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en.wikipedia.org Gallery of famous 17th-century Puritan theologians: Thomas Gouge, William Bridge, Thomas Manton, John Flavel, Richard Sibbes, Stephen Charnock, William Bates, John Owen, John Howe, Richard Baxter. The Puritans were a significant grouping of English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries, including, but not limited to, English Calvinists. Puritanism in this sense was founded by some Marian exiles from the clergy shortly after the accession of Elizabeth I of England in 1558, as an activist movement within the Church of England. The designation “Puritan” is often incorrectly used, notably based on the assumption that hedonism and puritanism are antonyms. Historically, the word was used pejoratively to characterize the Protestant group as extremists similar to the Cathari of France, and according to Thomas Fuller in his Church History dated back to 1564, Archbishop Matthew Parker of that time used it and “precisian” with the sense of modern “stickler”. Puritans were blocked from changing the established church from within, and severely restricted in England by laws controlling the practice of religion, but their views were taken by the emigration of congregations to the Netherlands and later New England, and by evangelical clergy to Ireland and later into Wales, and were spread into lay society by preaching and parts of the educational system, particularly certain colleges of the University of Cambridge. They took on distinctive views on clerical dress and in opposition to the episcopal system, particularly after the 1619 conclusions of the Synod of Dort were resisted by the English bishops. They largely adopted Sabbatarian views in the 17th century, and were influenced by millennialism. In alliance with the growing commercial world, the parliamentary opposition to the royal prerogative, and in the late 1630s with the Scottish Presbyterians with whom they had much in common, the Puritans became a major political force in England and came to power as a result of the First English Civil War (1642–46). After the English Restoration of 1660 and the 1662 Uniformity Act, almost all Puritan clergy left the Church of England, some becoming nonconformist ministers, and the nature of the movement in England changed radically, though it retained its character for much longer in New England. Puritans by definition felt that the English Reformation had not gone far enough, and that the Church of England was tolerant of practices which they associated with the Catholic Church. They formed into and identified with various religious groups advocating greater “purity” of worship and doctrine, as well as personal and group piety. Puritans adopted a Reformed theology and in that sense were Calvinists (as many of their earlier opponents were, too), but also took note of radical views critical of Zwingli in Zurich and Calvin in Geneva. In church polity, some advocated for separation from all other Christians, in favor of autonomous gathered churches. These separatist and independent strands of Puritanism became prominent in the 1640s, when the supporters of a presbyterian polity in the Westminster Assembly were unable to forge a new English national church. Background

Main article: History of the Puritans The term “Puritan” in the sense of this article was not coined until the 1560s, when it appears as a term of abuse for those who found the Elizabethan Religious Settlement of 1559 inadequate. Puritanism has a historical importance over a period of a century (followed by 50 years of development in New England), and general views must contend with the way it changed character and emphasis almost decade by decade over that time. Elizabethan Puritanism

For more details on this topic, see History of the Puritans under Elizabeth I. During the reign of Elizabeth I, the Puritans appeared as a reforming movement. Politically, they attempted unsuccessfully to have Parliament pass legislation to replace episcopal polity with a congregational form of church governance, and to alter the Book of Common Prayer. By the end of Elizabeth’s reign, the Puritans constituted a self-defined group within the Church of England who regarded themselves as the godly; they held out little hope for those who remained attached to “popish superstitions” and worldliness. Puritanism was fundamentally anti-Roman Catholic: Puritans felt that the Church of England was still too close to Roman Catholicism and needed to be reformed further. Many of the rituals preserved by the Church of England were not only considered to be objectionable, but were believed by some nonconformists to put one’s soul in peril. Three major educational foundations of the 1580s and 1590s — Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge and Trinity College, Dublin — were strongly Calvinist in tone and became Puritan by reputation. Emmanuel under Laurence Chaderton had a head who had earlier at Christ’s College, Cambridge aimed at a Puritan training for the ministry, while still conforming to the Church of England. The Dublin college came close to being the outstanding Puritan seminary, taking Emmanuel as its model but reputedly becoming more “godly” yet. Puritanism

For more details on this topic, see History of the Puritans under James I. The accession of James I brought the Millenary Petition, a Puritan manifesto of 1603 for reform of the English church, but James wanted a new religious settlement along different lines. He called the Hampton Court Conference in 1604, and heard the views of four prominent Puritan leaders including Chaderton there, but largely sided with his bishops. Well informed by his education and Scottish upbringing on theological matters, he dealt shortly with the peevish legacy of Elizabethan Puritanism, and tried to pursue an eirenic religious policy in which he was arbiter. Many of his episcopal appointments were Calvinists, notably James Montague who was an influential courtier. Puritans still opposed much of the Catholic summation in the Church of England, notably the Book of Common Prayer, but also the use of non-secular vestments (cap and gown) during services, the sign of the Cross in baptism, and kneeling to receive Holy Communion. Although the Puritan movement was subjected to repression by some of the bishops under both Elizabeth and James, other bishops were more tolerant, and in many places, individual ministers were able to omit disliked portions of the Book of Common Prayer. The Puritan movement of Jacobean times became distinctive by adaptation and compromise, with the emergence of “semi-separatism”, “moderate puritanism”, the writings of William Bradshaw who adopted the term “Puritan” as self-identification, and the beginnings of congregationalism. Most Puritans of this period were non-separating and remained within the Church of England, and Separatists who left the Church of England altogether were numerically much fewer. Conflict within the Church of England under Charles I

For more details on this topic, see History of the Puritans under Charles I. James I was succeeded by his son Charles I of England in 1625. In the year before becoming King, he married Henrietta-Marie de Bourbon of France, a Roman Catholic daughter of the convert Henry IV of France, who refused to attend the coronation of her husband in a non-Catholic cathedral. She had no tolerance for Puritans. At the same time, William Laud, Bishop of London, was becoming increasingly powerful as an advisor to Charles. Laud viewed Puritans as a schismatic threat to orthodoxy in the church. With the Queen and Laud among his closest advisors, Charles pursued policies to eliminate the religious distinctiveness and “excesses” of Puritans. Laud became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633, and

moved the Church of England away from Puritanism, rigorously enforcing the law against ministers who deviated from the Book of Common Prayer or who refused to read the Book of Sports after its re-issue in 1633, a shibboleth for the Sabbatarian views spread by Nicholas Bownde and Nicholas Byfield. Charles relied largely on the Star Chamber and Court of High Commission to implement his policies, courts under the control of the King, not the Parliament, capable of convicting and imprisoning Puritans under prerogative. He adapted them as instruments of suppression, following the juristic methods of Elizabeth I in dealing in the 1590s with the supporters of Thomas Cartwright. The Puritan movement in England then allied itself with the cause of “England’s ancient liberties”; the unpopularity of Laud was a major factor leading to the English Civil War, during which Puritans formed the backbone of the parliamentarian forces. Laud was arrested in 1641 and executed in 1645, after a lengthy trial in which a large mass of evidence was brought, tending to represent him as obstructive of the “godly” and amounting to the whole, detailed Puritan case against the royal church policy of the preceding decade. Fragmentation and political failure

For more details on this topic, see History of the Puritans from 1649. The Westminster Assembly in a Victorian history painting by John Rogers Herbert. The Puritan movement in England was riven over decades by emigration and inconsistent interpretations of Scripture, and some political differences that then surfaced. The Westminster Assembly (an assembly of clergy of the Church of England) was called in 1643. Doctrinally, the Assembly was able to agree to the Westminster Confession of Faith, a consistent Reformed theological position. While its content was orthodox, many Puritans would have rejected portions of it. The Directory of Public Worship was made official in 1645, and the larger framework now called the Westminster Standards was adopted for the Church of England (reversed in 1660).[clarification needed][citation needed]

The Westminster Divines were, on the other hand, divided over questions of church polity, and split into factions supporting a reformed episcopacy, presbyterianism, congregationalism, and Erastianism. Although the membership of the Assembly was heavily weighted towards the presbyterians, Oliver Cromwell was a Congregationalist separatist who imposed his views. The Church of England of the Interregnum was run on presbyterian lines, but never became a national presbyterian church such as existed in Scotland, and England was not the theocratic state which leading Puritans had called for as “godly rule”. Great Ejection and Dissenters

For more details on this topic, see History of the Puritans from 1649. At the time of the English Restoration (1660), the Savoy Conference was called to determine a new religious settlement for England and Wales. With only minor changes, the Church of England was restored to its pre-Civil War constitution under the Act of Uniformity 1662, and the Puritans found themselves sidelined. A traditional estimate of the historian Calamy is that around 2,400 Puritan clergy left the Church, in the “Great Ejection” of 1662. At this point, the term Dissenter came to include “Puritan”, but more accurately describes those (clergy or lay) who “dissented” from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.[citation needed]

Dividing themselves from all Christians in the Church of England, the Dissenters established their own separatist congregations in the 1660s and 1670s; an estimated 1,800 of the ejected clergy continued in some fashion as ministers of religion (according to Richard Baxter). The government initially attempted to suppress these schismatic organizations by the Clarendon Code. There followed a

period in which schemes of “comprehension” were proposed, under which presbyterians could be brought back into the Church of England; nothing resulted from them. The Whigs, opposing the court religious policies, argued that the Dissenters should be allowed to worship separately from the established Church, and this position ultimately prevailed when the Toleration Act was passed in the wake of the Glorious Revolution (1689). This permitted the licensing of Dissenting ministers and the building of chapels. The term Nonconformist generally replaced the term “Dissenter” from the middle of the eighteenth century. Terminology and scholarly debates

Puritans who felt that the Reformation of the Church of England was not to their satisfaction but who remained within the Church of England advocating further reforms are known as non-separating Puritans. This group differed among themselves about how much further reformation was necessary. Those who felt that the Church of England was so corrupt that true Christians should separate from it altogether are known as separating Puritans or simply as Separatists. Especially after the English Restoration of 1660, separating Puritans were called Dissenters. The term “puritan” cannot strictly be used to describe any new religious group after the 17th century. The practitioners knew themselves as members of particular churches or movements, and not by a single term. The word “Puritan” is applied unevenly to a number of Protestant churches (and religious groups within the Anglican Church) from the later 16th century onwards, and Puritans did not originally use the term for themselves, considering that it was a term of abuse that first surfaced in the 1560s. “Precisemen” and “Precisians” were other early antagonistic terms for Puritans who preferred to call themselves “the godly.” The word “Puritan” thus always referred to a type of religious belief, rather than a particular religious sect, and the attribution has been determined, generally, by a polemical context. Patrick Collinson has an extreme view that “Puritanism had no content beyond what was attributed to it by its opponents.” The literature on Puritans, particularly biographical literature on individual Puritan ministers, became large already in the 17th century, and indeed the interests of Puritans in the narratives of early life and conversions made the recording of the internal lives important to them. The historical literature on Puritans is, however quite problematic and subject to controversies of interpretation. The early writings are those of the defeated, excluded and victims. The great interest of authors of the 19th century in Puritan figures was routinely accused in the 20th century of consisting of anachronism and the reading back of contemporary concerns. Peter Gay writes of the Puritans’ standard reputation for “dour prudery” as a “misreading that went unquestioned in the nineteenth century”, commenting how unpuritanical they were in favour of married sexuality, and in opposition to the Catholic view of virginity, citing Edward Taylor and John Cotton. Much of the religious history of the Puritans is written with a degree of anachronism or denominational bias, also. The analysis of “mainstream Puritanism” in terms of the evolution from it of separatist and antinomian groups that did not flourish, and others that continue to this day such as Baptists and Quakers, can suffer in this way, as well as risking an incoherent view of where the burden of belief lay for the “godly”. The national context (England and Wales, plus the kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland) frames the definition of Puritans, but was not a self-identification for those Protestants who saw the progress of the Thirty Years’ War from 1620 as directly bearing on their denomination, and as a continuation of the religious wars of the previous century, carried on by the English Civil Wars. Christopher Hill, who has contributed Marxist analyses of Puritan concerns that are more respected than accepted, writes of the 1630s, old church lands, and the accusations that Laud was a crypto-Catholic: Puritans were politically important in England, but it is debated whether the movement was in

any way a party with policies and leaders before the early 1640s; and while Puritanism in New England was important culturally for a group of colonial pioneers in America, there have been many studies trying to pin down exactly what the identifiable cultural component was. Fundamentally, historians remain dissatisfied with the grouping as “Puritan” as a working concept for historical explanation. The conception of a Protestant work ethic, identified more closely with Calvinist or Puritan principles, has been criticised at its root, mainly as a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy aligning economic success with a narrow religious scheme. Beliefs

There were substantial works of theology written by Puritans, such as the Medulla Theologiae of William Ames, but there is no theology that is distinctive of Puritans. “Puritan theology” makes sense only as certain parts of Reformed theology, i.e. the legacy in theological terms of Calvinism, as it was expounded by Puritan preachers (often known as lecturers), and applied in the lives of Puritans. Core beliefs

In the relation of churches to civil power, Puritans believed that secular governors are accountable to God to protect and reward virtue, including “true religion”, and to punish wrongdoers. They opposed the supremacy of the monarch in the church (Erastianism), and argued that the only head of the Church in heaven or earth is Christ. The idea of personal Biblical interpretation, while central to Puritan beliefs, was shared with most Protestants in general. Puritans sought both individual and corporate conformity to the teaching of the Bible, with moral purity pursued both down to the smallest detail as well as ecclesiastical purity to the highest level. They believed that man existed for the glory of God; that his first concern in life was to do God’s will and so to receive future happiness.[15]

Like some of Reformed churches on the European continent, Puritan reforms were typified by a minimum of ritual and decoration and by an unambiguous emphasis on preaching. Calvinists generally believed that the worship in the church ought to be strictly regulated by what is commanded in the Bible (the regulative principle of worship), and condemned as idolatry many current practices, regardless of antiquity or widespread adoption among Christians, against opponents who defended tradition. Simplicity in worship led to the exclusion of pre-Reformation vestments, images, candles, etc. Puritans did not celebrate traditional holidays which they believed to be in violation of the regulative principles. Diversity

