Periods of English

Literature
I. The Old English Period
(450- 1066 A.D):
1.Political, social, and economical features:
Anglo-Saxon is derived from two Germanic tribes: the
Angles and the Saxons. This literary period begins around
450 when they invaded Celtic England (together with the
Jutes). In 1066, Norman France, led by William, defeated
England, bringing the period to a close. The historical
events that happened in that period greatly influenced the
literature at the time. Though Christianity was present,
paganism dominated the literature in this period.
Oral literature dominated the first part of this period—at
least until the seventh century. Some writings, such as
Beowulf and those by period poets Caedmon and
Cynewulf, are notable; but, much of the literature during
this time was a translation of something else or otherwise
legal, medicinal, or religious.

2.Literature features:
Anglo-Saxon literature incorporates prose, poetry,
puzzles, maxims, and countless wisdom epigrams. It is an
amalgamation of pagan conventions – concepts about soul
and nature – and also Christian conventions and moral
values. Heroic poems were very famous in Old English
poetry. The subject matter of these poems was taken not
only from the Bible but also from pagan sources. The
Anglo-Saxon period is known for wars and battles and so
does the writings of this era. Poems like “The Battle of
Maldon” and “The Battle of Brunanburh” depict the
various battles of that time. The themes of the Anglo-
Saxon poetry were mostly war, invasion, and heroism. In
addition to that, Old English poetry is also filled with
lament and melancholy that is often found in delineating
man’s conflicts against his environment. Examples of
such poems are “The Ruin”, “The Seafarer”, and “The
Wanderer” etc. Other poems portray the parting of a
husband and the Wife and the following sadness, for
instance in “The Husband’s Message” and “The Wife’s
Lament”. Because the church and the monasteries were
the center of education and culture during the Anglo-
Saxon period so the clergy and the clerics were mostly
associated with education and the literature of that time.

3.Some famous authors and their popular works:

- The oldest recorded English poem is “Caedmon’s
Hymn”. It is a short Old English poem originally
composed by Cædmon, a supposedly a shepherd whom
the voice of God came to him. “Caedmon began to sing
verses which he had never heard before in praise of God
the creator.” His “Hymn” is the first song of praise in
English literature. Bede embedded a Latin translation of
this poem.
- Many of the earliest books were histories, rather than
imaginative writings. They give a lot of information about
the period.
- It was influenced by Latin.
- Bede, known as the Venerable Bible, was a monk who
lived between 673 and 735. He wrote many books and he
is remembered for his History of the English Church and
People written in Latin.
- One of the first books of history was The Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle. It tells the history of England from the
beginning of Christian times, with details of invasions and
battles. It contains both poetry and prose. King Alfred the
Great was one of the people who helped to put the
Chronicle together.
- The reign of King Alfred the Great was a period of great
literary productions. He translated many books from Latin
including The Pastor’s Book, about the ideals of a pastor,
and Bede’s Church History. Also, he made medical
information, chronicles, and information for law books.
- Aelfric, a monk from Winchester, was a translator as
well as a writer. His works include Catholic Homilies–
Homilies= religious talk, Lives of the Saints. Aelfric is
the greatest figure in Old English prose. His writings were
clear to understand and beautiful in style.

II. The Middle English Period

(1066-1485):
1.Political, social, and economical features:
- 'Middle English' – a period of roughly 300 years from
around 1150 CE to around 1450 – is difficult to identify
because it is a time of transition between two eras that
each have stronger definition: Old English and Modern
English. Before this period we encounter a language
which is chiefly Old Germanic in its character – in its
sounds, spellings, grammar and vocabulary. After this
period we have a language which displays a very different
kind of structure, with major changes having taken place
in each of these areas, many deriving from the influence
of French following the Norman Conquest of 1066.
- Middle English is the long period of accommodation
between the Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxons
(Old English) and the Latin based language ofthe Norman
French. The Anglo-Saxon period was over. French
became the language of the upper class. French became
the language of the court, government, education.
