthur's Round Table to literature.
His Roman de Rou placed the Dukes of Normandy within an epic context.[20]
The Prophecy of Merlin is a 12th-century poem written in Latin hexameters by John of Cornwall,
which he claimed was based or revived from a lost manuscript in the Cornish language. Marginal
notes on Cornish vocabulary are among the earliest known writings in the Cornish language. [23]
At the end of the 12th century, Layamon's Brut adapted Wace to make the first English language
work to discuss the legends of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. It was also the first
historiography written in English since the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
The Chronicle of the Kings of Alba is a short chronicle of the Kings of Alba. It was written
in Hiberno-Latin but displays some knowledge of contemporary Middle Irish orthographyand
probably put together in the early 13th century by the man who wrote de Situ Albanie. The
original text was without doubt written in Scotland, probably in the early 11th century, shortly after
the reign of Kenneth II, the last reign it relates. It is possible that more Middle Irish literature was
written in medieval Scotland than is often thought, but has not survived because the Gaelic

literary establishment of eastern Scotland died out before the 14th century. Thomas Owen
Clancy has argued that the Lebor Bretnach, the so-called "Irish Nennius", was written in
Scotland, and probably at the monastery in Abernethy, but this text survives only from
manuscripts preserved in Ireland.[24] Other literary work that has survived includes that of the
prolific poet Gille Brighde Albanach. About 1218, Gille Brighde wrote a poemHeading for
Damiettaon his experiences of the Fifth Crusade.[25] The major corpus of Medieval Scottish
Gaelic poetry, The Book of the Dean of Lismore was compiled by the brothers James and Donald
MacGregor in the early decades of the sixteenth century. Beside Scottish Gaelic verse it contains
a large number of poems composed in Ireland as well verse and prose in Scots and Latin. The
subject matter includes love poetry, heroic ballads and philosophical pieces. It also is notable for
containing poetry by at least four women.[26]
Early English Jewish literature developed after the Norman Conquest with Jewish settlement in
England. Berechiah ha-Nakdan is known chiefly as the author of a 13th-century set of over a
hundred fables, called Mishle Shualim, (Fox Fables), which are derived from both Berachyah's
own inventions and some borrowed and reworked from Aesop's fables, the Talmud, and the
Hindus.[27] The collection also contains fables conveying the same plots and morals as those
of Marie de France. The development of Jewish literature in mediaeval England ended with
the Edict of Expulsion of 1290.
Matthew Paris (c. 1200 1259), a Benedictine monk, wrote a number of works in the 13th
century. Some were written in Latin, some in Anglo-Norman or French verse.
In the later medieval period a new form of English now known as Middle English evolved. This is
the earliest form which is comprehensible to modern readers and listeners, albeit not
easily. Middle English Bible translations, notably Wycliffe's Bible, helped to establish English as a
literary language. Wycliffe's Bible is the name now given to a group of Bible
translations into Middle English that were made under the direction of, or at the instigation
of, John Wycliffe. They appeared over a period from approximately 1382 to 1395. [28]These Bible
translations were the chief inspiration and chief cause of the Lollard movement, a preReformation movement that rejected many of the distinctive teachings of theRoman Catholic
Church. In the early Middle Ages, most Western Christian people encountered the Bible only in
the form of oral versions of scriptures, verses and homilies in Latin (other sources were mystery
plays, usually conducted in the vernacular, and popular iconography). Though relatively few
people could read at this time, Wycliffe's idea was to translate the Bible into the vernacular,
saying "it helpeth Christian men to study the Gospel in that tongue in which they know best
Christ's sentence".[29] Although unauthorised, the work was popular and Wycliffite Bible texts are
the most common manuscript literature in Middle English and over 250 manuscripts of the
Wycliffite Bible survive.
Romances appear in English from the 13th century, with King Horn and Havelock the Dane,
based on Anglo-Norman originals such as the Romance of Horn.[19]
Piers Plowman (written c. 13601387) or Visio Willelmi de Petro Plowman (William's Vision of
Piers Plowman) is a Middle English allegorical narrative poem by William Langland. It is written in
unrhymed alliterative verse divided into sections called "passus" (Latin for "step"). Piers is
considered by many critics to be one of the early great works of English literature along
with Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight during the Middle Ages.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a late-14th-century Middle English alliterative romance. It is
one of the better-known Arthurian stories, of an established type known as the "beheading
game". Developing from Welsh, Irish and English tradition Sir Gawain highlights the importance
of honour and chivalry. It is an important poem in the romance genre, which typically involves a
hero who goes on a quest that tests his prowess. "Preserved in the same manuscript with Sir
Gawayne were three other poems, now generally accepted as the work of its author. These are
two alliterative poems of moral teaching, Patience and Purity, and an intricate elegiac
poem, Pearl. The author of Sir Gawayne and the other poems is frequently referred to as 'the
Pearl Poet.' "[30] The English dialect of these poems from the Midlands is markedly different from
that of the London-based Chaucer and though influenced by French in the scenes at court in Sir

Gawain, there are in the poems also has many dialect words, often of Scandinavian origin, that
belonged to northwest England.[31]

Geoffrey Chaucer, father of English literature

Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343 1400), known as the Father of English literature, is widely
considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Agesand was the first poet to have been
buried in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey. Among his many works, which include The Book
of the Duchess, the House of Fame, the Legend of Good Women and Troilus and Criseyde.
Chaucer is best known today for The Canterbury Tales, a collection of stories written in Middle
English (mostly written in verse although some are in prose), that are presented as part of a
story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims as they travel together on a journey from Southwark to
the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. The prize for this contest is a free
meal at the Tabard Inn at Southwark on their return. Chaucer is a crucial figure in developing the
legitimacy of the vernacular, Middle English, at a time when the dominant literary languages in
England were French and Latin. The first recorded association of Valentine's Day with romantic
love is in Chaucer's Parlement of Foules of 1382.[32]
The multilingual nature of the audience for literature in the 14th century can be illustrated by the
example of John Gower (c. 1330 October 1408). A contemporary of William Langland and a
personal friend of Geoffrey Chaucer, Gower is remembered primarily for three major works,
the Mirroir de l'Omme, Vox Clamantis, and Confessio Amantis, three long poems written
in Anglo-Norman, Latin and, Middle English respectively, which are united by common moral and
political themes.[33]
Women writers were also active, such as Marie de France in the 12th century and Julian of
Norwich in the early 14th century. Julian'sRevelations of Divine Love (circa 1393) is believed to
be the first published book written by a woman in the English language. [34] Margery Kempe (c.
1373 after 1438) is known for writing The Book of Margery Kempe, a work considered by some
to be the first autobiography in the English language, which chronicles, to some extent, her
extensive pilgrimages to various holy sites in Europe and Asia.
Dafydd ap Gwilym (c. 1315/1320 c. 1350/1370), is regarded as one of the leading Welsh poets
and amongst the great poets of Europe in the Middle Ages. His main themes were love and
nature. The influence of wider European ideas of courtly love, as exemplified in
the troubadour poetry of Provenal, is seen as a significant influence on his poetry. He was an
innovative poet who was responsible for popularising the metre known as the "cywydd" and first
to use it for praise. But perhaps his greatest innovation was to make himself the main focus of his
poetry, in poems such as "The Girls of Llanbadarn", "Trouble at a Tavern", "The Wind" and "The
Seagull". By its very nature, most of the work of the traditional Welsh court poets kept their own
personalities far from their poetry, whereas Dafydd ap Gwilym's poems are full of his own
feelings and experiences.
Since at least the 14th century, poetry in English has been written in Ireland and by Irish writers
abroad.

From c. 1100 until c. 1600 Welsh poetry can be divided roughly into two distinct periods: the
period of the Poets of the Princes (Beirdd y Tywysogion, also called Y Gogynfeirdd) who worked
before the loss of Welsh independence in 1282 and the Poets of the Nobility (Beirdd yr Uchelwyr)
who worked from 1282 until the period of the English incorporation of Wales in the 16th century.
The earliest poem in English by a Welsh poet (Ieuan ap Hywel Swrdwal's Hymn to the Virgin[35])
dates from about 1470. The Latin and English poemFlen flyys written around 1475, is chiefly
famous for containing in coded form the first known written usage in English of a
particular profane term in the English language. Acywydd attributed to Tudur Penllyn (fl. c. 1420
1490) is written in alternate Welsh and English sections, and depicts the poet attempting to
seduce an unwilling Englishwoman, exploiting their mutual incomprehension for comic effect. [36]
Among
the
earliest Lowland
Scots literature
is Barbour's Brus (14th
century). Whyntoun's Kronykil and Blind Harry's Wallace date from the 15th century. From the
13th century much literature based around the royal court in Edinburgh and from the 14th
century at the University of St Andrews, which was founded early in that century. Major writers
from the 15th century include Henrysoun, Dunbar, Douglas and Lyndsay. The works of Chaucer
had an influence on Scottish writers. Robert Henryson's (c. 14601500) most famous work is the
narrative poem The Testament of Cresseid, which imagines a tragic fate for Cressida, in the
medieval story of Troilus and Criseyde, which was left untold in Geoffrey Chaucer's version.
[37]
Henryson's cogent psychological drama makes the poem a major works of northern
renaissance literature. The poem was written in Middle Scots; a modern English translation
by Seamus Heaney was published in 2004. For the Scottish Literary Renaissance in the midtwentieth century, Dunbar was a touchstone. Many tried to imitate his style, and "high-brow"
subject matter, such as Hugh MacDiarmid and Sydney Goodsir Smith. As MacDiarmid himself
said, they had to go "back to Dunbar". [38] Gavin Douglas (c. 1474 September 1522) was
a Scottish bishop, makar and translator. Although he had an important political career, it is for his
poetry that he is now chiefly remembered. His principal pioneering achievement was
the Eneados (1553), a full and faithful vernacular translation of the Aeneid of Virgil and the first
successful example of its kind in any Anglic language.[39] Sir David Lyndsay of the Mount, (also
spelled Lindsay) (c. 1490 c. 1555) was a Scottish poet whose works reflect the spirit of
the Renaissance.
In the Cornish language Passhyon agan Arloedh ("The Passion of our Lord"), a poem of 259
eight-line verses written in 1375, is one of the earliest surviving works of Cornish literature. The
most important work of literature surviving from the Middle Cornish period is An Ordinale
Kernewek ("The Cornish Ordinalia"), a 9000-line religious drama composed around the year
1400. The longest single surviving work of Cornish literature is Bywnans Meriasek (The Life of
Meriasek), a play dated 1504, but probably copied from an earlier manuscript.
Le Morte d'Arthur, is Sir Thomas Malory's 15th-century compilation of some French and English
Arthurian romances, was among the earliest books printed in England, printed byCaxton in 1485.
It was popular and influential in the later revival of interest in the Arthurian legends.
Medieval drama
Main article: Medieval theatre
In the Middle Ages, drama in the vernacular languages of Europe may have emerged from
religious enactments of the liturgy. Mystery plays were presented on the porch of the cathedrals
or by strolling players on feast days. Miracle and mystery plays, along with moralities and
interludes, later evolved into more elaborate forms of drama, such as was seen on the
Elizabethan stages. Another form of medieval theatre was the mummers' plays, a form of early
street theatre associated with the Morris dance, concentrating on themes such as Saint
George and the Dragon and Robin Hood. These were folk tales re-telling old stories, and the
actors travelled from town to town performing these for their audiences in return for money and
hospitality.
Mystery plays and miracle plays (sometimes distinguished as two different forms, [40] although the
terms are often used interchangeably) are among the earliest formally developed plays
in medieval Europe. Medieval mystery plays focused on the representation of Bible stories in
churches as tableaux with accompanying antiphonal song. They developed from the 10th to the

16th century, reaching the height of their popularity in the 15th century before being rendered
obsolete by the rise of professional theatre. The name derives from mystery used in its sense
of miracle,[41] but an occasionally quoted derivation is from misterium, meaning craft, a play
performed by the craft guilds.[42]
There are four complete or nearly complete extant English biblical collections of plays from the
late medieval period; although these collections are sometimes referred to as "cycles," it is now
believed that this term may attribute to these collections more coherence than they in fact
possess. The most complete is the York cycle of forty-eight pageants. They were performed in
the city of York, from the middle of the fourteenth century until 1569. There are also the Towneley
plays of thirty-two pageants, once thought to have been a true 'cycle' of plays and most likely
performed around the Feast of Corpus Christi probably in the town of Wakefield, England during
the late Middle Ages until 1576. TheLudus Coventriae (also called the N Town plays" or Hegge
cycle), now generally agreed to be a redacted compilation of at least three older, unrelated plays,
and the Chester cycle of twenty-four pageants, now generally agreed to be an Elizabethan
reconstruction of older medieval traditions. Besides the Middle English drama, there are three
surviving plays in Cornish known as the Ordinalia.
These biblical plays differ widely in content. Most contain episodes such as the Fall of Lucifer,
the Creation and Fall of Man, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Flood, Abraham and Isaac,
the Nativity, the Raising of Lazarus, the Passion, and the Resurrection. Other pageants included
the story of Moses, the Procession of the Prophets, Christ's Baptism, theTemptation in the
Wilderness, and the Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin. In given cycles, the plays came to
be sponsored by the newly emerging Medieval craft guilds.[43][44]
Having grown out of the religiously based mystery plays of the Middle Ages, the morality play is
a genre of Medieval and early Tudor theatrical entertainment, which represented a shift towards
a more secular base for European theatre. In their own time, these plays were known as
"interludes", a broader term given to dramas with or without a moraltheme.[45] Morality plays are a
type of allegory in which the protagonist is met by personifications of various moral attributes who
try to prompt him to choose a Godly life over one of evil. The plays were most popular in Europe
during the 15th and 16th centuries.
The Somonyng of Everyman (The Summoning of Everyman) (c. 150919), usually referred to
simply as Everyman, is a late-15th-century English morality play. Like John Bunyan's
allegory Pilgrim's
Progress (1678), Everyman examines
the
question
of Christian
salvation through the use of allegorical characters. The play is the allegorical accounting of the
life of Everyman, who represents all mankind. In the course of the action, All the characters are
also allegorical, each personifying an abstract idea such as Fellowship, (material) Goods, and
Knowledge and the conflict between good and evil is dramatised by the interactions between
characters.

The Renaissance: 15001660

The English Renaissance and the Renaissance in Scotland date from the late 15th century to the
early 17th century. Italian literary influences arrived in Britain: the sonnet form was introduced
into English by Thomas Wyatt in the early 16th century, and developed by Henry Howard, Earl of
Surrey, (1516/1517 1547), who also introduced blank verseinto England, with his translation
of Virgil's Aeneid in c. 1540.[46] Chaucerian, classical and French literary language continued to
influence Scots literature up until the Reformation, and Latin remained an important literary
language in Scotland in the 17th century, long after its literary importance in England had
waned. The Complaynt of Scotland shows the interplay of language and ideas between the
kingdoms of Scotland and England in the years leading up to the 1603 Union of the Crowns.
During theJacobean debate on the Union, a tradition of prophetic literature going back to
the Prophetiae Merlini was invoked. The Whole Prophesie of Scotland of 1603 treated Merlin's
prophecies as authoritative.[47] Sir William Alexander, writing in praise of King James, invoked the
prophetic tradition and dated it to 300 years before the king's birth (the middle of the 13th
century). This timing tied it to the Scottish writer, Thomas the Rhymer. The use of "Great Britain"
as a title of the kingdom as united by James was considered to reference Brutus of Troy, of the

Anglo-Welsh traditional foundation myth. A mythological consonance was seen by some at the
time between what were different traditions.[48]
The spread of printing affected the transmission of literature across Britain and Ireland. The first
book printed in English, William Caxton's own translation of Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye,
was printed abroad in 1473, to be followed by the establishment of the first printing press in
England in 1474. The establishment of a printing press in Scotland under royal patent
from James IV in 1507 made it easier to disseminate Scottish literature. [49] The first printing press
in Ireland followed later in 1551. Although the first book in Welsh to be printed was produced
by John Prise in 1546, restrictions on printing meant that only clandestine presses, such as that
of Robert Gwyn who published Y Drych Cristionogawl in 1586/1587, could operate in Wales until
1695. The first legal printing press to be set up in Wales was in 1718 by Isaac Carter. [35] The first
printed work in Manx dates from 1707: a translation of a Prayer Book catechism in English by
Bishop Thomas Wilson. Printing arrived even later in other parts of Britain and Ireland: the first
printing press in Jersey was set up by Mathieu Alexandre in 1784. [50] The earliest datable text
in Manx (preserved in 18th-century manuscripts), a poetic history of the Isle of Man from the
introduction of Christianity, dates to the 16th century at the latest.

Thomas More book Utopia, illustration of imaginary island, 1516

In the late fifteenth century, Scots prose began to develop as a genre and to demonstrate
classical and humanist influences[51] as theRenaissance reached Scotland. The first complete
surviving work includes John Ireland's The Meroure of Wyssdome (1490).[52] There were also
prose translations of French books of chivalry that survive from the 1450s, including The Book of
the Law of Armys and the Order of Knychthode and the treatise Secretum Secretorum, an Arabic
work believed to be Aristotle's advice to Alexander the Great.[53]
The landmark work in the reign of James IV of Scotland was Gavin Douglas's Eneados, the first
complete translation of a major classical text in an Anglian language, finished in 1513. Its
reception however was overshadowed by the Flodden defeat that same year, and the political
instability that followed in the kingdom.
Scotsman George Buchanan (15061582) wrote mostly in Latin (see below), but two original
plays, Jepthes and Baptistes, are the earliest extant plays of substance written by a Scot and
were influential on the development of French and Portuguese drama. [13]

Latin literature
Latin continued in use as a language of learning long after the Reformation had established the
vernaculars as liturgical languages for the lites. In Scotland, Latin as a literary language thrived
into the 17th century as Scottish writers writing in Latin were able to engage with their audiences

on an equal basis in a prestige language without feeling hampered by their less confident
handling of English.[13]
Utopia is a work of fiction and political philosophy by Thomas More (14781535) published in
1516. The book, written in Latin, is a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society
and its religious, social and political customs.
New Atlantis is a utopian novel by Sir Francis Bacon (15611626), published in Latin (as Nova
Atlantis) in 1624 and in English in 1627. In this work, Bacon portrayed a vision of the future of
human discovery and knowledge, expressing his aspirations and ideals for humankind. The
novel depicts the creation of a utopian land where "generosity and enlightenment, dignity and
splendour, piety and public spirit" are the commonly held qualities of the inhabitants of the
mythical Bensalem. The plan and organisation of his ideal college, Salomon's House (or
Solomon's House), envisioned the modern research university in both applied and pure sciences.
Scotsman George Buchanan (15061582) was the Renaissance writer from Britain (and Ireland)
who had the greatest international reputation, being considered the finest Latin poet since
classical times.[54] As he wrote mostly in Latin, his works travelled across Europe as did he
himself. His Latin paraphrases of the Hebrew Psalms (composed while Buchanan was
imprisoned by the Inquisition in Portugal) remained in print for centuries and were used into the
19th century for the purposes of studying Latin
Amongst English poets who wrote poems in Latin in the 17th century were George
Herbert (15931633) (who also wrote poems in Greek), and John Milton (160874).
Philosopher Thomas Hobbes' Elementa Philosophica de Cive (16421658) was in Latin.
However, things were changing and by about 1700 the growing movement for the use of national
languages (already found earlier in literature and the Protestant religious movement) had
reached academia, and an example of the transition is Isaac Newton's writing career, which
began in New Latin and ended in English: Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in
Latin Opticks, 1704, in English.

