English Lit 101

From Jane Austen to George Orwell and the Enlightenment to Realism, an essential guide to Britain's greatest writers and works

Brian Boone

• Publisher: Adams Media
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781440599729
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A guide to the greats in British literature! From Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Charles Dickens' Tiny Tim to Jane Austen's Mr. Darcy and Shakespeare's Juliet, British authors have created some of the most compelling characters in all of literature. But too often, textbooks reduce these vibrant voices to boring summaries that would put even an English dean to sleep. English Lit 101 is an engaging and comprehensive guide through the major players in American literature. From romanticism to modernism and every literary movement in between, this primer is packed with hundreds of entertaining tidbits and concepts, along with easy-to-understand explanations on why each author's work was important then and still relevant now. So whether you're looking for a refresher course on key English literature or want to learn about it for the first time, English Lit 101 has all the answers--even the ones you didn't know you were looking for.

Chapter 1

Old English

To the modern-day reader of contemporary English literature, the earliest examples of “English literature” may seem like they were written in an entirely foreign language . . . and they kind of were. The beginnings of the English language took shape in the seventh century after multiple tribes—collectively referred to as Anglo-Saxons—migrated from central Europe to the British Isles. Most spoke Germanic languages—and each tribe spoke its own Germanic language—and brought those languages with them. Eventually, those different dialects coalesced into a single language, one with wildly inconsistent spelling and grammar, but a single language nonetheless: Old English.

Old English literature runs concurrent with the Anglo-Saxon era, which comprises works from the seventh century up through to a few decades past the Norman Conquest of 1066. Old English was complex, ever changing, and adaptable. New words and rules became standardized over the centuries, eventually creating a language that was nearly universal across Britain. Language was a necessary tool for communication, and communication became a vital tool for evolving the common tongue.

Very little written material from the Old English era survived, and what documents did survive are primarily what those in power felt was necessary for scribes to record. This is especially true after the large-scale conversion to Christianity by invading Romans. The local church kept records and histories because the monks were the ones who were literate, and many of the Old English documents that we still have around include sermons, church writings translated from Latin, Anglo-Saxon histories, and legal documents. In addition, scribes and poets outside of the sphere of the church’s influence wrote down things that weren’t quite so dry, things that provide a window into the lives and thoughts of the people who lived in this era. Luckily, those myths, legends, and stories (many of which had been passed down orally for generations) were preserved.

Only about 400 manuscripts total from the Anglo-Saxon period even survive—the expulsion of the Roman-controlled church in the 1500s from England would lead to a lot of intentional document destruction, particularly by way of fire. But these manuscripts would be the basis for a language and a canon that would emerge as comparable, and often superior, to anything ever produced in Greek, Latin, or French.

Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People

The First English Book

Also known as “St. Bede” or “the Venerable Bede,” the monk named Bede (672–735) has additionally been called “the father of English history.” A historian and archivist at the monastery of Saint Peter in Monkwearmouth in what was at the time the kingdom of Northumbria, Bede was the first to document for the ages the already extensive history of the rapidly growing civilization of the British Isles. To Bede, this history largely meant the rise of Christianity, but this drive to convert the residents of early Britain happened at the same time as the development of the island, as well as the development of what would soon be a common tongue to unite the disparate tribes.

Bede deftly championed English pride as a way to bring about more converts to Christianity by making religious texts more available to Britons. Drawing on his monastery’s library of more than 200 volumes of early Catholic Church books, Bede compiled the story of the local church and made it more accessible. His most famous and lasting work is his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (731). While written in Latin rather than English, this five-book series is the first permanent work to be written in the British Isles. Ecclesiastical History of the English People, as it’s called in English, was written with the assistance of an abbot named Albinus, and it covers the history of England through the lens of the history of Christianity in Britain. Without Bede’s work, which relied on oral histories and interviews in addition to church texts, the details of the Roman invasion and settlement of Britain—really, the history of England itself to that point—would have been lost forever.