- Old English, which is also called Anglo Saxon, was very
different from the modern language. A person living
today cannot understand Old English texts unless they
learn to read them as a foreign language. Initially, people
who spoke Celtic languages inhabited England. The
Celtic languages form another branch of the Indo-
European language family. Welsh, Irish Gaelic, Scots
Gaelic, Breton, Manx, and Cornish are all Celtic
languages.In the late 5th century AD, Germanic tribes
from across the North Sea began settling in England. The
English language descended from the language that these
tribes spoke. Old English was spoken during a period in
history called the Early Middle Ages. By about the year
1000, the Early Middle Ages ended, and the High Middle
Ages began. Middle English was spoken during the High
Middle Ages and the period that followed, the Late
Middle Ages.
- One of the most significant events in English history
took place in 1066. A French-speaking group called the
Normans invaded and conquered England. The Normans
descended from Vikings who had settled in France in the
10th century. However, they quickly adopted the French
language and culture. By 1066, the Normans were
completely French. The Norman invasion created a
French-speaking aristocracy that ruled England, but it had
an enormous impact on the English language. Thousands
of French words entered the English language after the
invasion. French is a Romance language derived from
Latin. Even though Latin is an Indo-European language, it
differs considerably in grammar and vocabulary from
Germanic languages. The introduction of so many French
words into English makes English vocabulary very
different from the vocabulary of other Germanic
languages. Over half the words in the English language
are of French or Latin origin.Most English people from
the Middle Ages did not speak French; however, the
language of the ruling classes seeped down into the
speech of common people. Eventually, the ruling classes
acculturated to England and spoke the modified English
language as their native tongue.
- During the Middle Ages, a great deal of literature was
written in Latin, the international language of the
educated people. However, flourishing English-language
literature existed, as well. The most significant work
written in the Middle English language is The Canterbury
Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, written late in the 14th
century. These works are a collection of stories about
English pilgrims on their way to Canterbury, one of the
holiest sites in England. The Canterbury Tales not only
contains a great deal of source material about the Middle
English language but avast amount of material on
everyday life and social mores in England during the
Middle Ages. Chaucer based his work on The
Decameron, a collection of Italian stories written by
Giovanni Boccaccio earlier in the 14th century. Italy was
one of the major centers of European culture during the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance. A great deal of English
literature is based on works that came from Italy.

2.Literature features:
- During the Middle English period, many Old English
grammatical features either became simplified or
disappeared altogether. Noun, adjective and verb
inflections were simplified by the reduction (and eventual
elimination) of most grammatical case distinctions.
Middle English also saw considerable adoption of
Norman vocabulary, especially in the areas of politics,
law, the arts, and religion, as well as poetic and emotive
diction. Conventional English vocabulary remained
primarily Germanic in its sources, with Old Norse
influences becoming more apparent. Significant changes
in pronunciation took place, particularly involving long
vowels and diphthongs, which in the later Middle English
period began to undergo the Great Vowel Shift. Little
survives of early Middle English literature, due in part to
Norman domination and the prestige that came with
writing in French rather than English. During the 14th
century, a new style of literature emerged with the works
of writers including John Wycliffe and Geoffrey Chaucer,
whose Canterbury Tales remains the most studied and
read work of the period.
- Norman Conquest of England in 1066 saw the
replacement of the top levels of the English-speaking
political and ecclesiastical hierarchies by Norman rulers
who spoke a dialect of Old French known as Old
Norman, which developed in England into Anglo-
Norman. The use of Norman as the preferred language of
literature and polite discourse fundamentally altered the
role of Old English in education and administration, even
though many Normans of this period were illiterate and
depended on the clergy for written communication and
record-keeping. A significant number of words of
Norman origin began to appear in the English language
alongside native English words of similar meaning, giving
rise to such Modern English synonyms as pig/pork,
chicken/poultry,
calf/veal,cow/beef,sheep/mutton,wood/forest,house/mansi
on,worthy/valuable,bold/courageous,freedom/
liberty,sight/vision, and eat/dine.
- The role of Anglo-Norman as the language of
government and law can be seen in the abundance of
Modern English words for the mechanisms of government
that are derived from Anglo-Norman: court, judge, jury,
appeal, parliament. There are alsomany Norman-derived
terms relating to the chivalric cultures that arose in the
12th century; an era of feudalism, seigneurialism and
crusading.