Various strands of Calvinist thought of the 17th century were taken up by different parts of the Puritan movement, and in particular Amyraldism was adopted by some influential figures (John Davenant, Samuel Ward, and to some extent Richard Baxter). In the same way, there is no theory of church polity that is uniquely Puritan, and views differed beyond opposition to Erastianism (state control), though even that had its small group of supporters in the Westminster Assembly. Some approved of the existing church hierarchy with bishops, but others sought to reform the Episcopal churches on the Presbyterian model. Some separatist Puritans were Presbyterian, but most were early Congregationalists. The separating Congregationalists believed the Divine Right of Kings was heresy; but on the other hand there were many royalist Presbyterians, in terms of allegiance in the political struggle. Migration also brought out differences. It brought together Puritan communities with their own regional customs and beliefs. As soon as there were New World Puritans, their views on church governance diverged from those remaining in the British Isles, who faced different issues.[16]

Demonology

Puritans believed in demonic forces, as did almost all Christians of this period. Puritan pastors undertook exorcisms for demonic possession in some high-profile cases, and believed in some allegations of witchcraft. The exorcist John Darrell was supported by Arthur Hildersham in the case of Thomas Darling;[17] Samuel Harsnett , a sceptic on witchcraft and possession, attacked Darrell. But Harsnett was in the minority, and many clergy, not only Puritans, took the opposite viewpoint.[18] The possession case of Richard Dugdale was taken up by the ejected nonconformist Thomas Jollie, and other local ministers, in 1689. The context of the Salem witch trials of 1692-3 shows the intricacy of trying to place “Puritan” beliefs as distinctive. The publication of Saducismus Triumphatus, an anti-sceptical tract that has been implicated in the moral panic at Salem, involved Joseph Glanvill (a latitudinarian), Henry More (a Cambridge Platonist) as editor, and Anthony Horneck, an evangelical German Anglican, as translator of a pamphlet about a Swedish witch hunt; and none of these was a Puritan. Glanvill and More had been vehemently opposed in the 1670s by the sceptic John Webster, an Independent and sometime chaplain to the Parliamentary forces. Millennialism

Puritan millennialism has been placed in the broader context of European Reformed views on the millennium and interpretation of Biblical prophecy, for which representative figures of the period were Johannes Piscator, Thomas Brightman, Joseph Mede, Johannes Heinrich Alsted, and John Amos Comenius.[19] Both Brightman and Mede were Puritan by conviction, and so are identified by their biographers, though neither clashed with the church authorities. David Brady describes a “lull before the storm” in which, in the early 17th century, “reasonably restrained and systematic” Protestant exegesis of the Book of Revelation was seen with Brightman, Mede and Hugh Broughton; after which “apocalyptic literature became too easily debased” as it became more populist, less scholarly.[20] Within the church, William Lamont argues, the Elizabethan millennial views of John Foxe became sidelined, with Puritans adopting instead the “centrifugal” views of Brightman, while the Laudians replaced the “centripetal” attitude of Foxe to the ‘Christian Emperor’ by the national and episcopal Church closer to home, with its royal head, as leading the Protestant world iure divino (by divine right).[21] Viggo Norskov Olsen writes[22] that Mede “broke fully away from the Augustinian-Foxian tradition, and is the link between Brightman and the premillennialism of the seventeenth century”. The dam then broke in 1641 when the traditional retrospective reverence for Thomas Cranmer and other martyred bishops in the Acts and Monuments was displaced by forward-looking attitudes to prophecy, among radical Puritans.[21]

Cultural consequences

For more details on this topic, see New England Puritan culture and recreation. Some strong religious views common to Puritans had direct impacts on culture. The opposition to acting as public performance, typefied by William Prynne’s Histriomastix, was not a concern with drama as a form. John Milton wrote Samson Agonistes as verse drama, and indeed had at an early stage contemplated writing Paradise Lost in that form. N. H. Keeble writes: But the sexualisation of Restoration theatre was attacked as strongly as ever, by Thomas Gouge, as Keeble points out.[23] Puritans eliminated the use of musical instruments in their religious services, for theological and practical reasons. Church organs were commonly damaged or destroyed in the Civil War period, for example an axe being taken to the organ of Worcester Cathedral in 1642.[24]

Education for the masses was so they could read the Bible for themselves. Educated pastors

could read the Bible in its original languages of Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic, as well as church tradition and scholarly works, which were most commonly written in Latin. Most of the leading Puritan divines studied at the University of Oxford or the University of Cambridge before seeking ordination. Diversions for the educated included discussing the Bible and its practical applications as well as reading the classics such as Cicero, Virgil, and Ovid. They also encouraged the composition of poetry that was of a religious nature, though they eschewed religious-erotic poetry except for the Song of Solomon. This they considered magnificent poetry, without error, regulative for their sexual pleasure, and, especially, as an allegory of Christ and the Church. Social consequences and family life

The Snake in the Grass or Satan Transform’d to an Angel of Light, title page, ca. 1660 Puritan culture emphasized the need for self-examination and the strict accounting for one’s feelings as well as one’s deeds. This was the centre of evangelical experience, which women in turn placed at the heart of their work to sustain family life. The words of the Bible, as they interpreted them, were the origin of many Puritan cultural ideals, especially regarding the roles of men and women in the community. While both sexes carried the stain of original sin, for a girl, original sin suggested more than the roster of Puritan character flaws. Eve’s corruption, in Puritan eyes, extended to all women, and justified marginalizing them within churches’ hierarchical structures[citation needed] . An example is the different ways that men and women were made to express their conversion experiences. For full membership, the Puritan church insisted not only that its congregants lead godly lives and exhibit a clear understanding of the main tenets of their Christian faith, but they also must demonstrate that they had experienced true evidence of the workings of God’s grace in their souls. Only those who gave a convincing account of such a conversion could be admitted to full church membership. While women were typically not permitted to speak in church, they were allowed to engage in religious discussions outside it, and they could narrate their conversions.[citation needed]

The English Puritan William Gouge wrote: “…a familie is a little Church, and a little common-wealth, at least a lively representation thereof, whereby triall may be made of such as are fit for any place of authoritie, or of subjection in Church or commonwealth. Or rather it is as a schoole wherein the first principles and grounds of government and subjection are learned: whereby men are fitted to greater matters in Church or common-wealth.” Order in the family, then, fundamentally structured Puritan belief. The essence of social order lay in the authority of husband over wife, parents over children, and masters over servants in the family. John White wrote in his Genesis commentary of a wife as “but a helper”, a view called “typically puritan” by Philip C. Almond.[25]

Ideas of proper order both sharply defined and confined a woman’s authority. Indeed, God’s word often prescribed important roles of authority for women; the Complete Body of Divinity stated that “…as to Servants, the Metaphorical and Synecdochial usage of the words Father and Mother, heretofore observed, implys it; for tho’ the Husband be the Head of the Wife, yet she is an Head of the Family.”[citation needed]. Samuel Sewall, a magistrate, advised his son’s servant that “he could not obey his Master without obedience to his Mistress; and vice versa.” Authority and obedience characterized the relationship between Puritan parents and their children. Proper love meant proper discipline;, the family was the basic unit of supervision. A breakdown in family rule indicated a disregard of God’s order. “Fathers and mothers have ‘disordered and disobedient children,’” said the Puritan Richard Greenham, “because they have been disobedient children to the Lord and disordered to their parents when they were young.” Because the duty of early childcare fell almost exclusively on women, a woman’s salvation necessarily depended upon the

observable goodness of her child.[citation needed] Puritans further connected the discipline of a child to later readiness for conversion. Accordingly, parents attempted to check their affectionate feelings toward a disobedient child, at least after the child was about two years old, in order to break his or her will[citation

needed] . This suspicious regard of “fondness” and heavy emphasis on obedience placed pressures on the Puritan mother. While Puritans expected mothers to care for their young children tenderly, a mother who doted could be accused of failing to keep God present. A father’s more distant governance should check the mother’s tenderness once a male child reached the age of 6 or 7 so that he could bring the child to God’s authority[citation needed] . New England Puritans

Particularly in the years after 1630, Puritans left for New England (see Migration to New England (1620–1640)), supporting the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and other settlements. The large-scale Puritan emigration to New England then ceased, by 1641, with around 21,000 having moved across the Atlantic. This English-speaking population in America did not all consist of colonists, since many returned[clarification needed], but produced more than 16 million descendants.[26][27] This so-called “Great Migration” is not so named because of sheer numbers, which were much less than the number of English citizens who emigrated to Virginia and the Caribbean during this time.[28] The rapid growth of the New England colonies (~700,000 by 1790) was almost entirely due to the high birth rate and lower death rate per year. Cotton Mather, influential New England Puritan minister, portrait by Peter Pelham. Education

New England differed from its mother country, where nothing in English statute required schoolmasters or the literacy of children. With the possible exception of Scotland, the Puritan model of education in New England was unique. John Winthrop in 1630 had claimed that the society they would form in New England would be “as a city upon a hill;”[29] and the colony leaders would educate all. These were men of letters, had attended Oxford or Cambridge, and communicated with intellectuals all over Europe; and in 1636 they founded the school that shortly became Harvard College. Besides the Bible, children needed to read in order to “understand…the capital laws of this country,” as the Massachusetts code declared, order being of the utmost importance, and children not taught to read would grow “barbarous” (the 1648 amendment to the Massachusetts law and the 1650 Connecticut code, both used the word “barbarisme”). By the 1670s, all New England colonies (excepting Rhode Island) had passed legislation that mandated literacy for children. In 1647, Massachusetts passed a law that required towns to hire a schoolmaster to teach writing. Forms of schooling ranged from dame schools to “Latin” schools for boys already literate in English and ready to master preparatory grammar for Latin, Hebrew, and Greek. Reading schools would often be the single source of education for girls, whereas boys would go to the town grammar schools. Indeed, gender largely determined educational practices: women introduced all children to reading, and men taught boys in higher pursuits. Since girls could play no role in the ministry, and since grammar schools were designed to “instruct youth so far as they may be fited for the university,” Latin grammar schools did not accept girls (nor did Harvard). Most evidence suggests that girls could not attend the less ambitious town schools, the lower-tier writing-reading schools mandated for townships of over fifty families. Restrictions and pleasures

Window, Old Ship Church, Puritan meetinghouse, Hingham, Massachusetts In modern usage, the

word puritan is often used to describe someone who is strict in matters of sexual morality, disapproves of recreation, and wishes to impose these beliefs on others. This popular image is more accurate as a description of Puritans in colonial America, who were among the most radical Puritans and whose social experiment took the form of a theocracy. The first Puritans of New England certainly disapproved of Christmas celebrations, as did some other Protestant churches of the time. Celebration was outlawed in Boston from 1659. The ban was revoked in 1681 by the English-appointed governor Sir Edmund Andros, who also revoked a Puritan ban on festivities on Saturday nights. Nevertheless, it was not until the mid-19th century that celebrating Christmas became fashionable in the Boston region.[30] Likewise the colonies banned many secular entertainments, such as games of chance, maypoles, and drama, on moral grounds. They were not, however, opposed to drinking alcohol in moderation.[31] Early New England laws banning the sale of alcohol to Native Americans were criticized because it was “not fit to deprive Indians of any lawfull comfort aloweth to all men by the use of wine.” Laws banned the practice of individuals toasting each other, with the explanation that it led to wasting God’s gift of beer and wine, as well as being carnal. Bounds were not set on enjoying sexuality within the bounds of marriage, as a gift from God.[32] In fact, spouses (albeit, in practice, mainly females) were disciplined if they did not perform their sexual marital duties, in accordance with 1 Corinthians 7 and other biblical passages. Puritans publicly punished drunkenness and sexual relations outside marriage. Opposition to Quakerism

The Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were the most active of the New England persecutors of Quakers, and the persecuting spirit was shared by the Plymouth Colony and the colonies along the Connecticut river.[33] In 1660, one of the most notable victims of the religious intolerance was English Quaker Mary Dyer who was hanged in Boston, Massachusetts for repeatedly defying a Puritan law banning Quakers from the colony.[33] She was one of the four executed Quakers known as the Boston martyrs. In 1661 King Charles II explicitly forbade Massachusetts from executing anyone for professing Quakerism.[34] In 1684 England revoked the Massachusetts charter, sent over a royal governor to enforce English laws in 1686, and in 1689 passed a broad Toleration act.[34]

The Puritan spirit in the United States

Late 19th century view, the Puritan stereotype in a sculpture by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Alexis de Tocqueville suggested in Democracy in America that Puritanism was the very thing

that provided a firm foundation for American democracy. As Sheldon Wolin puts it, “Tocqueville was aware of the harshness and bigotry of the early colonists”; but on the other hand he saw them as “archaic survivals, not only in their piety and discipline but in their democratic practices”.[35] The theme of a religious basis of economic discipline is echoed in sociologist Max Weber’s work, but both de Tocqueville and Weber argued that this discipline was not a force of economic determinism, but one factor among many that should be considered when evaluating the relative economic success of the Puritans. See also

Church covenant Independents List of Puritans Plymouth Rock Salem witch trials Separatists

