Category: Classics of Literature
FOREWORD. The two earliest of the nine main divisions of English Literature are by far the longest--taken together are longer than all the others combined--but we shall pass rather rapidly over them. This is partly because the amount of thoroughly great literature which they p...
FOREWORD. The two earliest of the nine main divisions of English Literature are by far the longest--taken together are longer than all the others combined--but we shall pass rat...
2. Chapter 2PERIOD II. THE NORMAN-FRENCH PERIOD. A.D. 1066 TO ABOUT 1350 [Footnote: Scott's 'Ivanhoe,' the best-known work of fiction dealing with any part of this period, is interesting, b...
3. Chapter 3THE FIRST FIFTY YEARS. POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CONDITIONS. Of the century and a half, from 1350 to 1500, which forms our third period, the most important part for literature was th...
4. Chapter 4For the sake of clearness we have reserved for a separate chapter the discussion of the drama of the whole medieval period, which, though it did not reach a very high literary l...
5. Chapter 5PERIOD IV. THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. THE RENAISSANCE AND THE REIGN OF ELIZABETH [Footnote: George Eliot's 'Romola' gives one of the best pictures of the spirit of the Renaissance i...
6. Chapter 6THE INFLUENCE OF CLASSICAL COMEDY AND TRAGEDY. In Chapter IV we left the drama at that point, toward the middle of the sixteenth century, when the Mystery Plays had largely decl...
7. Chapter 7The first half of the seventeenth century as a whole, compared with the Elizabethan age, was a period of relaxing vigor. The Renaissance enthusiasm had spent itself, and in plac...
8. Chapter 8GENERAL CONDITIONS AND CHARACTERISTICS. The repudiation of the Puritan rule by the English people and the Restoration of the Stuart kings in the person of Charles II, in 1660, m...
9. Chapter 9POLITICAL CONDITIONS. During the first part of the eighteenth century the direct connection between politics and literature was closer than at any previous period of English lif...
10. Chapter 10THE GREAT WRITERS OF 1798-1830. THE CRITICAL REVIEWS. As we look back to-day over the literature of the last three quarters of the eighteenth century, here just surveyed, the pr...
11. Chapter 11GENERAL CONDITIONS. The last completed period of English literature, almost coincident in extent with the reign of the queen whose name it bears (Victoria, queen 1837-1901), sta...
12. Chapter 12Tamerlane was a Mongol (Scythian) leader who in the fourteenth century overran most of Western Asia and part of Eastern Europe in much the way indicated in the play, which is ba...