- Words were often taken from Latin, usually through
French transmission. This gave rise to various synonyms
including kingly (inherited from Old English), royal (from
French, which inherited it from Vulgar Latin), and regal
(from French, which borrowed it from classical Latin).
Later French appropriations were derived from standard,
rather than Norman, French. Examples of resultant
cognate pairs include the words warden (from Norman),
and guardian (from later French; both share a common
Germanic ancestor).
- The end of Anglo-Saxon rule did not result in immediate
changes to the language. The general population would
have spoken the same dialects as they had before the
Conquest. Once the writing of Old English came to an
end, Middle English had no standard language, only
dialects that derived from the dialects of the same regions
in the Anglo-Saxon period.

3.Some famous authors and their popular works:

CAXTON, WILLIAM (1422–1491), English printer and
publisher. William Caxton, the first English printer, began
his career as a London trader, becoming, after an
apprenticeship, a freeman of the powerful Mercers
Company. In Caxton's lifetime and for generations after,
the major Latin works of learning and literature, such as
were studied in Oxford and Cambridge, were imported to
England from continental shops. For readers of English,
however, Caxton was the dominant figure in respect of
both number and quality of publication. He produced the
first editions of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1477;
reprinted 1483 with woodcuts), of works by John Lydgate
and John Gower, and of Sir Thomas Malory's Morte
d'Arthur (1485). Among his many translations are The
Game and Play of Chess (1474; reprinted 1483 with
woodcuts), Aesop's Fables (1484, with woodcuts), The
History of Charlemagne (1485), and Reynard the Fox
(1481; reprinted 1489).
Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400)
In 1357, Geoffrey Chaucer became a public servant to
Countess Elizabeth of Ulster and continued in that
capacity with the British court throughout his lifetime.
The Canterbury Tales became his best known and most
acclaimed work. He died October 25, 1400, in London,
England, and was the first to be buried in Westminster
Abbey’s Poet’s Corner.Chaucer is believed to have
written the poem Troilus and Criseyde sometime in the
mid-1380s. Troilus and Criseyde is a narrative poem that
retells the tragic love story of Troilus and Criseyde in the
context of the Trojan War. Chaucer wrote the poem using
rime royal, a technique he originated. Rime royal involves
rhyming stanzas consisting of seven lines apiece.The
Canterbury Tales is by far Chaucer’s best known and
most acclaimed work. Initially Chaucer had planned for
each of his characters to tell four stories a piece. The first
two stories would be set as the character was on his/her
way to Canterbury, and the second two were to take place
as the character was heading home. Apparently,
Chaucer’s goal of writing 120 stories was an overly
ambitious one. In actuality, The Canterbury Tales is made
up of only 24 tales and rather abruptly ends before its
characters even make it to Canterbury. The tales are
fragmented and varied in order, and scholars continue to
debate whether the tales were published in their correct
order. Despite its erratic qualities, The Canterbury Tales
continues to be acknowledged for the beautiful rhythm of
Chaucer’s language and his characteristic use of clever,
satirical wit.
William Langland (1332?–1400?)