Work ethic Notes

^ q:H. L. Mencken, “Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy”, from A Book of Burlesques (1916), being a classic rendering. ^ “Puritanism (Lat. purit… - Online Information article about Puritanism (Lat. purit”. Encyclopedia.jrank.org. http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/PRE_PYR/PURITANISM_Lat_puritas_purity_.html. Retrieved 21 August 2010.  ^ “Emmanuel College — About Emmanuel — Famous Members”. Emma.cam.ac.uk. http://www.emma.cam.ac.uk/about/famous/index.cfm?id=2. Retrieved 21 August 2010.  ^ William Roger Louis, Andrew Porter, Alaine M. Low, The Oxford history of the British Empire: The nineteenth century (Volume 3) (1999), p. 6. ^ Patrick Collinson, Archbishop Grindal, 1519-1583: the struggle for a reformed Church (1979), p. 290 states that Sidney Sussex, as well as Emmanuel, was “as much a Puritan seminary as a college”, but this is contested. ^ Neil (1844), p. 246 ^ John Spurr, English Puritanism, 1603-1689 (1998), Chapter 5. ^ Lancelotte (1858), p. 684 ^ Gardiner (1895), pp. 10,11 ^ William M. Lamont, Godly Rule: Politics and Religion 1603-60 (1969). ^ a b  ”Calamy, Edmund (1671-1732)”. Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.  ^ Spurr (1998), p. 16; cites and quotes Patrick Collinson (1989). The Puritan Character, p. 8. ^ Peter Gay, The Tender Passion (1986), p. 49. ^ Christopher Hill, Economic Problems of the Church (1971), p. 337. ^ Morison, Samuel Eliot (1972). The Oxford History of the American People. New York City: Mentor. p. 102. ISBN 0-451-62600-1.  ^ Charlotte Gordon, Mistress Bradstreet (2005), p. 86 and p. 225. ^ Francis J. Bremer, Tom Webster, Puritans and Puritanism in Europe and America: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia (2006), p. 584. ^  ”Scott, Reginald”. Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.  ^ Howard Hotson, Paradise Postponed: Johann Heinrich Alsted and the Birth of Calvinist Millenarianism (2001), p. 173. ^ David Brady, The Contribution of British Writers Between 1560 and 1830 to the Interpretation of Revelation 13.16-18 (1983), p. 58. ^ a b William M. Lamont, Godly Rule: Politics and Religion 1603-60 (1969), p. 25, 36, 59, 67, 78. ^ Viggo Norskov Olsen, John Foxe and the Elizabethan Church (1973), p. 84. ^ N. H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England (1987), p. 153. ^ “Worcester Cathedral welcomes you to their Website”. Worcestercathedral.co.uk. 20 February 2010. http://www.worcestercathedral.co.uk/index.php?pr=The_Civil_War. Retrieved 21 August 2010.  ^ Philip C. Almond, Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought (1999), p. 149. ^ David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989) ISBN 0-19-

506905-6 ^ “The Puritans: A Sourcebook of Their Writings”. Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson. ^ “Leaving England: The Social Background of Indentured Servants in the Seventeenth Century”, The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. ^ Collins (1999), pp. 63-65. Quoting an excerpt from John Winthrop’s sermon. ^ When Christmas Was Banned - The early colonies and Christmas ^ West (2003) pp. 68ff ^ Lewis (1969), pp. 116–117. “On many questions and specially in view of the marriage bed, the Puritans were the indulgent party, … they were much more Chestertonian than their adversaries [the Roman Catholics]. The idea that a Puritan was a repressed and repressive person would have astonished Sir Thomas More and Luther about equally.” ^ a b Rogers, Horatio, 2009. Mary Dyer of Rhode Island: The Quaker Martyr That Was Hanged on Boston pp.1-2. BiblioBazaar, LLC ^ a b Puritans and Puritanism in Europe and America: a comprehensive encyclopedia ^ Sheldon Wolin, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds (2001), p. 234. References

Coffey, John and Paul C. H. Lim (2008). The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-86088-8 Collins, Owen (1999). Speeches That Changed the World, Westminster John Knox Press, ISBN 0-664-22149-1. Gardiner, Samuel Rawson (1895). The First Two Stuarts and the Puritan Revolution. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons. pp. 10–11. http://books.google.com/?id=8w8CAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA10.  Lancelott, Francis (1858). The Queens of England and Their Times. New York: D. Appleton and Co. p. 684. ISBN 1-4255-6082-2. http://books.google.com/?id=N2I0XNdlphUC.  C. S. Lewis (1969). Selected Literary Essays. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-07441-X.  Morone, James A. (2003). Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History, Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-10517-7. Neal, Daniel (1844). The History of the Puritans. New York: Harper. ISBN 1-899003-88-6. http://books.google.com/?id=72gPAAAAYAAJ.  Spurr, John. English Puritanism, 1603-1689. Macmillan. ISBN 0-312-21426-X.  West, Jim (2003). Drinking with Calvin and Luther!, Oakdown Books, ISBN 0-9700326-0-9 Categories: Puritanism English Reformation Congregationalism Christian terms 17th-century Christian clergy 18th-century Christian clergy American colonial people Christian religious leaders History of Christianity in the United States History of the Thirteen Colonies History of religion in the United States [1]

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en.wikipedia.org William Shakespeare English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; for example, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was Polish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, V.S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad, and Vladimir Nabokov was Russian, but all are considered important writers in the history of English literature. In other words, English literature is as diverse as the varieties and dialects of English spoken around the world. In academia, the term often labels departments and programmes practising English studies in secondary and tertiary educational systems. Despite the variety of authors of English literature, the works of William Shakespeare remain paramount throughout the English-speaking world. This article primarily deals with some of the literature from Britain written in English. For literature from specific English-speaking regions, consult the see also section, bottom of the page. Old English

Main article: Old English literature The first works in English, written in Old English, appeared in the early Middle Ages, the oldest surviving text being the Hymn of Cædmon. The oral tradition was very strong in the early English culture and most literary works were written to be performed. Epic poems were thus very popular, and many, including Beowulf, have survived to the present day in the rich corpus of Anglo-Saxon literature that closely resemble today’s Icelandic, Norwegian, North Frisian and the Northumbrian and Scots English dialects of modern English. Much Old English verse in the extant manuscripts is probably adapted from the earlier Germanic war poems from the continent. When such poetry was brought to England it was still being handed down orally from one generation to another, and the constant presence of alliterative verse, or consonant rhyme (today’s newspaper headlines and marketing abundantly use this technique such as in Big is Better) helped the Anglo-Saxon people to remember it. Such rhyme is a feature of Germanic languages and is opposed to vocalic or end-rhyme of Romance languages. But the first written literature dates to the early Christian monasteries founded by Augustine of Canterbury and his disciples and it is reasonable to believe that it was somehow adapted to suit the needs of Christian readers . Middle English literature

Main article: Middle English literature In the 12th century, a new form of English now known as Middle English evolved. This is the earliest form of English literature which is comprehensible to modern readers and listeners, albeit not easily. Middle English lasts up until the 1470s, when the Chancery Standard, a form of London-based English, became widespread and the printing press regularized the language. Middle English Bible translations, notably Wycliffe’s Bible, helped to establish English as a literary language. Geoffrey Chaucer There are three main categories of Middle English Literature: Religious, Courtly love, and Arthurian. William Langland’s Piers Plowman is considered by many critics to be one of the early great works of English literature along with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (most likely by the Pearl Poet) during the Middle Ages. Piers Plowman also contains the earliest surviving allusion to a literary tradition of the legendary English archer, swordsman, and outlaw Robin Hood. The most significant Middle English author was Geoffrey Chaucer who was active in the late 14th century. Often regarded as “the Father of English Literature,” Chaucer is widely credited as the first author to demonstrate the artistic legitimacy of the vernacular English language, rather than French

or Latin. The Canterbury Tales was Chaucer’s magnum opus, and a towering achievement of Western culture. The first recorded association of Valentine’s Day with romantic love is in Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules 1382. The multilingual audience for literature in the 14th century can be illustrated by the example of John Gower, who wrote in Latin, Middle English and Anglo-Norman. Among the many religious works are those in the Katherine Group and the writings of Julian of Norwich and Richard Rolle. Since at least the 14th century, poetry in English has been written in Ireland and by Irish writers abroad. The earliest poem in English by a Welsh poet dates from about 1470. Renaissance literature

Main article: English Renaissance Following the introduction of a printing press into England by William Caxton in 1476, vernacular literature flourished. The Reformation inspired the production of vernacular liturgy which led to the Book of Common Prayer, a lasting influence on literary English language. The poetry, drama, and prose produced under both Queen Elizabeth I and King James I constitute what is today labelled as Early modern (or Renaissance). Early Modern period

Further information: Early Modern English and Early Modern Britain Elizabethan era

Main article: Elizabethan literature The English playwrights were intrigued by Italian model: a conspicuous community of Italian actors had settled in London and Giovanni Florio had brought much of the Italian language and culture to England. It is also true that the Elizabethan Era was a very violent age and that the high incidence of political assassinations in Renaissance Italy (embodied by Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince) did little to calm fears of popish plots. As a result, representing that kind of violence on the stage was probably more cathartic for the Elizabethan spectator. Following earlier Elizabethan plays such as Gorboduc by Sackville and Norton and The Spanish Tragedy by Kyd that was to provide much material for Hamlet, William Shakespeare stands out in this period as a poet and playwright as yet unsurpassed. Shakespeare was not a man of letters by profession, and probably had only some grammar school education. He was neither a lawyer, nor an aristocrat as the “university wits” that had monopolised the English stage when he started writing. But he was very gifted and incredibly versatile, and he surpassed “professionals” as Robert Greene who mocked this “shake-scene” of low origins. Though most dramas met with great success, it is in his later years (marked by the early reign of James I) that he wrote what have been considered his greatest plays: Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest, a tragicomedy that inscribes within the main drama a brilliant pageant to the new king. Shakespeare also popularized the English sonnet which made significant changes to Petrarch’s model. The sonnet was introduced into English by Thomas Wyatt in the early 16th century. Poems intended to be set to music as songs, such as by Thomas Campion, became popular as printed literature was disseminated more widely in households. See English Madrigal School. Other important figures in Elizabethan theatre include Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont. Had Marlowe (1564–1593) not been stabbed at twenty-nine in a tavern brawl, says Anthony Burgess, he might have rivalled, if not equalled Shakespeare himself for his poetic gifts. Remarkably, he was born only a few weeks before Shakespeare and must have known him well. Marlowe’s subject matter, though, is different: it focuses more on the moral drama of the renaissance man than any other

thing. Marlowe was fascinated and terrified by the new frontiers opened by modern science. Drawing on German lore, he introduced Dr. Faustus to England, a scientist and magician who is obsessed by the thirst of knowledge and the desire to push man’s technological power to its limits. He acquires supernatural gifts that even allow him to go back in time and wed Helen of Troy, but at the end of his twenty-four years’ covenant with the devil he has to surrender his soul to him. His dark heroes may have something of Marlowe himself, whose death remains a mystery. He was known for being an atheist, leading a lawless life, keeping many mistresses, consorting with ruffians: living the ‘high life’ of London’s underworld. But many suspect that this might have been a cover-up for his activities as a secret agent for Elizabeth I, hinting that the ‘accidental stabbing’ might have been a premeditated assassination by the enemies of The Crown. Beaumont and Fletcher are less-known, but it is almost sure that they helped Shakespeare write some of his best dramas, and were quite popular at the time. It is also at this time that the city comedy genre develops. In the later 16th century English poetry was characterised by elaboration of language and extensive allusion to classical myths. The most important poets of this era include Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney. Elizabeth herself, a product of Renaissance humanism, produced occasional poems such as On Monsieur’s Departure. Jacobean literature

After Shakespeare’s death, the poet and dramatist Ben Jonson was the leading literary figure of the Jacobean era. However, Jonson’s aesthetics hark back to the Middle Ages rather than to the Tudor Era: his characters embody the theory of humours. According to this contemporary medical theory, behavioral differences result from a prevalence of one of the body’s four “humours” (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile) over the other three; these humours correspond with the four elements of the universe: air, water, fire, and earth. This leads Jonson to exemplify such differences to the point of creating types, or clichés. Jonson is a master of style, and a brilliant satirist. His Volpone shows how a group of scammers are fooled by a top con-artist, vice being punished by vice, virtue meting out its reward. Others who followed Jonson’s style include Beaumont and Fletcher, who wrote the brilliant comedy, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, a mockery of the rising middle class and especially of those nouveaux riches who pretend to dictate literary taste without knowing much literature at all. In the story, a couple of grocers wrangle with professional actors to have their illiterate son play a leading role in a drama. He becomes a knight-errant wearing, appropriately, a burning pestle on his shield. Seeking to win a princess’ heart, the young man is ridiculed much in the way Don Quixote was. One of Beaumont and Fletcher’s chief merits was that of realising how feudalism and chivalry had turned into snobbery and make-believe and that new social classes were on the rise. Another popular style of theatre during Jacobean times was the revenge play, popularized by John Webster and Thomas Kyd. George Chapman wrote a couple of subtle revenge tragedies, but must be remembered chiefly on account of his famous translation of Homer, one that had a profound influence on all future English literature, even inspiring John Keats to write one of his best sonnets. The King James Bible, one of the most massive translation projects in the history of English up to this time, was started in 1604 and completed in 1611. It represents the culmination of a tradition of Bible translation into English that began with the work of William Tyndale. It became the standard Bible of the Church of England. This project was headed by James I himself, who supervised the work of forty-seven scholars. Although many other translations into English have been made, some of which are widely considered more accurate, many aesthetically prefer the King James Bible, whose meter is made to mimic the original Hebrew verse. Besides Shakespeare, whose figure towers over the early 17th century, the major poets of the early 17th century included John Donne and the other Metaphysical poets. Influenced by continental

Baroque, and taking as his subject matter both Christian mysticism and eroticism, metaphysical poetry uses unconventional or “unpoetic” figures, such as a compass or a mosquito, to reach surprise effects. For example, in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”, one of Donne’s Songs and Sonnets, the points of a compass represent two lovers, the woman who is home, waiting, being the centre, the farther point being her lover sailing away from her. But the larger the distance, the more the hands of the compass lean to each other: separation makes love grow fonder. The paradox or the oxymoron is a constant in this poetry whose fears and anxieties also speak of a world of spiritual certainties shaken by the modern discoveries of geography and science, one that is no longer the centre of the universe. Apart from the metaphysical poetry of Donne, the 17th century is also celebrated for its Baroque poetry. Baroque poetry served the same ends as the art of the period; the Baroque style is lofty, sweeping, epic, and religious. Many of these poets have an overtly Catholic sensibility (namely Richard Crashaw) and wrote poetry for the Catholic counter-Reformation in order to establish a feeling of supremacy and mysticism that would ideally persuade newly emerging Protestant groups back toward Catholicism. Restoration literature