Elizabethan and Jacobean eras: 15581625

Main articles: Elizabethan literature and Jacobean era literature
The overlapping Elizabethan era (15581603: the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England)
and Jacobean era (15671625: the reign of King James VI of Scotland, who also inherited the
crown of England in 1603 as James I) saw the development of Britishness in literature. Since
1541, monarchs of England had also styled their Irish territory as aKingdom, while Wales
became more closely integrated into the Kingdom of England under Henry VIII. In anticipation of
James VI's expected inheritance of the English throne, court masques in England were already
developing the new literary imagery of a united "Great Britain", sometimes delving into Roman
and Celtic sources.[55] William Camden'sBritannia, a county-by-county description of Great Britain
and Ireland, was an influential work of chorography: a study relating landscape, geography,
antiquarianism, and history.Britannia came to be viewed as the personification of Britain, in
imagery that was developed during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.

William Shakespeare's career straddled the change of Tudor andStuart dynasties and encompassed
English history and the emerging imperial idea of the 17th century

In the later 16th century, English poetry was characterised by elaboration of language and
extensive allusion to classical myths. Edmund Spenser (155599) was the author of The Faerie
Queene, an epic poem and fantastical allegory celebrating the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I.
The works of Sir Philip Sidney (15541586) a poet, courtier and soldier, include Astrophel and
Stella, The Defence of Poetry, and The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. Poems intended to be
set to music as songs, such as by Thomas Campion, became popular as printed literature was
disseminated more widely in households (see English Madrigal School). Jane Lumley (1537
1578) was the first person to translate Euripides into English. Her translation of Iphigeneia at
Aulis is the first known dramatic work by a woman in English.[56]
During the reign of Elizabeth I (15581603) and then James I (160325), in the late 16th and
early 17th century, a London-centred culture, that was both courtly and popular, produced great
poetry and drama. The English playwrights were intrigued by Italian model: a conspicuous
community of Italian actors had settled in London. The linguist and lexicographer John
Florio (15531625), whose father was Italian, was a royal language tutor at the Court of James I,
and a possible friend and influence on William Shakespeare, had brought much of the Italian
language and culture to England. He was also the translator of Montaigne into English. The
earliest Elizabethan plays include Gorboduc(1561), by Sackville and Norton, and Thomas Kyd's
(155894) revenge tragedy The Spanish Tragedy (1592). Highly popular and influential in its
time, The Spanish Tragedy established a new genre in English literature theatre, the revenge
play or revenge tragedy. Its plot contains several violent murders and includes as one of
its characters a personification of Revenge. The Spanish Tragedy was often referred to, or
parodied, in works written by other Elizabethan playwrights, including William Shakespeare, Ben
Jonson, and Christopher Marlowe. Many elements of The Spanish Tragedy, such as the playwithin-a-play used to trap a murderer and a ghost intent on vengeance, appear in
Shakespeare's Hamlet. Thomas Kyd is frequently proposed as the author of the hypothetical UrHamlet that may have been one of Shakespeare's primary sources for Hamlet.
William Shakespeare stands out in this period as a poet and playwright as yet unsurpassed.
Shakespeare was not a man of letters by profession, and probably had only some grammar
school education. He was neither a lawyer, nor an aristocrat as the "university wits" that had
monopolised the English stage when he started writing. But he was very gifted and versatile, and
he surpassed "professionals" as Robert Greene who mocked this "shake-scene" of low origins.
Shakespeare wrote plays in a variety of genres, includinghistories, tragedies, comedies and the
late romances, or tragicomedies. His early classical and Italianate comedies, like A Comedy of
Errors, containing tight double plots and precise comic sequences, give way in the mid-1590s to
the romantic atmosphere of his greatest comedies. [57] A Midsummer Night's Dream is a witty
mixture of romance, fairy magic, and comic lowlife scenes. [58] Shakespeare's next comedy, the
equally romantic Merchant of Venice, can be problematic because of how it portrays Shylock, a

vengeful Jewish moneylender.[59] The wit and wordplay of Much Ado About Nothing,[60] the
charming rural setting of As You Like It, and the lively merrymaking of Twelfth Night complete
Shakespeare's sequence of great comedies.[61] After the lyrical Richard II, written almost entirely
in verse, Shakespeare introduced prose comedy into the histories of the late 1590s, Henry IV,
parts 1 and 2, and Henry V. His characters become more complex and tender as he switches
deftly between comic and serious scenes, prose and poetry, and achieves the narrative variety of
his mature work.[62] This period begins and ends with two tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, the
famous romantic tragedy of sexually charged adolescence, love, and death; [63] and Julius Caesar
based on Sir Thomas North's 1579 translation of Plutarch's Parallel Liveswhich introduced a
new kind of drama.[64] In the early 17th century, Shakespeare wrote the so-called "problem
plays", Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and All's Well That Ends Well, as well as a
number of his best known tragedies, including Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear and Anthony
and Cleopatra.[65] The plots of Shakespeare's tragedies often hinge on such fatal errors or flaws,
which overturn order and destroy the hero and those he loves. [66] In his final period, Shakespeare
turned to romance or tragicomedy and completed three more major plays:Cymbeline, The
Winter's Tale and The Tempest, as well as the collaboration, Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Less bleak
than the tragedies, these four plays are graver in tone than the comedies of the 1590s, but they
end with reconciliation and the forgiveness of potentially tragic errors. [67] Some commentators
have seen this change in mood as evidence of a more serene view of life on Shakespeare's part,
but it may merely reflect the theatrical fashion of the day. [68] Shakespeare collaborated on two
further surviving plays, Henry VIIIand The Two Noble Kinsmen, probably with John Fletcher.[69]
Shakespeare also popularised the English sonnet which made significant changes to Petrarch's
model. A collection of 154 by sonnets, dealing with themes such as the passage of time, love,
beauty and mortality, were first published in a 1609 quarto entitled SHAKE-SPEARES
SONNETS.: Never before imprinted. (although sonnets 138 and 144 had previously been
published in the 1599 miscellany The Passionate Pilgrim). The first 17 poems, traditionally called
the procreation sonnets, are addressed to a young man urging him to marry and have children to
immortalise his beauty by passing it to the next generation. [70] Other sonnets express the
speaker's love for a young man; brood upon loneliness, death, and the transience of life; seem to
criticise the young man for preferring a rival poet; express ambiguous feelings for the
speaker's mistress; and pun on the poet's name. The final two sonnets are allegorical treatments
of Greek epigrams referring to the "little love-god" Cupid.
Other important figures in Elizabethan theatre include Christopher Marlowe (1564
1593), Thomas Dekker (c. 1572 1632), John Fletcher (15791625) and Francis
Beaumont(15841616). Marlowe's subject matter is different from Shakespeare's as it focuses
more on the moral drama of the renaissance man than any other thing. Marlowe was fascinated
and terrified by the new frontiers opened by modern science. Drawing on German lore, he
introduced the story of Faust to England in his play Doctor Faustus (c. 1592), a scientist and
magician who is obsessed by the thirst of knowledge and the desire to push man's technological
power to its limits. He acquires supernatural gifts that even allow him to go back in time and
wed Helen of Troy, but at the end of his twenty-four years' covenant with the devil he has to
surrender his soul to him. Beaumont and Fletcherare less-known, but they may have helped
Shakespeare write some of his best dramas, and were popular at the time. One of Beaumont
and Fletcher's chief merits was that of realising how feudalism and chivalry had turned into
snobbery and make-believe and that new social classes were on the rise. Beaumont's
comedy, The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), satirises the rising middle class and especially
of those nouveaux riches who pretend to dictate literary taste without knowing much literature at
all.
After Shakespeare's death, the poet and dramatist Ben Jonson (15721637) was the leading
literary figure of the Jacobean era. Jonson's aesthetics hark back to the Middle Ages and his
characters embody the theory of humours. According to this contemporary medical theory,
behavioural differences result from a prevalence of one of the body's four "humours" (blood,
phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile) over the other three; these humours correspond with the four
elements of the universe: air, water, fire, and earth. However, the stock types of Latin
literature were an equal influence.[71] Jonson therefore tends to create types or caricatures.
However, in his best work, characters are "so vitally rendered as to take on a being that

transcends the type".[72] He is a master of style, and a brilliant satirist. Jonson's famous
comedyVolpone (1605 or 1606) shows how a group of scammers are fooled by a top con-artist,
vice being punished by vice, virtue meting out its reward. Other major plays by Jonson
are Epicoene (1609), The Alchemist (1610), and Bartholomew Fair (1614).
A popular style of theatre during Jacobean times was the revenge play, which had been
popularised earlier in the Elizabethan era by Thomas Kyd (155894), and then subsequently
developed by John Webster (15781632) in the 17th century. Webster's most famous plays
are The White Devil (1612) and The Duchess of Malfi (1613). Other revenge tragedies
include The Changeling written by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Atheist's
Tragedyby Cyril Tourneur, first published in 1611, Christopher Marlow's The Jew of Malta, The
Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois by George Chapman, The Malcontent (c. 1603) of John
Marston and John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. Besides Hamlet, other plays of Shakespeare's
with at least some revenge elements, are Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar andMacbeth.
The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry, a closet drama written by Elizabeth Tanfield
Cary (15851639) and first published in 1613, was the first original play in English known to have
been written by a woman. Elizabeth Melville (1582[?] 1640) is the earliest known Scottish
woman writer to have her work appear in print. [73] Melville first published Ane Godlie Dreame,
a Calvinist dream-vision poem which describes the religious experience of a woman active in
the Scottish Reformation, in 1603 in Scots, and then translated it into English, probably the
following year.[74]
George Chapman (?1559-?1634) was a successful playwright who produced comedies (his
collaboration on Eastward Hoe led to his brief imprisonment in 1605 as it offended the King with
its anti-Scottish sentiment), tragedies (most notably Bussy D'Ambois) and court masques (The
Memorable Masque of the Middle Temple and Lincoln's Inn), but who is remembered chiefly for
his translation in 1616 of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey into English verse. This was the first ever
complete translation of either poem into the English language. The translation had a profound
influence on English literature and inspired the sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's
Homer from John Keats. The highly popular tale of the Trojan War had previously only been
available to English readers only in Medieval epic retellings, such as Caxton's Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye.
David Lyndsay's Ane Pleasant Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis (1552), is a surviving example of a
Scots dramatic tradition in the period that has otherwise largely been lost. James Wedderburn is
recorded as having written anti-Catholic tragedies and comedies in Scots around 1540 before
being forced to flee into exile. Although the propaganda value of drama in the Scottish
Reformation was important, the Kirk hardened its attitude to such public entertainments. In 1599
James VI had to intervene to overturn a prohibition on attending performances by a visiting
theatre troupe from England. Scottish drama did not succeed in becoming a popular artform in
the face of religious opposition and the absence of King and court after 1603. As with drama in
England, only a small proportion of plays written and performed were actually published, and the
smaller production in Scotland meant that a much less significant record of Scottish drama
remains to us.[54] The ribald verse play in Scots, Philotus,[75] is known from an anonymous edition
published in London in 1603.[76]
At the end of the 16th century, James VI of Scotland founded the Castalian Band, a group
of makars and musicians in the court, based on the model of the Pliade in France. The courtier
and makar Alexander Montgomerie was a leading member. Ane Schort Treatise conteining some
Reulis and Cautelis to be observit and eschewit in Scottis poesie is a treatise to describe and
propose the ideal standard for poets, written in 1584 by the 19-year-old James VI of Scotland
and first published in Edinburgh. However this Scottish cultural centre was lost after the
1603 Union of the Crowns when James shifted his court to London. From 1603, London was the
unrivalled cultural capital of Britain and Ireland.
Petrarchan and English influence also spread to Scotland, where William Drummond of
Hawthornden's pastoral poetry evoked a stable, ordered classicism in contrast to what he
criticised as a desire by poets to transform everything with "metaphysical Ideas and Scholastical
Quiddities".[77] This has been taken as the earliest labelling of Metaphysical poets. Drummond of

Hawthornden has been described as the "most accomplished poet to write in English in
seventeenth-century Scotland".[13]
The Renaissance in Wales was marked by humanism and scholarship. The Welsh language, its
grammar and lexicography, was studied for the first time and biblical studies flourished. Welsh
writers such as John Owen and William Vaughan wrote in Latin or English to communicate their
ideas outside Wales, but the humanists were unsuccessful in opening the established practices
of professional Welsh poets to Renaissance influences. [35] From the Reformation until the 19th
century most literature in the Welsh language was religious in character. Morgan Llwyd's Llyfr y
Tri Aderyn ("The Book of the Three Birds") (1653) took the form of a dialogue between an eagle
(representing secular authority, particularly Cromwell); a dove (representing the Puritans); and a
raven (representing the Anglican establishment).
While historically Welsh literature in English might be said to begin with the fifteenth-century
bard Ieuan ap Hywel Swrdwal, well into the nineteenth century English was spoken by few in
Wales. The only significant Welsh poet in this period writing in English was George
Herbert (15931633) from Montgomeryshire, though some see him as clearly belonging to the
English tradition.[78]
Drama in Wales as a literary tradition dates to morality plays from north-east Wales in the second
half of the 15th century. The development of Renaissance theatre in England did not have great
influence in Wales as the gentry found different forms of artistic patronage. One surviving
example of Welsh literary drama is Troelus a Chresyd, an anonymous adaptation from poems by
Henrysoun and Chaucer dating to around 1600. With no urban centres to compare to England to
support regular stages, morality plays and interludes continued to circulate in inn-yard
theatresand fairs, supplemented by visiting troupes performing English repertoire. [35]
Philosopher Sir Francis Bacon (15611626) wrote the utopian novel New Atlantis, and coined the
phrase "Knowledge is Power". Francis Godwin's 1638 The Man in the Moone recounts
an imaginary voyage to the moon and is now regarded as the first work of science fiction in
English literature.[79]
Besides Shakespeare the major poets of the early 17th century included the Metaphysical
poets John
Donne (15721631)
and George
Herbert(15931633).
Influenced
by
continental Baroque, and taking as his subject matter both Christian mysticism and eroticism,
Donne's metaphysical poetry uses unconventional or "unpoetic" figures, such as a compass or a
mosquito, to reach surprise effects. For example, in "Valediction: Forbidding Mourning", one of
Donne's Songs and Sonnets, the points of a compass represent two lovers, the woman who is
home, waiting, being the centre, the farther point being her lover sailing away from her. But the
larger the distance, the more the hands of the compass lean to each other: separation makes
love grow fonder. The paradox or the oxymoron is a constant in this poetry whose fears and
anxieties also speak of a world of spiritual certainties shaken by the modern discoveries of
geography and science, one that is no longer the centre of the universe.

The Reformation and vernacular literature

At the Reformation, the translation of liturgy and Bible into vernacular languages provided new
literary models.
The Book of Common Prayer and the Authorized King James Version of the Bible have been
hugely influential. The King James Bible, one of the biggest translation projects in the history of
English up to this time, was started in 1604 and completed in 1611. It represents the culmination
of a tradition of Bible translation into English from the original languages that began with the work
of William Tyndale (previous translations into English had relied on the Vulgate). It became the
standard Bible of the Church of England, and some consider it one of the greatest literary works
of all time.
The earliest surviving examples of Cornish prose are Pregothow Treger (The Tregear Homilies) a
set of 66 sermons translated from English by John Tregear 15551557.

In 1567 William Salesbury's Welsh translations of the New Testament and Book of Common
prayer were published. William Morgan's translation of the whole Bible followed in 1588 and
remained the standard Welsh Bible until well into the 20th century.
The first Irish translation of the New Testament was begun by Nicholas Walsh, Bishop of Ossory,
continued by John Kearney (Treasurer of St Patrick's, Dublin), his assistant, andDr. Nehemiah
Donellan, Archbishop of Tuam, and finally completed by William O'Domhnuill (William Daniell,
Archbishop of Tuam in succession to Donellan). Their work was printed in 1602. [80] The work of
translating the Old Testament was undertaken by William Bedell (15711642), Bishop of Kilmore,
who completed his translation within the reign ofCharles the First. However, it was not published
until 1685, in a revised version by Narcissus Marsh (16381713), Archbishop of Dublin.[81][82]
The Book of Common Order was translated into Scottish Gaelic by Son Carsuel (John
Carswell), Bishop of the Isles, and printed in 1567. This is considered the first printed book in
Scottish Gaelic though the language resembles classical Irish. [83] The Irish translation of the Bible
dating from the Elizabethan period was in use in Scotland until the Bible was translated into
Scottish Gaelic.[84] James Kirkwood (16501709) promoted Gaelic education and attempted to
provide a version of William Bedell's Bible translations into Irish, edited by his friend Robert
Kirk (16441692), which failed, though he did succeed in publishing a Psalter in Gaelic (1684). [85]
[86]

The Book of Common Prayer was translated into French by Jerseyman Jean Durel, later Dean of
Windsor, and published for use in the Channel Islands in 1663 as Anglicanism was established
as the state religion after the Stuart Restoration.
The Book of Common Prayer and Bible were translated into Manx in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The printing of prayers for the poor families was projected by Thomas Wilson in a memorandum
of Whit-Sunday 1699, but was not carried out until 30 May 1707, the date of issue of
his Principles and Duties of Christianity ... in English and Manks, with short and plain directions
and prayers, 1707. This was the first book published in Manx, and is often styled the Manx
Catechism. The Gospel of St. Matthew was translated, with the help of his vicars-general in 1722
and published in 1748 under the sponsorship of his successor as bishop, Mark Hildesley. The
remaining Gospels and the Acts were also translated into Manx under his supervision, but not
published. Hildesley printed the New Testament and the Book of Common Prayer, translated,
under his direction, by the clergy of the diocese, and the Old Testament was finished and
transcribed in December 1772, at the time of the bishop's death. [87] The Manx Bible established a
standard for written Manx. A tradition of Manx carvals, religious songs or carols, developed.
Religious literature was common, but secular writing much rarer.

