THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

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Gothic Fiction Smith and Burney Cowper, Blake, and Burns Wordsworth Coleridge, Southey, and Crabbe Austen, the ‘Regional’ Novel, and Scott Byron, Shelley, and Keats The ‘Romantic’ Essayists Clare and Cobbett 7. HIGH VICTORIAN LITERATURE 1830-1880 ........................................................................................................398 ‘The Condition of England’: Carlyle and Dickens ‘Condition of England’ Fiction Macaulay, Thackeray, and Trollope The Brontë Sisters Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelite Poets The Brownings The Drama, the Melodrama, and the ‘Sensation’ Novel The New Fiction of the 1860s: Meredith and Eliot The ‘Strange Disease of Modern Life’: Mill, Arnold, Clough, and Ruskin The ‘Second Spring’ and Hopkins Coda: Carroll and Lear 8. LATE VICTORIAN AND EDWARDIAN LITERATURE 1880-1920.............................................................................457 The ‘Agnostic’ Fiction of the Late Century ‘The Letter Killeth’: Hardy, Gissing, and Moore Mystery and History: Conan Doyle, Stoker, and Stevenson ‘Our Colonial Expansion’: Kipling and Conrad ‘Our Theatre in the 90s’: London and Dublin The Edwardian Age The Edwardian Novel The Poetry 9. MODERNISM AND ITS ALTERNATIVES: LITERATURE 1920-1945 ........................................................................505 ‘Bloomsbury’ and beyond: Strachey, Woolf, and Mansfield Richardson and Lawrence Old and New Writing: Practitioners, Promoters, and the ‘Little Magazines’ Eliot, Firbank, and the Sitwells Joyce Inter-War Drama: O’Casey, Coward, Priestley, and Sherriff Retrospect and Historical Memory: Graves and Jones ‘Society’ and Society: The New Novelists of the 1920s and 1930s Bright Young Things and Brave New Worlds: Wodehouse, Waugh, and Huxley The Auden Circle ‘Rotten Elements’: MacDiarmid, Upward, Koestler, and Orwell Looking at Britain at War 10. POST- WAR AND POST-MODERN LITERATURE..................................................................................................577 Dividing and Ruling: Britain in the 1950s The New Theatre The New Novelists of the 1950s Poetry since 1950 The ‘New Morality’: The 1960s and 1970s Female and Male Reformulations: Fiction in the 1960s and 1970s Drama since the 1950s Fin de siècle: Some Notes of Late-Century Fiction CHRONOLOGY ..................................................................................................................................................641
Index A NOTE ON THE TEXT IN the case of quotations I have endeavoured to cite the best scholarly texts available. In most instances this has meant that the spellings have not been brought into line with modern usage, though where I have quoted from the plays and certain poems of Shakespeare and his contemporaries I have followed the common editorial practice of accepting a modernized spelling. I apologize if these anomalies offend certain readers. I hope that the quotations in the text give some sense of the development of the English language and English usage over the centuries. INTRODUCTION Poets’ Corners: The Development of a Canon of English Literature Soon after his death in October 1400 the body of Geoffrey Chaucer was placed in a modest tomb in the eastern aisle of the north transept of Westminster Abbey, the coronation church of the English kings. He was so honoured not because he was the author of The Canterbury Tales, but because he had formerly held the post of Clerk of the King’s Works and because he had been living in the precincts of the Abbey at the time of his death. He was, moreover, distantly connected to the royal family through his wife Philippa. When John Gower died some eight years later he was interred in the Priory Church of St Mary Overie in Southwark (now Southwark Cathedral). Gower, who had retired to the Priory in his old age, received a far more elaborate tomb, one which proclaimed him to be Anglorum Poeta celeberrimus (‘the most famous poet of the English nation’) and one which showed him in effigy somewhat uncomfortably resting his head on his three great works, the Vox Clamantis, the Speculum Meditantis, and the Confessio Amantis. The respective fortunes of the burial sites of these two ‘dead, white, male poets’ is to a significant degree indicative of how a distinct canon of English literature has emerged over the centuries. Although St Mary