Main article: Restoration Literature John Milton, religious epic poem Paradise Lost published in 1667. Restoration literature includes both Paradise Lost and the Earl of Rochester’s Sodom, the high

spirited sexual comedy of The Country Wife and the moral wisdom of Pilgrim’s Progress. It saw Locke’s Two Treatises on Government, the founding of the Royal Society, the experiments of Robert Boyle and the holy meditations of Boyle, the hysterical attacks on theatres from Jeremy Collier, the pioneering of literary criticism from Dryden, and the first newspapers. The official break in literary culture caused by censorship and radically moralist standards under Cromwell’s Puritan regime created a gap in literary tradition, allowing a seemingly fresh start for all forms of literature after the Restoration. During the Interregnum, the royalist forces attached to the court of Charles I went into exile with the twenty-year-old Charles II. The nobility who travelled with Charles II were therefore lodged for over a decade in the midst of the continent’s literary scene. Charles spent his time attending plays in France, and he developed a taste for Spanish plays. Those nobles living in Holland began to learn about mercantile exchange as well as the tolerant, rationalist prose debates that circulated in that officially tolerant nation. The largest and most important poetic form of the era was satire. In general, publication of satire was done anonymously. There were great dangers in being associated with a satire. On the one hand, defamation law was a wide net, and it was difficult for a satirist to avoid prosecution if he were proven to have written a piece that seemed to criticize a noble. On the other hand, wealthy individuals would respond to satire as often as not by having the suspected poet physically attacked by ruffians. John Dryden was set upon for being merely suspected of having written the Satire on Mankind. A consequence of this anonymity is that a great many poems, some of them of merit, are unpublished and largely unknown. Prose in the Restoration period is dominated by Christian religious writing, but the Restoration also saw the beginnings of two genres that would dominate later periods: fiction and journalism. Religious writing often strayed into political and economic writing, just as political and economic writing implied or directly addressed religion. The Restoration was also the time when John Locke wrote many of his philosophical works. Locke’s empiricism was an attempt at understanding the basis of human understanding itself and thereby devising a proper manner for making sound decisions. These same scientific methods led Locke to his three Treatises on Government, which later inspired the thinkers in the American Revolution. As with his work on understanding, Locke moves from the most basic units of society toward the more elaborate, and, like Thomas Hobbes, he emphasizes the plastic nature of the social contract. For an age that had seen absolute monarchy overthrown, democracy

attempted, democracy corrupted, and limited monarchy restored, only a flexible basis for government could be satisfying. The Restoration moderated most of the more strident sectarian writing, but radicalism persisted after the Restoration. Puritan authors such as John Milton were forced to retire from public life or adapt, and those Digger, Fifth Monarchist, Leveller, Quaker, and Anabaptist authors who had preached against monarchy and who had participated directly in the regicide of Charles I were partially suppressed. Consequently, violent writings were forced underground, and many of those who had served in the Interregnum attenuated their positions in the Restoration. John Bunyan stands out beyond other religious authors of the period. Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress is an allegory of personal salvation and a guide to the Christian life. Instead of any focus on eschatology or divine retribution, Bunyan instead writes about how the individual saint can prevail against the temptations of mind and body that threaten damnation. The book is written in a straightforward narrative and shows influence from both drama and biography, and yet it also shows an awareness of the grand allegorical tradition found in Edmund Spenser. During the Restoration period, the most common manner of getting news would have been a broadsheet publication. A single, large sheet of paper might have a written, usually partisan, account of an event. However, the period saw the beginnings of the first professional and periodical (meaning that the publication was regular) journalism in England. Journalism develops late, generally around the time of William of Orange’s claiming the throne in 1689. Coincidentally or by design, England began to have newspapers just when William came to court from Amsterdam, where there were already newspapers being published. It is impossible to satisfactorily date the beginning of the novel in English. However, long fiction and fictional biographies began to distinguish themselves from other forms in England during the Restoration period. An existing tradition of Romance fiction in France and Spain was popular in England. The “Romance” was considered a feminine form, and women were taxed with reading “novels” as a vice. One of the most significant figures in the rise of the novel in the Restoration period is Aphra Behn. She was not only the first professional female novelist, but she may be among the first professional novelists of either sex in England. Behn’s most famous novel was Oroonoko in 1688. This was a biography of an entirely fictional African king who had been enslaved in Suriname. Behn’s novels show the influence of tragedy and her experiences as a dramatist. As soon as the previous Puritan regime’s ban on public stage representations was lifted, the drama recreated itself quickly and abundantly. The most famous plays of the early Restoration period are the unsentimental or “hard” comedies of John Dryden, William Wycherley, and George Etherege, which reflect the atmosphere at Court, and celebrate an aristocratic macho lifestyle of unremitting sexual intrigue and conquest. After a sharp drop in both quality and quantity in the 1680s, the mid-90s saw a brief second flowering of the drama, especially comedy. Comedies like William Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700), and John Vanbrugh’s The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697) were “softer” and more middle-class in ethos, very different from the aristocratic extravaganza twenty years earlier, and aimed at a wider audience. The playwrights of the 1690s set out to appeal to more socially mixed audiences with a strong middle-class element, and to female spectators, for instance by moving the war between the sexes from the arena of intrigue into that of marriage. The focus in comedy is less on young lovers outwitting the older generation, more on marital relations after the wedding bells. Augustan literature

Main article: Augustan literature The term Augustan literature derives from authors of the 1720s and 1730s themselves, who responded to a term that George I of England preferred for himself. While George I meant the title to reflect his might, they instead saw in it a reflection of Ancient Rome’s transition from rough and ready literature to highly political and highly polished literature. Because of

the aptness of the metaphor, the period from 1689 – 1750 was called “the Augustan Age” by critics throughout the 18th century (including Voltaire and Oliver Goldsmith). The literature of the period is overtly political and thoroughly aware of critical dictates for literature. It is an age of exuberance and scandal, of enormous energy and inventiveness and outrage, that reflected an era when English, Scottish, and Irish people found themselves in the midst of an expanding economy, lowering barriers to education, and the stirrings of the Industrial Revolution. The most outstanding poet of the age is Alexander Pope, but Pope’s excellence is partially in his constant battle with other poets, and his serene, seemingly neo-Classical approach to poetry is in competition with highly idiosyncratic verse and strong competition from such poets as Ambrose Philips. It was during this time that James Thomson produced his melancholy The Seasons and Edward Young wrote Night Thoughts. It is also the era that saw a serious competition over the proper model for the pastoral. In criticism, poets struggled with a doctrine of decorum, of matching proper words with proper sense and of achieving a diction that matched the gravity of a subject. At the same time, the mock-heroic was at its zenith. Pope’s Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad are still the greatest mock-heroic poems ever written. In prose, the earlier part of the period was overshadowed by the development of the English essay. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s The Spectator established the form of the British periodical essay, inventing the pose of the detached observer of human life who can meditate upon the world without advocating any specific changes in it. However, this was also the time when the English novel, first emerging in the Restoration, developed into a major art form. Daniel Defoe turned from journalism and writing criminal lives for the press to writing fictional criminal lives with Roxana and Moll Flanders. He also wrote a fictional treatment of the travels of Alexander Selkirk called Robinson Crusoe (1719). The novel would benefit indirectly from a tragedy of the stage, and in mid-century many more authors would begin to write novels. Jonathan Swift If Addison and Steele overawed one type of prose, then Jonathan Swift did another. Swift’s prose style is unmannered and direct, with a clarity that few contemporaries matched. He was a profound skeptic about the modern world, but he was similarly profoundly distrustful of nostalgia. He saw in history a record of lies and vanity, and he saw in the present a madness of vanity and lies. Core Christian values were essential, but these values had to be muscular and assertive and developed by constant rejection of the games of confidence men and their gullies. Swift’s A Tale of a Tub announced his skeptical analysis of the claims of the modern world, and his later prose works, such as his war with Patridge the astrologer, and most of all his derision of pride in Gulliver’s Travels left only the individual in constant fear and humility safe. After his “exile” to Ireland, Swift reluctantly began defending the Irish people from the predations of colonialism. His A Modest Proposal and the Drapier Letters provoked riots and arrests, but Swift, who had no love of Irish Roman Catholics, was outraged by the abuses and barbarity he saw around him. Drama in the early part of the period featured the last plays of John Vanbrugh and William Congreve, both of whom carried on the Restoration comedy with some alterations. However, the majority of stagings were of lower farces and much more serious and domestic tragedies. George Lillo and Richard Steele both produced highly moral forms of tragedy, where the characters and the concerns of the characters were wholly middle class or working class. This reflected a marked change in the audience for plays, as royal patronage was no longer the important part of theatrical success. Additionally, Colley Cibber and John Rich began to battle each other for greater and greater spectacles to present on stage. The figure of Harlequin was introduced, and pantomime theatre began to be staged. This “low” comedy was quite popular, and the plays became tertiary to the staging. Opera also began to be popular in London, and there was significant literary resistance to this Italian incursion. This trend was broken only by a few attempts at a new type of comedy. Pope and John Arbuthnot and John Gay attempted a play entitled Three Hours After Marriage that failed. In 1728, however, John Gay returned

to the playhouse with The Beggar’s Opera. Gay’s opera was in English and retold the story of Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild. However, it seemed to be an allegory for Robert Walpole and the directors of the South Sea Company, and so Gay’s follow up opera was banned without performance. The Licensing Act 1737 brought an abrupt halt to much of the period’s drama, as the theatres were once again brought under state control. An effect of the Licensing Act was to cause more than one aspiring playwright to switch over to writing novels. Henry Fielding began to write prose satire and novels after his plays could not pass the censors. Henry Brooke also turned to novels. In the interim, Samuel Richardson had produced a novel intended to counter the deleterious effects of novels in Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740). Henry Fielding attacked the absurdity of this novel with two of his own works, Joseph Andrews and Shamela, and then countered Richardson’s Clarissa with Tom Jones. Henry Mackenzie wrote The Man of Feeling and indirectly began the sentimental novel. Laurence Sterne attempted a Swiftian novel with a unique perspective on the impossibility of biography (the model for most novels up to that point) and understanding with Tristram Shandy, even as his detractor Tobias Smollett elevated the picaresque novel with his works. Each of these novels represents a formal and thematic divergence from the others. Each novelist was in dialogue and competition with the others, and, in a sense, the novel established itself as a diverse and open-formed genre in this explosion of creativity. The most lasting effects of the experimentation would be the psychological realism of Richardson, the bemused narrative voice of Fielding, and the sentimentality of Brooke. 18th century

Further information: 18th century literature During the Age of Sensibility, literature reflected the worldview of the Age of Enlightenment (or Age of Reason) – a rational and scientific approach to religious, social, political, and economic issues that promoted a secular view of the world and a general sense of progress and perfectibility. Led by the philosophers who were inspired by the discoveries of the previous century (Newton) and the writings of Descartes, Locke and Bacon. They sought to discover and to act upon universally valid principles governing humanity, nature, and society. They variously attacked spiritual and scientific authority, dogmatism, intolerance, censorship, and economic and social restraints. They considered the state the proper and rational instrument of progress. The extreme rationalism and skepticism of the age led naturally to deism; the same qualities played a part in bringing the later reaction of romanticism. The Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot epitomized the spirit of the age. During the end of the 18th century, Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, created the Gothic fiction genre, that combines elements of horror and romance. The pioneering gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe introduced the brooding figure of the gothic villain which developed into the Byronic hero. Her most popular and influential work The Mysteries of Udolpho 1794, is frequently cited as the archetypal Gothic novel. Vathek 1786 by William Beckford, and The Monk 1796 by Matthew Lewis, were further notable early works in both the gothic and horror literary genres. Romanticism

William Blake is considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age The changing landscape of Britain brought about by the steam engine has two major outcomes: the boom of industrialism with the expansion of the city, and the consequent depopulation of the countryside as a result of the enclosures, or privatisation of pastures. Most peasants poured into the city to work in the new factories. This abrupt change is revealed by the change of meaning in five key words: industry (once meaning “creativity”), democracy (once disparagingly used as “mob rule”), class (from now also used

with a social connotation), art (once just meaning “craft”), culture (once only belonging to farming). But the poor condition of workers, the new class-conflicts and the pollution of the environment causes a reaction to urbanism and industrialisation prompting poets to rediscover the beauty and value of nature. Mother earth is seen as the only source of wisdom, the only solution to the ugliness caused by machines. The superiority of nature and instinct over civilisation had been preached by Jean Jacques Rousseau and his message was picked by almost all European poets. The first in England were the Lake Poets, a small group of friends including William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. These early Romantic Poets brought a new emotionalism and introspection, and their emergence is marked by the first romantic Manifesto in English literature, the “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads”. This collection was mostly contributed by Wordsworth, although Coleridge must be credited for his long and impressive Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a tragic ballad about the survival of one sailor through a series of supernatural events on his voyage through the south seas which involves the slaying of an albatross, the death of the rest of the crew, a visit from Death and his mate, Life-in-Death, and the eventual redemption of the Mariner. Coleridge and Wordsworth, however, understood romanticism in two entirely different ways: while Coleridge sought to make the supernatural “real” (much like sci-fi movies use special effects to make unlikely plots believable), Wordsworth sought to stir the imagination of readers through his down-to-earth characters taken from real life (in “The Idiot Boy”, for example), or the beauty of the Lake District that largely inspired his production (as in “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”). Lord Byron The “Second generation” of Romantic poets includes Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. Byron, however, was still influenced by 18th-century satirists and was, perhaps the least ‘romantic’ of the three. His amours with a number of prominent but married ladies was also a way to voice his dissent on the hypocrisy of a high society that was only apparently religious but in fact largely libertine, the same that had derided him for being physically impaired. His first trip to Europe resulted in the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, a mock-heroic epic of a young man’s adventures in Europe but also a sharp satire against London society. Despite Childe Harold’s success on his return to England, accompanied by the publication of The Corsair his alleged incestuous affair with his half-sister Augusta Leigh in 1816 actually forced him to leave England for good and seek asylum on the continent. Here he joined Percy Bysshe Shelley, his wife Mary, with his secretary John William Polidori on the shores of Lake Geneva during the ‘year without a summer’ of 1816. Polidori’s The Vampyre was published in 1819, creating the literary vampire genre. His short story was inspired by the life of Lord Byron and his poem The Giaour. One of Percy Shelley’s most prominent works is the Ode to the West Wind. Despite his apparent refusal to believe in God, this poem is considered a homage to pantheism, the recognition of a spiritual presence in nature. Shelley’s groundbreaking poem The Masque of Anarchy calls for nonviolence in protest and political action. It is perhaps the first modern statement of the principle of nonviolent protest.Mahatma Gandhi’s passive resistance was influenced and inspired by Shelley’s verse, and Gandhi would often quote the poem to vast audiences. Mary Shelley The plot for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is said to have come from a nightmare she had during stormy nights on Lake Geneva in the company of Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori. Her idea of making a body with human parts stolen from different corpses and then animating it with electricity was perhaps influenced by Alessandro Volta’s invention and Luigi Galvani’s experiments with dead frogs. Frankenstein’s chilling tale also suggests modern organ transplants, tissue regeneration, reminding us of the moral issues raised by today’s medicine. But the creature of Frankenstein is incredibly romantic as well. Although “the monster” is intelligent, good and loving, he is shunned by everyone because of his ugliness and deformity, and the desperation and envy that result