The late Renaissance or Caroline period: 16251660

Main article: Caroline era
The Metaphysical poets continued writing in this period. Both John Donne and George Herbert
died after 1625, but there was a second generation of metaphysical poets, consisting of Andrew
Marvell (16211678), Thomas Traherne (1636 or 16371674) and Henry Vaughan(16221695).
Another important group of poets at this time were the Cavalier poets. They were an important
group of writers, who came from the classes that supported King Charles I during the Wars of the
Three Kingdoms (163951). (King Charles reigned from 1625 and was executed 1649). The best
known of the Cavalier poets are Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace, Thomas Carew, and Sir John
Suckling. They "were not a formal group, but all were influenced" by Ben Jonson.[88] Most of the
Cavalier poets were courtiers, with notable exceptions. For example, Robert Herrick was not a
courtier, but his style marks him as a Cavalier poet. Cavalier works make use of allegory and
classical allusions, and are influence by Latin authors Horace, Cicero, and Ovid.[89]
John Milton (160874) is one of the greatest English poets, who wrote at a time of religious flux
and political upheaval. He is generally seen as the last major poet of the English Renaissance,
though his major epic poems were written in the Restoration period, including. Paradise
Lost(1671). Among the important poems Milton wrote during this period are L'Allegro, 1631; Il
Penseroso, 1634; Comus (a masque), 1638; andLycidas, (1638). His later major works
are: Paradise Regained, 1671; Samson Agonistes, 1671. Milton's works reflect deep personal
convictions, a passion for freedom and self-determination, and the urgent issues and political

turbulence of his day. Writing in English, Latin, and Italian, he achieved international renown
within his lifetime, and his celebrated Areopagitica (1644), written in condemnation of prepublication censorship, is among history's most influential and impassioned defences of free
speech and freedom of the press. William Hayley's 1796 biography called him the "greatest
English author",[90] and he remains generally regarded "as one of the preeminent writers in the
English language".[91]
Thomas Urquhart (16111660), a Scottish Royalist, translated Rabelais' Gargantua and
Pantagruel into English, a translation that has achieved its "own creative identity", [54] and has
been described as "the greatest Scottish translation since Gavin Douglas's Eneados".
[13]
According to legend, Urquhart died in a fit of laughter on receiving news of the Restoration of
Charles II.[54]

Neoclassicism: 16601798
This period is also described as the Neoclassical age or Age of reason.

The Restoration: 16601700

Main articles: Restoration literature and Restoration comedy
The Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 launched a fresh start for literature, both in celebration
of the new worldly and playful court of the king, and in reaction to it. Theatres in England
reopened after having been closed during the protectorship of Oliver Cromwell, Puritanism lost
its momentum, and the bawdy "Restoration comedy" became a recognisable genre. In addition,
women were allowed to perform on stage for the first time. The Mercurius Caledonius, founded in
Edinburgh in 1660 by the playwright Thomas Sydserf, was Scotland's first newspaper.[92] Sydserf
was behind the establishment in Edinburgh of the first regular theatre in Scotland, and his 1667
play Tarugo's Wiles: or, The Coffee-House, based on a Spanish play, was produced in London to
amazement that a Scot could write such excellent English. He was also among the first to
translateCyrano de Bergerac into English; his , or the Government of the World in the
Moon (1659).[13] Scottish poet John Ogilby, who was the first Irish Master of the Revels, had
established the Werburgh Street Theatre, the first theatre in Ireland, in the 1630s. It was closed
by the Puritans in 1641. The Restoration of the monarchy in Ireland enabled Ogilby to resume his
position as Master of the Revels and open the first Theatre Royal in Dublin in 1662 in Smock
Alley. In 1662 Katherine Philips went to Dublin where she completed a translation of Pierre
Corneille's Pompe, produced with great success in 1663 in the Smock Alley Theatre, and
printed in the same year both in Dublin and London. Although other women had translated or
written dramas, her translation of Pompey broke new ground as the first rhymed version of a
French tragedy in English and the first English play written by a woman to be performed on the
professional stage. Aphra Behn (one of the women writers dubbed "The fair triumvirate of wit")
was a prolific dramatist and one of the first English professional female writers. Her greatest
dramatic success was The Rover (1677).
Behn's depiction of the character Willmore in The Rover and the witty, poetry-reciting rake
Dorimant in George Etherege's The Man of Mode(1676) are seen as a satire on John Wilmot,
2nd Earl of Rochester (16471680), an English libertine poet, and a wit of the Restoration court.
His contemporary Andrew Marvell described him as "the best English satirist", and he is
generally considered to be the most considerable poet and the most learned among the
Restoration wits.[93] His A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind is assumed to be
a Hobbesian critique ofrationalism.[94] Rochester's poetic work varies widely in form, genre, and
content. He was part of a "mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease", [95] who continued to produce
their poetry in manuscripts, rather than in publication. As a consequence, some of Rochester's
work deals with topical concerns, such as satires of courtly affairs in libels, to parodies of the
styles of his contemporaries, such as Sir Charles Scroope. He is also notable for his impromptus,
[96]
Voltaire, who spoke of Rochester as "the man of genius, the great poet", admired his satire for
its "energy and fire" and translated some lines into French to "display the shining imagination his
lordship only could boast".[97]

John Dryden (16311700) was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who
dominated the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be
known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden. He established the heroic couplet as a standard
form of English poetry by writing successful satires, religious pieces, fables, epigrams,
compliments, prologues, and plays with it; he also introduced the alexandrine and triplet into the
form. In his poems, translations, and criticism, he established a poetic diction appropriate to the
heroic couplet. Dryden's greatest achievements were in satiric verse in works like the mockheroic MacFlecknoe (1682). W. H. Audenreferred to him as "the master of the middle style" that
was a model for his contemporaries and for much of the 18th century. [98] The considerable loss
felt by the English literary community at his death was evident from the elegies that it inspired.
[99]
Alexander Pope (16881744) was heavily influenced by Dryden, and often borrowed from him;
other writers in the 18th century were equally influenced by both Dryden and Pope.
Iain Lom (c. 1624 c. 1710) was a Royalist Scottish Gaelic poet appointed poet laureate in
Scotland by Charles II at the Restoration. He delivered a eulogy for the coronation, and remained
loyal to the Stuarts after 1688, opposing the Williamites and later, in his vituperative Oran an
Aghaidh an Aonaidh, the 1707 Union of the Parliaments.[54] Though Ben Jonson had been poet
laureate to James I in England, this was not then a formal position and the formal title of Poet
Laureate, as a royal office, was first conferred by letters patent on John Dryden in 1670. The post
then became a regular British institution.
Diarists John Evelyn (16201706) and Samuel Pepys (16331703) depicted everyday London
life and the cultural scene of the times. Their works are among the most important primary
sources for the Restoration period in England, and consists of eyewitness accounts of many
great events, such as the Great Plague of London (16445), and the Great Fire of
London (1666). Cn Lae U Mheallin is an account of the Irish Confederate Wars which
"reflected the Ulster Catholic point of view" written by Tarlach Meallin. James Melville's diary
is written in a vigorous, fresh style, and is especially direct in its descriptions of Scottish
contemporaries and an original authority for the period, written with much navet, and revealing
an attractive personality.
Described as "an account of the progress of the Confederate war from the outbreak of rebellion
in 1641 until February 1647" its text "reflected the Ulster Catholic point of view."
The
publication
of The
Pilgrim's
Progress (Part
I:1678;
1684),
established
the Puritan preacher John Bunyan (162888) as a notable writer. Bunyan's The Pilgrim's
Progress is anallegory of personal salvation and a guide to the Christian life. Bunyan writes
about how the individual can prevail against the temptations of mind and body that threaten
damnation. The book is written in a straightforward narrative and shows influence from both
drama and biography, and yet it also shows an awareness of the grand allegorical tradition found
in Edmund Spenser.
Nicholas Boson (16241708) wrote three significant texts in Cornish, Nebbaz gerriau dro tho
Carnoack (A Few Words about Cornish) between 1675 and 1708; Jowan Chy-an-Horth, py, An
try foynt a skyans (John of Chyannor, or, The three points of wisdom), published by Edward
Lhuyd in 1707, though written earlier; and The Dutchess of Cornwall's Progress, partly in
English, now known only in fragments. The first two are the only known surviving Cornish prose
texts from the 17th century.[100]
In Scotland, after the 17th century, anglicisation increased, though Lowland Scots was still
spoken by the vast majority of the population, and Scottish Gaelic by a minority. At the time,
many of the oral ballads from the borders and the North East were written down. Writers of the
period include Robert Sempill (c. 1595 1665), Lady Wardlaw and LadyGrizel Baillie.

The Augustan age: 17001750

Main articles: Augustan literature and Augustan prose
The late 17th, early 18th century (16891750) in English literature is known as the Augustan
Age. Writers at this time "greatly admired their Roman counterparts, imitated their works and
frequently drew parallels between" contemporary world and the age of the Roman emperor
Augustus (27 AD BC 14)[101] (see Augustan literature (ancient Rome) ). Some of the major

writers in this period were John Dryden (16311700), Jonathan Swift (16671745), William
Congreve, (16701729), Joseph Addison (16721719), Richard Steele (16721729), Alexander
Pope (16881744), Henry Fielding (170754), Samuel Johnson (170984).
The "invention of British literature"
The Union of the Parliaments of Scotland and England in 1707 to form a single Kingdom of Great
Britain and the creation of a joint state by the Acts of Union had little impact on the literature of
England nor on national consciousness among English writers. The situation in Scotland was
different: the desire to maintain a cultural identity while partaking of the advantages offered by
the English literary market and English literary standard language led to what has been
described as the "invention of British literature" by Scottish writers. English writers, if they
considered Britain at all, tended to assume it was merely England writ large; Scottish writers
were more clearly aware of the new state as a "cultural amalgam comprising more than just
England".[102] James Thomson's "Rule Britannia!" is an example of the Scottish championing of
this new national and literary identity. With the invention of British literature came the
development of the first British novels, in contrast to the English novel of the 18th century which
continued to deal with England and English concerns rather than exploring the changed political,
social and literary environment.[102] Tobias Smollett (172171) was a Scottish pioneer of the British
novel, exploring the prejudices inherent within the new social structure of Britain through
comic picaresque novels. His The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) is the first major novel
written in English to have a Scotsman as hero, [102] and the multinational voices represented in the
narrative confront Anglocentric prejudices only two years after the Battle of Culloden. The
Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) brings together characters from the extremes of Britain to
question how cultural and linguistic differences can be accommodated within the new British
identity, and influenced Charles Dickens.[103] Richard Cumberland wrote patriotic comedies
depicting characters taken from the "outskirts of the empire," and intended to vindicate the good
elements of the Scots, Irish, and colonials from English prejudice. [104] His most popular play, "The
West Indian" (1771) was performed in North America and the West Indies. It was the first English
language play known to have been staged in Jersey (on 5 May 1792).; [105] Boden translated it into
German, and Goethe acted in it at the Weimar court.[104]
Prose, including the novel
Main article: Augustan prose
In prose, the earlier part of the period was overshadowed by the development of the English
essay. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's The Spectator established the form of the British
periodical essay, inventing the pose of the detached observer of human life who can meditate
upon the world without advocating any specific changes in it. Periodical essays bloomed into
journalistic writings; such as Samuel Johnson's "Reports of the Debates of the Senate of Lilliput",
titled to disguise the actual proceeding of parliament as it was illegal for any Parliamentary
Reports to be reproduced in print. However, this was also the time when the English novel, first
emerging in the Restoration, developed into a major art form. Daniel Defoe turned from
journalism and writing criminal lives for the press to writing fictional criminal lives
with Roxana and Moll Flanders.
Edward Cave created the first general-interest magazine in 1731 with The Gentleman's
Magazine. He was the first to use the term "magazine" on the analogy of a military storehouse of
varied material. The Daily Courant, first published on 11 March 1702 in Fleet Street, was the first
British daily newspaper. The News Letter is one of Northern Ireland's main daily newspapers and
is the oldest English language general daily newspaper still in publication in the world, having
first been printed in 1737.[106][107] The Press and Journal is a daily regional newspaper serving the
northern counties of Scotland including the cities of Aberdeen and Inverness. Established in
1747, it is Scotland's oldest daily newspaper.[108] (see also History of British newspapers)
John Newbery made children's literature a sustainable and profitable part of the literary market,
and he published his most popular story The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes in 1765.

The English pictorial satirist and editorial cartoonist William Hogarth (16971764) has been
credited with pioneering Western sequential art. His work ranged from realisticportraiture
to comic strip-like series of pictures called "modern moral subjects". Much of his work satirises
contemporary politics and customs.[109]
A seminal book in piracy, A General History of the Pyrates 1724, was published in London, and
contained biographies of several notorious English pirates such as Blackbeard andCalico Jack.[110]
The English novel has generally been seen as beginning with Daniel Defoe's Robinson
Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722),[111] though John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678)
and Aphra Behn's, Oroonoko (1688) are also contenders, while earlier works such as Sir Thomas
Malory's Morte d'Arthur, and even the "Prologue" to Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales have
been suggested.[112] The rise of the novel as an important literary genre is generally associated
with the growth of the middle class in England. Other major 18th-century British novelists
areSamuel Richardson (16891761), author of the epistolary novels Pamela, or Virtue
Rewarded (1740) and Clarissa (174748); Henry Fielding(170754), who wrote Joseph
Andrews (1742) and The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749).

Jonathan Swift's distinctive satirical style has given rise to the adjective "Swiftian"

Anglo-Irish literature achieved an ambiguous independence in the 18th century with the
emergence of writers such as Jonathan Swift,[1] whose important early novel Gulliver's
Travels (1726, amended 1735) is both a satire of human nature, as well as a parody of travellers'
tales like Robinson Crusoe.[113]
Drama in the Augustan age
See also: Restoration Comedy
Although documented history of Irish theatre began at least as early as 1601, the earliest Irish
dramatists of note were William Congreve (16701729), one of the most interesting writers
of Restoration comedies and author ofThe Way of the World (1700) and playwright, George
Farquhar (?16771707), The Recruiting Officer (1706).Anglo-Irish drama in the 18th century also
includes Charles Macklin (?16991797), and Arthur Murphy (17271805).[1]
The age of Augustan drama was brought to an end by the censorship established by
the Licensing Act 1737. After 1737, authors with strong political or philosophical points to make
would no longer turn to the stage as their first hope of making a living, and novels began to have
dramatic structures involving only normal human beings, as the stage was closed off for serious
authors. Prior to the Licensing Act 1737, theatre was the first choice for most wits. After it, the
novel was.
Poetry in the Augustan age
Main article: Augustan poetry
The most outstanding poet of the age is Alexander Pope (16881744), whose major works
include: The Rape of the Lock (1712; enlarged in 1714); a translation of the Iliad(171520); a
translation of the Odyssey (172526); The Dunciad (1728; 1743). Since his death, Pope has
been in a constant state of re-evaluation. His high artifice, strict prosody, and, at times, the sheer
cruelty of his satire were an object of derision for the Romantic poets, and it was not until the

1930s that his reputation was revived. Pope is now considered the dominant poetic voice of his
century, a model of prosodic elegance, biting wit, and an enduring, demanding moral force.
[114]
The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad are masterpieces of the mock-epic genre.[115]
Ellis Wynne's Gweledigaetheu y Bardd Cwsc ('Visions of the Sleeping Bard'), first published in
London in 1703, is regarded as a Welsh language classic. It is generally said that no better
model exists of such 'pure' idiomatic Welsh, before writers had become influenced by English
style and method.
A mover in the classical revival of Welsh literature in the 18th century was Lewis Morris, one of
the founders in 1751 of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, a Welsh literary society in
Londonat that time the most important centre of Welsh publishing. [35] He set out to counter the
trend among patrons of Welsh literature to turn towards English culture. A writer himself, he
circulated prose and poetry in Welsh composed by himself and, to the extent they were satirical,
influenced by Swift. He attempted to recreate a classic school of Welsh poetry with his support
forGoronwy Owen and other Augustans. Goronwy Owen, when young, had written poetry in
Welsh and Latin and returned to the classical tradition in 1751 with the intention of establishing
new ideals for Welsh poetry: no longer fawning on patrons but adopting the manner of Horace to
express Christian behaviour. His plans for a Miltonic epic were never achieved, but influenced
the aims of eisteddfodau competitions through the 19th century.[116]
In the Scots-speaking areas of Ulster there was traditionally a considerable demand for the work
of Scottish poets, often in locally printed editions. These included Alexander Montgomerie's The
Cherrie and the Slae in 1700, over a decade later an edition of poems by Sir David Lindsay, and
nine printings of Allan Ramsay's The Gentle shepherd between 1743 and 1793.
The Habbie stanza was developed as a Scottish poetic form.
The Scottish Gaelic Enlightenment figure Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair compiled the first
secular book in Scottish Gaelic to be printed: Leabhar a Theagasc Ainminnin (1741), a GaelicEnglish glossary. The second secular book in Scottish Gaelic to be published was his poetry
collection Ais-Eiridh na Sean Chnoin Albannaich (The Resurrection of the Ancient Scottish
Language). His lexicography and poetry was informed by his study of old Gaelic manuscripts, an
antiquarian interest which also influenced the orthography he employed. As an observer of the
natural world of Scotland and a Jacobite rebel, Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair was the most
overtly nationalist poet in Gaelic of the 18th century. His Ais-Eiridh na Sean Chnoin
Albannaich was reported to have been burned in public by the hangman in Edinburgh. [13] He was
influenced by James Thomson's The Seasons as well as by Gaelic "village poets" such as Iain
Mac Fhearchair (John MacCodrum). As part of the oral literature of the Highlands, few of the
works of such village poets were published at the time, although some have been collected
since.[13]
Scottish Gaelic poets produced laments on the Jacobite defeats of 1715 and 1745. Mairghread
nighean Lachlainn and Catriona Nic Fhearghais are among woman poets who reflected on the
crushing effects on traditional Gaelic culture of the aftermath of the Jacobite uprisings. A
consequent sense of desolation pervaded the works of Scottish Gaelic writers such as Dughall
Bochanan which mirrored many of the themes of the graveyard poets writing in England.[13] A
legacy of Jacobite verse was later compiled (and adapted) by James Hogg in his Jacobite
Reliques (1819).
The first printed Jrriais literature appears in the first newspapers following the introduction of the
printing press at the end of the 18th century. The earliest identified dated example of printed
poetry in Jrriais is a fragment by Matchi L'G (Matthew Le Geyt 17771849) dated 1795.

The roots of Romanticism: 17501798

Robert Burns inspired many vernacular writers across Britain and Ireland with works such asAuld Lang
Syne, A Red, Red Rose and Halloween.