Our author’s name is not certainly known. That his
Christian name was William there can be no doubt,
though by some mistake he has sometimes been called
Robert. In a note written on the fly-leaf of one of the
Dublin MSS., in a hand of the fifteenth century, we are
told that a certain Stacy de Rokayle, living at Shipton-
under-Wychwood (about four miles from Burford in
Oxfordshire), and holding land of Lord le Spenser, was
the father of William de Langlond who wrote the book
called Piers Plowman. The only difficulty about this
testimony is the name Langland, which should rather,
perhaps, be read as Langley; since the Langland family
was at that date connected with Somersetshire, whilst
there is actually a hamlet named Langley at no great
distance from Shipton. He was born about A.D. 1332,
probably at Cleobury Mortimer in Shropshire. His father
and his friends put him to school (possibly in the
monastery at Great Malvern), made a clerk or scholar of
him, and taught him what holy writ meant. In 1362, at the
age of about thirty, he first began work upon the poem,
which was to occupy him during a great part of his after
life. The real subject of the poem is the religious and
social condition of the poorer classes of England during
the reigns of Edward III and Richard II. Histestimony is
invested with a peculiar interest by the fact that he clearly
knew what he was talking about. His own experience, and
his own keen owers of observation provided him with an
abundant supply of material. He saw the necessity of
some reform, and endeavoured to realise in hisown mind
the person of the coming reformer. To this ideal person he
gave the name of Piers the Plowman, to signify that great
results can often be achieved by comparatively humble
means; and perhaps as hinting, at the same time, that if
the labouring classes were to expect any great
improvement to take place in their condition, they had
best consider what they could do to help themselves. As
years wore on, William’s supposed reformer seems to
have become less actual to him, and assumed, as it were, a
more spiritual form to his mind. At last he fully grasps the
idea that it is better to turn from any expectation of a
reformer to come to the contemplation of the Saviour who
has come already. At this point, his mind seizes a bolder
conception; he no longer describes Piers Plowman as he
had done at first, as if he were no more than what was
formerly called a head harvestman, giving directions to
the reapers and sowing the corn himself that he might be
sure it was sown properly; but he identifies him rather
with the Good Samaritan, or personified Love, who is to
be of more help to mankind than Faith as typified by
Abraham, or than Hope as typified by Moses. The true
Good Samaritan is He who told the parable of Himself;
the Reformer is no other than Christ. When Christ became
incarnate, He was like a warrior doing battle in another’s
cause, and wearing his arms and cognisance. He put on
the armour of Piers the Plowman when He took upon
Himself human nature; and His victory over death was the
earnest of the deliverance of mankind from all miseries,
and the beginning of the improvement of the condition of
the lower orders. Such ideas as these form, in fact, a part
of the author’s own life; they are essentially an important
chapter in his autobiography.

4. A summary Biography of Geoffrey Chaucer:

- English poet Geoffrey Chaucer wrote the unfinished
work, 'The Canterbury Tales.' It is considered one of the
greatest poetic works in English. He has been honored as
the Father of English Literature and the first great
humorist and realist.
- In 1357, Geoffrey Chaucer became a public servant to
Countess Elizabeth of Ulster and continued in that
capacity with the British court throughout his lifetime.
The Canterbury Tales became his best known and most
acclaimed work. He died October 25, 1400, in London,
England, and was the first to be buried in Westminster
Abbey’s Poet’s Corner.
- Poet Geoffrey Chaucer was born circa 1340, most likely
at his parents’ house on Thames Street in London,
England. Chaucer’s family was of thebourgeois class,
descended from an affluent family who made their money
in the London wine trade. According to some sources,
Chaucer’s father, John, carried on the family wine
business.Geoffrey Chaucer is believed to have attended
the St. Paul’s Cathedral School, where he probably first
became acquainted with the influential writing of Virgil
and Ovid.
- In 1357, Chaucer became a public servant to Countess
Elizabeth of Ulster, the Duke of Clarence’s wife, for
which he was paid a small stipend—enough to pay for his
food and clothing. In 1359, the teenage Chaucer went off
to fight in the Hundred Years’ War in France, and at
Rethel he was captured for ransom. Thanks to Chaucer’s
royal connections, King Edward III helped pay his
ransom. After Chaucer’s release, he joined the Royal
Service, traveling throughout France, Spain and Italy on
diplomatic missions throughout the early to mid-1360s.
For his services, King Edward granted Chaucer a pension
of 20 marks.
- In 1366, Chaucer married Philippa Roet, the daughter of
Sir Payne Roet, and the marriage conveniently helped
further Chaucer’s career in the English court.
- By 1368, King Edward III had made Chaucer one of his
esquires. When the queen died in 1369, it served to
strengthen Philippa’s position and subsequently
Chaucer’s as well. From 1370 to 1373, he went abroad
again and fulfilled diplomatic missions in Florence and
Genoa, helping establish an English port in Genoa. He
also spent time familiarizing himself with the work of
Italian poets Dante and Petrarch along the way. By the
time he returned, he and Philippa were prospering, and he
was rewarded for his diplomatic activities with an
appointment as Comptroller of Customs, a lucrative
position. Meanwhile, Philippa and Chaucer were also
granted generous pensions by John of Gaunt, the first
duke of Lancaster.