from social exclusion turn him against the very man who created him. John Keats did not share Byron’s and Shelley’s extremely revolutionary ideals, but his cult of pantheism is as important as Shelley’s. Keats was in love with the ancient stones of the Parthenon that Lord Elgin had brought to England from Greece, also known as the Elgin Marbles). He celebrates ancient Greece: the beauty of free, youthful love couples here with that of classical art. Keats’s great attention to art, especially in his Ode on a Grecian Urn is quite new in romanticism, and it inspired Walter Pater’s and then Oscar Wilde’s belief in the absolute value of art as independent from aesthetics. Some rightly think that the most popular novelist of the era was Sir Walter Scott, whose grand historical romances inspired a generation of painters, composers, and writers throughout Europe. Scott’s novel-writing career was launched in 1814 with Waverley, often called the first historical novel, and was followed by Ivanhoe. His popularity in England and further abroad did much to form the modern stereotype of Scottish culture. Other novels by Scott which contributed to the image of him as a Scottish patriot include Rob Roy. In retrospect, we now look back to Jane Austen, who wrote novels about the life of the landed gentry, seen from a woman’s point of view, and wryly focused on practical social issues, especially marriage and choosing the right partner in life, with love being above all else. Austen’s Pride and Prejudice would set the model for all Romance Novels to follow. Jane Austen created the ultimate hero and heroine in Darcy and Elizabeth, who must overcome their own stubborn pride and the prejudices they have toward each other, in order to come to a middle ground, where they finally realize their love for one another. Austen’s other most notable works include; Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Persuasion and Emma. In her novels, Austen brings to light the hardships women faced, who usually did not inherit money, could not work and where their only chance in life depended on the man they married. She brought to light not only the difficulties women faced in her day, but also what was expected of men and of the careers they had to follow. This she does with wit and humour and with endings where all characters, good or bad, receive exactly what they deserve. Poet, painter and printmaker William Blake is usually included among the English Romanticists, though his visionary work is much different from that of the others discussed in this section. In America, with the essays and poetry of Ralph Waldo Emerson began an explosion of American English literature, which included the publication of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Victorian literature

Main article: Victorian literature Charles Dickens H. G. Wells It was in the Victorian era (1837–1901) that the novel became the leading form of literature in English. Most writers were now more concerned to meet the tastes of a large middle class reading public than to please aristocratic patrons. The best known works of the era include the emotionally powerful works of the Brontë sisters; the satire Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray; the realist novels of George Eliot; and Anthony Trollope’s insightful portrayals of the lives of the landowning and professional classes. Charles Dickens emerged on the literary scene in the 1830s, confirming the trend for serial publication. Dickens wrote vividly about London life and the struggles of the poor, but in a good-humoured fashion which was acceptable to readers of all classes. His early works such as The Pickwick Papers are masterpieces of comedy. Later his works became darker, without losing his genius for caricature. The Brontë sisters were English writers of the 1840s and 1850s. Their novels caused a sensation when they were first published and were subsequently accepted into the canon of great English literature. They had written compulsively from early childhood and were first published, at their own

expense, in 1846 as poets under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. The book attracted little attention, selling only two copies. The sisters returned to prose, producing a novel each in the following year. Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey were released in 1847. Later were published such significant works as Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) and Charlotte’s Villette (1853). An interest in rural matters and the changing social and economic situation of the countryside may be seen in the novels of Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Gaskell, and others. Leading poetic figures included Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Christina Rossetti. The novels of George Eliot, such as Middlemarch, were a milestone of literary realism, and combine high Victorian literary detail with an intellectual breadth that removes them from the narrow confines they often depict. Novels of Thomas Hardy and others, dealt with the changing social and economic situation of the countryside. Wilkie Collins epistolary novel The Moonstone 1868, has been acclaimed as the first detective novel in the English language. The premier ghost story writer of the 19th century was Sheridan Le Fanu. His works include the macabre mystery novel Uncle Silas 1865, and his Gothic novella Carmilla 1872, tells the story of a young woman’s susceptibility to the attentions of a female vampire. Bram Stoker’s seminal horror Dracula, has been attributed to a number of literary genres including vampire literature, horror fiction, gothic novel and invasion literature. H. G. Wells invented a number of themes that are now classic in the science fiction genre. The War of the Worlds 1898, describing an invasion of late Victorian England by Martians using tripod fighting machines equipped with advanced weaponry, is a seminal depiction of an alien invasion of Earth. The Time Machine is generally credited with the popularization of the concept of time travel using a vehicle that allows an operator to travel purposefully and selectively. The term “time machine” coined by Wells, is now universally used to refer to such a vehicle. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Scotland of Irish parents but his Sherlock Holmes stories have typified a fog-filled London for readers worldwide Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes is a brilliant London-based “consulting detective”, famous for his intellectual prowess. Conan Doyle wrote four novels and fifty-six short stories featuring Holmes, from 1880 up to 1907, with a final case in 1914. All but four Conan Doyle stories are narrated by Holmes’ friend, assistant, and biographer, Dr. Watson. Literature for children developed as a separate genre. Some works become globally well-known, such as those of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, both of whom used nonsense verse. Adventure novels, such as those of Robert Louis Stevenson, are generally classified as for children. Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, depicts the dual personality of a kind and intelligent physician who turns into a psychopathic monster after imbibing a drug intended to separate good from evil in a personality. His Kidnapped is a fast-paced historical novel set in the aftermath of the Jacobite rising of 1745, and Treasure Island 1883, is the classic pirate adventure. At the end of the Victorian era and leading into the Edwardian era, Beatrix Potter was an author and illustrator, best known for her children’s books, which featured animal characters. In her thirties, Potter published the highly successful children’s book The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 1902. Potter eventually went on to published 23 children’s books and become a wealthly woman. Her books along with Lewis Carroll’s are read and published to this day. The Lost World literary genre was inspired by real stories of archaeological discoveries by imperial adventurers. H. Rider Haggard wrote one of the earliest examples, King Solomon’s Mines, in 1885. Contemporary European politics and diplomatic manoeuvrings informed Anthony Hope’s swashbuckling Ruritanian adventure novel The Prisoner of Zenda. An important forerunner of modernist literature, Joseph Conrad wrote the novel Heart of Darkness in 1899. A symbolic story

within a story or frame narrative about an Englishman Marlow’s foreign assignment, it is widely regarded as a significant work of English literature and part of the Western canon. English literature since 1900

Rudyard Kipling The major lyric poet of the first decades of the 20th century was Thomas Hardy. Following the classic novels Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy then concentrated on poetry after the harsh critical response to his last novel, Jude the Obscure. The most widely popular writer of the early years of the 20th century was arguably Rudyard Kipling, a highly versatile writer of novels, short stories and poems, and to date the youngest ever recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Kipling’s works include The Jungle Book, The Man Who Would Be King and Kim, while his inspirational poem If— is a national favourite. Like William Ernest Henley’s poem Invictus that has inspired such people as Nelson Mandela when he was incarcerated,If— is a memorable evocation of Victorian stoicism, regarded as a traditional British virtue. Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands 1903, defined the spy novel. The Kailyard school of Scottish writers, notably J. M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan, presented an idealised version of society and brought elements of fantasy and folklore back into fashion. The 1905 novel The Scarlet Pimpernel by Emma Orczy, is a precursor to the “disguised superhero”. In 1908, Kenneth Grahame wrote the children’s classic The Wind in the Willows, while the Scouts founder Robert Baden-Powell’s first book Scouting for Boys was published. John Buchan penned the adventure novel The Thirty-Nine Steps in 1915. Strongly influenced by his Christian faith, G. K. Chesterton was a prolific and hugely influential writer with a diverse output. Aldous Huxley’s futuristic novel Brave New World, anticipates developments in reproductive technology and sleep-learning that combine to change society. The future society is an embodiment of the ideals that form the basis of futurism. Modernism

Main article: Modernist literature The movement known as English literary modernism grew out of a general sense of disillusionment with Victorian era attitudes of certainty, conservatism, and objective truth. The movement was greatly influenced by the ideas of Romanticism, Karl Marx’s political writings, and the psychoanalytic theories of subconscious – Sigmund Freud. The continental art movements of Impressionism, and later Cubism, were also important inspirations for modernist writers. James Joyce, 1918 Although literary modernism reached its peak between the First and Second World Wars, the earliest examples of the movement’s attitudes appeared in the mid to late 19th century. Gerard Manley Hopkins, A. E. Housman, and the poet and novelist Thomas Hardy represented a few of the major early modernists writing in England during the Victorian period. The first decades of the 20th century saw several major works of modernism published, including the seminal short story collection Dubliners by James Joyce, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and the poetry and drama of William Butler Yeats. Joyce’s magnum opus Ulysses, is arguably the most important work of Modernist literature, and has been referred to as “a demonstration and summation of the entire movement”. It is an interpretation of the Odyssey set in Dublin, and culminates in Finnegans Wake. Virginia Woolf Important novelists between the World Wars included Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, P. G. Wodehouse and D. H. Lawrence. Woolf was an influential feminist, and a major stylistic innovator associated with the stream-of-consciousness technique. Her 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own contains her famous dictum; “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”.T. S. Eliot was the preeminent English poet of the period. Across the Atlantic writers like William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and the poets Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost developed a more American take on the modernist aesthetic in their work.

Important in the development of the modernist movement was the American poet Ezra Pound. Credited with “discovering” both T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, Pound also advanced the cause of imagism and free verse. Gertrude Stein, an American expat, was also an enormous literary force during this time period, famous for her line “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” Other notable writers of this period included H.D., Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, W. H. Auden, Vladimir Nabokov, William Carlos Williams, Ralph Ellison, Dylan Thomas, R. S. Thomas and Graham Greene. However, some of these writers are more closely associated with what has become known as post-modernism, a term often used to encompass the diverse range of writers who succeeded the modernists. Post-modern literature

Main article: Postmodern literature The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain tendencies in post-World War II literature. It is both a continuation of the experimentation championed by writers of the modernist period (relying heavily, for example, on fragmentation, paradox, questionable narrators, etc.) and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature. Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, is difficult to define and there is little agreement on the exact characteristics, scope, and importance of postmodern literature. Henry Miller, William S. Burroughs, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, Thomas Pynchon. Post World War II

George Orwell One of the most significant writers in this period was George Orwell. An essayist and novelist, Orwell’s works are considered among the most important social and political commentaries of the 20th century. Dealing with issues such as poverty in The Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London, totalitarianism in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, and colonialism in Burmese Days. Orwell’s works were often semi-autobiographical and in the case of Homage to Catalonia, wholly. Malcolm Lowry is best known for Under the Volcano. Agatha Christie was a crime writer of novels, short stories and plays, best remembered for her 80 detective novels and her successful West End theatre plays. Christie’s works, particularly featuring the detectives Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple, have given her the title the ‘Queen of Crime’ and made her one of the most important and innovative writers in the development of the genre. Christie’s novels include, Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile and And Then There Were None. Another popular writer during the Golden Age of detective fiction was Dorothy L. Sayers. The novelist Georgette Heyer created the historical romance genre. J. R. R. Tolkien An informal literary discussion group associated with the English faculty at the University of Oxford, were the “Inklings”. Its leading members were the major fantasy novelists; C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Lewis is known for his fiction, especially The Chronicles of Narnia, while Tolkien is best known as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. In thriller writing, Ian Fleming created the character James Bond 007 in January 1952, while on holiday at his Jamaican estate, Goldeneye. Fleming chronicled Bond’s adventures in twelve novels, including Casino Royale (1953), Live and Let Die (1954), Dr. No (1958), Goldfinger (1959), Thunderball (1961), and nine short story works. In Anthony Burgess’s dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange (1962), the main character Alex’s exercise of free will is curtailed by the use of a classical conditioning technique. Burgess creates a new speech in his novel that is the teenage slang of the not-too-distant future. Roald Dahl rose to prominence with his children’s fantasy novels, often inspired by experiences from his childhood, which are notable for their often unexpected endings, and unsentimental, dark humour. Science fiction novelist Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, is based on his various short stories, particularly The Sentinel. Some notable writers in the latter half of

the 20th century include Margaret Atwood, Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, J. G. Ballard, Philip Pullman, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, William Golding and Salman Rushdie. See also

List of English language poets American literature Australian literature Canadian literature References

^ Oruch, Jack B., “St. Valentine, Chaucer, and Spring in February,” Speculum, 56 (1981): 534–65. Oruch’s survey of the literature finds no association between Valentine and romance prior to Chaucer. He concludes that Chaucer is likely to be “the original mythmaker in this instance.” [1] ^ http://www.morrissociety.org/JWMS/SP94.10.4.Nichols.pdf ^ Thomas Weber, “Gandhi as Disciple and Mentor,” Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 28–29. ^ David, Deirdre The Cambridge companion to the Victorian novel p.179. Cambridge University Press, 2001. ^ Elleke Boehmer (2008). Nelson Mandela: a very short introduction. p. 157. Oxford University Press, 2008. “‘Invictus’, taken on its own, Mandela clearly found his Victorian ethic of self-mastery” ^ Beebe, Maurice (Fall 1972). “Ulysses and the Age of Modernism”. James Joyce Quarterly (University of Tulsa) 10 (1): p. 176. ^ The Cambridge companion to Virginia Woolf. By Sue Roe, Susan Sellers. p.219. Cambridge University Press, 2000. External links