The second half of the 18th century is sometimes called the "Age of Johnson". Samuel
Johnson (17091784), often referred to as Dr Johnson, was an English author who made lasting
contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor
andlexicographer. Johnson has been described as "arguably the most distinguished man of
letters in English history".[117] He is also the subject of "the most famous single work of
biographical art in the whole of literature": James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson (1791).[118] His
early works include the poems "London" and "his most impressive poem" "The Vanity of Human
Wishes" (1749).[119] Both poems are modelled on Juvenal's satires.[119] After nine years of work,
Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755; it had a far-reaching
effect onModern English and has been described as "one of the greatest single achievements of
scholarship."[120] This work brought Johnson popularity and success. Until the completion of
the Oxford English Dictionary 150 years later, Johnson's was viewed as the pre-eminent British
dictionary.[121] His later works included essays, an influential annotated edition of William
Shakespeare's plays (1765), and the widely read taleRasselas (1759). In 1763, he befriended
James Boswell, with whom he later travelled to Scotland; Johnson described their travels in A
Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1786). Towards the end of his life, he produced the
massive and influential Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (177981), a collection of
biographies and evaluations of 17th- and 18th-century poets. Through works such as the
"Dictionary, his edition of Shakespeare, and his Lives of the Poets in particular, he helped invent
what we now call English Literature".[119]
The second half of the 18th century saw the emergence of three major Irish authors Oliver
Goldsmith (17281774), Richard Brinsley Sheridan(17511816) and Laurence Sterne (1713
68). Goldsmith settled in London in 1756, where he published the novel The Vicar of
Wakefield(1766), a pastoral poem The Deserted Village (1770) and two plays, The Good-Natur'd
Man 1768 and She Stoops to Conquer 1773. This latter was a huge success and is still regularly
revived. Sheridan was born in Dublin into a family with a strong literary and theatrical tradition.
The family moved to England in the 1750s. His first play, The Rivals 1775, was performed
at Covent Garden and was an instant success. He went on to become the most significant
London playwright of the late 18th century with plays like The School for Scandal and The Critic.
Both Goldsmith and Sheridan reacted against the sentimental comedy of the 18th-century
theatre, writing plays closer to the style of Restoration comedy.[122] Sterne published his famous
novel Tristram Shandy in parts between 1759 and 1767.[123]
The sentimental novel or the novel of sensibility is a genre which developed during the second
half of the 18th century. It celebrates the emotional and intellectual concepts of
sentiment, sentimentalism, and sensibility. Sentimentalism, which is to be distinguished from
sensibility, was a fashion in both poetry and prose fiction beginning in the eighteenth century in
reaction to the rationalism of the Augustan Age. Sentimental novels relied on emotional

response, both from their readers and characters. They feature scenes of distress and
tenderness, and the plot is arranged to advance emotions rather than action. The result is a
valorisation of "fine feeling," displaying the characters as a model for refined, sensitive emotional
effect. The ability to display feelings was thought to show character and experience, and to
shape social life and relations.[124] Among the most famous sentimental novels in English
are Samuel Richardson's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740), Oliver Goldsmith's Vicar of
Wakefield (1766), Laurence
Sterne's Tristram
Shandy (175967), Sentimental
Journey (1768), Henry Brooke's The Fool of Quality (176570),Henry Mackenzie's The Man of
Feeling (1771) and Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800).[125]
Another novel genre also developed in this period. In 1778, Frances Burney (17521840)
wrote Evelina, one of the first novel's of manners.[126]Social behaviour in public and private
settings accounts for much of the plot of Evelina. This is mirrored in other novels that were
particularly popular at the beginning of the 19th century, especially those of Jane Austen. Fanny
Burney's novels' indeed "were enjoyed and admired by Jane Austen".[127]
The period of intellectual and scientific accomplishments in Scotland in the latter part of the 18th
century has been called the Scottish Enlightenment. Important early works were David Hume's
(171176) Treatise on Human Nature (1738) and Essays, Moral and Political (1741).Adam
Smith (172390) was another important philosopher in Scotland at this time, author of the first
modern work of economics, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of
Nations (1776). Smith is cited as the "father of modern economics" and is still among the most
influential thinkers in the field of economics today.[128] Scottish Common Sense Realism is another
important school of philosophy that originated in the ideas of Scottish philosophers Thomas
Reid (171096), Adam Ferguson (17231816) and Dugald Stewart (17531828) during the 18thcentury Scottish Enlightenment. Scottish philosophy was dominated by Scottish Common Sense
Realism, which shared some characteristics with Romanticism, and it would be a major influence
on the development of one of the most important offshoots of Romanticism inNew
England, Transcendentalism, particularly in the writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson (180382).[129]
The Encyclopdia Britannica was first published between 1768 and 1771 in Edinburgh. In part, it
was conceived in reaction to the French Encyclopdie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond
d'Alembert (published 17511772), which had been inspired by Chambers's Cyclopaedia (first
edition 1728). The Britannica was primarily a Scottish enterprise; it is one of the most enduring
legacies of the Scottish Enlightenment.[130]
The demand for the works of Scottish poets in the Scots-speaking areas of Ulster continued in
the second half of the 18th century with nine printings of Allan Ramsay's The Gentle
shepherd between 1743 and 1793, and an edition of Robert Burns' poetry in 1787, the same
year as the Edinburgh edition, followed by reprints in 1789, 1793 and 1800. Among other
Scottish poets published in Ulster were James Hogg and Robert Tannahill. In
1780, Dumfries poet John Mayne makes note of pranks at Halloween; "What fearfu' pranks
ensue!", as well as the supernatural associated with the night, "Bogies" (ghosts).[131] Robert Burns'
1785 poem Halloween is recited by Scots at Halloween, and Burns was influenced by Mayne's
composition.[131][132]
Some 60 to 70 volumes of Ulster rhyming weaver poetry were published between 1750 and
1850, the peak being in the decades 1810 to 1840. These weaver poets, such asJames
Orr (17701816), looked to Scotland for their cultural and literary models and were not simple
imitators but clearly inheritors of the same literary tradition following the same poetic and
orthographic practices; it is not always immediately possible to distinguish traditional Scots
writing from Scotland and Ulster.
The graveyard poets were a number of pre-Romantic English poets, writing in the 1740s and
later, whose works are characterised by their gloomy meditations on mortality, "skulls and coffins,
epitaphs and worms" in the context of the graveyard. [133] To this was added, by later practitioners,
a feeling for the 'sublime' and uncanny, and an interest in ancient English poetic forms and folk
poetry.[134] They are often considered precursors of the Gothic genre. [135] The poets
include; Thomas Gray (171671), whose Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751) is "the
best known product of this kind of sensibility"; [136] William Cowper (17311800); Christopher

Smart (172271); Thomas Chatterton (175270); Robert Blair (16991746), author of The
Grave (1743), "which celebrates the horror of death"; [137] and Edward Young (16831765),
whose The Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (174245), is another
"noted example of the graveyard genre". [138] Other precursors of Romanticism are the
poets James Thomson(170048) and James Macpherson (173696), the Gothic novel and
the novel
of
sensibility.[139] Significant
foreign
influences
were
the
Germans Goethe, Schiller and August Wilhelm Schlegel and French philosopher and
writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau (171278).[140] Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the
Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) is another important influence.[141] The
changing landscape, brought about by the industrial and agricultural revolutions, with the
expansion of the city and depopulation of the countryside, was another influences on the growth
of the Romantic movement in Britain. The poor condition of workers, the new class conflicts and
the pollution of the environment, led to a reaction against urbanism and industrialisation and a
new emphasis on the beauty and value of nature.
Also foreshadowing Romanticism was Gothic fiction, in works such as Horace Walpole's 1764
novel The Castle of Otranto. The Gothic fictiongenre combines elements of horror and romance.
The pioneering gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe introduced the brooding figure of the gothic villain
which later developed into the Byronic hero. Her most popular and influential work, The
Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), is frequently cited as the archetypal Gothic novel. Vathek (1786)
by William Beckford, and The Monk (1796) by Matthew Lewis, were other notable early works in
both the gothic and horror genres. Iolo Morganwg, founder of the Gorsedd, first came to public
notice in 1789 when he produced Barddoniaeth Dafydd ab Gwilym, a collection of the poetry of
the 14th-century Dafydd ap Gwilym. Included in this edition was a large number of previously
unknown poems by Dafydd that he claimed to have discovered; these poems are regarded as
Williams' first literary forgeries.[142] In 1794 he published some of his own poetry, which was later
collected in the two-volume Poems, Lyric and Pastoral. Essentially his only genuine work, it
proved quite popular.[142]
Although William Williams Pantycelyn was claimed by Saunders Lewis as the first poet of the
Romantic movement, and Iolo Morganwg's antiquarian enthusiasms fed an appetite elsewhere
for Romantic ideas, a true movement of Romanticism in Welsh literature only developed in the
19th century when it overlapped with Aestheticism.[35]
James Macpherson (173696) was the first Scottish poet to gain an international reputation.
Claiming to have found poetry written by the ancient bard Ossian, he published translations that
acquired international popularity, being proclaimed as a Celtic equivalent of
the Classical epics.Fingal, written in 1762, was speedily translated into many European
languages, and its appreciation of natural beauty and treatment of the ancient legend has been
credited more than any single work with bringing about the Romantic movement in European,
and especially in German literature, through its influence on Johann Gottfried von
Herder and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.[143] It was also popularised in France by figures that
included Napoleon.[144] Eventually it became clear that the poems were not direct translations from
the Gaelic, but flowery adaptations made to suit the aesthetic expectations of his audience.
[145]
Both Robert Burns (175996) andWalter Scott (17711832) were highly influenced by the
Ossian cycle.
Robert Burns (17591796) was a pioneer of the Romantic movement, and after his death he
became a cultural icon in Scotland. As well as writing poems, Burns also collectedfolk songs from
across Scotland, often revising or adapting them. His Poems, chiefly in the Scottish Dialect was
published in 1786. Among poems and songs of Burns that remain well known across the world
are, "Auld Lang Syne"; "A Red, Red Rose"; "A Man's A Man for A' That"; "To a Louse"; "To a
Mouse"; "The Battle of Sherramuir"; "Tam o' Shanter" and "Ae Fond Kiss".
The importance of translation in spreading the influence of English literature to other cultures of
the islands can be exemplified by the abridged Manx version of Paradise Lost byJohn
Milton published in 1796 by Thomas Christian. The influence also went the other way as

Romanticism discovered inspiration in the literatures and legends of the Celtic countries of the
islands. The Ossian hoax typifies the growth of this interest.
The interest in Celtic bards such as the supposed Ossian inspired a reaction in England that saw
Shakespeare being termed "the Bard" or the "Bard of Avon". [13] The 1769Shakespeare
Jubilee was an example of what was derisively called bardolatry as Shakespeare was held up as
an example of transcendent genius, the ideal of the Romantic poet.

19th-century literature
Romanticism: 17981837
Main articles: Romanticism English literature and Romanticism in Scotland

William Blake's "The Tyger", published in his Songs of Innocence and of Experience is a work of
Romanticism

Romanticism was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward
the end of the 18th century. Various dates are given for the Romantic period in British literature,
but here the publishing of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 is taken as the beginning, and the crowning
of Queen Victoria in 1837 as its end, even though, for example, William Wordsworth lived until
1850 and William Blake published before 1798. The writers of this period, however, "did not think
of themselves as 'Romantics' ", and the term was first used by critics of the Victorian period. [146]
The Romantic period was one of major social change in England, because of the depopulation of
the countryside and the rapid development of overcrowded industrial cities, that took place in the
period roughly between 1750 and 1850. The movement of so many people in England was the
result of two forces: the Agricultural Revolution, that involved the Enclosure of the land, drove
workers off the land, and the Industrial Revolution which provided them employment, "in the
factories and mills, operated by machines driven by steam-power".[147] Indeed, Romanticism may
be seen in part as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution,[148] though it was also a revolt against
aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment, as well a reaction against the
scientific rationalisation of nature.[149] The French Revolution was an especially important
influence on the political thinking of many of the Romantic poets.[150]
The landscape is often prominent in the poetry of this period, so that it the Romantics, especially
perhaps Wordsworth, are often described as 'nature poets'. However, the longer Romantic
'nature poems' have a wider concern because they are usually meditations on "an emotional
problem or personal crisis".[151]

The poet, painter, and printmaker William Blake (17571827) was one of the first of the English
Romantic poets. Largely disconnected from the major streams of the literature of the time, Blake
was generally unrecognised during his lifetime, but is now considered a seminal figure in the
history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. Considered mad by
contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is held in high regard by later critics for his
expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his
work. Among his most important works are Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of
Experience (1794) "and profound and difficult 'prophecies' " such as Visions of the Daughters of
Albion (1793), The First Book of Urizen (1794), Milton (1804?11), and "Jerusalem: the
Emanation of the Giant Albion" (1804?20).[152]
After Blake, among the earliest Romantics were the Lake Poets, a small group of friends,
including William Wordsworth (17701850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (17721834), Robert
Southey (17741843) and journalist Thomas de Quincey (17851859). However, at the
time Walter Scott(17711832) was the most famous poet. Scott achieved immediate success
with his long narrative poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel in 1805, followed by the full epic
poem Marmion in 1808. Both were set in the distant Scottish past.[153]
The early Romantic Poets brought a new emotionalism and introspection, and their emergence is
marked by the first romantic manifesto in English literature, the "Preface" to Lyrical
Ballads (1798). In it Wordsworth discusses what he sees as the elements of a new type of
poetry, one based on the "real language of men" and which avoids the poetic diction of much
18th-century poetry. Here, Wordsworth gives his famous definition of poetry, as "the spontaneous
overflow of powerful emotions recollected in tranquility" which "takes its origin from emotion
recollected in tranquility." The poems in Lyrical Ballads were mostly by Wordsworth, although
Coleridge contributed the long "Rime of the Ancient Mariner", a tragic ballad about the survival of
one sailor through a series of supernatural events on his voyage through the south seas which
involves the slaying of an albatross. Coleridge is also especially remembered for "Kubla Khan",
"Frost at Midnight", "Dejection: an Ode", "Christabel" and his major prose work Biographia
Literaria. His critical work, especially on Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped
introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture.[154] Coleridge and Wordsworth,
along
with Thomas
Carlyle,
were
a
major
influence,
through Emerson,
on
American transcendentalism.[155] Among Wordsworth's most important poems, are "Michael",
"Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey", "Resolution and Independence", "Ode:
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" and the long, autobiographical,
epic The Prelude. The Prelude was begun in 1799 but published posthumously in 1850.
Robert Southey (17741843) was another of the so-called "Lake Poets", and Poet Laureate for
30 years from 1813 to his death in 1843. Although his fame has been long eclipsed by that of his
contemporaries and friends William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His most enduring
contribution to literary history is perhaps the children's classic, The Story of the Three Bears, the
basis of the original Goldilocks story. Thomas De Quincey (17851859) was an English essayist,
best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821),[156] an autobiographical
account of his laudanum and its effect on his life. William Hazlitt (17781830), friend of both
Coleridge and Wordsworth, is another important essayist at this time, though today he is best
known for his literary criticism, especially Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (181718).[157]
The second generation of Romantic poets includes Lord Byron (17881824), Percy Bysshe
Shelley (17921822) and John Keats (17951821). Byron, however, was still influenced by 18thcentury satirists and was, perhaps the least 'romantic' of the three, preferring "the brilliant wit
of Pope to what he called the 'wrong poetical system' of his Romantic contemporaries". [158] Byron
achieved enormous fame and influence throughout Europe with works exploiting the violence
and drama of their exotic and historical settings. Goethe called Byron "undoubtedly the greatest
genius of our century".[159] However, despite the success of Childe Harold and other works, Byron
was forced to leave England for good in 1816 and seek asylum on the Continent, because,
among other things, of his alleged incestuous affair with his half-sister Augusta Leigh. [160] Between
1819 and 1824 Byron published his unfinished epic satire Don Juan, which, though initially
condemned by the critics, "was much admired by Goethe who translated part of it" [161]

Though John Keats shared Byron and Shelley's radical politics, "his best poetry is not political".
[162]
but is especially noted for its sensuous music and imagery, along with a concern with material
beauty and the transience of life. [163] Among his most famous works are: "The Eve of St Agnes",
"Ode to Psyche", "La Belle Dame sans Merci", "Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode on a Grecian Urn",
"Ode on Melancholy", "To Autumn" and the incomplete Hyperion, a 'philosophical' poem in blank
verse, which was "conceived on the model of Milton's Paradise Lost ".[164] Keats has always been
regarded as a major Romantic "and his stature as a poet has grown steadily through all changes
of fashion".[165] In 1882, Swinburne wrote in the Encyclopdia Britannicathat "the Ode to a
Nightingale, [is] one of the final masterpieces of human work in all time and for all ages". [166] More
recently critic Helen Vendler stated the odes "are a group of works in which the English language
find ultimate embodiment".[167] Keats' letters "are among the finest in English" and important "for
their discussion of his aesthetic ideas", including 'negative capability' ".[168]
Percy Shelley, famous for his association with Keats and Byron, was the third major romantic
poet of the second generation. Generally regarded as among the finest lyric poets in the English
language, Shelley is perhaps best known for poems such as Ozymandias, Ode to the West
Wind, To a Skylark, Music, When Soft Voices Die, The Cloud, The Masque of
Anarchy and Adonas, an elegy written on the death of Keats. Shelley's early profession of
atheism, in the tract "The Necessity of Atheism", led to his expulsion from Oxford [169]and branded
him as a radical agitator and thinker, setting an early pattern of marginalisation and ostracism
from the intellectual and political circles of his time. His close circle of admirers, however,
included the most progressive thinkers of the day, including his future father-in-law,
philosopher William Godwin. A work like Queen Mab (1813) reveal Shelley, "as the direct heir to
the French and British revolutionary intellectuals of the 1790s. [170] Shelley became an idol of the
next three or four generations of poets, including important Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite poets
such as Robert Browning, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.[171] Shelley's influential poem The Masque
of Anarchy (1819) calls for nonviolence in protest and political action. It is perhaps the first
modern statement of the principle of nonviolent protest.[172] Mahatma Gandhi's passive resistance
was influenced and inspired by Shelley's verse, and Gandhi would often quote the poem to vast
audiences.[173]
Mary Shelley (17971851) is remembered as the author of Frankenstein (1818), an
important Gothic novel, as well as being an early example of science fiction. [174] The plot of this is
said to have come from a waking dream she had, in the company of Percy Shelley, Lord Byron,
and John Polidori, following a conversation about galvanism and the feasibility of returning a
corpse or assembled body parts to life, and on the experiments of the 18th-century natural
philosopher and poet Erasmus Darwin, who was said to have animated dead matter.[175] Sitting
around a log fire at Byron's villa, the company also amused themselves by reading German
ghost stories, prompting Byron to suggest they each write their own supernaturaltale.
Another important poet in this period was John Clare (17931864), Clare was the son of a farm
labourer, who came to be known for his celebratory representations of the English countryside
and his lamentation for the changes taking place in rural England. [176] Between 1820 and 1841
Clare published for collections of poems. His poetry underwent a major re-evaluation in the late
20th century and he is often now considered to be among the most important 19th-century poets.
[177]
His biographer Jonathan Bate states that Clare was "the greatest labouring-class poet that
England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural
childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self". [178]
George Crabbe (17541832) was an English poet who, during the Romantic period, wrote
"closely observed, realistic portraits of rural life [...] in the heroic couplets of theAugustan age".
[179]
Lord Byron who was an admirer of Crabbe's poetry, described him as "nature's sternest
painter, yet the best".[180] Modern critic Frank Whitehead has said that "Crabbe, in his verse tales
in particular, is an importantindeed, a majorpoet whose work has been and still is seriously
undervalued."[181] Crabbe's works include The Village (1783), Poems (1807), The Borough (1810),
and his poetry collections Tales (1812) and Tales of the Hall (1819).
Major novelists in this period were the Englishwoman Jane Austen (17751817) and the
Scotsman Sir Walter Scott (17711832), while Gothic fictionof various kinds also flourished.
Austen's works satirise the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are

part of the transition to 19th-century realism. [182] Her plots, though fundamentally comic, highlight
the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security.
[183]
Austen brings to light the hardships women faced, who usually did not inherit money, could
not work and where their only chance in life depended on the man they married. She reveals not
only the difficulties women faced in her day, but also what was expected of men and of the
careers they had to follow. This she does with wit and humour and with endings where all
characters, good or bad, receive exactly what they deserve. Austen's work brought her little
personal fame and only a few positive reviews during her lifetime, but the publication in 1869 of
her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced her to a wider public, and by the 1940s she
had become accepted as a major writer. The second half of the 20th century saw a proliferation
of Austen scholarship and the emergence of a Janeite fan culture. Austen's works include Pride
and
Prejudice(1813) Sense
and
Sensibility (1811), Mansfield
Park (1814), Emma (1815) and Persuasion (1818).
The most important British novelist at the beginning of the early 19th century was Sir Walter
Scott, who was not only a highly successful British novelist, but "the greatest single influence on
fiction in the 19th century [...] [and] a European figure". [184] Scott's novel writing career was
launched in 1814 with Waverley, often called the first historical novel, and was followed
byIvanhoe. The Waverley Novels, including The Antiquary, Old Mortality, The Heart of
Midlothian, and whose subject is Scottish history, are now generally regarded as Scott's
masterpieces.[185] He was one of the most popular novelist of the era and his historical romances
inspired a generation of painters, composers, and writers throughout Europe, including Franz
Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn and J. M. W. Turner. His novels also inspired many operas, of
which the most famous are Lucia di Lammermoor (1835) by Donizetti and Bizet's, La jolie fille de
Perth, The Fair Maid of Perth (1867).[186] However, Austen is today widely read and the source for
films and television series, while Scott is neglected.
Ewen MacLachlan (Gaelic: Eoghan MacLachlainn) (17751822) was a Scots poet of this period
who translated the first eight books of Homer'sIliad into Scottish Gaelic. He also composed and
published his own Gaelic Attempts in Verse (1807) and Metrical Effusions (1816), and
contributed greatly to the 1828 GaelicEnglish Dictionary.

