THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

inappropriate to a history of ‘English’ literature. I have included Irish, Scottish, and Welsh writers not out of imperial
arrogance or ignorance but because certain Irish, Scottish, and Welsh writers cannot easily be separated from the
English tradition or from the broad sense of an English literature which once embraced regional, provincial, and other
national traditions within the British Isles. It is proper, for example, to see Yeats as an Anglo-Irish poet, but to what
extent can we see Shaw exclusively as an Anglo-Irish dramatist? Joyce and Beckett, it is true, deliberately avoided
England as a place of exile from Ireland, but how readily can Burke, Goldsmith, Wilde, George Moore, Bram Stoker,
or Louis MacNeice be taken out of the English contexts they chose for themselves? And how could the history of
English literature in the eighteenth century be written without due reference to Swift? It is right to abandon the term
‘Scottish Chaucerian’ to describe Henryson and Dunbar and to allow that both should be seen as distinctive Scots
poets working in Scotland in a loose Chaucerian tradition. But how far can we take the idea that James Thomson is a
distinctively Scottish poet who happened to work in England in a loose Miltonic tradition? It is essential to recognize
the Welshness of Dylan Thomas, but it is rather harder to put one’s finger on the Welshness of Henry Vaughan. This
[p. 15]
History has also included certain English writers who wrote in Latin and others whose origins were not English, let
alone British or Irish, whose work seems to have been primarily intended to associate them with a British market and
with an English literary tradition. Conrad and T. S. Eliot, who are included, took British citizenship in mid-career
and accepted that their writing was ‘English’ in the narrow sense of the term. On the other hand, Henry James, who is
excluded, took British citizenship only at the close of his life and when his writing career was effectively over. Both
Auden and Isherwood, who became citizens of the United States in the 1940s, have been included simply because it
seems impossible to separate their most distinctive work from the British context in which it was written. The
situations of Conrad, Eliot, James, Auden, and Isherwood are in certain ways exemplary of what has happened to
English literature in the twentieth century. It is both English and it is not. It is both British and it is not. What really
matters is that English literature, rather than being confined to an insular Poets’ Corner, now belongs in and to a
wider world.
[Andrew SANDERS: The Short Oxford History of English Literature, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1994]
[p. 16]
1
Old English Literature
THE term ‘Old English’ was invented as a patriotic and philological convenience. The more familiar term ‘Anglo-
Saxon’ has a far older pedigree. ‘Old English’ implied that there was a cultural continuity between the England of the
sixth century and the England of the nineteenth century (when German, and later British, philologists determined that
there had been phases in the development of the English language which they described as ‘Old’, ‘Middle’, and
‘Modern’). ‘Anglo-Saxon’ had, on the other hand, come to suggest a culture distinct from that of modern England,
one which might be pejoratively linked to the overtones of ‘Sassenach’ (Saxon), a word long thrown back by angry
Celts at English invaders and English cultural imperialists. In 1871 Henry Sweet, the pioneer Oxford phonetician and
Anglicist, insisted in his edition of one of King Alfred’s translations that he was going to use ‘Old English’ to denote
‘the unmixed, inflectional state of the English language, commonly known by the barbarous and unmeaning title of
“Anglo-Saxon”’. A thousand years earlier, King Alfred himself had referred to the tongue which he spoke and in
which he wrote as ‘englisc’. It was the language of the people he ruled, the inhabitants of Wessex who formed part of
a larger English nation. That nation, which occupied most of the ferale arable land in the southern part of the island
of Britain, was united by its Christian religion, by its traditions, and by a form of speech which, despite wide regional
varieties of dialect, was already distinct from the ‘Saxon’ of the continental Germans. From the thirteenth century
onwards, however, Alfred’s ‘English’ gradually became incomprehensible to the vast majority of the Englishspeaking
descendants of those same Anglo-Saxons. Scholars and divines of the Renaissance period may have revived
interest in the study of Old English texts in the hope of proving that England had traditions in Church and State
which distinguished it from the rest of Europe. Nineteenth-century philologists, like Sweet, may have helped to lay
the foundations of all modern textual and linguistic research, and most British students of English literature may have
been obliged, until relatively recently, to acquire some kind of mastery of the earliest written form of their language,
but