The English Literary Canon English Literature Forum British literature – Books tagged British literature LibraryThing Luminarium: Anthology of Middle English Literature (1350–1485) Luminarium: 16th Century Renaissance English Literature (1485–1603) Luminarium: Seventeenth Century English Literature (1603–1660) Norton Anthology of English Literature A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism and Philology Ed. José Ángel García Landa, (University of Zaragoza, Spain) Categories: English literature English-language culture [1]

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en.wikipedia.org William Shakespeare English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; for example, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was Polish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, V.S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad, and Vladimir Nabokov was Russian, but all are considered important writers in the history of English literature. In other words, English literature is as diverse as the varieties and dialects of English spoken around the world. In academia, the term often labels departments and programmes practising English studies in secondary and tertiary educational systems. Despite the variety of authors of English literature, the works of William Shakespeare remain paramount throughout the English-speaking world. This article primarily deals with some of the literature from Britain written in English. For literature from specific English-speaking regions, consult the see also section, bottom of the page. Old English

Main article: Old English literature The first works in English, written in Old English, appeared in the early Middle Ages, the oldest surviving text being the Hymn of Cædmon. The oral tradition was very strong in the early English culture and most literary works were written to be performed. Epic poems were thus very popular, and many, including Beowulf, have survived to the present day in the rich corpus of Anglo-Saxon literature that closely resemble today’s Icelandic, Norwegian, North Frisian and the Northumbrian and Scots English dialects of modern English. Much Old English verse in the extant manuscripts is probably adapted from the earlier Germanic war poems from the continent. When such poetry was brought to England it was still being handed down orally from one generation to another, and the constant presence of alliterative verse, or consonant rhyme (today’s newspaper headlines and marketing abundantly use this technique such as in Big is Better) helped the Anglo-Saxon people to remember it. Such rhyme is a feature of Germanic languages and is opposed to vocalic or end-rhyme of Romance languages. But the first written literature dates to the early Christian monasteries founded by Augustine of Canterbury and his disciples and it is reasonable to believe that it was somehow adapted to suit the needs of Christian readers . Middle English literature

Main article: Middle English literature In the 12th century, a new form of English now known as Middle English evolved. This is the earliest form of English literature which is comprehensible to modern readers and listeners, albeit not easily. Middle English lasts up until the 1470s, when the Chancery Standard, a form of London-based English, became widespread and the printing press regularized the language. Middle English Bible translations, notably Wycliffe’s Bible, helped to establish English as a literary language. Geoffrey Chaucer There are three main categories of Middle English Literature: Religious, Courtly love, and Arthurian. William Langland’s Piers Plowman is considered by many critics to be one of the early great works of English literature along with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (most likely by the Pearl Poet) during the Middle Ages. Piers Plowman also contains the earliest surviving allusion to a literary tradition of the legendary English archer, swordsman, and outlaw Robin Hood. The most significant Middle English author was Geoffrey Chaucer who was active in the late 14th century. Often regarded as “the Father of English Literature,” Chaucer is widely credited as the first author to demonstrate the artistic legitimacy of the vernacular English language, rather than French

or Latin. The Canterbury Tales was Chaucer’s magnum opus, and a towering achievement of Western culture. The first recorded association of Valentine’s Day with romantic love is in Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules 1382. The multilingual audience for literature in the 14th century can be illustrated by the example of John Gower, who wrote in Latin, Middle English and Anglo-Norman. Among the many religious works are those in the Katherine Group and the writings of Julian of Norwich and Richard Rolle. Since at least the 14th century, poetry in English has been written in Ireland and by Irish writers abroad. The earliest poem in English by a Welsh poet dates from about 1470. Renaissance literature

Main article: English Renaissance Following the introduction of a printing press into England by William Caxton in 1476, vernacular literature flourished. The Reformation inspired the production of vernacular liturgy which led to the Book of Common Prayer, a lasting influence on literary English language. The poetry, drama, and prose produced under both Queen Elizabeth I and King James I constitute what is today labelled as Early modern (or Renaissance). Early Modern period

Further information: Early Modern English and Early Modern Britain Elizabethan era

Main article: Elizabethan literature The English playwrights were intrigued by Italian model: a conspicuous community of Italian actors had settled in London and Giovanni Florio had brought much of the Italian language and culture to England. It is also true that the Elizabethan Era was a very violent age and that the high incidence of political assassinations in Renaissance Italy (embodied by Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince) did little to calm fears of popish plots. As a result, representing that kind of violence on the stage was probably more cathartic for the Elizabethan spectator. Following earlier Elizabethan plays such as Gorboduc by Sackville and Norton and The Spanish Tragedy by Kyd that was to provide much material for Hamlet, William Shakespeare stands out in this period as a poet and playwright as yet unsurpassed. Shakespeare was not a man of letters by profession, and probably had only some grammar school education. He was neither a lawyer, nor an aristocrat as the “university wits” that had monopolised the English stage when he started writing. But he was very gifted and incredibly versatile, and he surpassed “professionals” as Robert Greene who mocked this “shake-scene” of low origins. Though most dramas met with great success, it is in his later years (marked by the early reign of James I) that he wrote what have been considered his greatest plays: Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest, a tragicomedy that inscribes within the main drama a brilliant pageant to the new king. Shakespeare also popularized the English sonnet which made significant changes to Petrarch’s model. The sonnet was introduced into English by Thomas Wyatt in the early 16th century. Poems intended to be set to music as songs, such as by Thomas Campion, became popular as printed literature was disseminated more widely in households. See English Madrigal School. Other important figures in Elizabethan theatre include Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont. Had Marlowe (1564–1593) not been stabbed at twenty-nine in a tavern brawl, says Anthony Burgess, he might have rivalled, if not equalled Shakespeare himself for his poetic gifts. Remarkably, he was born only a few weeks before Shakespeare and must have known him well. Marlowe’s subject matter, though, is different: it focuses more on the moral drama of the renaissance man than any other

thing. Marlowe was fascinated and terrified by the new frontiers opened by modern science. Drawing on German lore, he introduced Dr. Faustus to England, a scientist and magician who is obsessed by the thirst of knowledge and the desire to push man’s technological power to its limits. He acquires supernatural gifts that even allow him to go back in time and wed Helen of Troy, but at the end of his twenty-four years’ covenant with the devil he has to surrender his soul to him. His dark heroes may have something of Marlowe himself, whose death remains a mystery. He was known for being an atheist, leading a lawless life, keeping many mistresses, consorting with ruffians: living the ‘high life’ of London’s underworld. But many suspect that this might have been a cover-up for his activities as a secret agent for Elizabeth I, hinting that the ‘accidental stabbing’ might have been a premeditated assassination by the enemies of The Crown. Beaumont and Fletcher are less-known, but it is almost sure that they helped Shakespeare write some of his best dramas, and were quite popular at the time. It is also at this time that the city comedy genre develops. In the later 16th century English poetry was characterised by elaboration of language and extensive allusion to classical myths. The most important poets of this era include Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney. Elizabeth herself, a product of Renaissance humanism, produced occasional poems such as On Monsieur’s Departure. Jacobean literature

After Shakespeare’s death, the poet and dramatist Ben Jonson was the leading literary figure of the Jacobean era. However, Jonson’s aesthetics hark back to the Middle Ages rather than to the Tudor Era: his characters embody the theory of humours. According to this contemporary medical theory, behavioral differences result from a prevalence of one of the body’s four “humours” (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile) over the other three; these humours correspond with the four elements of the universe: air, water, fire, and earth. This leads Jonson to exemplify such differences to the point of creating types, or clichés. Jonson is a master of style, and a brilliant satirist. His Volpone shows how a group of scammers are fooled by a top con-artist, vice being punished by vice, virtue meting out its reward. Others who followed Jonson’s style include Beaumont and Fletcher, who wrote the brilliant comedy, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, a mockery of the rising middle class and especially of those nouveaux riches who pretend to dictate literary taste without knowing much literature at all. In the story, a couple of grocers wrangle with professional actors to have their illiterate son play a leading role in a drama. He becomes a knight-errant wearing, appropriately, a burning pestle on his shield. Seeking to win a princess’ heart, the young man is ridiculed much in the way Don Quixote was. One of Beaumont and Fletcher’s chief merits was that of realising how feudalism and chivalry had turned into snobbery and make-believe and that new social classes were on the rise. Another popular style of theatre during Jacobean times was the revenge play, popularized by John Webster and Thomas Kyd. George Chapman wrote a couple of subtle revenge tragedies, but must be remembered chiefly on account of his famous translation of Homer, one that had a profound influence on all future English literature, even inspiring John Keats to write one of his best sonnets. The King James Bible, one of the most massive translation projects in the history of English up to this time, was started in 1604 and completed in 1611. It represents the culmination of a tradition of Bible translation into English that began with the work of William Tyndale. It became the standard Bible of the Church of England. This project was headed by James I himself, who supervised the work of forty-seven scholars. Although many other translations into English have been made, some of which are widely considered more accurate, many aesthetically prefer the King James Bible, whose meter is made to mimic the original Hebrew verse. Besides Shakespeare, whose figure towers over the early 17th century, the major poets of the early 17th century included John Donne and the other Metaphysical poets. Influenced by continental

Baroque, and taking as his subject matter both Christian mysticism and eroticism, metaphysical poetry uses unconventional or “unpoetic” figures, such as a compass or a mosquito, to reach surprise effects. For example, in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”, one of Donne’s Songs and Sonnets, the points of a compass represent two lovers, the woman who is home, waiting, being the centre, the farther point being her lover sailing away from her. But the larger the distance, the more the hands of the compass lean to each other: separation makes love grow fonder. The paradox or the oxymoron is a constant in this poetry whose fears and anxieties also speak of a world of spiritual certainties shaken by the modern discoveries of geography and science, one that is no longer the centre of the universe. Apart from the metaphysical poetry of Donne, the 17th century is also celebrated for its Baroque poetry. Baroque poetry served the same ends as the art of the period; the Baroque style is lofty, sweeping, epic, and religious. Many of these poets have an overtly Catholic sensibility (namely Richard Crashaw) and wrote poetry for the Catholic counter-Reformation in order to establish a feeling of supremacy and mysticism that would ideally persuade newly emerging Protestant groups back toward Catholicism. Restoration literature

Main article: Restoration Literature John Milton, religious epic poem Paradise Lost published in 1667. Restoration literature includes both Paradise Lost and the Earl of Rochester’s Sodom, the high

spirited sexual comedy of The Country Wife and the moral wisdom of Pilgrim’s Progress. It saw Locke’s Two Treatises on Government, the founding of the Royal Society, the experiments of Robert Boyle and the holy meditations of Boyle, the hysterical attacks on theatres from Jeremy Collier, the pioneering of literary criticism from Dryden, and the first newspapers. The official break in literary culture caused by censorship and radically moralist standards under Cromwell’s Puritan regime created a gap in literary tradition, allowing a seemingly fresh start for all forms of literature after the Restoration. During the Interregnum, the royalist forces attached to the court of Charles I went into exile with the twenty-year-old Charles II. The nobility who travelled with Charles II were therefore lodged for over a decade in the midst of the continent’s literary scene. Charles spent his time attending plays in France, and he developed a taste for Spanish plays. Those nobles living in Holland began to learn about mercantile exchange as well as the tolerant, rationalist prose debates that circulated in that officially tolerant nation. The largest and most important poetic form of the era was satire. In general, publication of satire was done anonymously. There were great dangers in being associated with a satire. On the one hand, defamation law was a wide net, and it was difficult for a satirist to avoid prosecution if he were proven to have written a piece that seemed to criticize a noble. On the other hand, wealthy individuals would respond to satire as often as not by having the suspected poet physically attacked by ruffians. John Dryden was set upon for being merely suspected of having written the Satire on Mankind. A consequence of this anonymity is that a great many poems, some of them of merit, are unpublished and largely unknown. Prose in the Restoration period is dominated by Christian religious writing, but the Restoration also saw the beginnings of two genres that would dominate later periods: fiction and journalism. Religious writing often strayed into political and economic writing, just as political and economic writing implied or directly addressed religion. The Restoration was also the time when John Locke wrote many of his philosophical works. Locke’s empiricism was an attempt at understanding the basis of human understanding itself and thereby devising a proper manner for making sound decisions. These same scientific methods led Locke to his three Treatises on Government, which later inspired the thinkers in the American Revolution. As with his work on understanding, Locke moves from the most basic units of society toward the more elaborate, and, like Thomas Hobbes, he emphasizes the plastic nature of the social contract. For an age that had seen absolute monarchy overthrown, democracy

attempted, democracy corrupted, and limited monarchy restored, only a flexible basis for government could be satisfying. The Restoration moderated most of the more strident sectarian writing, but radicalism persisted after the Restoration. Puritan authors such as John Milton were forced to retire from public life or adapt, and those Digger, Fifth Monarchist, Leveller, Quaker, and Anabaptist authors who had preached against monarchy and who had participated directly in the regicide of Charles I were partially suppressed. Consequently, violent writings were forced underground, and many of those who had served in the Interregnum attenuated their positions in the Restoration. John Bunyan stands out beyond other religious authors of the period. Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress is an allegory of personal salvation and a guide to the Christian life. Instead of any focus on eschatology or divine retribution, Bunyan instead writes about how the individual saint can prevail against the temptations of mind and body that threaten damnation. The book is written in a straightforward narrative and shows influence from both drama and biography, and yet it also shows an awareness of the grand allegorical tradition found in Edmund Spenser. During the Restoration period, the most common manner of getting news would have been a broadsheet publication. A single, large sheet of paper might have a written, usually partisan, account of an event. However, the period saw the beginnings of the first professional and periodical (meaning that the publication was regular) journalism in England. Journalism develops late, generally around the time of William of Orange’s claiming the throne in 1689. Coincidentally or by design, England began to have newspapers just when William came to court from Amsterdam, where there were already newspapers being published. It is impossible to satisfactorily date the beginning of the novel in English. However, long fiction and fictional biographies began to distinguish themselves from other forms in England during the Restoration period. An existing tradition of Romance fiction in France and Spain was popular in England. The “Romance” was considered a feminine form, and women were taxed with reading “novels” as a vice. One of the most significant figures in the rise of the novel in the Restoration period is Aphra Behn. She was not only the first professional female novelist, but she may be among the first professional novelists of either sex in England. Behn’s most famous novel was Oroonoko in 1688. This was a biography of an entirely fictional African king who had been enslaved in Suriname. Behn’s novels show the influence of tragedy and her experiences as a dramatist. As soon as the previous Puritan regime’s ban on public stage representations was lifted, the drama recreated itself quickly and abundantly. The most famous plays of the early Restoration period are the unsentimental or “hard” comedies of John Dryden, William Wycherley, and George Etherege, which reflect the atmosphere at Court, and celebrate an aristocratic macho lifestyle of unremitting sexual intrigue and conquest. After a sharp drop in both quality and quantity in the 1680s, the mid-90s saw a brief second flowering of the drama, especially comedy. Comedies like William Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700), and John Vanbrugh’s The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697) were “softer” and more middle-class in ethos, very different from the aristocratic extravaganza twenty years earlier, and aimed at a wider audience. The playwrights of the 1690s set out to appeal to more socially mixed audiences with a strong middle-class element, and to female spectators, for instance by moving the war between the sexes from the arena of intrigue into that of marriage. The focus in comedy is less on young lovers outwitting the older generation, more on marital relations after the wedding bells. Augustan literature

