1. January, 6th2014
English Literature
British literature is not one stagnant specific thing it's more like a living growing organism
that involves and changes along with British culture, from the works produced in England to
the works of Scottish and Irish and other works written in English not necessarily in England.
The English life witnessed several historical events that influenced Literature from the old,
Mediaeval period, to the bringing of the sixteenth and age of enlightenment, till the
eighteenths and twentieths.
The Middle Ages is a vast literary time period. It stretches from the collapse of the
Roman Empire in Britain to the beginning of the Renaissance .The period is subdivided
into three parts: Anglo-Saxon literature, Anglo-Norman literature, and Middle English
literature. The Old English period marks religious epic poems; and documentary prose
dealing. The Middle English is the time for the French literary modes flood. Old and
Middle English impact the literary culture of later periods: The 16th and 17th centuries
which became the renaissance Elizabethan and Jacobean prose drama , among the many
varieties of poetry one might have found were the lyric, the elegy, the tragedy, and the
pastoral.
Many scholars think of it as properly many discrete literary eras: the Restoration (16601700), dominated by Dryden; the Age of Satire (1700-1745), dominated by Swift and Pope;
the Age of Johnson (1745-1790), dominated not only by Johnson but by a new kind of
poetry and a major new literary form, the novel. And the Age of Reason (1660-1780),

2. Middle-class readers began buying more and more books concerning realistic situations
that pertain to themselves.
From the 18th century through the 20th century, British writings spanned Romanticism,
Victorian literature, Modernism, and post-modern literature. Extending from about 1789
until 1837, the romantic age in English literature was characterized by the subordination of
reason to intuition and passion, the cult of nature, and the primacy of the individual. Yet,
later on the Victorian writers shifted to issues as the growth of English democracy, and the
progress of industrial enterprise. Modernist literature reacted against the Victorian novel
and the 19th objective realistic representation, rejecting tradition with the Loss of
spirituality and loneliness.post modernists later on appeared with totally new techniques,
relies on fragmentation, paradox, questionable narrators, Irony and black humor.
That having been said, English literature has shaped and represented to the world over
ages from talented men that wrote down what they went through whether in prose , poetry
or even performed it for1, 200 years via old, middle, modern English and literature.