A Short History of British and American Literature: Part 1

 

Every work of literature has a generic context. In addition, every work has a historical context: that is, it belongs to a particular historical period. Writers at a given time tend to have similar concerns and, often, similar values. An awareness of the historical context of a writer, then, should tell you what you can expect to encounter in, for example , an eighteenth-century poet as opposed to a romantic poet. This again provides a starting point for looking at a work. What follows here, therefore, is a simple historical survey of literature in English.

 

English literature begins with Old English or Anglo Saxon literature, which mainly belongs to the period before the Norman Conquest in 1066. The language in which it is written is more like German than modern English. The greatest single poem is Beowulf (probably written around 700), which can be described as either an epic or tragic poem. A king's hall is threatened by a monster called Grendel. Beowulf comes to help, and kills the monster and its mother. Fifty years later a dragon attacks his own kingdom: Beowulf kills it, but dies himself. One way of making sense of this story is to use a simple critical idea that we can apply to a great many literary works: we can say that what the poem is about is Beowulf's attempt to establish and maintain order in a threatening and disordered world. In other words we can look at the poem in terms of its larger meaning and pattern, seeing how it makes use of a tension between the ideas of order and disorder. The same pattern is in evidence in other works from this period, such as the prose Chronicles, Christian poems such as 'The Dream of the Rood ', and 'The Battle of Maldon'. This, like Beowulf, is a narrative poem, the major mode in Old English literature, and similarly deals with the desire for order in a savage and unruly world.

 

Middle English or medieval literature belongs to the period 1066 to about 1550 (dates for literary periods can only ever be approximate). The outstanding writer is Chaucer. In this period there are narrative poems (such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, fourteenth century; and Chaucer's works, including The Canterbury Tales, around 1400), lyric poetry, and drama (the miracle and morality plays). Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the literature of this period is that it is markedly Christian. It is also often very sophisticated. A familiar pattern is the gap between the Christian ideal and the reality of life in this imperfect world. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales can be looked at in this way: the ideal is a devout band of pilgrims on their way to Canterbury, all acknowledging the greatness and authority of God, but the reality is a diverse group of characters, with numerous flaws in their personalities, who tell stories that reveal what an untidy and problematic world we live in . An ideal of religious order is thus set against the reality of everyday disorder. It is important to recognise, however, that Chaucer is a comic poet: he is amused by man's folly, but not troubled by it. Confident that God's order prevails, he can enjoy the imperfections of fallen man, weighing them against the ideals of Christianity.

 

The notion of an ideal Christian existence is still in evidence after the medieval period, for example in Spenser's Faerie Queene (1596), which presents Christian knights on journeys through life encountering all manner of temptations. This essentially religious view of experience starts to disappear, however, during the period that follows medieval literature. This is the period around the beginning of the seventeenth century and is one of the richest eras in English literature: it is the time of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Donne, Jonson and many other outstanding poets and dramatists. This is often referred to as the Renaissance period in English literature (approximate dates are 1550 to 1660), but one can also talk about modern literature starting at this time : from about 1600 onwards the language resembles the language we use today, and this in itself indicates that the works are referring to a world which we can identify with in some way.

 

The literature of the Renaissance is so rich because society was changing in such a fundamental way: the world was becoming much more complex, with the whole economic and social fabric of social changing. A great gap opens up between those religious ideals which had previously dominated man's thinking and a new sort of dynamic society which no longer found it possible to focus on other-worldly concerns in the same way as had been the case in the past. What we thus find in Renaissance literature is a tension between a traditional order and disruption of this order. It is this tension which is at the heart of such Shakespeare plays as Hamlet (1600) and King Lear (1605): the old order is dislodged and displaced by the new self-interest of a new sort of worldly-wise man. The central historical event in the seventeenth century, the Civil War of 1642-51, embodies a similar conflict between old and new, between the king's traditional status and authority and new forces who wish to wrest power from the king. This tension between an old order and disorder is also evident in Milton's choice of theme for his epic poem Paradise Lost (1667): the rebellion of Adam and Eve against God. Deceived by Satan they are expelled from Eden with its ideal order and have to confront the reality of life in our disordered world. Like medieval writers, seventeenth-century writers still recognize God as the only true source of order, even though so much of their attention is on how man is distracted and tempted by worldly ambition and secular concerns. Towards the end of the century, however, the focus of literature becomes almost entirely secular. Explicitly religious poetry all but disappears and is replaced by social poetry, for example the poetry of Dryden and Pope. The period from about 1660 to 1790 is in addition characterize by the rise of the novel, a genre which concentrates on social life, in particular on the lives of individuals in a complex society. What the poets and novelists (such as Richardson and Fielding) of the eighteenth century are interested in is in seeing whether harmony and balance can be created within society. The tension that is in evidence in their works, however, is between this notion of the desirability of social order and their awareness of the inevitability of social disorder. Here again it proves useful to look at the literature of a period in terms of a pattern of the tension between order and disorder, seeing how the writers deal with the gap between how things could or should be in society and how they really are. Social order, however, is not a very inspiring ideal, although it continues to be at the heart of many subsequent works of literature, particularly at the heart of realistic novels, such as those of Jane Austen, who was writing around 1800, and George Eliot, whose novels were published between 1859 and 1876. The period in which Austen writes is known as the romantic period, though Austen herself seems a slightly anomalous figure in the literature of this time (roughly 1790 to 1830), when there was a reaction against the social philosophy of eighteenth-century literature.

 

The romantic period is one of the great ages of English poetry, with Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron and Shelley all publishing around 1800. Unlike earlier writers, the romantics do not turn to God as the source of order, nor is order sought in society: what the romantics seek is to find a harmony in life which is at one with a pattern that can be found in the natural world. At the same time there is a great stress on the imagination: the source of order becomes internal, as in the work of Wordsworth, where there is a stress on how his mind interacts with what he sees in the natural world, so that some pattern and harmony is created in life. Wordsworth is aware, however, that this vision is a rare thing, that it might be illusory, and that life for the most part is disordered, puzzling and fragmented.