How old is literature

He is best known for his Every Man in his Humour. After leaving university, he studied at home. Milton was a great poet, polemic, pamphleteer, theologian, and parliamentarian. In , Milton married a woman much younger than himself.

She left Milton and did not return for two years. This unfortunate incident led Milton to write two strong pamphlets on divorce. The greatest of all his political writings is Areopagitica, a notable and impassioned plea for the liberty of the press. Comus is a masque written by Milton when he was at Cambridge.

His pastoral elegy Lycidas is on his friend, Edward King who drowned to death on a voyage to Ireland. Milton is remembered for his greatest epic poem Paradise Lost. Paradise Lost contained twelve books and published in Milton composed it in blank verse. Paradise Lost covers the rebellion of Satan Lucifer in heaven and his expulsion. Paradise Lost contains hundreds of remarkable lines. Milton coined many words in this poem. Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes are other two major poems of Milton.

Milton occupies a central position in English literature. He wrote many pamphlet in support of parliament.

These lyrical poets dealt chiefly with love and war. Sir John Suckling was a famous wit at court. His poems are generous and witty. His famous poem is Ballad upon a Wedding. Robert Herrick wrote some fresh and passionate lyrics. Philip Massinger and John Ford produced some notable in this period. Sir Thomas Browne is the best prose writer of the period.

His ReligioMedici is a curious mixture of religious faith and scientific skepticism. Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Vulgar Errors is another important work. His Compleat Angler discusses the art of river fishing. With the collapse of the Puritan Government there sprang up activities that had been so long suppressed.

The Restoration encouraged levity in rules that often resulted in immoral and indecent plays. Dryden is the greatest literary figure of the Restoration. In his works, we have an excellent reflection of both the good and the bad tendencies of the age in which he lived.

Before the Restoration, Dryden supported Oliver Cromwell. Dryden appeared as the chief literary champion of the monarchy in his famous satirical allegory, Abasalom and Achitophel. John Dryden is now remembered for his greatest mock-heroic poem, Mac Flecknoe.

Mac Flecknoe is a personal attack on his rival poet Thomas Shadwell. John Dryden popularized heroic couplets in his dramas. His dramatic masterpiece is All for Love. Restoration period produced a brilliant group of dramatists who made this age immortal in the history of English literature. These plays are hard and witty, comic and immoral. It was George Etheredge who introduced Comedy of Manners. William Congreve is the greatest of Restoration comedy writers.

William Wycherley is another important Restoration comedy playwright. His Country Wife, and Love in a Wood are notable plays. Alexander Pope was the undisputed master of both prose and verse. Pope wrote many poems and mock-epics attacking his rival poets and social condition of England. His Dunciad is an attack on dullness. He wrote An Essay on Criticism in heroic couplets.

It is a mock-heroic poem dealing with the fight of two noble families. Oliver Goldsmith wrote two popular poems in heroic couplets. James Thompson is remembered for his long series of descriptive passages dealing with natural scenes in his poem The Seasons.

He wrote another important poem The Castle of Indolence. Edward Young produced a large amount of literary work of variable quality. Thomas Gray is one of the greatest poets of English literature. Then after years of revision, he published his famous Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.

Its popularity had been maintained to the present day. William Blake is both a great poet and artist. His two collections of short lyrics are Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. His finest lyric is The Tiger. Robert Burns is known as the national poet of Scotland. Daniel Defoe wrote in bulk. His greatest work is the novel Robinson Crusoe. It is based on an actual event which took place during his time. Robinson Crusoe is considered to be one of the most popular novels in English language.

He started a journal named The Review. Sir Richard Steele and Joseph Addison worked together for many years. Joseph Addison contributed in these periodicals and wrote columns. The imaginary character of Sir Roger de Coverley was very popular during the eighteenth century. Jonathan Swift is one of the greatest satirists of English literature. His first noteworthy book was The Battle of the Books. Samuel Johnson is very much famous for his Dictionary The Vanity of Human Wishes is a longish poem by him.

Johnson started a paper named The Rambler. His Autobiography contains valuable material concerning his life. Edmund Burke is one of the masters of English prose. He was a great orator also. His speech On American Taxation is very famous. The English novel proper was born about the middle of the eighteenth century. Samuel Richardson is considered as the father of English novel. He published his first novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded in This novel is written in the form of letters.

The character Pamela is a poor and virtuous woman who marries a wicked man and afterwards reforms her husband. Clarissa is the beautiful daughter of a severe father who wants her to marry against her will. Clarissa is a very long novel. Henry Fielding is another important novelist. He published Joseph Andrews in His greatest novel is Tom Jones. Laurence Sterne is now remembered for his masterpiece Tristram Shandy which was published in These novels are unique in English literature.

Sterne blends humour and pathos in his works. Horace Walpole is famous both as a letter writer and novelist. His one and only novel The Castle of Otranto deals with the horrific and supernatural theme. The main stream of poetry in the eighteenth century had been orderly and polished, without much feeling for nature. The publication of the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads in came as a shock.

They together with Southey are known as the Lake Poets, because they liked the Lake district in England and lived in it. William Wordsworth was the poet of nature. In the preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth set out his theory of poetry. His views on poetical style are the most revolutionary.

The Prelude is the record of his development as a poet. It is a philosophical poem. Tintern Abbey is one of the greatest poems of Wordsworth. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the most noteworthy. Biographia Literaria is his most valuable prose work. Don Juan ranks as one of the greatest of satirical poems. The Vision of Judgment is a fine political satire in English. PB Shelley was a revolutionary figure of Romantic period.

