routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

Beowulf, the Dane, dear king of his people
(Beowulf)
CONTEXTS AND CONDITIONS
Literature is as old as human language, and as new as tomorrow’s
sunrise. And literature is everywhere, not only in books, but in videos,
television, radio, CDs, computers, newspapers, in all the media of
communication where a story is told or an image created.
It starts with words, and with speech. The first literature in any culture
is oral. The classical Greek epics of Homer, the Asian narratives of
Gilgamesh and the Bhagavad Gita, the earliest versions of the Bible and
the Koran were all communicated orally, and passed on from generation
to generation – with variations, additions, omissions and embellishments
until they were set down in written form, in versions which have come
down to us. In English, the first signs of oral literature tend to have
three kinds of subject matter – religion, war, and the trials of daily life –
all of which continue as themes of a great deal of writing.
There is a vast expanse of time before the Norman Conquest in
1066, from which fragments of literary texts remain, although these
fragments make quite a substantial body of work. If we consider that
the same expanse of time has passed between Shakespeare’s time
and now as passed between the earliest extant text and 1066, we can
begin to imagine just how much literary expression there must have
been. But these centuries remain largely dark to us, apart from a few
illuminating flashes and fragments, since almost all of it was never
written down, and since most of what was preserved in writing was
destroyed later, particularly during the 1530s.