Victorian literature: 18371901

See also: Victorian literature
Victorian fiction
The novel
It was in the Victorian era (18371901) that the novel became the leading literary genre in
English.[187] Women played an important part in this rising popularity both as authors and as
readers.[188] Monthly serialising of fiction encouraged this surge in popularity, due to a combination
of the rise of literacy, technological advances in printing, and improved economics of distribution.
[189]
Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers, was published in twenty parts between April 1836 and
November 1837.[190] Both Dickens and Thackeray frequently published this way.[191] However, the
standard practice of publishing three volume editions continued until the end of the 19th century.
[192]
Circulating libraries, that allowed books to be borrowed for an annual subscription, were a
further factor in the rising popularity of the novel.
Although London, as imperial capital, was the pre-eminent centre for literature and publishing,
the pluricentric nature of British culture and the growing sophistication of provincial towns and
cities as rapid industrialisation progressed meant that literature developed in the provinces. The
Lake Poets (William Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge), the Bronts, George Eliot and Elizabeth
Gaskell are all figures who strengthened the provincial trend in the literature of England,
examining questions of Englishness at the same time as other writers throughout Britain and
Ireland were exploring the conflicts of their own non-English identities. [193] This was in many ways
a reaction to rapid industrialisation, and the social, political and economic issues associated with
it, and was a means of commenting on abuses of government and industry and the suffering of
the poor, who were not profiting from England's economic prosperity. [194] Stories of the working
class poor were directed toward middle class to help create sympathy and promote change. An
early example is Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist (183738). Other significant early example of this

genre are Sybil, or The Two Nations, a novel by Benjamin Disraeli (180481) andCharles
Kingsley's (181975) Alton Locke (1849).
Charles Dickens (181270) emerged on the literary scene in the late 1830s and soon became
probably the most famous novelist in the history of British literature. One of his most popular
works to this day is A Christmas Carol (1843). Dickens fiercely satirised various aspects of
society, including the workhouse in Oliver Twist, the failures of the legal system in Bleak House,
the dehumanising effect of money in Dombey and Son and the influence of the philosophy
of utilitarianism in factories, education etc., in Hard Times. However some critics have suggested
that Dickens' sentimentality blunts the impact of his satire. [195] In more recent years Dickens has
been most admired for his later novels, such as Dombey and Son (184648), Bleak
House (185253) and Little Dorrit (185557), Great Expectations (18601), and Our Mutual
Friend (186465).[196] An early rival to Dickens was William Makepeace Thackeray (181163),
who during the Victorian period ranked second only to him, but he is now much less read and is
known almost exclusively for Vanity Fair (1847). In that novel he satirises whole swaths of
humanity while retaining a light touch. It features his most memorable character, the engagingly
roguish Becky Sharp.
The Bront sisters, Emily, Charlotte and Anne, were other significant novelists in the 1840s and
1850s. Their novels caused a sensation when they were first published but were subsequently
accepted as classics. They had written compulsively from early childhood and were first
published, at their own expense, in 1846 as poets under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton
Bell. The following year the three sisters each published a novel. Charlotte Bront's (181655)
work was Jane Eyre, which is written in an innovative style that combines naturalism with
gothic melodrama, and broke new ground in being written from an intensely first-person female
perspective.[197] Emily Bront's (181848) novel was Wuthering Heights and, according to Juliet
Gardiner, "the vivid sexual passion and power of its language and imagery impressed,
bewildered and appalled reviewers," [198]and led the Victorian public and many early reviewers to
think that it had been written by a man. [199] Even though it received mixed reviews when it first
came out, and was often condemned for its portrayal of amoral passion, the book subsequently
became an English literary classic. [200] The third Bront novel of 1847 was Anne Bront's (1820
49) Agnes Grey, which deals with the lonely life of a governess. Anne Bront's second
novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), is perhaps the most shocking of the Bronts' novels. In
seeking to present the truth in literature, Anne's depiction of alcoholism and debauchery was
profoundly disturbing to 19th-century sensibilities. [201] Charlotte Bront's Shirley was published in
1849, Villette in 1853, and The Professor in 1857.
Elizabeth Gaskell (181065) was also a successful writer and her first novel, Mary Barton, was
published anonymously in 1848. Gaskell's North and South contrasts the lifestyle in the industrial
north of England with the wealthier south. Even though her writing conforms to Victorian
conventions, Gaskell usually frames her stories as critiques of contemporary attitudes, and her
early works focused on factory work in southeast Lancashire. She always emphasised the role of
women, with complex narratives and dynamic female characters. [202]
Anthony Trollope's (181582) was one of the most successful, prolific and respected English
novelists of the Victorian era. Some of his best-loved works are set in the imaginary west country
county of Barsetshire, including The Warden (1855) and Barchester Towers (1857). Trollope's
novels portray the lives of the landowning and professional classes of early Victorian
England. Henry James suggested that Trollope's greatest achievement was "great apprehension
of the real", and that "what made him so interesting, came through his desire to satisfy us on this
point".[203]
George Eliot's (Mary Ann Evans (181980) first novel Adam Bede was published in 1859, and
she was a major novelist of the mid-Victorian period. Her works, especiallyMiddlemarch 1871-2),
are important examples of literary realism, and are admired for their combination of high Victorian
literary detail, with an intellectual breadth that removes them from the narrow geographic
confines they often depict, that has led to comparisons with Tolstoy. [204] While her reputation
declined somewhat after her death, [205] in the 20th century she was championed by a new breed
of critics, most notably by Virginia Woolf, who called Middlemarch "one of the few English novels

written for grown-up people".[206]Various film and television adaptations of Eliot's books have also
introduced her to a wider readership.[207]
George Meredith (18281909) is best remembered for his novels The Ordeal of Richard
Fevered (1859) and The Egotist (1879). "His reputation stood very high well into" the 20th
century but then seriously declined.[208]
Victor Hugo spent 18 years in exile in the Channel Islands, 18521870. He completed Les
Misrables in Guernsey and Les Travailleurs de la mer was written and set in Guernsey and has
been described as "the finest British novel written in French". [209] Hugo used some of Guernsey
poet George Mtivier's work as material in his novels.[210]
An interest in rural matters and the changing social and economic situation of the countryside is
seen in the novels of Thomas Hardy(18401928). A Victorian realist, in the tradition of George
Eliot, he was also influenced both in his novels and poetry by Romanticism, especially by William
Wordsworth.[211] Charles Darwin is another important influence on Thomas Hardy.[212] Like Charles
Dickens he was also highly critical of much in Victorian society, though Hardy focused more on a
declining rural society. While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life, and regarded himself
primarily as a poet, his first collection was not published until 1898, so that initially he gained
fame as the author of such novels as, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of
Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles(1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). He ceased
writing novels following adverse criticism of this last novel. In novels such as The Mayor of
Casterbridge and Tess of the d'Urbervilles Hardy attempts to create modern works in the genre
of tragedy, that are modelled on the Greek drama, especially Aeschylus and Sophocles, though
in prose, not poetry, fiction, not a play, and with characters of low social standing, not nobility.
[213]
Another significant late-19th-century novelist is George Robert Gissing (18571903), who
published 23 novels between 1880 and 1903. His best-known novel is New Grub Street (1891).
Also in the late 1890s, the first novel of Polish-born immigrantJoseph Conrad, (18571924), an
important forerunner of modernist literature, was published. Conrad's Heart of Darkness was
published in 1899, a symbolic story within a story, or frame narrative, about the journey to
the Belgian Congo by an Englishman called Marlow. This was followed by Lord Jim in 1900.
Ulster Scots was used in the narrative by Ulster novelists such as W. G. Lyttle (18441896). By
the middle of the 19th century the Kailyard school of prose had become the dominant literary
genre, overtaking poetry. This was a tradition shared with Scotland which continued into the early
20th century.[214] The Scottish authors; Robert Louis Stevenson, William Alexander, Sir James M.
Barrie, and George MacDonald, also wrote in Lowland Scots or used it in dialogue.
The Welsh novel in English starts with "The Adventures and Vagaries of Twm Shon Catti" (1828)
by T. J. Ll. Prichard, and novelists following him developed two important genres: the industrial
novel and the rural romance. Serial fiction in Welsh had been appearing from 1822 onwards, but
the work to be recognisable as the first novel in Welsh was William Ellis Jones' 1830 " Y Bardd,
neu y Meudwy Cymreig". This was a moralistic work, as were many of the productions of the
time. The first major novelist in the Welsh language was Daniel Owen (18361895), author of
works such asRhys Lewis (1885) and Enoc Huws (1891).[35]
The first novel in Scottish Gaelic was John MacCormick's Dn-luinn, no an t-Oighre 'na
Dhobarach, which was serialised in the People's Journal in 1910, before publication in book
form in 1912. The publication of a second Scottish Gaelic novel, An t-Ogha Mr by Angus
Robertson, followed within a year.[215]
The short story
There are early European examples of short stories published separately between 1790 and
1810, but the first true collections of short stories appeared between 1810 and 1830 in several
countries around the same period.[216] The first short stories in the United Kingdom were gothic
tales like Richard Cumberland's "remarkable narrative" "The Poisoner of Montremos" (1791).
[217]
Major novelists like Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens also wrote some short stories.
Literary magazines first began to appear in the early part of the 19th century, mirroring an overall
rise in the number of books, magazines and scholarly journals being published at that time.
Critics Francis Jeffrey, Henry Brougham and Sydney Smith founded the Edinburgh Review in

1802. Other British reviews of this period included the Westminster Review (1824), The
Spectator (1828) and Athenaeum (1828).
Welsh writers in English have favoured the short story form over the novel for two main reasons:
in a society lacking sufficient wealth to support professional writers, the amateur writer was able
to spare time only for short bursts of creativity; and, like poetry, it concentrated linguistic delight
and exuberance. However, the genre did not develop in these writers much beyond its origin in
rural sketches. Satire was avoided, and, since the main market was London publishers, the short
stories tended to focus on the eccentricities (as seen from a metropolitan viewpoint) of Welsh life.
[35]

Somerville and Ross's Some Experiences of an Irish RM (1899) and its successors also played
on popular provincial stereotypes.
The short story in Welsh only developed as a serious literary form in the early years of the 20th
century, as writers absorbed European and American models and moved on from the moralistic
parables that were typical of the Nonconformist press that had grown up in the 19th century.
Daniel Owen's last book Straeon y Pentan ("Tales of the hearth", 1895) served as the pattern for
the short story form that became a codified part of the competitions at the National Eisteddfod at
the start of the 20th century.[35]
Ulster Scots regularly appeared in Ulster newspaper columns such as those of "Bab M'Keen"
from the 1880s.[218]
Philippe Le Sueur Mourant's Jrriais tales of Bram Bilo, an innocent abroad in Paris, were an
immediate success in Jersey in 1889 and went through a number of reprintings. [219]
Genre fiction

Bram Stoker

Important developments occurred in genre fiction in this era.

Sir John Barrow's descriptive 1831 account of the Mutiny on the Bounty immortalised the Royal
Navy ship HMS Bounty and her people. The legend of Dick Turpin was popularised when the
18th-century English highwayman's exploits appeared in the novel Rookwood in 1834.
Although pre-dated by John Ruskin's The King of the Golden River in 1841, the history of the
modern fantasy genre is generally said to begin withGeorge MacDonald, the influential author
of The Princess and the Goblin and Phantastes (1858). William Morris was a popular English
poet who also wrote several fantasy novels during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Wilkie
Collins' epistolary novel The Moonstone (1868), is generally considered the first detective
novel in the English language, while The Woman in White is regarded as one of the
finest sensation novels. H. G. Wells's (18661946) writing career began in the 1890s with
science fiction novels like The Time Machine (1895), and The War of the Worlds (1898) which
describes an invasion of late Victorian England by Martians, and Wells is seen, along with
Frenchman Jules Verne (18281905), as a major figure in the development of the science fiction
genre. He also wrote realistic fiction about the lower middle class in novels like Kipps (1905)
and The History of Mr Polly (1910).

Penny dreadful publications were an alternative to mainstream works, and were aimed at
working class adolescents, introducing the infamousSweeney Todd. The premier ghost
story writer of the 19th century was the Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu. His works include the
macabre mystery novel Uncle Silas 1865, and his Gothic novella Carmilla 1872, tells the story of
a young woman's susceptibility to the attentions of a female vampire. The vampire genre fiction
began with John William Polidori's "The Vampyre" (1819). This short story was inspired by the life
of Lord Byron and his poem The Giaour. An important later work is Varney the Vampire (1845),
where many standard vampire conventions originated: Varney has fangs, leaves two puncture
wounds on the neck of his victims, and has hypnotic powers and superhuman strength. Varney
was also the first example of the "sympathetic vampire", who loathes his condition but is a slave
to it.[220] Bram Stoker, yet another Irish writer, was the author of seminal horror work Dracula and
featured as its primary antagonist the vampire Count Dracula, with the vampire hunter Abraham
Van Helsing his arch-enemy. Dracula has been attributed to a number of literary
genres including vampire literature, horror fiction, gothic novel and invasion literature.

Sir Arthur Conan Doylewas born in Scotland of Irish parents but his Sherlock Holmes stories have typified a
fog-filled London for readers worldwide

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes is a brilliant London-based "consulting detective",
famous for his intellectual prowess, skilful use of astute observation, deductive reasoning and
forensic skills to solve difficult cases. Holmes' archenemy Professor Moriarty, is widely
considered to be the first true example of a supervillain, while Sherlock Holmes has become a
by-word for a detective. Conan Doyle wrote four novels and fifty-six short stories featuring
Holmes, from 1880 up to 1907, with a final case in 1914. All but four Conan Doyle stories are
narrated by Holmes' friend, assistant, and biographer, Dr John H. Watson.
The Lost World literary genre was inspired by real stories of archaeological discoveries by
imperial adventurers. H. Rider Haggard wrote one of the earliest examples, King Solomon's
Mines in 1885. Contemporary European politics and diplomatic manoeuvrings informed Anthony
Hope's swashbuckling Ruritanian adventure novels The Prisoner of Zenda 1894, and Rupert of
Hentzau, 1898.
F. Anstey's comic novel Vice Versa 1882, sees a father and son magically switch bodies.
Satirist Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat 1889, is a humorous account of a boating
holiday on the river Thames. Grossmith brothers George & Weedon's Diary of a Nobody 1892, is
also considered a classic work of humour.

Lewis Carroll

Literature for children developed as a separate genre. Some works become internationally
known, such as those of Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its
sequel Through the Looking-Glass. Adventure novels, such as those of Robert Louis
Stevenson (185094), are generally classified as for children. Stevenson'sStrange Case of Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), depicts the dual personality of a kind and intelligent physician who
turns into a psychopathic monster after imbibing a drug intended to separate good from evil in a
personality. HisKidnapped (1886) is a fast-paced historical novel set in the aftermath of
the Jacobite rising of 1745, and Treasure Island 1883, is the classicpirate adventure. At the end
of the Victorian era and leading into the Edwardian era, Beatrix Potter was an author and
illustrator, best known for her children's books, which featured animal characters. In her thirties,
Potter published The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 1902. Potter eventually went on to publish 23
children's books and become a wealthy woman. Another classic of the period is Anna Sewell's
animal novel Black Beauty.
In the latter years of the 19th century, precursors of the modern picture book were illustrated
books of poems and short stories produced by English illustrators Randolph Caldecott, Walter
Crane, and Kate Greenaway. These had a larger proportion of pictures to words than earlier
books, and many of their pictures were in colour. Some British artists made their living illustrating
novels and children's books, include Arthur Rackham, Cicely Mary Barker, W. Heath
Robinson, Henry J. Ford, John Leech, and George Cruikshank.
Victorian poetry
The leading poets during the Victorian period were Alfred, Lord Tennyson (18091892), Robert
Browning (181289), Elizabeth Barrett Browning(180661), and Matthew Arnold (182288). The
poetry of this period was heavily influenced by the Romantics, but also went off in its own
directions. Particularly notable was the development of the dramatic monologue, a form used by
many poets in this period, but perfected by Browning. Literary criticism in the 20th century
gradually drew attention to the links between Victorian poetry and modernism. [221]
Tennyson was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom during much of Queen Victoria's reign. He
was described by T. S. Eliot, as "the greatest master of metrics as well as melancholia", and as
having "the finest ear of any English poet since Milton".[222] Browning main achievement was
indramatic monologues such as "My Last Duchess", "Andrea del Sarto" and "The Bishop Orders
his Tomb", which were published in his two-volume Men and Women in 1855. In his introduction
to the Oxford University Press edition of Browning's Poems 18331864, Ian Jack comments,
that Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Ezra Pound and T S Eliot "all learned from Browning's
exploration of the possibilities of dramatic poetry and of colloquial idiom". [223] Tennyson was also a
pioneer in the use of the dramatic monologue, in "The Lotus-Eaters" (1833), "Ulysses" (1842),
and '"Tithonus" (1860).[224] While Elizabeth Barrett Browning was the wife of Robert Browning she
had established her reputation as a major poet before she met him. Her most famous work is the
sequence of 44 sonnets "Sonnets from the Portuguese" published in Poems (1850).[225] Matthew
Arnold's reputation as a poet has declined in recent years and he is best remembered now for
his critical works, like Culture and Anarchy (1869), and his 1867 poem "Dover Beach". This poem
depicts a nightmarish world from which the old religious verities have receded. It is sometimes

