Brief History of the English

Literature
 BEOWULF

Britannia and its dialects are confused with Old

English, harsh and consonantal language and
survive in poems such as "Beowulf", a warrior
saga full of Nordic deities, presumably created
in the 9th century.
 The Canterbury Tales
• After that, we see the figure of Geoffrey
Chaucer in the 14th century, a contemporary
of the Hundred Years' War, who with his “The
Tales of Canterbury” gave literary status to the
dialect that was then spoken in London. It is a
collection of ordinary people who during a
religious pilgrimage are entertained in a
contest to evaluate during a dinner who tells
the best story.
 William Shakespeare
• Already in the 16th century, passing through
the medieval forms of theater called mysteries,
miracles and moralities, the English drama
reached a certain maturity with the writers
Marlowe(1564-1593) and Shakespeare(1564-
1616) who, introducing white verses, in a direct
reference to the Greeks Seneca, Ovid and
Plauto, promoted the neo -classicism, authentic
revival of the Greek model of writing.
• Even today Shakespeare is acclaimed as the
greatest playwright of all time and his literary
world is a stylistic mixture that brings together
the tragic and the comic, the grotesque and
the sublime, metaphors and puns. and fifty-
four sonnets.
• The frequent themes in Shakespeare are: the
criticism to the unrestricted power, the
verticality of the State over the citizen,
feminism, the supernatural, the impossible
love, the hypocrisy of the coexistence-
coexistence relations.
 John Milton(1608-1674)

• The 17th century saw the puritanism of John

Milton, a fervent defender of the Reformation,
who in his “Paradise Lost” dealt with the
theme of the Fall of Man.
 Mary Shelley(1789-1851)
• On the other hand, he was enchanted by a brilliant
woman, Mary Shelley, rebel, Gothic , who achieved
notoriety with his “Frankestein or the Modern
Prometheus” narrated from three points of view.
She was the daughter of a feminist, Mary
Wollstonecraft, also a novelist, and William Godwin,
a philosopher; she was certainly visionary when she
wrote “The Last Man”, a work in which humanity is
devastated by a pandemic in the 21st century
 Mary Shelley

• .
• Valperga” and the autobiographical
• “Lodore”, as well as essays,
• demonstrating great intelligence.
 Jane Austen(1775-1817)
• Another important name of the 19th century
that became a successful writer was Jane
Austen, narrating the private life of English
elites and was, for a long time, the only one to
contest the life reserved for the woman of her
time, exposing her point of view in novels
such as "Pride and Prejudice", "Reason and
Feeling", "Emma" and "Mansfield Park"
among other.
 William Blake(1775-1827)
• In that same period we have the incomparable literary
mark of William Blake, a wild and accursed poet, with
his work “The Matrimony of Heaven and Hell”. He was
also an illustrator, printmaker and in his first work
“Songs of Innocence”, the first traces appear of
mysticism. After five years he resumed the theme with
“Songs of Experience”, with the first presenting
innocence and the second, religious hypocrisy, the fall,
the coexistence of two eternally irreconciliable visions.
His books are incredibly current.
 James Joyce(1882-1941)
• The twentieth century announced a new
breath of drama with Oscar Wilde, William
Yeats,and James Joyce with the monumental
and revolutionary "Ulysses" and the exotic
"Fineganns Wake" and behold Virginia Woolf
acclaimed feminist and visionary with her
"Orlando" and "The Waves”, an experimental
novel, Woolf was a genius who also wrote
essays, plays and other genres.
 Agatha Christie(1890-1976)
• During this period, a resounding popular (and
worldwide) success occurred with Agatha
Christie in her more than seventy mystery novels
with her “Miss Marple” and plays that remained
on display for decades as “The Mousetrap”
• We can see that the female presence has been
punctual, infrequent in the history of English
literature, perhaps due to the conservatism of
British society.
 Contemporary names
• Two new names in the English novel are Julian
Barnes with his fragmentation of the plot and
the temporal and spatial coordinates, the
search for the lost meaning in “Flaubert's
Parrot” and also Ian McEwan in “Saturday”
which offers us art and culture as an antidote
to a world dominated by terrorism and that
maps in detail the current English atmosphere
under political and social exhaustion.
• Other big names could be mentioned, but
there is no deadline for that. Thank you!
 REFERENCE

• CADERNO ENTRE LIVROS, Panorama da

Literatura Inglesa nº 01, Editora Duetto , São
Paulo, 2006
• ISBN 978-85-99535-30-1