Main article: Augustan literature The term Augustan literature derives from authors of the 1720s and 1730s themselves, who responded to a term that George I of England preferred for himself. While George I meant the title to reflect his might, they instead saw in it a reflection of Ancient Rome’s transition from rough and ready literature to highly political and highly polished literature. Because of

the aptness of the metaphor, the period from 1689 – 1750 was called “the Augustan Age” by critics throughout the 18th century (including Voltaire and Oliver Goldsmith). The literature of the period is overtly political and thoroughly aware of critical dictates for literature. It is an age of exuberance and scandal, of enormous energy and inventiveness and outrage, that reflected an era when English, Scottish, and Irish people found themselves in the midst of an expanding economy, lowering barriers to education, and the stirrings of the Industrial Revolution. The most outstanding poet of the age is Alexander Pope, but Pope’s excellence is partially in his constant battle with other poets, and his serene, seemingly neo-Classical approach to poetry is in competition with highly idiosyncratic verse and strong competition from such poets as Ambrose Philips. It was during this time that James Thomson produced his melancholy The Seasons and Edward Young wrote Night Thoughts. It is also the era that saw a serious competition over the proper model for the pastoral. In criticism, poets struggled with a doctrine of decorum, of matching proper words with proper sense and of achieving a diction that matched the gravity of a subject. At the same time, the mock-heroic was at its zenith. Pope’s Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad are still the greatest mock-heroic poems ever written. In prose, the earlier part of the period was overshadowed by the development of the English essay. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s The Spectator established the form of the British periodical essay, inventing the pose of the detached observer of human life who can meditate upon the world without advocating any specific changes in it. However, this was also the time when the English novel, first emerging in the Restoration, developed into a major art form. Daniel Defoe turned from journalism and writing criminal lives for the press to writing fictional criminal lives with Roxana and Moll Flanders. He also wrote a fictional treatment of the travels of Alexander Selkirk called Robinson Crusoe (1719). The novel would benefit indirectly from a tragedy of the stage, and in mid-century many more authors would begin to write novels. Jonathan Swift If Addison and Steele overawed one type of prose, then Jonathan Swift did another. Swift’s prose style is unmannered and direct, with a clarity that few contemporaries matched. He was a profound skeptic about the modern world, but he was similarly profoundly distrustful of nostalgia. He saw in history a record of lies and vanity, and he saw in the present a madness of vanity and lies. Core Christian values were essential, but these values had to be muscular and assertive and developed by constant rejection of the games of confidence men and their gullies. Swift’s A Tale of a Tub announced his skeptical analysis of the claims of the modern world, and his later prose works, such as his war with Patridge the astrologer, and most of all his derision of pride in Gulliver’s Travels left only the individual in constant fear and humility safe. After his “exile” to Ireland, Swift reluctantly began defending the Irish people from the predations of colonialism. His A Modest Proposal and the Drapier Letters provoked riots and arrests, but Swift, who had no love of Irish Roman Catholics, was outraged by the abuses and barbarity he saw around him. Drama in the early part of the period featured the last plays of John Vanbrugh and William Congreve, both of whom carried on the Restoration comedy with some alterations. However, the majority of stagings were of lower farces and much more serious and domestic tragedies. George Lillo and Richard Steele both produced highly moral forms of tragedy, where the characters and the concerns of the characters were wholly middle class or working class. This reflected a marked change in the audience for plays, as royal patronage was no longer the important part of theatrical success. Additionally, Colley Cibber and John Rich began to battle each other for greater and greater spectacles to present on stage. The figure of Harlequin was introduced, and pantomime theatre began to be staged. This “low” comedy was quite popular, and the plays became tertiary to the staging. Opera also began to be popular in London, and there was significant literary resistance to this Italian incursion. This trend was broken only by a few attempts at a new type of comedy. Pope and John Arbuthnot and John Gay attempted a play entitled Three Hours After Marriage that failed. In 1728, however, John Gay returned

to the playhouse with The Beggar’s Opera. Gay’s opera was in English and retold the story of Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild. However, it seemed to be an allegory for Robert Walpole and the directors of the South Sea Company, and so Gay’s follow up opera was banned without performance. The Licensing Act 1737 brought an abrupt halt to much of the period’s drama, as the theatres were once again brought under state control. An effect of the Licensing Act was to cause more than one aspiring playwright to switch over to writing novels. Henry Fielding began to write prose satire and novels after his plays could not pass the censors. Henry Brooke also turned to novels. In the interim, Samuel Richardson had produced a novel intended to counter the deleterious effects of novels in Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740). Henry Fielding attacked the absurdity of this novel with two of his own works, Joseph Andrews and Shamela, and then countered Richardson’s Clarissa with Tom Jones. Henry Mackenzie wrote The Man of Feeling and indirectly began the sentimental novel. Laurence Sterne attempted a Swiftian novel with a unique perspective on the impossibility of biography (the model for most novels up to that point) and understanding with Tristram Shandy, even as his detractor Tobias Smollett elevated the picaresque novel with his works. Each of these novels represents a formal and thematic divergence from the others. Each novelist was in dialogue and competition with the others, and, in a sense, the novel established itself as a diverse and open-formed genre in this explosion of creativity. The most lasting effects of the experimentation would be the psychological realism of Richardson, the bemused narrative voice of Fielding, and the sentimentality of Brooke. 18th century

Further information: 18th century literature During the Age of Sensibility, literature reflected the worldview of the Age of Enlightenment (or Age of Reason) – a rational and scientific approach to religious, social, political, and economic issues that promoted a secular view of the world and a general sense of progress and perfectibility. Led by the philosophers who were inspired by the discoveries of the previous century (Newton) and the writings of Descartes, Locke and Bacon. They sought to discover and to act upon universally valid principles governing humanity, nature, and society. They variously attacked spiritual and scientific authority, dogmatism, intolerance, censorship, and economic and social restraints. They considered the state the proper and rational instrument of progress. The extreme rationalism and skepticism of the age led naturally to deism; the same qualities played a part in bringing the later reaction of romanticism. The Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot epitomized the spirit of the age. During the end of the 18th century, Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, created the Gothic fiction genre, that combines elements of horror and romance. The pioneering gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe introduced the brooding figure of the gothic villain which developed into the Byronic hero. Her most popular and influential work The Mysteries of Udolpho 1794, is frequently cited as the archetypal Gothic novel. Vathek 1786 by William Beckford, and The Monk 1796 by Matthew Lewis, were further notable early works in both the gothic and horror literary genres. Romanticism

William Blake is considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age The changing landscape of Britain brought about by the steam engine has two major outcomes: the boom of industrialism with the expansion of the city, and the consequent depopulation of the countryside as a result of the enclosures, or privatisation of pastures. Most peasants poured into the city to work in the new factories. This abrupt change is revealed by the change of meaning in five key words: industry (once meaning “creativity”), democracy (once disparagingly used as “mob rule”), class (from now also used

with a social connotation), art (once just meaning “craft”), culture (once only belonging to farming). But the poor condition of workers, the new class-conflicts and the pollution of the environment causes a reaction to urbanism and industrialisation prompting poets to rediscover the beauty and value of nature. Mother earth is seen as the only source of wisdom, the only solution to the ugliness caused by machines. The superiority of nature and instinct over civilisation had been preached by Jean Jacques Rousseau and his message was picked by almost all European poets. The first in England were the Lake Poets, a small group of friends including William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. These early Romantic Poets brought a new emotionalism and introspection, and their emergence is marked by the first romantic Manifesto in English literature, the “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads”. This collection was mostly contributed by Wordsworth, although Coleridge must be credited for his long and impressive Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a tragic ballad about the survival of one sailor through a series of supernatural events on his voyage through the south seas which involves the slaying of an albatross, the death of the rest of the crew, a visit from Death and his mate, Life-in-Death, and the eventual redemption of the Mariner. Coleridge and Wordsworth, however, understood romanticism in two entirely different ways: while Coleridge sought to make the supernatural “real” (much like sci-fi movies use special effects to make unlikely plots believable), Wordsworth sought to stir the imagination of readers through his down-to-earth characters taken from real life (in “The Idiot Boy”, for example), or the beauty of the Lake District that largely inspired his production (as in “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”). Lord Byron The “Second generation” of Romantic poets includes Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. Byron, however, was still influenced by 18th-century satirists and was, perhaps the least ‘romantic’ of the three. His amours with a number of prominent but married ladies was also a way to voice his dissent on the hypocrisy of a high society that was only apparently religious but in fact largely libertine, the same that had derided him for being physically impaired. His first trip to Europe resulted in the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, a mock-heroic epic of a young man’s adventures in Europe but also a sharp satire against London society. Despite Childe Harold’s success on his return to England, accompanied by the publication of The Corsair his alleged incestuous affair with his half-sister Augusta Leigh in 1816 actually forced him to leave England for good and seek asylum on the continent. Here he joined Percy Bysshe Shelley, his wife Mary, with his secretary John William Polidori on the shores of Lake Geneva during the ‘year without a summer’ of 1816. Polidori’s The Vampyre was published in 1819, creating the literary vampire genre. His short story was inspired by the life of Lord Byron and his poem The Giaour. One of Percy Shelley’s most prominent works is the Ode to the West Wind. Despite his apparent refusal to believe in God, this poem is considered a homage to pantheism, the recognition of a spiritual presence in nature. Shelley’s groundbreaking poem The Masque of Anarchy calls for nonviolence in protest and political action. It is perhaps the first modern statement of the principle of nonviolent protest.Mahatma Gandhi’s passive resistance was influenced and inspired by Shelley’s verse, and Gandhi would often quote the poem to vast audiences. Mary Shelley The plot for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is said to have come from a nightmare she had during stormy nights on Lake Geneva in the company of Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori. Her idea of making a body with human parts stolen from different corpses and then animating it with electricity was perhaps influenced by Alessandro Volta’s invention and Luigi Galvani’s experiments with dead frogs. Frankenstein’s chilling tale also suggests modern organ transplants, tissue regeneration, reminding us of the moral issues raised by today’s medicine. But the creature of Frankenstein is incredibly romantic as well. Although “the monster” is intelligent, good and loving, he is shunned by everyone because of his ugliness and deformity, and the desperation and envy that result

from social exclusion turn him against the very man who created him. John Keats did not share Byron’s and Shelley’s extremely revolutionary ideals, but his cult of pantheism is as important as Shelley’s. Keats was in love with the ancient stones of the Parthenon that Lord Elgin had brought to England from Greece, also known as the Elgin Marbles). He celebrates ancient Greece: the beauty of free, youthful love couples here with that of classical art. Keats’s great attention to art, especially in his Ode on a Grecian Urn is quite new in romanticism, and it inspired Walter Pater’s and then Oscar Wilde’s belief in the absolute value of art as independent from aesthetics. Some rightly think that the most popular novelist of the era was Sir Walter Scott, whose grand historical romances inspired a generation of painters, composers, and writers throughout Europe. Scott’s novel-writing career was launched in 1814 with Waverley, often called the first historical novel, and was followed by Ivanhoe. His popularity in England and further abroad did much to form the modern stereotype of Scottish culture. Other novels by Scott which contributed to the image of him as a Scottish patriot include Rob Roy. In retrospect, we now look back to Jane Austen, who wrote novels about the life of the landed gentry, seen from a woman’s point of view, and wryly focused on practical social issues, especially marriage and choosing the right partner in life, with love being above all else. Austen’s Pride and Prejudice would set the model for all Romance Novels to follow. Jane Austen created the ultimate hero and heroine in Darcy and Elizabeth, who must overcome their own stubborn pride and the prejudices they have toward each other, in order to come to a middle ground, where they finally realize their love for one another. Austen’s other most notable works include; Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Persuasion and Emma. In her novels, Austen brings to light the hardships women faced, who usually did not inherit money, could not work and where their only chance in life depended on the man they married. She brought to light not only the difficulties women faced in her day, but also what was expected of men and of the careers they had to follow. This she does with wit and humour and with endings where all characters, good or bad, receive exactly what they deserve. Poet, painter and printmaker William Blake is usually included among the English Romanticists, though his visionary work is much different from that of the others discussed in this section. In America, with the essays and poetry of Ralph Waldo Emerson began an explosion of American English literature, which included the publication of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Victorian literature

