English Literature: Modern

With the seventeenth century the great school of imaginative writers that made glorious the last years of Elizabeth's reign, had passed away. Spenser was dead before 1600, Sir P...

There are two ways of approaching the periods of change and new birth in literature. The commonest and, for all the study which it entails, the easiest, is that summed up in the...

To understand Elizabethan literature it is necessary to remember that the social status it enjoyed was far different from that of literature in our own day. The splendours of th...

The student of literature, when he passes in his reading from the age of Shakespeare and Milton to that of Dryden and Pope, will be conscious of certain sharply defined differen...

The faculty for telling stories is the oldest artistic faculty in the world, and the deepest implanted in the heart of man. Before the rudest cave-pictures were scratched on the...

By 1730 the authors whose work made the "classic" school in England were dead or had ceased writing; by the same date Samuel Johnson had begun his career as a man of letters. Th...

Biologists tell us that the hybrid--the product of a variety of ancestral stocks--is more fertile than an organism with a direct and unmixed ancestry; perhaps the analogy is not...

Had it not been that with two exceptions all the poets of the Romantic Revival died early, it might be more difficult to draw a line between their school and that of their succe...

There are times in every man's experience when some sudden widening of the boundaries of his knowledge, some vision of hitherto untried and unrealized possibilities, has come an...

We have carried our study down to the death of Ruskin and included in it authors like Swinburne and Meredith who survived till recently; and in discussing the novel we have incl...

Bacon, Francis, Ballad, the, Beaumont and Fletcher, Bennett, Arnold, Bible, the, Biography, Blake, William, Blank Verse, Boswell, James, Brontës, the, Browne, Sir Thomas, Browne...

John Donne, 1573-1631. _Poems_, 1633 (first published, but known, like those of all Elizabethan poets, in manuscript long before). William Browne, 1591-1643. George Herbert, 159...

Christopher Marlowe, 1564-1593. _Tamburlaine_, 1587 (date of performance). _Dr. Faustus_, 1588 (date of performance). _Edward II._, 1593. Thomas Kyd, 1557(?)-1595(?). _The Spani...

John Dryden, 1631-1700. _Absalom and Achitophel_ and _Religio Laici_, 1682. _The Hind and the Panther_, 1687. Alexander Pope, 1688-1744. _Essay on Criticism_, 1711. _Rape of the...

Sir Thomas Wyatt, 1503-1542. The Earl of Surrey, 1517-1547. _Tottel's Miscellany_ (containing their poems), 1557. Sir Philip Sidney. 1554-1586. _Arcadia_, 1590. _Astrophel and S...

William Wordsworth, 1770-1850. _Lyrical Ballads_, 1798. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 1772-1834. Sir Walter Scott, 1771-1832. Lord Byron, 1788-1824. _Child Harold's Pilgrimage_, 1812...

Lord Tennyson, 1809-1892. _Poems_, 1842. _Idylls of the King_, 1859. Robert Browning, 1812-1889. _Men and Women_, 1855. _The Ring and the Book_, 1868. D. G. Rossetti, 1828-1882....

*Jane Austen's _Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice,_ and _Northanger Abbey_ (as a parody of the Radcliffe School); *Scott's _Waverley, Antiquary, Ivanhoe, Old Mortality, Bride of L...