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In its literature, England arguably has attained its most influential cultural expression. For more than a millennium, each stage in the development of the English language has produced its masterworks.
Little is known of English literature before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, though echoes of England’s Celtic past resound in Arthurian legend. Anglo-Saxon literature, written in the Old English language, is remarkably diverse. Its surviving corpus includes hymns, lyric poems such as “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer,” riddles and spells, songs, and the epic poem Beowulf, which dates from the 9th or 10th century. Following the Norman Conquest of 1066, French influence shaped the vocabulary as well as the literary preoccupations of Middle English. Geoffrey Chaucer epitomized both the courtly philosophical concerns and the earthy vernacular of this period in his Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales, respectively, while William Langland’s Piers Plowman was an early expression of the religious and political dissent that would later characterize English literature. The Elizabethan era of the late 16th century fostered the flowering of the European Renaissance in England and the golden age of English literature. The plays of William Shakespeare, while on their surface representing the culmination of Elizabethan English, achieve a depth of characterization and richness of invention that have fixed them in the dramatic repertoire of virtually every language. The publication of the King James Version of the Bible in 1611 infused the literature of the period with both religious imagery and a remarkably vigorous language, and it served as an important instrument for the spread of literacy throughout England. Political and religious conflicts of the 17th century provided a backdrop for a wealth of poetry, ranging from the metaphysical introspections of John Donne to the visionary epics of John Milton, in addition to the prose allegory Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan.
The dichotomy of Classicism and Romanticism as well as of reason and imagination came to dominate the 18th century, with the Neoclassical satire and criticism of Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Johnson on the one hand and the somewhat later Romantic self-expression of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Keats on the other. Also during this period, the novel emerged as a form capable of bringing everyday life into the province of literature, as can be seen in the work of Jane Austen. At roughly this point, the distinctive regions of England began to exert a powerful influence on many writers—such as the Lake District on Wordsworth, the Yorkshire moors on the Brontë sisters (Anne, Charlotte, and Emily), Dorset on Thomas Hardy, the Midlands coalfields on D.H. Lawrence, and London on Charles Dickens. In the mid to late 19th century, English literature increasingly addressed social concerns, yielding the utopian writings of William Morris and Samuel Butler, the psychological analysis of George Eliot, the realistic novels of Elizabeth Gaskell, and the nationalistic stories and fables of Rudyard Kipling. Many writers also found a new audience in children, giving rise to work such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and generating later classics such as Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit stories, A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, and even, it can be argued, the late 20th-century work of J.K. Rowling.
English literature in the 20th century was remade by native writers such as Virginia Woolf. It also absorbed and transmuted alien elements, taking into the mainstream of its tradition poets as Irish as William Butler Yeats, as Welsh as Dylan Thomas, or as securely in the classic line as the American expatriates T.S. Eliot and Henry James. Popular novelists such as Agatha Christie, P.D. James, Dick Francis, and John Le Carré fed the English love for mysteries and police procedurals, while poets W.H. Auden, Ted Hughes, and Philip Larkin brought a new approach to questions of personal relationships, and novelists Anthony Burgess, Graham Greene, and Kingsley Amis dealt with moral ambiguities and modern dilemmas. Many others, including Iris Murdoch and Martin Amis, worked in a well-established comic or satiric vein. Immigration continued to diversify England’s literary landscape, producing writers such as V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, and Kazuo Ishiguro. (For further discussion, see English literature.)