Photo Credit: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Illustration of “the Venerable Bede,” author of Ecclesiastical History of the English People, as seen in the Nuremberg Chronicle.

A People’s History

Historia ecclesiastica depicts the religious and political history (which are more or less one and the same) of the Anglo-Saxons on the British Isles. This time period runs from the fifth century up to about A.D. 731, which is when Bede finished writing. This book isn’t so much literature as it is a methodically delivered historical survey, but this history book makes the history books because it’s the oldest text written in England.

Any good contemporary literature both reflects its time period and serves as a de facto historical document, and Historia ecclesiastica certainly qualifies. Bede includes an outline of Roman Britain’s geography, reports on significant disagreements between the two main local religious factions (Roman-influenced Christians and Celtic Christians in present-day Ireland and Scotland), and passages on the political uprisings of the 600s, even ones that aren’t expressly related to ecclesiastical history. And while books made in England were new, this book’s style was not—it was written to emulate the classical history style of the Greeks and Romans.

Bede took his research from those people who historically were the historians and record keepers—monasteries and government records—and he is hardly objective. Less a journalist and more of a storyteller, Bede has a distinct angle and bias: to bring in new Christians. (As Bede later became “St. Bede,” that’s a telling indication of his aims.) That perspective affected the way he wrote: simply, plainly, and for maximum comprehension.

Literary Lessons

One other lasting effect of Historia ecclesiastica is that Bede solidified the way the West told time: The books popularized and universalized anno Domini as a form of marking years. Prior to this, governments and the church used various local systems, such as indictions, which noted the passage of time in fifteen-year cycles, and regnal years, a complicated system in which a year was indicated by where it fell inside of a particular monarch’s reign.

Moments in Time

Book I of Historia ecclesiastica begins in 55 B.C. with the moment Britain became a part of the rest of Europe: when Caesar invaded and brought it into the Roman Empire. The evolution of the Roman Empire into the Holy Roman Empire as it unfolded in Britain is covered, particularly Augustine’s A.D. 597 mission to the islands.

Book II concerns the evangelization of Northumbria, which is jeopardized when a pagan king named Penda kills Edwin, the chief missionary.

Book III covers the growth of Christianity under local kings as each is converted to the new religion, and Book IV’s main event is the consecration of Theodore, the first to hold the iconic post of the archbishop of Canterbury.

The fifth and final book takes things up to Bede’s present day (731), and particularly covers both the conflict between the Roman and British churches over the correct dating of Easter and how England forged its own identity (in terms of the church) once the Romans departed.

Now a nearly 1,300-year-old document, more than 160 manuscripts of Historia ecclesiastica are somehow still intact. That’s especially impressive as they were all handwritten and there were probably only ever about 200 copies overall. Bede wrote more than forty more books in his life, mostly biblical commentaries written in Latin, and few of those other manuscripts have survived.

Beowulf

A Monster of Early Literature

In 1066, William the Conqueror led troops in the Norman Conquest of England. The new rulers spoke a primitive version of French, which became the official language of the land. Natives of England continued to speak English, which had evolved and combined from related Germanic languages when their Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian ancestors settled into Britain hundreds of years earlier. Beowulf was in that language—Old English—and it survived the reign of French to be recognized as the earliest and oldest surviving work of narrative fiction (literature) in the English language. In fact, it’s the first major poem in any major latter-day European vernacular, and it’s as beautifully written and historically important as anything written by Homer or Virgil.

Beowulf is an epic poem, and at 3,182 lines it is the longest in Old English, and one of the longest in any form of English. A classic example (if not the classic example, such is its introduction of storytelling tropes) of a hero’s journey, the poem tells ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Old English
• Chapter 2: The Elizabethan Era
• Chapter 3: The Restoration and Beyond
• Chapter 4: The Romantic Era
• Chapter 5: The Victorian Era and the Industrial Revolution
• Chapter 6: The Modernist Movement
• Chapter 7: Contemporary English Literature
• About the Author