- In 1377 and 1388, Chaucer engaged in yet more
diplomatic missions, with the objectives of finding a
French wife for Richard II and securing military aid in
Italy. Busy with his duties, Chaucer had little time to
devote to writing poetry, his true passion. In 1385 he
petitioned for temporary leave. For the next four years he
lived in Kent but worked as a justice of the peace and
later a Parliament member, rather than focusing on his
writing.When Philippa passed away in 1387, Chaucer
stopped sharing in her royal annuities and suffered
financial hardship. He needed to keep working in public
service to earn a living and pay off his growing
accumulation of debt.The precise dates of many of
Chaucer’s written works are difficult to pin down with
certainty, but one thing is clear: His major works have
retained their relevancy even in the college classroom of
today.
- Chaucer’s body of best-known works includes the
Parliament of Fouls, otherwise known as the Parlement of
Foules, in the Middle English spelling. Some historians of
Chaucer’s work assert that it was written in1380, during
marriage negotiations between Richard and Anne of
Bohemia. Critic J.A.W. Bennet interpreted the Parliament
of Fouls as a study of Christian love. It had been
identified as peppered with Neo-Platonic ideas inspired
by the likes of poets Cicero and Jean De Meun, among
others. The poem uses allegory, and incorporates
elements of irony and satire as it points to the inauthentic
quality of courtly love. Chaucer was well acquainted with
the theme firsthand—during his service to the court and
his marriage of convenience to a woman whose social
standing served to elevate his own.
- Chaucer is believed to have written the poem Troilus
and Criseyde sometime in the mid-1380s. Troilus and
Criseyde is a narrative poem that retells the tragic love
story of Troilus and Criseyde in the context of the Trojan
War. Chaucer wrote the poem using rime royal, a
technique he originated. Rime royal involves rhyming
stanzas consisting of seven lines apiece. Troilus and
Criseyde is broadly considered one of Chaucer’s greatest
works, and has a reputation for being more complete and
self-contained than most of Chaucer’s writing, his famed
The Canterbury Tales being no exception. The period of
time over which Chaucer penned The Legend of Good
Women is uncertain, although most scholars do agree that
Chaucer seems to have abandoned it before its
completion. The queen mentioned in the work is believed
to be Richard II’s wife, Anne of Bohemia. Chaucer’s
mention of the real-life royal palaces Eltham and Sheen
serve to support this theory. In writing The Legend of
Good Women, Chaucer played with another new and
innovative format: The poem comprises a series of shorter
narratives, along with the use of iambic pentameter
couplets (seen for the first time in English).
- The Canterbury Tales is by far Chaucer’s best known
and most acclaimed work. Initially Chaucer had planned
for each of his characters to tell four stories a piece. The
first two stories would be set as the character was on
his/her way to Canterbury, and the second two were to
take place as the character was heading home.
Apparently, Chaucer’s goal of writing 120 stories was an
overly ambitious one. In actuality, The Canterbury Tales
is made up of only 24 tales and rather abruptly ends
before its characters even make it to Canterbury. The tales
are fragmented and varied in order, and scholars continue
to debate whether the tales were published in their correct
order. Despite its erratic qualities, The Canterbury Tales
continues to be acknowledged for the beautiful rhythm of
Chaucer’s language and his characteristic use of clever,
satirical wit.
III. The Renaissance (The
Elizabethan Age) (1485-1660):
1. Political, social, and economical features:
- The cultural, artistic, political and economic “rebirth” in
Europe, referred to as the Renaissance, occurred during
the 14th-17th centuries. Renaissance means rebirth_ the
“rebirth” or revival of interest in ancient Greek and
Roman literature and civilization. Besides people of that
age also seemed to be reborn in the ways that they began
to realize the capacities of the human mind and the
achievements of human culture, in contrast to the
medieval emphasis on God and the contempt for the
things of this world. They were more optimistic believing
that earthy happiness was achievable and depended on
their own capabilities. They were the real masters of their
life.
- The Renaissance was a time of territorial exploration
and discovery. The Renaissance promoted the rediscovery
of classical philosophy, literature and art. Some of the
greatest thinkers, authors, statesmen, scientists and artists
in human history thrived during this era, while global
exploration opened up new lands and cultures to
European commerce. The Renaissance is credited with
bridging the gap between the Middle Ages and modern-
day civilization.