Overie’s, renamed St Saviour’s in the sixteenth century, later housed the tombs of the playwrights John Fletcher (d. 1625) and Philip Massinger (d. 1640) and of Bishop Lancelot Andrewes (who died at the nearby Winchester House in 1626), it never proved as prestigious a church as the distinctly aristocratic Westminster Abbey. Nor did the body of Gower prove to be as powerful an object of poetic veneration as that of Chaucer. In 1556 Nicholas Brigham, a government official with antiquarian tastes, erected a new, but conservatively Gothic, monument over Chaucer’s bones. His act of national piety was a tribute to Chaucer’s acknowledged status as, to use Edmund Spenser’s term, the ‘pure well head of Poesie’. It was within feet of Chaucer’s grave that Spenser himself was buried in 1599, his mural monument, erected some twenty years later, pronouncing him to be ‘the Prince of Poets in his Tyme’. Thus specially consecrated to the Muses, this corner of a royal church later contained the ashes of Michael Drayton, who ‘exchanged his Laurell for a Crowne of Glorye’ in 1631, of ‘rare’ Ben Jonson [p. 2] who died in 1637, and of Abraham Cowley who died in 1667. Its prestige was firmly established with the burial of John Dryden in 1700 and by the subsequent construction of an elegant funerary monument which seems to guard the entrance to the aisle. Writing in The Spectator in 1711, Joseph Addison referred to this already celebrated part of the Abbey as ‘the poetical Quarter’. Its name was gradually transmogrified into the familiar ‘Poets’ Corner’. The seal was set on its function as a place where English poets might, and indeed ought, to be commemorated, regardless of their actual place of interment, in the middle years of the eighteenth century. Here, in what was rapidly becoming less like an exclusively royal church and more like a national pantheon, was an area largely devoted to the posthumous celebration of writers. Here distinguished citizens, and not the state, decreed that, with the Dean of Westminster’s permission, men of letters might rest or be sculpturally remembered in the ancient Roman manner. In 1721 the architect James Gibbs designed a fine mural tablet in memory of Matthew Prior. In 1737 William Benson, a connoisseur of literature and the Surveyer-General of Works, paid for the setting-up of Rysbrack’s posthumous bust of John Milton (d. 1674) and, three years later, a spectacular mural cenotaph, carved by Peter Scheemakers, was erected
Page 1 and 2: THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH
Page 3: Gower, Lydgate, and Hoccleve Poetry
Page 7 and 8: justify its continued existence. Ch
Page 9 and 10: suggested, in England, at least,
Page 11 and 12: (1948, also derived from Scrutiny e
Page 13 and 14: inappropriate to a history of ‘En
Page 15 and 16: appears to have remained a more gen
Page 17 and 18: [p. 22] and community. Around these
Page 19 and 20: moves to a lengthy, and non-Scriptu
Page 21 and 22: where king, nobleman, and peasant s
Page 23 and 24: [p. 33] cathedrals at Canterbury (b
Page 25 and 26: swords, their scales gleaming like
Page 27 and 28: daughter Marie de Champagne, woman
Page 29 and 30: strides up to his missing head, pic
Page 31 and 32: daughter only to awaken in the arbo
Page 33 and 34: complaint, struck certain English o
Page 35 and 36: figure of Anima (the soul) that Pie
Page 37 and 38: embodying the spirit of chivalry, s
Page 39 and 40: ounds of marriage (‘In wyfhod I w
Page 41 and 42: Like them, he suggests a tense, shi
Page 43 and 44: virtue of his influence, responsibl
Page 45 and 46: We cannot tell precisely what impac
Page 47 and 48: [p. 73] The yettis [gates] of hell
Page 49 and 50: variously tempted by the vices and
Page 51 and 52: Malory and Caxton In October 1471 M
Page 53 and 54: it a firm sense of England as a nat
Page 55 and 56:
‘delectable’ and whose language
Page 57 and 58:
Wyatt’s love-poetry suggests an e
Page 59 and 60:
playing the role of a sophisticated
Page 61 and 62:
The Literature of the English Refor
Page 63 and 64:
lasting impact on English letters w
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In the hands of John Foxe’s frien
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dignity of the modern gentleman poe
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Although Stella is portrayed as the
Page 71 and 72:
uilt around expressions of conflict
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to the throne by providing a troop