Main article: Victorian literature Charles Dickens H. G. Wells It was in the Victorian era (1837–1901) that the novel became the leading form of literature in English. Most writers were now more concerned to meet the tastes of a large middle class reading public than to please aristocratic patrons. The best known works of the era include the emotionally powerful works of the Brontë sisters; the satire Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray; the realist novels of George Eliot; and Anthony Trollope’s insightful portrayals of the lives of the landowning and professional classes. Charles Dickens emerged on the literary scene in the 1830s, confirming the trend for serial publication. Dickens wrote vividly about London life and the struggles of the poor, but in a good-humoured fashion which was acceptable to readers of all classes. His early works such as The Pickwick Papers are masterpieces of comedy. Later his works became darker, without losing his genius for caricature. The Brontë sisters were English writers of the 1840s and 1850s. Their novels caused a sensation when they were first published and were subsequently accepted into the canon of great English literature. They had written compulsively from early childhood and were first published, at their own

expense, in 1846 as poets under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. The book attracted little attention, selling only two copies. The sisters returned to prose, producing a novel each in the following year. Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey were released in 1847. Later were published such significant works as Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) and Charlotte’s Villette (1853). An interest in rural matters and the changing social and economic situation of the countryside may be seen in the novels of Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Gaskell, and others. Leading poetic figures included Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Christina Rossetti. The novels of George Eliot, such as Middlemarch, were a milestone of literary realism, and combine high Victorian literary detail with an intellectual breadth that removes them from the narrow confines they often depict. Novels of Thomas Hardy and others, dealt with the changing social and economic situation of the countryside. Wilkie Collins epistolary novel The Moonstone 1868, has been acclaimed as the first detective novel in the English language. The premier ghost story writer of the 19th century was Sheridan Le Fanu. His works include the macabre mystery novel Uncle Silas 1865, and his Gothic novella Carmilla 1872, tells the story of a young woman’s susceptibility to the attentions of a female vampire. Bram Stoker’s seminal horror Dracula, has been attributed to a number of literary genres including vampire literature, horror fiction, gothic novel and invasion literature. H. G. Wells invented a number of themes that are now classic in the science fiction genre. The War of the Worlds 1898, describing an invasion of late Victorian England by Martians using tripod fighting machines equipped with advanced weaponry, is a seminal depiction of an alien invasion of Earth. The Time Machine is generally credited with the popularization of the concept of time travel using a vehicle that allows an operator to travel purposefully and selectively. The term “time machine” coined by Wells, is now universally used to refer to such a vehicle. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Scotland of Irish parents but his Sherlock Holmes stories have typified a fog-filled London for readers worldwide Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes is a brilliant London-based “consulting detective”, famous for his intellectual prowess. Conan Doyle wrote four novels and fifty-six short stories featuring Holmes, from 1880 up to 1907, with a final case in 1914. All but four Conan Doyle stories are narrated by Holmes’ friend, assistant, and biographer, Dr. Watson. Literature for children developed as a separate genre. Some works become globally well-known, such as those of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, both of whom used nonsense verse. Adventure novels, such as those of Robert Louis Stevenson, are generally classified as for children. Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, depicts the dual personality of a kind and intelligent physician who turns into a psychopathic monster after imbibing a drug intended to separate good from evil in a personality. His Kidnapped is a fast-paced historical novel set in the aftermath of the Jacobite rising of 1745, and Treasure Island 1883, is the classic pirate adventure. At the end of the Victorian era and leading into the Edwardian era, Beatrix Potter was an author and illustrator, best known for her children’s books, which featured animal characters. In her thirties, Potter published the highly successful children’s book The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 1902. Potter eventually went on to published 23 children’s books and become a wealthly woman. Her books along with Lewis Carroll’s are read and published to this day. The Lost World literary genre was inspired by real stories of archaeological discoveries by imperial adventurers. H. Rider Haggard wrote one of the earliest examples, King Solomon’s Mines, in 1885. Contemporary European politics and diplomatic manoeuvrings informed Anthony Hope’s swashbuckling Ruritanian adventure novel The Prisoner of Zenda. An important forerunner of modernist literature, Joseph Conrad wrote the novel Heart of Darkness in 1899. A symbolic story

within a story or frame narrative about an Englishman Marlow’s foreign assignment, it is widely regarded as a significant work of English literature and part of the Western canon. English literature since 1900

Rudyard Kipling The major lyric poet of the first decades of the 20th century was Thomas Hardy. Following the classic novels Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy then concentrated on poetry after the harsh critical response to his last novel, Jude the Obscure. The most widely popular writer of the early years of the 20th century was arguably Rudyard Kipling, a highly versatile writer of novels, short stories and poems, and to date the youngest ever recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Kipling’s works include The Jungle Book, The Man Who Would Be King and Kim, while his inspirational poem If— is a national favourite. Like William Ernest Henley’s poem Invictus that has inspired such people as Nelson Mandela when he was incarcerated,If— is a memorable evocation of Victorian stoicism, regarded as a traditional British virtue. Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands 1903, defined the spy novel. The Kailyard school of Scottish writers, notably J. M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan, presented an idealised version of society and brought elements of fantasy and folklore back into fashion. The 1905 novel The Scarlet Pimpernel by Emma Orczy, is a precursor to the “disguised superhero”. In 1908, Kenneth Grahame wrote the children’s classic The Wind in the Willows, while the Scouts founder Robert Baden-Powell’s first book Scouting for Boys was published. John Buchan penned the adventure novel The Thirty-Nine Steps in 1915. Strongly influenced by his Christian faith, G. K. Chesterton was a prolific and hugely influential writer with a diverse output. Aldous Huxley’s futuristic novel Brave New World, anticipates developments in reproductive technology and sleep-learning that combine to change society. The future society is an embodiment of the ideals that form the basis of futurism. Modernism

Main article: Modernist literature The movement known as English literary modernism grew out of a general sense of disillusionment with Victorian era attitudes of certainty, conservatism, and objective truth. The movement was greatly influenced by the ideas of Romanticism, Karl Marx’s political writings, and the psychoanalytic theories of subconscious – Sigmund Freud. The continental art movements of Impressionism, and later Cubism, were also important inspirations for modernist writers. James Joyce, 1918 Although literary modernism reached its peak between the First and Second World Wars, the earliest examples of the movement’s attitudes appeared in the mid to late 19th century. Gerard Manley Hopkins, A. E. Housman, and the poet and novelist Thomas Hardy represented a few of the major early modernists writing in England during the Victorian period. The first decades of the 20th century saw several major works of modernism published, including the seminal short story collection Dubliners by James Joyce, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and the poetry and drama of William Butler Yeats. Joyce’s magnum opus Ulysses, is arguably the most important work of Modernist literature, and has been referred to as “a demonstration and summation of the entire movement”. It is an interpretation of the Odyssey set in Dublin, and culminates in Finnegans Wake. Virginia Woolf Important novelists between the World Wars included Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, P. G. Wodehouse and D. H. Lawrence. Woolf was an influential feminist, and a major stylistic innovator associated with the stream-of-consciousness technique. Her 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own contains her famous dictum; “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”.T. S. Eliot was the preeminent English poet of the period. Across the Atlantic writers like William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and the poets Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost developed a more American take on the modernist aesthetic in their work.

Important in the development of the modernist movement was the American poet Ezra Pound. Credited with “discovering” both T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, Pound also advanced the cause of imagism and free verse. Gertrude Stein, an American expat, was also an enormous literary force during this time period, famous for her line “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” Other notable writers of this period included H.D., Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, W. H. Auden, Vladimir Nabokov, William Carlos Williams, Ralph Ellison, Dylan Thomas, R. S. Thomas and Graham Greene. However, some of these writers are more closely associated with what has become known as post-modernism, a term often used to encompass the diverse range of writers who succeeded the modernists. Post-modern literature

Main article: Postmodern literature The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain tendencies in post-World War II literature. It is both a continuation of the experimentation championed by writers of the modernist period (relying heavily, for example, on fragmentation, paradox, questionable narrators, etc.) and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature. Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, is difficult to define and there is little agreement on the exact characteristics, scope, and importance of postmodern literature. Henry Miller, William S. Burroughs, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, Thomas Pynchon. Post World War II

George Orwell One of the most significant writers in this period was George Orwell. An essayist and novelist, Orwell’s works are considered among the most important social and political commentaries of the 20th century. Dealing with issues such as poverty in The Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London, totalitarianism in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, and colonialism in Burmese Days. Orwell’s works were often semi-autobiographical and in the case of Homage to Catalonia, wholly. Malcolm Lowry is best known for Under the Volcano. Agatha Christie was a crime writer of novels, short stories and plays, best remembered for her 80 detective novels and her successful West End theatre plays. Christie’s works, particularly featuring the detectives Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple, have given her the title the ‘Queen of Crime’ and made her one of the most important and innovative writers in the development of the genre. Christie’s novels include, Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile and And Then There Were None. Another popular writer during the Golden Age of detective fiction was Dorothy L. Sayers. The novelist Georgette Heyer created the historical romance genre. J. R. R. Tolkien An informal literary discussion group associated with the English faculty at the University of Oxford, were the “Inklings”. Its leading members were the major fantasy novelists; C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Lewis is known for his fiction, especially The Chronicles of Narnia, while Tolkien is best known as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. In thriller writing, Ian Fleming created the character James Bond 007 in January 1952, while on holiday at his Jamaican estate, Goldeneye. Fleming chronicled Bond’s adventures in twelve novels, including Casino Royale (1953), Live and Let Die (1954), Dr. No (1958), Goldfinger (1959), Thunderball (1961), and nine short story works. In Anthony Burgess’s dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange (1962), the main character Alex’s exercise of free will is curtailed by the use of a classical conditioning technique. Burgess creates a new speech in his novel that is the teenage slang of the not-too-distant future. Roald Dahl rose to prominence with his children’s fantasy novels, often inspired by experiences from his childhood, which are notable for their often unexpected endings, and unsentimental, dark humour. Science fiction novelist Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, is based on his various short stories, particularly The Sentinel. Some notable writers in the latter half of

the 20th century include Margaret Atwood, Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, J. G. Ballard, Philip Pullman, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, William Golding and Salman Rushdie. See also

List of English language poets American literature Australian literature Canadian literature References

^ Oruch, Jack B., “St. Valentine, Chaucer, and Spring in February,” Speculum, 56 (1981): 534–65. Oruch’s survey of the literature finds no association between Valentine and romance prior to Chaucer. He concludes that Chaucer is likely to be “the original mythmaker in this instance.” [1] ^ http://www.morrissociety.org/JWMS/SP94.10.4.Nichols.pdf ^ Thomas Weber, “Gandhi as Disciple and Mentor,” Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 28–29. ^ David, Deirdre The Cambridge companion to the Victorian novel p.179. Cambridge University Press, 2001. ^ Elleke Boehmer (2008). Nelson Mandela: a very short introduction. p. 157. Oxford University Press, 2008. “‘Invictus’, taken on its own, Mandela clearly found his Victorian ethic of self-mastery” ^ Beebe, Maurice (Fall 1972). “Ulysses and the Age of Modernism”. James Joyce Quarterly (University of Tulsa) 10 (1): p. 176. ^ The Cambridge companion to Virginia Woolf. By Sue Roe, Susan Sellers. p.219. Cambridge University Press, 2000. External links

The English Literary Canon English Literature Forum British literature – Books tagged British literature LibraryThing Luminarium: Anthology of Middle English Literature (1350–1485) Luminarium: 16th Century Renaissance English Literature (1485–1603) Luminarium: Seventeenth Century English Literature (1603–1660) Norton Anthology of English Literature A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism and Philology Ed. José Ángel García Landa, (University of Zaragoza, Spain) Categories: English literature English-language culture [1]

[2][3][4][5][6][7]

en.wikipedia.org

the Puritan Age-some features

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flag by gulnazahmad 152 Followers Some Features of Puritan Age

Published: March 2, 2011 Puritan age is marked by the decline of Renaissance age: the age of revival of knowledge. Puritan age is further divided into two classes;  the Jacobian period in which James.I was the ruler  Caroline period in which Charles.I was the ruler In Puritan age new spirit came to the society, a literary mission started from Renaissance age was accomplished in Puritan age. The salient features of Puritan age are as follows: Source: John Milton: the representative of Puritan age Source: Reforms in the old customs of English church The writers of Puritan ages followed the paths of the great Renaissance writers. The spirit of science popularizes by great men like Newton, Bacon and Descartes. In literature the spirit infuses itself in the form of criticism, which was truly the creation of Puritan age. IN this period people took stock of what had been acquired. People classified, analysed, and systematized many things which were having no importance before that. English language was started being used as the medium for instruction and for storing the data and for conveying facts. Art of Biography popularized which was unknown in previous ages. Satire and Irony got fame in Puritan age, individually as well as on collective basis. Readers had become criticizers and asked for the facts and figures, so that they may judge and can take sides in the controversial matters. John Milton was the best representative of Puritan age. Puritanism is considered as the second greatest renaissance. Rebirth of the moral nature of man which followed intellectual awakening of Europe in 15th and 16th century. Despotism was the oder of the day. Puritan movement stood for the liberty of people of Europe. There was an introduction of morality and high ideals in politics.  Puritan age had two perspectives; personal righteousness and civil and religious liberty. It aimed at making people free and honest. In puritan age John Milton and Thomas Cromwell fought for the religious liberties of people. With the passage of time Puritanism became the movement against the King which stood for the freedom of the society. Puritans was the name given to the people who advocated certain changes in the form of the worship of the reformed English church under Queen Elizabeth. Puritan age

Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War Amazon Price: $23.71 List Price: $25.00 The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change

(Galaxy Books Series Gb P) Amazon Price: $8.50 List Price: $19.99 The Puritan Age and Rule in the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay, 1629-1685: -1888 Amazon Price: $35.99 The Art of Prophesying with The Calling of the Ministry (Puritan Paperbacks) Amazon Price: $2.45 List Price: $8.00 You can help the HubPages community highlight top quality content by ranking this article up or down. Useful {2} • Funny  • Awesome {2} • Beautiful  • Interesting {1} working

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the puritan age

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