held up as an early, if not the first, example of the modern sensibility. The influence of William
Wordsworth, both in ideas and in diction, is unmistakable in Arnold's best poetry, and Arnold has
been seen as a bridge between Romanticism and Modernism, because of his use of symbolic
landscapes was typical of the Romantic era, while his sceptical and pessimistic perspective was
typical of the Modern era.[citation needed]
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (18281882) was a poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded
the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and
was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by
the movement, most notably William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones.[226] Rossetti's art was
characterised by its sensuality and its medieval revivalism. [227] Poetry and image are closely
entwined in Rossetti's work and he frequently wrote sonnets to accompany his pictures. He also
illustrated poems by his sister Christina Rossetti such as Goblin Market.
While Arthur Clough (181961) was a more minor figure of this era, he has been described as "a
fine poet whose experiments in extending the range of literary language and subject were ahead
of his time".[228]
George Meredith (18281909) is remembered for his innovative collection of poems Modern
Love (1862).[208]
George Mtivier published Rimes Guernesiaises, a collection of poems in Guernsiais and
French in 1831 and Fantaisies Guernesiaises in 1866. Mtivier's poems had first appeared in
newspapers from 1813 onward, but he spent time in Scotland in his youth where he became
familiar with the Scots literary tradition although he was also influenced by Occitan literature. The
first printed anthology of Jrriais poetry, Rimes Jersiaises, was published in 1865.
In the second half of the century, English poets began to take an interest in French Symbolism.
The moral earnestness of the 1840s and 1850s expressed in the industrial novel sparked a
reaction against the idea that art should advance a moral agenda. Aestheticism responded with a
concern for formal values, virtuoso manipulation of a wide range of poetic forms, both
established and revived, and open disrespect for Christian doctrines and sexual
respectability. Algernon Charles Swinburne's 1866 collection Poems and Ballads revived
classical metres and evoked extreme sexual passion. A major innovation of Aesthetic writing was
the importance of the poem or prose poem composed in response to a work of visual art, blurring
the distinction between art criticism and ekphrasis.[229] Two groups of poets emerged in the 1890s:
the Yellow Book poets who adhered to the tenets of Aestheticism, including Oscar
Wilde and Arthur Symons and the Rhymers' Club group, that included Ernest Dowson, Lionel
Johnson and William Butler Yeats. Irishman Yeats went on to become an important modernist in
the 20th century. Also in the 1890s A. E. Housman (18591936) published at his own expense A
Shropshire Lad, a cycle of 63 poems, because he could not find a publisher. At first selling slowly,
it rapidly became a lasting success, and its appeal to English musicians had helped to make it
widely known before World War I, when its themes struck a powerful chord with English readers.
The poems' wistful evocation of doomed youth in the English countryside, in spare language and
distinctive imagery, appealed strongly to late Victorian and Edwardian taste. Housman wrote
most of them while living in Highgate, London, before ever visiting that part of Shropshire(about
thirty miles from his birthplace), which he presented in an idealised pastoral light, as his 'land of
lost content'.[230] Though A. E. Housman was born in the Victorian era and first published in the
1890s, his poetry only really became known in the 20th century. He published a further highly
successful collection, Last Poems, in 1922, while a third volume, More Poems, was published
posthumously in 1936.[231] A Shropshire Lad has been in print continuously since May 1896.
The nonsense verse of Edward Lear, along with the novels and poems of Lewis Carroll, is
regarded as a precursor of surrealism.[232] In 1846 Lear published A Book of Nonsense, a volume
of limericks that went through three editions and helped popularise the form. In 1865 The History
of the Seven Families of the Lake Pipple-Popple was published, and in 1867 his most famous
piece of nonsense, The Owl and the Pussycat, which he wrote for the children of his
patron Edward Stanley, 13th Earl of Derby. Many other works followed. Lewis Carroll wrote the
poems "The Hunting of the Snark" and "Jabberwocky".

Denys Corbet published collections of Guernsiais poems Les Feuilles de la Fort (1871)
and Les Chnts du dran rimeux (1884), and also brought out an annual poetry anthology 1874
1877, similar to Augustus Asplet Le Gros's annual in Jersey 18681875.[219]
Increased literacy in rural and outlying areas and wider access to publishing through, for
example, local newspapers encouraged regional literary development as the 19th century
progressed. Some writers in lesser-used languages and dialects of the islands gained a literary
following outside their native regions, for example William Barnes (180186) in Dorset, George
Mtivier (17901881) in Guernsey and Robert Pipon Marett (182084) in Jersey.[219]
Writers of comic verse included the dramatist, librettist, poet and illustrator W. S. Gilbert (1836
1911), who is best known for his fourteen comic operas produced in collaboration with the
composer Sir Arthur Sullivan, of which the most famous include H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of
Penzanceand one of the most frequently performed works in the history of musical theatre, The
Mikado.[233]
The so-called "Cranken Rhyme" produced by John Davey of Boswednack, one of the last people
with some traditional knowledge of the language, [234] may be the last piece of traditional Cornish
literature.
John Ceiriog Hughes desired to restore simplicity of diction and emotional sincerity and do for
Welsh poetry what Wordsworth and Coleridge did for English poetry.
Edward Faragher (18311908) has been considered the last important native writer of Manx. He
wrote poetry, reminiscences of his life as a fisherman, and translations of selected Aesop's
Fables.
Victorian drama

Oscar Wilde, 1882

For much of the first half of the 19th century, drama in London and provincial theatres was
restricted by a licensing system to the Patent theatre companies, and all other theatres could
perform only musical entertainments (although magistrates had powers to license occasional
dramatic performances). By the early 19th century, however, music hall entertainments had
become popular, and provided a loophole in the restrictions on non-patent theatres in the genre
of melodrama which did not contravene the Patent Acts, as it was accompanied by music. The
passing of the Theatres Act 1843 removed the monopoly on drama held by the Patent theatres,
enabling local authorities to license theatres as they saw fit, and also restricted the Lord
Chamberlain's powers to censor new plays. The 1843 Act did not apply to Ireland where the
power of the Lord Lieutenant to license patent theatres enabled control of stage performance
analogous to that exercised by the Lord Chamberlain in Great Britain. [235]

Drama did not achieve importance as a genre in the 19th century until the end of the century, and
then the main figures were Irish-born. Irish playwright Dion Boucicault (182090), was an
extremely popular writer of comedies who achieved success on the London stage ( London
Assurance, 1841). In the last decade of the century major playwrights emerged,
including George Bernard Shaw (18561950) (Arms and the Man, 1894) and Oscar
Wilde (18541900) (The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895). Both these writers lived mainly in
England and wrote in English, with the exception of some works in French by Wilde.
The development of Irish literary culture was encouraged in the late 19th and early 20th century
by the Irish Literary Revival (see also TheCeltic Revival), which was supported by William Butler
Yeats (18651939), Augusta, Lady Gregory, and John Millington Synge (The Playboy of the
Western World, 1907). The Revival stimulated a new appreciation of traditional Irish literature.
This was a nationalist movement that also encouraged the creation of works written in the spirit
of Irish, as distinct from British culture. While drama was an important component of this
movement, it also included prose and poetry.
Ernest Rhys was seen as the leading Welsh member of the Celtic Revival and his poetry and
translations were held in high regard at the time, not least by Yeats. However posterity
remembers him best as the shaper and first editor of the Everyman's Library, which brought
affordable classics to a wide reading public.

20th century
The year 1922 marked a significant change in the relationship between Great Britain and Ireland,
with the setting up of the Irish Free State in the predominantly Catholic South, while the
predominantly Protestant Northern Ireland remained part of the United Kingdom. This separation
also leads to questions as to what extent Irish writing prior to 1922 should be treated as a
colonial literature. There are also those who question whether the literature of Northern Ireland is
Irish or British. Nationalist movements in Britain, especially in Wales and Scotland, also
significantly influenced writers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The transformation of the British Empire into a Commonwealth of Nations has given rise to the
concept of British and Commonwealth literature used for literary prizes such as theBooker Prize.
[236]
Questions of identity have been raised, notably in 1994 when James Kelman's How Late It
Was, How Late became the first (and only, as of 2012) Scottish novel to win the Booker Prize.
[237]
Simon Jenkins, a columnist for The Times, called the award "literary vandalism." In his
acceptance speech, Kelman countered the criticism and decried its basis as suspect, making the
case for the culture and language of "indigenous" people outside London. "...the gist of the
argument amounts to the following, that vernaculars, patois, slangs, dialects, gutter-languages
etc. might well have a place in the realms of comedy (and the frequent references to Billy
Connolly or Rab C. Nesbittsubstantiate this) but they are inferior linguistic forms and have no
place in literature. And a priori any writer who engages in the use of such so-called language is
not really engaged in literature at all."[238]
Irish poetry and prose has redefined itself against British literature, and moves to political
independence in Scotland are leading to a redefinition of the relationship between English
literature and other literatures that have historically been defined in association with it. [236]
By the end of the twentieth century further political devolution had taken place in the UK, and
both Scotland and Wales now have their own parliaments, together with more control over their
internal matters, though far from full independence.

Modernism and cultural revivals: 19011945

From around 1910 the Modernist movement began to influence British literature. While their
Victorian predecessors had usually been happy to cater to mainstream middle-class taste, 20thcentury writers often felt alienated from it, so responded by writing more intellectually challenging
works or by pushing the boundaries of acceptable content.
Vorticism was a short-lived modernist movement in British art and poetry of the early 20th
century,[239] based in London but international in make-up and ambition. The movement was

announced in 1914 in the first issue of BLAST, which contained its manifesto. It was co-founded
and edited by Wyndham Lewis (18821957), the English painter and author. His novels
include Tarr (1918) and the trilogy The Human Age (1928 and 1955) set in the afterworld.
In the late 19th century and early 20th century, Welsh literature began to reflect the way the
Welsh language was increasingly becoming a political symbol. Two important literary nationalists
were Saunders Lewis (18931985) and Kate Roberts (18911985), both of whom began
publishing in the 1920s. Saunders Lewis was above all a dramatist. His earliest published play
was Blodeuwedd (The woman of flowers) (192325, revised 1948). Other notable plays
include Buchedd Garmon (The life of Germanus) (radio play, 1936) and several others after the
war. Lewis also published two novels, Monica (1930) and Merch Gwern Hywel (The daughter of
Gwern Hywel) (1964) and two collections of poems. In addition he was a historian, literary critic,
and a founder of the Welsh National Party in 1925 (later known asPlaid Cymru). Kate Roberts'
first volume of short stories, O gors y bryniau ("From the swamp of the hills"), appeared in 1925
but perhaps her most successful book of short stories is Te yn y grug ("Tea in the
heather") (1959), a series of stories about children. As well as short stories Roberts also wrote
novels, perhaps her most famous being Traed mewn cyffion ("Feet in chains") (1936) which
reflected the hard life of a slate quarrying family. Kate Roberts' and Saunders Lewis's careers
continued after World War II and they both were among the foremost Welsh-language authors of
the twentieth century.
First World War
The experiences of the First World War were reflected in the work of war poets such as Wilfred
Owen, Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg,Edmund Blunden and Siegfried Sassoon. Dmhnall
Ruadh Chorna was a Scottish Gaelic poet who served in the First World War, and as a war
poet described the use of poison gas in his poem ran a' Phuinnsuin ("Song of the Poison"). His
poetry is part of oral literature, as he himself never learnt to read and write in his native language.
Welsh poet Hedd Wyn, who was killed in World War I although producing comparatively few war
poems as such,[35] was later the subject of an Oscar-nominated Welsh film. In Parenthesis,
an epic poem by David Jones first published in 1937, is a notable work of the literature of the
First World War, that was influenced by Welsh traditions, despite Jones being born in England. In
non-fiction prose T. E. Lawrence's (Lawrence of Arabia) autobiographical account in Seven
Pillars of Wisdom of the Arab Revolt against theOttoman Empire is important. Poetry reflecting
life on the home-front was also published; Guernsiais writer Thomas Henry Mahy's
collectionDires et Penses du Courtil Poussin, published in 1922, contained some of his
observational poems published in La Gazette de Guerneseyduring the war.
The end of the First World War saw a decline in the quantity of poetry published in Jrriais and
Guernsiais in favour of short-story-like newspaper columns in prose, some being collected in
book or booklet form this being a common genre in the Norman mainland.
Poetry: 19011945
Two Victorian poets who published little in the 19th century, Thomas Hardy (18401928)
and Gerard Manley Hopkins (184489), have since come to be regarded as major poets. While
Hardy first established his reputation the late 19th century with novels, he also wrote poetry
throughout his career. However he did not publish his first collection until 1898, so that he tends
to be treated as a 20th-century poet. Hardy lived well into the third decade of the twentieth
century, an important transitional figure between the Victorian era and the 20th century, but
because of the adverse criticism of his last novel, Jude the Obscure, in 1895, from that time
Hardy concentrated on publishing poetry.[240] Gerard Manley Hopkins's Poems were posthumously
published in 1918 by Robert Bridges(18441930, Poet Laureate from 1913). Hopkins' poem "The
Wreck of the Deutschland", written in 1875, first introduced what Hopkins called "sprung
rhythm."[241] As well as developing new rhythmic effects, Hopkins "was also very interested in
ways of rejuvenating poetic language" and frequently "employed compound and unusual word
combinations".[242] Several twentieth-century poets, includingW. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, and
American Charles Wright, "turned to his work for its inventiveness and rich aural patterning". [242]
Free verse and other stylistic innovations came to the forefront in this era, with which T. S. Eliot
and Ezra Pound were especially associated. T. S. Eliot (18881965) was born American,

migrated to England in 1914, at the age of 25, and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at
the age of 39. He was "arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th
century."[243] He produced some of the best-known poems in the English language, including "The
Waste Land" (1922) and Four Quartets (19351942).[244] He is also known for his seven plays,
particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in
1948.[245] Eliot's friend Ezra Pound (18851972), an American expatriate, made important
contributions of British literature during his residence in London. He was responsible for the
publication in 1915 of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", but more important was the
major editing that he did on the "The Waste Land".[246]
The Georgian poets like Rupert Brooke, Walter de la Mare (18731956), John Masefield (1878
1967, Poet Laureate from 1930) maintained a more conservative approach to poetry by
combining romanticism, sentimentality and hedonism, sandwiched as they were between the
Victorian era, with its strict classicism, and Modernism, with its strident rejection of pure
aestheticism. Edward Thomas (18781917) is sometimes treated as another Georgian poet. [247]
A duality of character in the literature of Scotland came to be characterised as Caledonian
Antisyzygya self-imposed critical discourse about how to forge a model of homogeneous
national Scottish culture out of a heterogeneous patchwork of language communities and
national loyalties.[248] In the early 20th century in Scotland, a renaissance in the use of Lowland
Scots occurred, its most vocal figure being Hugh MacDiarmid whose A Drunk Man Looks at the
Thistle (1926), is widely regarded as one of the most important long poems in 20th-century
Scottish literature.[249] Other contemporaries were Douglas Young, Sydney Goodsir Smith, Robert
Garioch and Robert McLellan. The revival produced verse and other literature, including the
plays for which Robert McLellan is best known.[250]
James Pittendrigh Macgillivray (18561938) and Lewis Spence (18741955) looked back to what
they regarded as a Golden Age of Middle Scots literature, partly as a political gesture to revive
the style that prevailed when Scotland was a sovereign nation under the Stuarts. Such
experimentation with archaising language for poetic effect did not found a new direction for
literature in Scots, but their willingness to play with Mediaeval poetic language had an influence
by stimulating debate and stimulating new ways of experimenting with Scots as a literary
language.[251]
A somewhat diminished tradition of vernacular Ulster Scots poetry survived into the 20th century
in the work of poets such as Adam Lynn, author of the 1911 collection Random Rhymes frae
Cullybackey, John Stevenson (died 1932), writing as "Pat M'Carty", and John Clifford (1900
1983) from East Antrim.[252]
With the revival of Cornish there have been newer works written in the language. In the first half
of the 20th century poetry was the focus of literary production in Cornish. The epic poem Trystan
hag Isolt by A. S. D. Smith (18831950) reworked the Tristan and Iseult legend. Peggy Pollard's
1941 play Beunans Alysaryn was modelled on the 16th-century saints' plays. John Hobson
Matthews wrote several poems, such as the patriotic "Can Wlascar Agam Mamvro" ("Patriotic
Song of our Motherland"). Robert Morton Nance(18731959) created a body of verse, such as
"Nyns yu Marow Myghtern Arthur" ("King Arthur is not Dead").
In the 1930s the Auden Group, sometimes called simply the Thirties poets, was an important
group of politically left-wing writers, that included W. H. Auden (190773), Louis
MacNeice (190763), Cecil Day-Lewis (190472, Poet Laureate from 1968), and Stephen
Spender (190995). Auden was a major poet who had a similar influence on subsequent poets
as W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot had had on earlier generations. [253] Others associated with this
group were novelist and playwright Christopher Isherwood (190486), and sometimes,
novelist Edward Upward (19032009), and poet and novelist Rex Warner (190586).
The challenge of the modernist novel
While modernism was to become an important literary movement in the early decades of the new
century, there were also many fine writers who, like Thomas Hardy, were not modernists.
Novelists include: Rudyard Kipling (18651936), who was also a successful poet; H. G.
Wells (18661946); John Galsworthy (18671933), (Nobel Prize in Literature, 1932), whose

novels include The Forsyte Saga (190621); Arnold Bennett (18671931) author of The Old
Wives' Tale (1908); G. K. Chesterton (18741936); E.M. Forster (18791970). The most popular
British writer of the early years of the 20th century was arguably Rudyard Kipling, a highly
versatile writer of novels, short stories and poems, and to date the youngest ever recipient of
the Nobel Prize for Literature (1907). Kipling's works include The Jungle Books (189495), The
Man Who Would Be King and Kim(1901), while his inspirational poem "If" (1895) is a national
favourite and a memorable evocation of Victorian stoicism, regarded as a traditional British
virtue. Kipling's reputation declined during his lifetime but more recently postcolonial studies has
"rekindled an intense interest in his work, viewing it as both symptomatic and critical of imperialist
attitudes".[254] H. G. Wells was a highly prolific author who is now best known for his work in the
science fiction genre.[255] His most notable science fiction works include The War of the
Worlds, The Time Machine, The Invisible Man and The Island of Doctor Moreau, all written in the
1890s. Other novels include Kipps (1905) and Mr Polly (1910). Strongly influenced by his
Christian faith,G. K. Chesterton was a prolific and hugely influential writer with a diverse output.
His best-known character is the priest-detective Father Brown, who appeared only in short
stories, while The Man Who Was Thursday published in 1908 is arguably his best-known novel.
Of his nonfiction, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study(1906) has received some of the broadestbased praise. However, unlike these other authors, Forster's work is "frequently regarded as
containing both modernist and Victorian elements". [256] Forster's A Passage to India 1924,
reflected challenges to imperialism, while his earlier works such as A Room with a View (1908)
and Howards End (1910), examined the restrictions and hypocrisy of Edwardian society in
England.
Writing in the 1920s and 1930s Virginia Woolf was an influential feminist, and a major stylistic
innovator associated with the stream-of-consciousness technique. Her novels include Mrs
Dalloway 1925, To the Lighthouse 1927, Orlando 1928, The Waves 1931, and A Room of One's
Own 1929, which contains her famous dictum; "A woman must have money and a room of her
own if she is to write fiction". [257] Woolf and E. M. Forster were members of the Bloomsbury Group,
an enormously influential group of associated English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and
artists.[258]
Other early modernists were Dorothy Richardson (18731957), whose novel Pointed
Roof (1915), is one of the earliest example of the stream of consciousness technique and D. H.
Lawrence (18851930), who wrote with understanding about the social life of the lower and
middle classes, and the personal life of those who could not adapt to the social norms of his
time. Sons and Lovers 1913, is widely regarded as his earliest masterpiece. There followedThe
Rainbow 1915, though it was immediately seized by the police. and its sequel Women in
Love published 1920.[259] Lawrence attempted to explore human emotions more deeply than his
contemporaries and challenged the boundaries of the acceptable treatment of sexual issues,
most notably in Lady Chatterley's Lover, which was privately published in Florence in 1928.
However, the unexpurgated version of this novel was not published until 1959. [259]
An important development, beginning really in the 1930s and 1940s, was a tradition of working
class novels that were actually written by writers who had a working-class background. Among
these were coal miner Jack Jones, James Hanley, whose father was a stoker and who also went
to sea as a young man, and other coal miner authors' Lewis Jones from South Wales and Harold
Heslop from County Durham.
An essayist and novelist, George Orwell's works are considered important social and political
commentaries of the 20th century, dealing with issues such as poverty in The Road to Wigan
Pier (1937) and Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), the exploration of colonialism
in Burmese Days(1934), and in the 1940s his satires of totalitarianism included Animal
Farm (1945). Orwell's works were often semi-autobiographical and in the case of Homage to
Catalonia, wholly. Malcolm Lowry published in the 1930s, but is best known for Under the
Volcano (1947). Evelyn Waughsatirised the "bright young things" of the 1920s and 1930s,
notably in A Handful of Dust, and Decline and Fall, while Brideshead Revisited 1945, has a
theological basis, aiming to examine the effect of divine grace on its main characters. [260] Aldous
Huxley (18941963) published his famous dystopia Brave New World in 1932, the same year