When Shelley was studying at Oxford, he wrote the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism which caused his expulsion from the university. Prometheus Unbound is a combination of the lyric and the drama. Of his many odes, the most remarkable is Ode to the West Wind. Adonais is an elegy on the death of John Keats. John Keats is another great Romantic poet who wrote some excellent poems in his short period of life.

The Eve of St Agnes is regarded as his finest narrative poem. His Letters give give a clear insight into his mind and artistic development.

Robert Southey is a minor Romantic poet. Alfred Lord Tennyson is a chief figure of later nineteenth century poetry. In Memoriam caused a great stir when it first appeared. In Memoriam is the most deeply emotional, and probably the greatest poetry he ever produced. Maud and Other Poems was received with amazement by the public. Idylls of the King, Enoch Arden, Harold etc. Robert Browning is an English poet and playwright whose mastery of dramatic monologues made him one of the foremost Victorian poets.

He married Elizabeth Barrett, another famous poet during the Victorian period. Matthew Arnold was an English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of Rugby School. Arnold valued natural scenery for its peace and permanence in contrast with the ceaseless change of human things. His descriptions are often picturesque, and marked by striking similes.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator in the late nineteenth century England. Rossetti wrote about nature with his eyes on it. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, wife of Robert Browning wrote some excellent poems in her volume of Sonnets from the Portuguese. Rudyard Kipling and Francis Thompson also wrote some good poems during the later nineteenth century. Jane Austen is one of the greatest novelists of nineteenth century English literature.

Her first novel Pride and Prejudice deals with the life of middle class people. The style is smooth and charming. Her second novel Sense and Sensibility followed the same general lines of Pride and Prejudice. Her characters are developed with minuteness and accuracy. Charles Dickens is considered as one of the greatest English novelists.

Dickens has contributed some evergreen characters to English literature. He was a busy successful novelist during his lifetime. The Pickwick Papers and Sketches by Boz are two early novels.

No English novelists excel Dickens in the multiplicity of his characters and situations. He creates a whole world people for the readers. He sketched both lower and middle class people in London. William Makepeace Thackeray was born in Calcutta and sent to England for education.

William Thackeray is now chiefly remembered for his novel The Vanity Fair. While Dickens was in full tide of his success, Thackeray was struggling through neglect and contempt to recognition.

Examiners expect doctoral researchers to show that they understand something of the development of their field, and that they understand why it is the way that it is.

In other words, the researcher must show how the field they are in, as well as the problem that they are researching, are historically situated. They must indicate what seminal texts and writers are relevant.

They must also indicate ongoing debates in the field. An examiner may well conclude that a researcher who works with literatures that are all very recent is someone who has, either knowingly or not, adopted a kind of amnesiac stance to what they are doing. There are very few fields in which there has been no scholarly activity for a long time.

Scholars generally live in crowded territories where someone is always writing something that is relevant to at least part of their endeavour. It means getting to grips with the present. In order to specify the contribution to be made, the researcher must survey the field and its trends — and this means right up to the moment.

Presenting a set of texts that are over ten years old will appear to examiners as an ossified view, stuck in a particular period. Of course with a thesis, as with a book or an article, there does come a point when the researcher just has to stop reading and finish the piece off. Very few researchers start from scratch. They always use some ideas and approaches that have gone before. So one of the major tasks of the literature review is for the researcher to identify the ideas and approaches that they will use.

If there is no recent literature referred to in the review, then the examiner is likely to read this as the researcher not knowing the field, and therefore not building on its most recent developments.

Now I can imagine a piece of research where the researcher wants to go back to something that happened in the field some time before. They think there is something in a piece of work done quite some time ago that could be important to the work that they want to do.

In this case, the literature that is being used to develop their piece of research will be older. However, in order to make the case that this is needed, the thesis writer still needs to deal with more recent work, indicating why and where it is inadequate, and what the significance of the older literatures might be. It depends on the field and the topic. Getting the balance right can be tricky for researchers, but not at the extremes and probably not in this case.

This is the case in some parts of the world and it is why open access is so important. I too am facing the problem of dealing with different sources of literature and research materials which have either become outdated or are not directly related to my field.

Good to read this write up. Like Like. Hi, really interesting post, thank you as always. It is really useful to hear the opinion on literature age from an examiners stand-point. Thanks again for a really useful post. As ever, thoughtful, interesting, informative and constructive. I was particularly struck by your comment on reviews that consider nothing older than the last few years.

The other thing that has struck me is that some doctoral programmes formally require a written review of the literature at quite an early stage. This is the case in most professional doctorates. Perhaps those who supervise or lead professional doctorates should encourage their students to remember that the thesis should include relevant literature whether or not it was considered in the initial literature review?

Pingback: The literature review - how old are the source Pingback: the literature review — how old are the s Pingback: Thesis-it: the final push TheLeadingEdge. Thanks so much for this post. Your post has been very helpful. Hope I get the balance right. Middle English Period: 3.

The Renaissance: 4. The Neoclassical Period: 5. The Romantic Period: 6. The Victorian Age: 7. The Edwardian Period: 8. The Georgian Period: 9. The Modern Period: Early 20th century The Postmodern Period: Midth century.

Hope you have a comprehensive understanding of the history of English literature through this blog. Interested in studying a degree in English Literature? Sign up for an e-meeting with our Leverage Edu experts and let us help you in finding the best course and university that aligns with your interests, aspirations and career goals! E English. Important Periods in the History of English Literature. Courtesy: Slideserve. How to Become a Poet? How to Write a Book? A short history of english literature from St:Mary's College.

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