The Routledge History

of Literature in English
Britain and Ireland

SECOND EDITION

RONALD CARTER AND JOHN McRAE

with a foreword by MALCOLM BRADBURY

LONDON AND NEW YORK

I VII

CONTENTS

List ofillustrations
Foreword by Malcolm Bradbury

"

xm
xiv

THE BEGINNINGS OF ENGLISH:

Old and Middle English 600-1485
Contexts and conditions
Personal and religious voices

3
6

Language note: The earliest figurative language

IO

Long poems
French influence and English affirmation
Language and dialect

n
14
18

Language note: The expanding lexicon: Chaucer and Middle English

21

From anonymity to individualism

Women's voices

22
25

Fantasy
Travel
Geoffrey Chaucer
Langland, Gower and Lydgate
T h e Scottish Chaucerians
Mediaeval drama
Malory and Skelton

27
28
29
35
39
41
44

Language note: Prose and sentence structure

47

THE RENAISSANCE: 1485-1660

Contexts and conditions
Language note: Expanding world: expanding lexicon

51
56

vni

I Contents

Renaissance poetry
Language note: Puttenham's Social Poetics

Drama before Shakespeare

From the street to a building the Elizabethan theatre
Language note: The further expanding lexicon

Renaissance prose
Translations of the Bible
Language note: The language of :he Bible

Shakespeare
The plays
The sonnets
Language note: Shakespeare's language

The Metaphysical poets

'.
The Cavalier poets
Jacobean drama - to the closure of the theatres, 1642
Ben Jonson
Masques
Other early seventeenth-century dramatists
Domestic tragedy
City comedy,
The end of the Renaissance theatre

57
60

61
67
69

70
76
77

79
80
90
92

94
100
101
101
103
104
no
in
113

RESTORATION TO ROMANTICISM: 1660-1789

Contexts and conditions

117

Language note: Changing patterns of 'thou' and 'you'

120

Milton
Restoration drama
Rochester
Dryden
Pope
,
Journalism
Scottish Enlightenment, diarists and Gibbon
The novel
Criticism

121
127
137
138
142
145
147
150
164

Language note: The expanding lexicon - 'standards of English'

Johnson
Sterne, Smollett and Scottish voices
Drama after 1737
Poetry after Pope
Language note: Metrical pattern:

165

166
168
176
177
183

Contents I

Melancholy, madness and nature

The Gothic and the sublime
Language note: Point of view

184
188
192

THE ROMANTIC PERIOD: 1789-1832

Contexts and conditions
Language note: William Cobbett, grammar and politics

Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge

197
2O2

203

Language note: Reading Wordsworth

207

Language note: The 'real' language of men

212

Keats

1.

Shelley
Byron
Rights and voices and poetry
Clare
Romantic prose
The novel in the Romantic period
Jane Austen
Language note: Jane Austen's English

Scott
From Gothic to Frankenstein
The Scottish regional novel

213

217
221
225
228
229
233
235
238

239
243
245

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: 1832-1900

Contexts and conditions
Dickens
Language note: Reading Dickens

Victorian thought and Victorian novels

The Brontes and Eliot
'Lady' novelists
Late Victorian novels
Victorian fantasy
Wilde and Aestheticism
Hardy and James

249
251
256

258
267
271
273
279
283
286

Language note: Dialect and character in Hardy

289

Victorian poetry
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and after

293
306

Language note: The developing uses of dialects in literature

310

ix

I Contents

Victorian drama
Language note: Reading the language of theatre and drama

312
315

T H E T W E N T I E T H C E N T U R Y : 1900-45
Contexts and conditions
Modern poetry to 1945
Language note: Reading Hardy
Later H a r d y
Language note: The fragmenting lexicon

Georgian and Imagist poetry

First World War poetry
Irish writing
W B . Yeats
T S . Eliot
Language note: Modernist poet c syntax

Popular poets
Thirties poets
Language note: Reading Auden

319
322
323
325
327

329
331
334
335
337
342

344
345
349

Scottish and Welsh poetry

350

Twentieth-century drama to 1945

Irish drama
D . H . Lawrence
Popular and poetic drama

353
355
357
358

Language note: Literature about language

The novel to 1945

Subjectivity: the popular tradition
The Kailyard School
Provincial novels
Social concerns
Light novels
Genre fiction
Modernism and the novel
Forster
Language note: Metaphor and Tietonymy

Conrad and Ford

D.H. Lawrence
Woolf and Joyce
Language note: Irish English, nationality and literature

Novels of the First World War

360

361
362
363
364
365
366
367
368
369
372

373
378
385
394

395

Contents I

Aldous Huxley
Rooms of their own
Ireland
Early Greene and Waugh
Thirties novelists

397
398
402
403
405

T H E T W E N T I E T H C E N T U R Y : 1945 to the present

Contexts and conditions
Drama since 1945
Language note: Drama and everyday language

Poetry of the Second World War

Poetry since 1945
Martians and gorgons
The novel since 1945
Writing for younger readers so-called children's literature
Later Greene
Post-war Waugh
Orwell
Dialogue novels
Language note: Discourse, titles and dialogism

411
414
415

434
436
450
457
458
459
460
462
465
467

The mid-century novel

Amis, father and son

469
472

Language note: City slang

473

Language note: Common speech

Golding
Fowles and Frayn
Novel sequences
The campus novel
Falling in love
. . . and blood
Muriel Spark and others
Margaret Drabble
Lessing, Hill, Dunmore and Weldon
Iris Murdoch
Internationalism
Rotten Englishes
New modes of modern writing
Language note: English, Scots and Scotland
The contemporary Scottish novel

475

476
478
479
480
482
486
487
489
489
491
493
494
501
508
509

xi

XII

I Contents
T h e contemporary Irish novel

515

Endings and beginnings

517

Winners of the Booker Prize

Winners of the Whitbread Prize
British and Irish winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature
Timelines

521
522
524
525

Acknowledgements

543

Select bibliography
Index

548
559