as John Cowper Powys's A Glastonbury Romance. In 1938 Graham Greene's (190491) first
major novel Brighton Rock was published.
British drama: 190145
Irish playwrights George Bernard Shaw (18561950) and J. M. Synge (18711909) were
influential in British drama. Shaw's career as a playwright began in the last decade of the
nineteenth century, while Synge's plays belong to the first decade of the twentieth century.
Synge's most famous play, The Playboy of the Western World, "caused outrage and riots when it
was first performed" in Dublin in 1907. [261] George Bernard Shaw turned the Edwardian theatre
into an arena for debate about important political and social issues, like marriage, class, "the
morality of armaments and war" and the rights of women. [262] In the 1920s and later Nol
Coward (18991973) achieved enduring success as a playwright, publishing more than 50 plays
from his teens onwards. Many of his works, such as Hay Fever (1925), Private
Lives (1930), Design for Living (1932), Present Laughter(1942) and Blithe Spirit (1941), have
remained in the regular theatre repertoire. In the 1930s W. H. Auden and Christopher
Isherwood co-authored verse dramas, of which The Ascent of F6 (1936) is the most notable, that
owed much to Bertolt Brecht. T. S. Eliot had begun this attempt to revive poetic drama
with Sweeney Agonistes in 1932, and this was followed by The Rock (1934), Murder in the
Cathedral (1935) and Family Reunion (1939). There were three further plays after the war.
Early 20th-century genre literature
Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands 1903, defined the spy novel.[citation needed
Emma Orczy (Baroness Orczy)'s The Scarlet Pimpernel was originally a highly successful play in
1905. The novel The Scarlet Pimpernel was published soon after the play opened and was an
immediate success. Orczy gained a following of readers in Britain and throughout the world. The
popularity of the novel, which recounted the adventures of a member of the English gentry in
the French Revolutionary period, encouraged her to write a number of sequels for her "reckless
daredevil" over the next 35 years. The play was performed to great acclaim in France, Italy,
Germany and Spain, while the novel was translated into 16 languages. Subsequently, the story
has been adapted for television, film, amusical and other media. Her stories about Lady Molly of
Scotland Yard were an early example of a female detective as main character. Her character The
Old Man in the Cornerwas among the earliest armchair detectives to be created.
John Buchan wrote adventure novels Prester John (1910) and four telling the adventures
of Richard Hannay, of which the first, The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) is the best known. Novels
featuring a gentleman adventurer were popular between the wars, exemplified by the series of H.
C. McNeile with Bulldog Drummond 1920, and Leslie Charteris, whose many books chronicled
the adventures of Simon Templar, alias The Saint.
The medieval scholar M. R. James wrote highly regarded ghost stories in contemporary settings.
In 1908, Kenneth Grahame wrote the children's classic The Wind in the Willows and
the Scouts founder Robert Baden-Powell's first book Scouting for Boys was published. Classics
of children's literature include A. A. Milne's collection of books about a fictional bear he
named Winnie-the-Pooh, who inhabits Hundred Acre Wood. Prolific children's author Enid
Blyton chronicled the adventures of a group of young children and their dog in The Famous
Five. T. H. White wrote the Arthurian fantasy The Once and Future King, the first part being The
Sword in the Stone 1938. Mary Norton wrote The Borrowers, featuring tiny people who borrow
from humans. Inspiration for Frances Hodgson Burnett's novel The Secret Garden, was
the Great Maytham Hall Garden in Kent. Hugh Lofting created the character Doctor Dolittle who
appears in a series of twelve books, while Dodie Smith's The Hundred and One
Dalmatians featured the villainous Cruella de Vil.

Agatha Christie

This was called the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. Agatha Christie, a writer of crime novels,
short stories and plays, is best remembered for her 80 detective novels and her successful West
End theatre plays. Christie's works, particularly those featuring the detectives Hercule
Poirot orMiss Marple, made her one of the most important and innovative writers in the
development of the genre. Her most influential novels include The Murder of Roger
Ackroyd 1926 (one of her most controversial novels, its innovative twist ending had a significant
impact on the genre), Murder on the Orient Express 1934, Death on the Nile 1937 and And Then
There Were None 1939. Other female writers dubbed "Queens of crime" include Dorothy L.
Sayers (gentleman detective, Lord Peter Wimsey), Margery Allingham (Albert Campion
supposedly created as a parody of Sayers' Wimsey,[263]) and New Zealander Ngaio
Marsh (Roderick Alleyn). Georgette Heyer created the historical romance genre, and also wrote
detective fiction.
A major work of science fiction, from the early 20th century, is A Voyage to Arcturus by Scottish
writer David Lindsay, first published in 1920. It combines fantasy, philosophy, and science fiction
in an exploration of the nature of good and evil and their relationship with existence. It has been
described by critic and philosopher Colin Wilson as the "greatest novel of the twentieth century",
[264]
and was a central influence on C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy.[265] Also J. R. R. Tolkien said he
read the book "with avidity", and praised it as a work of philosophy, religion, and morality. [266] It
was made widely available in paperback form when published as one of the precursor volumes
to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series in 1968.
From the early 1930s to late 1940s, an informal literary discussion group associated with the
English faculty at the University of Oxford, were the "Inklings". Its leading members were the
major fantasy novelists; C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Lewis is known for The Screwtape
Letters1942, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Space Trilogy, while Tolkien is best known as the
author of The Hobbit 1937, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion.
Second World War
It was anticipated that the outbreak of war in 1939 would produce a literary response equal to
that of the First World War. The Times Literary Supplement went so far as to pose the question in
1940: "Where are the war-poets?"[267]
Keith Douglas (19201944) was noted for his war poetry during World War II and his wry memoir
of the Western Desert Campaign, Alamein to Zem Zem. He was killed in action during
the invasion of Normandy. Alun Lewis (19151944), born in South Wales, was one of the bestknown English-language poets of the war [268] Alun Llywelyn-Williams wrote in Welsh from the
soldier's viewpoint, and R. Meirion Roberts from the viewpoint of a chaplain. Caradog
Prichard's 'Rwyf Innau'n Filwr Bychan (1943), a journal in Welsh, provided an account of military
life from a supporter of the war, although a minority of Welsh nationalist writers produced works
in opposition to the war.[35] Sidney Keyes was another important and prolific Second World War
poet.[267] David Gascoyne, a surrealist poet of the 1930s, developed Christian imagery, while Edith
Sitwell's Still Falls the Rain evoked the Blitz. Denton Welch (19151948) produced minutely
observed portraits of the English countryside during the war.

Fair Stood the Wind for France was a 1944 novel by H. E. Bates who was commissioned into
the RAF solely to write short stories as the Air Ministry realised that the populace was less
concerned with facts and figures about the war than it was with reading about those who were
fighting it.
Put Out More Flags (1942) by Evelyn Waugh is set during the "Phoney War", and follows the
wartime activities of characters introduced in Waugh's earlier satirical novels .
The German military occupation of the Channel Islands 19401945 encouraged increased use of
the vernacular languages among those who remained in the islands, but the German censorship
permitted little original writing to be published. Within the restrictions, Les Chroniques de Jersey,
the only surviving French language newspaper in the Islands, republished considerable
quantities of older Jrriais literature for purposes of morale and the assertion of identity. The
post-Liberation social changes meant, however, that vernacular literature in the Channel Islands
has never regained the situation it had enjoyed previously.
The Second World War has remained a theme in British literature. Later works of note
include: Atonement, Ian McEwan's Booker Prize shortlisted 2001 novel; Charlotte Gray, a 1999
novel by Sebastian Faulks; and Empire of the Sun, J. G. Ballard's 1984 novel drawing
extensively on his wartime experiences.

Late modernism: 19462000

Though some have seen modernism ending by around 1939, [269] with regard to English literature,
"When (if) modernism petered out and postmodernism began has been contested almost as
hotly as when the transition from Victorianism to modernism occurred". [270] In fact a number of
modernists were still living and publishing in the 1950s and 1960, including T. S. Eliot, Dorothy
Richardson and John Cowper Powys. Furthermore, Northumberland poet Basil Bunting, born in
1901, published little until Briggflatts in 1965.
The attitude of the post-war generation of Welsh writers in English towards Wales differs from the
previous generation, in that they were more sympathetic to Welsh nationalism and to the Welsh
language. The change can be linked to the nationalist fervour generated by Saunders Lewis and
the burning of the Bombing School on the Lleyn Peninsula in 1936, along with a sense of crisis
generated by World War II. In poetry R. S. Thomas (19132000) was the most important figure
throughout the second half of the twentieth century, beginning with The Stones of the Field in
1946 and concluding with No Truce with the Furies (1995). R. S. Thomas was an Anglican priest
who was noted for his nationalism, spirituality and deep dislike of the anglicisation of Wales. In
fiction the major figure in the second half of the twentieth century was Emyr Humphreys (1919).
Humphreys' first novel The Little Kingdomwas published in 1946; and during his long writing
career he has published over twenty novels, including a sequence of seven novels, The Land of
the Living, which surveys the political and cultural history of twentieth-century Wales. His most
recent work is the collection of short stories, The Woman in the Window (2009). Another Welsh
novelist of the post-Second-World-War era was Raymond Williams (192188). Born
near Abergavenny, Williams continued the earlier tradition of writing from a left-wing perspective
on the Welsh industrial scene in his trilogy: Border Country (1960), Second Generation (1964),
and The Fight for Manod (1979). Contemporary novelists in Welsh include Mihangel
Morgan (1955 ) and Fflur Dafydd (1978 ).
A new writer after the war was the popular novelist in Welsh Islwyn Ffowc Elis (19242004) (also
a winner of the crown at the 1947 National Eisteddfod). He made his debut as a novelist in 1953
with Cysgod y Cryman (translated into English as Shadow of the Sickle). He produced novels in
a range of genres, including the first science fiction novel in Welsh.
Among British writers in the 1940s and 1950s was Dylan Thomas; Evelyn Waugh and W.H.
Auden continued publishing significant works. In 1947 Malcolm Lowry published Under the
Volcano.
George Orwell's satire of totalitarianism, Nineteen Eighty-Four, was published in 1949. An
essayist and novelist, Orwell's works are important social and political commentaries of the 20th
century. One of the most influential novels of the immediate post-war period was William

Cooper's naturalistic Scenes from Provincial Life, a conscious rejection of the modernist tradition.
[271]

Graham Greene's works span the 1930s to the 1980s. He was a convert to Catholicism and his
novels explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world. He combined
serious literary acclaim with broad popularity in novels such as Brighton Rock (1938), The Power
and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948) and A Burnt-Out Case (1961), The Human
Factor (1978).
Other novelists writing in the 1950s and later were: Anthony Powell whose twelve-volume cycle
of novels A Dance to the Music of Time, is a comic examination of movements and manners,
power and passivity in English political, cultural and military life in the mid-20th century; Kingsley
Amis who is best known for his academic satire Lucky Jim 1954; Nobel Prize laureate William
Golding whose allegorical novel Lord of the Flies 1954, shows how culture created by man fails,
using, as an example, a group of British schoolboys marooned on a deserted island who try to
govern themselves with disastrous results; Edward Blishen whose first best-selling book Roaring
Boys 1955, is an honest account of teaching in a London secondary modern school in the 1950s
(followed by a sequel This Right Soft Lot 1969), and whose most famous work is The God
Beneath the Sea, a children's novel based on Greek mythology, written in collaboration with Leon
Garfield and published in 1970 (illustrated by Charles Keeping with a sequel The Golden
Shadow1973); philosopher Iris Murdoch who was a prolific writer of novels dealing with sexual
relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious, including Under the Net 1954. Scottish
novelist Muriel Spark pushed the boundaries of realism: her first novel, The Comforters (1957)
concerns a woman who becomes aware that she is a character in a novel;The Ballad of
Peckham Rye (1960) has a character who, in line with a tradition of Scottish literature, is literally
the devil incarnate. The narrator of her most famous novel, The Prime of Miss Jean
Brodie (1961), at times takes the reader briefly into the main action's distant future, to see the
various fates that befall its characters.
Anthony Burgess is especially remembered for his dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange 1962,
set in the not-too-distant future, which was made into a film (1971] by Stanley Kubrick. Mervyn
Peake (191168) published his Gothic fantasy Gormenghast trilogy between 1946 and 1959.
One of Penguin Books' most successful publications in the late 20th century was Richard
Adams's heroic fantasy Watership Down (1972). Evoking epic themes, it recounts theodyssey of
a group of rabbits seeking to establish a new home. John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's
Woman (1969) played with the nature of fiction, with its narrator who freely admits the fictive
nature of the story he relays, and its alternative endings.
Angela Carter (19401992) was a novelist and journalist, known for her feminist, magical
realism, and picaresque works. Writing from the 1960s until the 1980s, her novels include, The
Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman 1972, and Nights at the Circus 1984. Margaret
Drabble (1939 ) is a novelist, biographer and critic, who published from the 1960s into the 21st
century. Her older sister, A. S. Byatt (1936 ) is best known for Possession 1990.
Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary 1996, and its sequel Bridget Jones: The Edge of
Reason 1999, chronicle the life of Bridget Jones, a thirty-something single woman in London.
Since the 1970s a number of books of Jrriais literature have been published, including two
collections of writings by George F. Le Feuvre: Jrri Jadis and Histouaithes et Gens d'Jrri.[272]
The Book of Ebenezer Le Page was published in 1981 after the death of its author G.B.
Edwards (18991976). Edwards rejected the Guernsey mainstream literary traditions of the sea,
heroic adventure, romance and exoticism. The author's use of Guernsey English and exploration
of a personal journey against a background of rapid social change in Guernsey were among
factors that led to the novel's high critical reception. [209][273]
Salman Rushdie is among a number of post Second World War writers from former British
colonies who permanently settled in Britain. Rushdie achieved fame with Midnight's
Children (1981), that was awarded both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and Booker Prize
later that year, and was named Booker of Bookers in 1993. His most controversial novel The
Satanic Verses (1989) was inspired in part by the life of Muhammad.Doris Lessing from Southern

Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), published her first novel The Grass is Singing in 1950, after
immigrating to England. She initially wrote about her African experiences. Lessing soon became
a dominant presence in the English literary scene, publishing frequently, and won the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 2007. Other works by her include a sequence of five novels collectively
called Children of Violence (195269), The Golden Notebook (1962), The Good Terrorist (1985),
and a sequence of five science fiction novels the Canopus in Argos: Archives(19791983). V. S.
Naipaul (1932 ) was another immigrant, born in Trinidad, who wrote A House for Mr
Biswas (1961) and A Bend in the River(1979). Naipaul won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Also
from the West Indies is George Lamming (1927 ) who wrote In the Castle of My Skin(1953),
while from Pakistan came Hanif Kureshi (1954), a playwright, screenwriter, filmmaker, novelist
and short story writer. His novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) won the Whitbread Award for
the best first novel, and was also made into a BBC television series. Kazuo Ishiguro (1954 )
was born in Japan, but his parents immigrated to Britain when he was six. [274] Ishiguro wrote
historical novels in the first-person narrative style. His works include, The Remains of the
Day 1989, Never Let Me Go 2005. Scotland has in the late 20th century produced several
important novelists, including James Kelman who like Samuel Beckett can create humour out of
the most grim situations. How Late it Was, How Late, 1994, won the Booker Prize that year; A. L.
Kennedy whose 2007 novel Day was named Book of the Year in the Costa Book Awards.[275] In
2007 she won the Austrian State Prize for European Literature;[276] Alasdair Gray whose Lanark:
A Life in Four Books (1981) is a dystopian fantasy set in his home town Glasgow.
Highly anglicised Lowland Scots is often used in contemporary Scottish fiction, for example, the
Edinburgh dialect of Lowland Scots used in Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh to give a brutal
depiction of the lives of working class Edinburgh drug users. [277] But'n'Ben A-Go-Go is a
2000 cyberpunk novel entirely in Scots by Matthew Fitt, notable for using as many of the different
varieties of Scots as possible, including many neologismsimagining how Scots might develop
by 2090. In Northern Ireland, James Fenton's poetry, at times lively, contented, wistful, is written
in contemporary Ulster Scots.[214] The poet Michael Longley (born 1939) has experimented with
Ulster Scots for the translation of Classical verse, as in his 1995 collection The Ghost Orchid.
[218]
Philip Robinson's (born 1946) writing has been described as verging on "postmodern kailyard".[218] He has produced a trilogy of novels, as well as story books for children, and
two volumes of poetry.[278]
Martin Amis (1949) is one of the most prominent British novelists of the end of the 20th,
beginning of the 21st century. His best-known novels are Money (1984) and London
Fields (1989). Pat Barker (1943) has won many awards for her fiction. English novelist and
screenwriter Ian McEwan (1948 ) is a highly regarded writer whose works includeThe Cement
Garden (1978) and Enduring Love (1997), which was made into a film. In 1998 McEwan won the
Man Booker Prize with Amsterdam. Atonement (2001) was made into an Oscar-winning film.
This was followed by Saturday (2005), and Solar (2010). McEwan was awarded the Jerusalem
Prize in 2011. Alex Garland's works include The Beach1996, Giles Foden wrote The Last King of
Scotland 1998, and Joanne Harris's most notable work is Chocolat 1999.
A few novels have been published in Cornish since the last decades of the 20th century,
including Melville Bennetto's An Gurun Wosek a Geltya (The Bloody Crown of the Celtic
Countries) in 1984; subsequently Michael Palmer published Jory (1989) and Dyroans (1998).[279]
Drama after World War Two
An important cultural movement in the British theatre that developed in the late 1950s and early
1960s was Kitchen sink realism (or kitchen sink drama), art (the term itself derives from an
expressionist painting by John Bratby), novels, film, and television plays.[280] The term angry
young men was often applied members of this artistic movement. It used a style of social
realism which depicts the domestic lives of the working class, to explore social issues and
political issues. The drawing room plays of the post war period, typical of dramatists like Terence
Rattigan and Nol Coward were challenged in the 1950s by these Angry Young Men, in plays
like John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956).Arnold Wesker and Nell Dunn also brought social
concerns to the stage. Again in the 1950s the Theatre of the Absurd profoundly affected British
dramatists, especially IrishmanSamuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot, which premiered in
London in 1955 (originally En attendant Godot, 1952). Among those influenced were Harold