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volumes as The Itinerary of John Le
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Queen who was the great cacigue [ch
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long account of the historical deri
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Neither history nor the image of th
Page 83 and 84:
How things still unexpectedly have
Page 85 and 86:
dreames inticed man to doe | Follie
Page 87 and 88:
And threw him gaudy toys to please
Page 89 and 90:
When I have seen such interchange o
Page 91 and 92:
dramatic explorations of the theme
Page 93 and 94:
Shakespeare’s Plays Politics and
Page 95 and 96:
y the medieval concept of rule by a
Page 97 and 98:
[p. 157] If throughout Hamlet suici
Page 99 and 100:
women begin to take place on someth
Page 101 and 102:
The internal ‘problems’ that ar
Page 103 and 104:
Since its awkward beginnings in pla
Page 105 and 106:
misanthropy to public scrutiny and
Page 107 and 108:
their own ease’ and out of vice,
Page 109 and 110:
passivity into striking action. Asp
Page 111 and 112:
In Middleton’s two grimly chillin
Page 113 and 114:
[p. 183] princes’. This prayer co
Page 115 and 116:
Bible-centred Puritanism of the Pil
Page 117 and 118:
Hercules and its message was reinfo
Page 119 and 120:
unhappy extension, on Scottish Chur
Page 121 and 122:
profound and consistent perturbatio
Page 123 and 124:
in 1970), managed to work secretly
Page 125 and 126:
[p. 204] flows from his side it is
Page 127 and 128:
Here I joyn hands, and thrust my st
Page 129 and 130:
‘brave Soule’ had committed ‘
Page 131 and 132:
actions for which we have received
Page 133 and 134:
distinguish and define the componen
Page 135 and 136:
estructuring of institutions by men
Page 137 and 138:
the two centuries that followed. Ha
Page 139 and 140:
people’. As an alternative, Milto
Page 141 and 142:
familiar with all these works, was
Page 143 and 144:
The ‘second Adam’ is here to re
Page 145 and 146:
awarded to saints, soldiers, athlet
Page 147 and 148:
undergraduate, was not transcribed
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Amid the diverse setbacks and perse
Page 151 and 152:
Susanna Hopton, a grouping less for
Page 153 and 154:
and Dryden. No clear distinction be
Page 155 and 156:
master a mangled sheet of verses. L
Page 157 and 158:
oth to purge Dryden’s verse of it
Page 159 and 160:
talent. She served at court as a ma
Page 161 and 162:
[p. 265] œuvres of the upright ‘
Page 163 and 164:
of Shakespeare’s comedies and the
Page 165 and 166:
taken as indicative of honest genia
Page 167 and 168:
vice, selfishness and pride being t
Page 169 and 170:
moves to give relief to English Cat
Page 171 and 172:
notion of ‘wit’ than they do fr
Page 173 and 174:
hostility towards ‘drudge Dryden
Page 175 and 176:
the ‘use of Riches’ and in the
Page 177 and 178:
the diversity and didacticism of it
Page 179 and 180:
are self evident in an educated obs
Page 181 and 182:
heroic opportunities for a new gene
Page 183 and 184:
their social class and education, p
Page 185 and 186:
through six London editions in its
Page 187 and 188:
upright Sir Charles, and she in tur
Page 189 and 190:
Fielding’s least loved work. In 1
Page 191 and 192:
digressions as ‘incontestably ...
Page 193 and 194:
that tempts your wandering eyes | A
Page 195 and 196:
‘Oisean’, the son of the warrio
Page 197 and 198:
[p. 327] refined, pleasure in the d
Page 199 and 200:
oth for the relative pessimism of t
Page 201 and 202:
[p. 334] felt in the work of a new
Page 203 and 204:
sensibility and his innate religios
Page 205 and 206:
[p. 341] Figaro for the English sta
Page 207 and 208:
despairer to take his place. The ef
Page 209 and 210:
In Desmond (1792) Smith had made a
Page 211 and 212:
a walk outdoors and in an evening
Page 213 and 214:
And it grew both day and night. Til
Page 215 and 216:
the poet and in a poem of his own a
Page 217 and 218:
from them. For his immediate succes
Page 219 and 220:
The Mariner’s experience is tangl
Page 221 and 222:
The poem illustrates Crabbe’s ski
Page 223 and 224:
importance of the process of learni
Page 225 and 226:
might be attempted for my own count
Page 227 and 228:
the self explorative to the polemic
Page 229 and 230:
politics he tended to concentrate o
Page 231 and 232:
of the inspiring ‘Power’ behind
Page 233 and 234:
[p. 388] Who are these coming to th
Page 235 and 236:
Wordsworth’s mind may well be ‘
Page 237 and 238:
temperate monarchy against the fore