Pinter (19302008), (The Birthday Party, 1958), and Tom Stoppard (1937 ) (Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern are Dead,1966).[281] Pinter's works are often characterised by menace or
claustrophobia, while those of Stoppard are notable for their high-spirited wit and the great range
of intellectual issues which he tackles. [citation needed] Both Pinter and Stoppard continued to have new
plays produced into the 1990s.
The Theatres Act 1968 abolished the system of censorship of the stage that had existed in Great
Britain since 1737. In Jersey, public entertainment, including stage works, continues to be
licensed by the Bailiff (advised by the Bailiff's Panel for the Control of Public Entertainment).
[282]
The new freedoms of the London stage were tested by Howard Brenton's The Romans in
Britain, first staged at the National Theatre during 1980, and subsequently the focus of an
unsuccessful private prosecution in 1982.
Other playwrights whose careers began later in the century are: Caryl Churchill (Top Girls,
1982), Alan Ayckbourn (Absurd Person Singular, 1972), Michael Frayn (1933) playwright and
novelist, David Hare (1947 ), David Edgar (1948 ). Dennis Potter's most distinctive dramatic
work was produced for television.
Radio drama
During the 1950s and 1960s many major British playwrights either effectively began their careers
with the BBC, or had works adapted for radio. Most of playwright Caryl Churchill's early
experiences with professional drama production were as a radio playwright and, starting in 1962
with The Ants, there were nine productions with BBC radio drama up until 1973 when her stage
work began to be recognised at the Royal Court Theatre.[283] Joe Orton's dramatic debut in 1963
was the radio play The Ruffian on the Stair, which was broadcast on 31 August 1964.[284] Tom
Stoppard's "first professional production was in the fifteen-minute Just Before
Midnight programme on BBC Radio, which showcased new dramatists". [284] John Mortimer made
his radio debut as a dramatist in 1955, with his adaptation of his own novel Like Men
Betrayed for the BBC Light Programme. But he made his debut as an original playwright
with The Dock Brief, starring Michael Hordern as a hapless barrister, first broadcast in 1957
on BBC Radio's Third Programme, later televised with the same cast, and subsequently
presented in a double bill with What Shall We Tell Caroline? at the Lyric Hammersmith in April
1958, before transferring to the Garrick Theatre. Mortimer is most famous for Rumpole of the
Bailey a British television series which starred Leo McKern as Horace Rumpole, an ageing
London barrister who defends any and all clients. It has been spun off into a series of short
stories, novels, and radio programmes. [285][286] Other notable radio dramatists included
novelist Angela Carter. Novelist Susan Hill also wrote for BBC radio, from the early 1970s.
[287]
Among the most famous works created for radio, are Dylan Thomas'sUnder Milk
Wood (1954), Harold Pinter's A Slight Ache (1959) and Robert Bolt's A Man for All
Seasons (1954).[288]
Poetry after World War Two
While poets T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas were still publishing after 1945, new
poets started their careers in the 1950s and 1960s including Philip Larkin (192285) (The
Whitsun Weddings,1964) and Ted Hughes (193098, Poet Laureate from 1984) (The Hawk in
the Rain, 1957). Northern Ireland has produced a number of significant poets, the most famous
being Nobel prize winner Seamus Heaney, however, Heaney regarded himself as Irish and not
British. There are many others who question whether theLiterature of Northern Ireland is Irish or
British. Others poets from Northern Ireland include Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon, James
Fenton, Michael Longley, and Medbh McGuckian.James Fenton's poetry, at times lively,
contented, wistful, is written in contemporary Ulster Scots. The poet Michael Longley (born 1939)
has experimented with Ulster Scots for the translation of Classical verse, as in his 1995
collection The Ghost Orchid.
As part of the Scottish Gaelic Renaissance, Sorley MacLean's (191196) work in Scottish Gaelic
in the 1930s gave new value to modern literature in that language. However, while "most of his
most important poetry had been written in the 1930s and 1940s, almost none of it was widely
available" until the publication of Reothairt is Contraight/Spring Tide and Neap Tide: Selected
Poems 193272, in 1977 and a Collected Poems in 1989. [289] Iain Crichton Smith (192898) was

more prolific in English but also produced much Gaelic poetry and prose, and also translated
some of the work of Sorley Maclean from Gaelic to English, as well as some of his own poems
originally composed in Gaelic. Much of his English language work was related to, or translated
from, Gaelic equivalents. Modern Gaelic poetry has been most influenced by Symbolism,
transmitted via poetry in English, and by Scots poetry. Traditional Gaelic poetry utilised an
elaborate system of metres, which modern poets have adapted to their own ends. George
Campbell Hay looks back beyond the popular metres of the 19th and 20th centuries to forms of
early Gaelic poetry. Donald MacAuley's poetry is concerned with place and community.[290] The
following generation of Gaelic poets writing at the end of the 20th century lived in a bilingual
world to a greater extent than any other generation, with their work most often accompanied in
publication by a facing text in English. Such confrontation has inspired semantic experimentation,
seeking new contexts for words, and going as far as the explosive and neologistic verse of
Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh (1948 ).[291] Scottish Gaelic poetry has been the subject of translation
not only into English, but also into other Celtic languages: Maoilios Caimbeul and Miri
NicGumaraid have been translated into Irish, and John Stoddart has produced anthologies of
Gaelic poetry translated into Welsh.[248]
In the 1960s and 1970s Martian poetry aimed to break the grip of 'the familiar', by describing
ordinary things in unfamiliar ways, as though, for example, through the eyes of a Martian. Poets
most closely associated with it are Craig Raine and Christopher Reid. Martin Amis, an important
novelist in the late twentieth and twentieth centuries, carried into fiction this drive to make the
familiar strange.[292] Another literary movement in this period was the British Poetry Revival, a
wide-reaching
collection
of
groupings
and
subgroupings
that
embraces performance, sound and concrete poetry. Leading poets associated with this
movement include J. H. Prynne, Eric Mottram, Tom Raworth, Denise Riley and Lee Harwood. It
reacted to the more conservative group called "The Movement".
The Mersey Beat poets were Adrian Henri, Brian Patten and Roger McGough. Their work was a
self-conscious attempt at creating an English equivalent to the Beats. Many of their poems were
written in protest against the established social order and, particularly, the threat of nuclear war.
Ted Hughes was among poets whose work found roots in the speech patterns and dialects of
Northern England: other notable poets from the north of England include Tony Harrison (1937
), who explores the medium of language and the tension between native dialect (in his case,
that of working-class Leeds) and acquired language, [248] and Simon Armitage.
In Welsh language poetry, Alan Llwyd came to prominence when he achieved the rare feat of
winning both the Crown and the Chair at the 1973 National Eisteddfod and then repeated the feat
in 1976. He also wrote the script for the Oscar-nominated Welsh-language film Hedd Wyn (1992)
about the life of poet Hedd Wyn, who was killed in World War I.
In contemporary Cornish poetry, Tony Snell's work is heavily influenced by the early poetry of
Wales and Brittany, and it was he who adapted the Welsh traethodl to Cornish. The bard Pol
Hodge is another example of a poet writing in Cornish.
Amelia Perchard (19212012), one of Jersey's foremost contemporary writers, published many
poems and produced one-act plays.[293]
Geoffrey Hill (1932 ) has been considered to be among the most distinguished English poets of
his generation,[294] and on his 80th birthday was described in the House of Commons by
Education Secretary, Michael Gove, as the United Kingdom's "greatest living poet". [295] Although
frequently described as a "difficult" poet, Hill has retorted that poetry supposed to be difficult can
be "the most democratic because you are doing your audience the honour of supposing they are
intelligent human beings".[296] Charles Tomlinson (1927) is another important English poet of an
older generation, though "since his first publication in 1951, has built a career that has seen more
notice in the international scene than in his native England; this may explain, and be explained
by, his international vision of poetry". [297] The critic Michael Hennessy has described Tomlinson as
"the most international and least provincial English poet of his generation". [298] His poetry has won
international recognition and has received many prizes in Europe and the United States,
including the 1993 Bennett Award from the Hudson Review; the New Criterion Poetry Prize,

2002; the Premio Internazionale di Poesia Ennio Flaiano, 2001; and the Premio Internazionale di
Poesia Attilio Bertolucci, 2004.[297]
Late 20th-century genre literature
In thriller writing, Ian Fleming created the character James Bond 007 in January 1952, while on
holiday at his Jamaican estate, Goldeneye. Fleming chronicled Bond's adventures in twelve
novels,
including Casino
Royale 1953, Live
and
Let
Die 1954, Dr.
No 1958, Goldfinger 1959, Thunderball 1961, The Spy Who Loved Me 1962, and nine short story
works.
In contrast to the larger-than-life spy capers of Bond, John le Carr was an author of spy
novels who depicted a shadowy world of espionage and counter-espionage, and his best known
novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold 1963, is often regarded as one of the greatest in the
genre. Frederick Forsyth writes thriller novels, including The Day of the Jackal 1971, The
Odessa File 1972, The Dogs of War 1974 and The Fourth Protocol 1984. Ken Follett writes spy
thrillers, his first success being Eye of the Needle 1978, followed by The Key to Rebecca 1980,
as well as historical novels, notably The Pillars of the Earth 1989, and its sequel World Without
End 2007. Elleston Trevor is remembered for his 1964 adventure story The Flight of the Phoenix,
while the thriller novelist Philip Nicholson is best known for Man on Fire. Peter George's Red
Alert 1958, is a Cold War thriller.
War novels include Alistair MacLean thriller's The Guns of Navarone 1957, Where Eagles
Dare 1968, and Jack Higgins' The Eagle Has Landed 1975. Patrick O'Brian's nauticalhistorical
novels feature the AubreyMaturin series set in the Royal Navy, the first being Master and
Commander 1969.
The "father of Wicca" Gerald Gardner began propagating his own version of witchcraft in the
1950s. Having claimed to have been initiated into the New Forest coven in 1939, Gardner
published his books Witchcraft Today 1954 and The Meaning of Witchcraft 1959, the
foundational texts for the religion of Wicca. Ronald Welch's Carnegie Medal winning novel Knight
Crusader is set in the 12th century and gives a depiction of the Third Crusade, featuring the
Christian leader and King of England Richard the Lionheart.
In crime fiction, the murder mysteries of Ruth Rendell and P. D. James are popular.
Nigel Tranter wrote historical novels of celebrated Scottish warriors; Robert the Bruce in The
Bruce Trilogy, and William Wallace in The Wallace 1975, works noted by academics for their
accuracy.
Science fiction
John Wyndham wrote post-apocalyptic science fiction, his most notable works being The Day of
the Triffids 1951, and The Midwich Cuckoos1957. George Langelaan's The Fly 1957, is a
science fiction short story. Science fiction novelist Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey, is
based on his various short stories, particularly The Sentinel. His other major novels
include Rendezvous with Rama 1972, and The Fountains of Paradise 1979. Brian Aldiss is
Clarke's contemporary. Michael Moorcock, 1962) is a writer, primarily of science fiction and
fantasy, who has also published a number of literary novels. He was involved with the 'New
Wave' of science fiction writers "part of whose aim was to invest the genre with literary
merit"[299] Similarly J. G. Ballard (1930 ) "became known in the 1960s as the most prominent of
the 'New Wave' science fiction writers". [300] A later major figure in science fiction was Iain M.
Banks who created a fictional anarchist, socialist, and utopian society the Culture. The novels
that feature in it include Excession 1996, and Inversions 1998. He also published mainstream
novels, including the highly controversial The Wasp Factory in 1984. Nobel prize winner Doris
Lessing also published a sequence of five science fiction novels the Canopus in Argos:
Archives between 1979 and 1983.
Literature for children and young adults
Roald Dahl rose to prominence with his children's fantasy novels, often inspired from
experiences from his childhood, with often unexpected endings, and unsentimental, dark humour.
[301]
Dahl was inspired to write Charlie and the Chocolate Factory 1964, featuring the eccentric

candymaker Willy Wonka, having grown up near two chocolate makers in England who often
tried to steal trade secrets by sending spies into the other's factory. His other works
include James and the Giant Peach 1961, Fantastic Mr. Fox 1971, The Witches 1983,
and Matilda 1988.
Boarding schools in literature are centred on older pre-adolescent and adolescent school life,
and are most commonly set in English boarding schools. Popular school stories from this period
include Ronald
Searle's St
Trinian's and
his
illustrations
for Geoffrey
Willans's Molesworth series,Jill Murphy's The Worst Witch, the Jennings series by Anthony
Buckeridge (19122004).
Ruth Manning-Sanders collected and retold fairy tales, and her first work A Book of
Giants contains a number of famous giants, notably Jack and the Beanstalk. Susan
Cooper's The Dark Is Rising is a five-volume fantasy saga set in England and Wales. Raymond
Briggs' children's picture book The Snowman 1978 has been adapted as an animation, shown
every Christmas on British television, and for the stage as a musical. TheReverend. W.
Awdry and son Christopher's The Railway Series features Thomas the Tank Engine. Margery
Sharp's series The Rescuers is based on a heroic mouse organisation. The third Children's
Laureate Michael Morpurgo published War Horse in 1982. The prolific children's author Dick
King-Smith's novels include The Sheep-Pig 1984, and The Water Horse. Diana Wynne
Jones wrote the young adult fantasy novel Howl's Moving Castle in 1986. Anthony
Horowitz's Alex Rider series begins with Stormbreaker 2000.
J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter fantasy series is a sequence of seven novels that chronicle the
adventures of the adolescent wizard Harry Potter. The series began with Harry Potter and the
Philosopher's Stone in 1997 and ended with the seventh and final book Harry Potter and the
Deathly Hallows in 2007; becoming the best selling book-series in history. The series has been
translated into 67 languages,[302][303] placing Rowling among the most translated authors in history.
[304]
J.K. Rowling took part in a sequence of the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony which
celebrated British children's literature.[305]
Fantasy and horror
Terry Pratchett is best known for his Discworld series of comic fantasy novels, that begins
with The Colour of Magic 1983, and includes Mort 1987, Hogfather 1996, and Night Watch 2002.
Pratchett's other most notable work is the 1990 novel Good Omens.
Philip Pullman's fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials comprises Northern Lights 1995, The Subtle
Knife 1997, and The Amber Spyglass 2000. It follows the coming-of-age of two children as they
wander through a series of parallel universes against a backdrop of epic events.
Neil Gaiman is a writer of science fiction, fantasy short stories and novels, whose notable works
include Stardust 1998, Coraline 2002, The Graveyard Book 2009, and The Sandman series.
Alan Moore's works include Watchmen, V for Vendetta set in a dystopian future UK, The League
of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and From Hell, speculating on the identity and motives of Jack the
Ripper.
Douglas Adams wrote the five-volume science fiction comedy series The Hitchhiker's Guide to
the Galaxy, and also wrote the humorous fantasy detective novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective
Agency.
Clive Barker horror
novels
include The Hellbound
fantasy, Weaveworld 1987, Imajica and Abarat 2002.

Heart 1986,

and

works

in

21st century literature

Formerly an appointment for life, the appointment of the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom is
now made for a fixed term of 10 years, starting with Andrew Motion in 1999 as successor to Ted
Hughes.[306] Carol Ann Duffy succeeded Motion in the post in May 2009. [307] A position of
nationallaureate, entitled The Scots Makar, was established in 2004 by the Scottish Parliament.
The first appointment was made directly by the Parliament in that year when Edwin

Morgan received the honour[308][309] The post of National Poet of Wales (Welsh: Bardd
Cenedlaethol Cymru) was established in May 2005. [310] The post is an annual appointment with
the language of the poet alternating between English and Welsh.
In English literature, Zadie Smith's (1975 ) Whitbread Book Award winning novel White
Teeth 2000, mixes pathos and humour, focusing on the later lives of two war time friends in
London. Hilary Mantel's Booker Prizewinning novel Wolf Hall 2009, is set in the Tudor court of
King Henry VIII. In 2012 Mantel became the first woman and the first British writer to win the
Booker Prize twice, as the second part of her historical trilogy Bring Up the Bodies was awarded
the prize. In 2004, David Mitchell's science fiction novel Cloud Atlas won the British Book
Awards Literary Fiction Award.
Julian Barnes (1946 ) won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for his book The Sense of an Ending.
Three of his earlier novels had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: Flaubert's
Parrot (1984), England, England (1998), and Arthur & George (2005). He has also written crime
fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. England, England explores English national
identity, invented traditions, the creations of myths and the authenticity of history and memory.
[311]
In 2011, Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James set the record as the fastest selling paperback of
all time.[312]
Contemporary writers in Scottish Gaelic include Aonghas MacNeacail, and Angus Peter
Campbell who, besides two Scottish Gaelic poetry collections, has produced two Gaelic
novels: An Oidhche Mus Do Sheol Sinn (2003) and L a' Deanamh Sgeil Do L (2004).
A collection of short stories P'tites Lures Guernsiaises (in Guernsiais with parallel English
translation) by various writers was published in 2006. [313]
In March 2006 Brian Stowell's Dunveryssyn yn Tooder-Folley (The vampire murders) was
publishedthe first full-length novel in Manx.[314]
There is some production of modern literature in Irish in Northern Ireland. Performance
poet Gearid Mac Lochlainn exploits the creative possibilities for poetry of "creolised Irish" in
Belfast speech.[315]
The perceived success and promotion of genre authors from Scotland provoked controversy in
2009 when James Kelman criticised, in a speech at the Edinburgh International Book Festival,
the attention afforded to "upper middle-class young magicians" and "detective fiction" by the
"Anglocentric" Scottish literary establishment. John Byrne was supportive, saying that there was
"a danger of Scotland becoming known as the home of genre fiction". [316] This was a reaction to
the popularity of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and of Ian Rankin and other "Tartan Noir" authors.
The popularity of "Tartan Noir" has led to renewed interest in crime fiction set in Wales, attracting
the label "Welsh Noir",[317] and Northern Ireland, labelled as "Emerald Noir".[318]
The theatrical landscape has been reconfigured, moving from a single national theatre at the end
of the 20th century to four as a result of the devolution of cultural policy. [319] National theatre
companies were founded in Scotland and Wales as complements to the Royal National Theatrein
London: Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru (the Welsh language national theatre of Wales, founded
2003), National Theatre of Scotland (founded 2006), National Theatre Wales (the English
language national theatre company of Wales, founded 2009). Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru
attempts to shape a distinctive identity for drama in Welsh while also opening it up to outside
linguistic and dramatic influences.[320]

SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_literature