Page 239 and 240:
High Victorian Literature 1830-1880
Page 241 and 242:
Although, to an important degree, t
Page 243 and 244:
which he lived sharpened the nature
Page 245 and 246:
some of Dickens’s most fluently i
Page 247 and 248:
sensitivities. The subtitle of Hypa
Page 249 and 250:
profession seems to me to be as ser
Page 251 and 252:
Charlotte Brontë (1816-55) admired
Page 253 and 254:
ancestral house of the title is, as
Page 255 and 256:
To their haven under the hill; But
Page 257 and 258:
the Nazarenes, stood at the pinnacl
Page 259 and 260:
The Brownings Elizabeth Barrett Bro
Page 261 and 262:
may noisily explode in its vexation
Page 263 and 264:
from the work of his rivals. The Wo
Page 265 and 266:
which explores a series of dense et
Page 267 and 268:
moralism and it attempts to establi
Page 269 and 270:
(Such as one fancies may be in a st
Page 271 and 272:
of England known from its place of
Page 273 and 274:
educators should be men in Holy Ord
Page 275 and 276:
who reads Hardy, Meredith, and Kipl
Page 277 and 278:
ultimate truth in Art and Life and
Page 279 and 280:
ultimately defies male domination a
Page 281 and 282:
Jack the Ripper might serve to sugg
Page 283 and 284:
the short stories which he began pu
Page 285 and 286:
terrible fall marked by his trial a
Page 287 and 288:
settings, like his preoccupations,
Page 289 and 290:
Synge’s more conventionally shape
Page 291 and 292:
stage before being ushered off agai
Page 293 and 294:
‘civilized’ Italians. Forster
Page 295 and 296:
The mood is not simply nostalgic. L
Page 297 and 298:
Rhymers’ Club, whose members and
Page 299 and 300:
with the American poet Robert Frost
Page 301 and 302:
of transfiguration in an intermixtu
Page 303 and 304:
wasteful devastation of the war. Th
Page 305 and 306:
epresented. A month later Labour de
Page 307 and 308:
Watson) have slumped disastrously.
Page 309 and 310:
glancing insights into the identiti
Page 311 and 312:
unapproachable, demanding, and ‘d
Page 313 and 314:
ases for social relationships. This
Page 315 and 316:
‘Verbotens’ and about despising
Page 317 and 318:
medieval spiritual and a poetic aut
Page 319 and 320:
The most striking effects in The Wa
Page 321 and 322:
autobiography, that the Façade poe
Page 323 and 324:
Stephen Dedalus’s admiration for
Page 325 and 326:
itself ambiguous. Gunmen on both si
Page 327 and 328:
The military career of David Jones
Page 329 and 330:
only takes them as far as Liverpool
Page 331 and 332:
exposes the surface values and the
Page 333 and 334:
149 writers out of which 127 procla
Page 335 and 336:
dad’s on the dole: | Two shilling
Page 337 and 338:
one of the most sharply focused poe
Page 339 and 340:
mair snaw!’ [p. 567] The English
Page 341 and 342:
the vanguard and the undoing of the
Page 343 and 344:
Although in the intriguingly entitl
Page 345 and 346:
against the abomination of desolati
Page 347 and 348:
‘Success’, he added with a char
Page 349 and 350:
days of the imperial dream became n
Page 351 and 352:
determinedly breaks social rules by
Page 353 and 354:
in his appreciation of dead-pan hum
Page 355 and 356:
his continuing concern with moral a
Page 357 and 358:
‘our tendency to produce works wh
Page 359 and 360:
wartime planning and the Welfare St
Page 361 and 362:
poems with the Elizabethan title
Page 363 and 364:
stalwart above hacked marl. The cla
Page 365 and 366:
establishment, but, despite the fac
Page 367 and 368:
Female Eunuch (1970, reissued in pa
Page 369 and 370:
intricately translated into an omni
Page 371 and 372:
(1968), and The Island of the Might
Page 373 and 374:
Mrs Prentice finds her husband hold
Page 375 and 376:
given the generally imperturbable q
Page 377 and 378:
drama, it ought to be conceded that
Page 379 and 380:
extensive and clever play with idea
Page 381 and 382:
handcuffed in a very different way.
Page 383 and 384:
EVENTS LITERARY WORKS 1399 Depositi
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EVENTS LITERARY WORKS 1603 Death of
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EVENTS LITERARY WORKS 1733 1738 173
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EVENTS LITERARY WORKS Magazine 1818
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EVENTS LITERARY WORKS 1861 Victor E
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EVENTS LITERARY WORKS 1917 Third Ba
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EVENTS LITERARY WORKS Lessing, The
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