- In England, Henry Tudor was crowned King Henry VII
(1485-1509) to establish the Tudor dynasty, which was to
rule the country for more than a century. Henry VIII, a
wilful and audacious man, came to the throne in 1509. He
asked for a divorce with his wife Catherine of Aragon but
was refused by the Pope. Henry then not only defied the
Pope and remarried he also declared himself Supreme
head of the Church in England (also known as the
Anglican Church). The immediate consequence of this
was that Sir Thomas More-the leading figure of the early
Renaissance in Englandwas executed due to his
opposition to Henry’s divorce. On the death of Henry VIII
in 1547, Edward VI –his nine-year-old son came to the
throne but he died prematurely in 1553. The crown fell to
his older sister Mary (1553-1558)_ the offspring of Henry
VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. She was half
Spanish and a devout Catholic. She became the wife of
Philip II of Spain and instituted a reign of terror against
English Protestants in an attempt to return England to
Catholic authority Bloody Mary). But Mary died after
only 5 years on the throne, and her half-sister Elizabeth 1
(1558-1603)_ Henry WIII’s daughter by his second wife-
Anne Boleyn_ became Queen. Only 25 when she came to
the throne, she started one of the most glorious ages in the
history of England.

2. Literature features:
- During the 14th century, a cultural movement called
humanism began to gain momentum in Italy. Among its
many principles, humanism promoted the idea that man
was the center of his own universe, and people should
embrace human achievements in education, classical arts,
literature and science. In 1450, the invention of the
Gutenberg printing press allowed for improved
communication throughout Europe and for ideas to spread
more quickly. As a result of this advance in
communication, little-known texts from early humanist
authors such as those by Francesco Petrarch and Giovanni
Boccaccio, which promoted the renewal of traditional
Greek and Roman culture and values, were printed and
distributed to the masses. Additionally, many scholars
believe advances in international finance and trade
impacted culture in Europe and set the stage for the
Renaissance.
- In some ways, Renaissance humanism was not a
philosophy but a method of learning. In contrast to the
medieval scholastic mode, which focused on resolving
contradictions between authors, Renaissance humanists
would study ancient texts in the original and appraise
them through a combination of reasoning and empirical
evidence. Humanist education was based on the
programme of Studia Humanitatis, the study of five
humanities: poetry, grammar, history, moral philosophy,
and rhetoric. Although historians have sometimes
struggled to define humanism precisely, most have settled
on "a middle of the road definition... the movement to
recover, interpret, and assimilate the language, literature,
learning and values of ancient Greece and Rome". Above
all, humanists asserted "the genius of man ... the unique
and extraordinary ability of the human mind".
- The humanists believed that it is important to transcend
to the afterlife with a perfect mind and body, which could
be attained with education. The purpose of humanism was
to create a universal man whose person combined
intellectual and physical excellence and who was capable
of functioning honorably in virtually any situation. This
ideology was referred to as the uomo universale, an
ancient Greco-Roman ideal. Education during the
Renaissance was mainly composed of ancient literature
and history as it was thought that the classics provided
moral instruction and an intensive understanding of
human behavior.
- A unique characteristic of some Renaissance libraries is
that they were open to the public. These libraries were
places where ideas were exchanged and where
scholarship and reading were considered both pleasurable
and beneficial to the mind and soul. As freethinking was a
hallmark of the age, many libraries contained a wide
range of writers. Classical texts could be found alongside
humanist writings. These informal associations of
intellectuals profoundly influenced Renaissanceculture.
Some of the richest "bibliophiles" built libraries as
temples to books and knowledge. A number of libraries
appeared as manifestations of immense wealth joined
with a love of books. In some cases, cultivated library
builders were also committed to offering others the
opportunity to use their collections. Prominent aristocrats
and princes of the Church created great libraries for the
use of their courts, called "court libraries", and were
housed in lavishly designed monumental buildings
decorated with ornate woodwork, and the walls adorned
with frescoes (Murray, Stuart A.P.).
3. Some famous authors and their popular
works:
Some of the most famous and groundbreaking
Renaissance intellectuals, artists, scientists and writers
include the likes of:
- Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519): Italian painter,
architect, inventor and “Renaissance man” responsible for
painting “The Mona Lisa” and “The Last Supper.
- Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536): Scholar from Holland
who defined the humanist movement in Northern Europe.
Translator of the New Testament into Greek.
- Rene Descartes (1596–1650): French philosopher and
mathematician regarded as the father of modern
philosophy. Famous for stating, “I think; therefore I am.”
- Galileo (1564-1642): Italian astronomer, physicist and
engineer whose pioneering work with telescopes enabled
him to describes the moons of Jupiter and rings of Saturn.
Placed under house arrest for his views of a heliocentric
universe.
- Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543): Mathematician and
astronomer who made first modern scientific argument
for the concept of a heliocentric solar system.
- Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679): English philosopher and
author of “Leviathan.”
- Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400): English poet and author
of “The Canterbury Tales.”- Giotto (1266-1337): Italian
painter and architect whose more realistic depictions of
human emotions influenced generations of artists.Best
known for his frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua.
- Dante (1265–1321): Italian philosopher, poet, writer and
political thinker who authored “The Divine Comedy.”
- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527): Italian diplomat and
philosopher famous for writing “The Prince” and “The
Discourses on Livy.”
- Titian (1488–1576): Italian painter celebrated for his
portraits of Pope Paul III and Charles I and his later
religious and mythical paintings like “Venus and Adonis”
and "Metamorphoses."
- William Tyndale (1494–1536): English biblical
translator, humanist and scholar burned at the stake for
translating the Bible into English.
- William Byrd (1539/40–1623): English composer
known for his development of the English madrigal and
his religious organ music.
- John Milton (1608–1674): English poet and historian
who wrote the epic poem “Paradise Lost.”
- William Shakespeare (1564–1616): England’s “national
poet” and the most famous playwright of all time,
celebrated for his sonnets and plays like “Romeo and
Juliet."
- Donatello (1386–1466): Italian sculptor celebrated for
lifelike sculptures like “David,” commissioned by the
Medici family.
- Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510): Italian painter of “Birth
of Venus.”
- Raphael (1483–1520): Italian painter who learned from
da Vinci and Michelangelo.Best known for his paintings
of the Madonna and “The School of Athens.”
- Michelangelo (1475–1564): Italian sculptor, painter and
architect who carved “David” and painted The Sistine
Chapel in Rome.
4. A summary Biography of William
Shakespeare:
- William Shakespeare was a renowned English poet,
playwright, and actor born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-
Avon. His birthday is most commonly celebrated on 23
April (see When was Shakespeare born), which is also
believed to be the date he died in 1616.- Shakespeare was
a prolific writer during the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages
of British theatre (sometimes called the English
Renaissance or the Early Modern Period). Shakespeare’s
plays are perhaps his most enduring legacy, but they are
not all he wrote. Shakespeare’s poems also remain
popular to this day.
- Records survive relating to William Shakespeare’s
family that offer an understanding of the context of
Shakespeare's early life and the lives of his family
members. John Shakespeare married Mary Arden, and
together they had eight children. John and Mary lost two
daughters as infants, so William became their eldest child.
John Shakespeare worked as a glove-maker, but he also
became an important figure in the town of Stratford by
fulfilling civic positions. His elevated status meant that he
was even more likely to have sent his children, including
William, to the local grammar school. William
Shakespeare would have lived with his family in their
house on Henley Street until he turned eighteen. When he
was eighteen, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, who
was twenty-six. It was a rushed marriage because Anne
was already pregnant at the time of the ceremony.
Together they had three children. Their first daughter,
Susanna, was born six months after the wedding and was
later followed by twins Hamnet and Judith. Hamnet died
when he was just 11 years old.
- Shakespeare's career jump-started in London, but when
did he go there? We know Shakespeare's twins were
baptised in 1585, and that by 1592 his reputation was
established in London, but the intervening years are
considered a mystery. Scholars generally refer to these
years as ‘The Lost Years’. During his time in London,
Shakespeare’s first printed works were published. They
were two long poems, 'Venus and Adonis' (1593) and
'The Rape of Lucrece' (1594). He also became a founding
member of The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a company of
actors. Shakespeare was the company's regular dramatist,
producing on average two plays a year, for almost twenty
years. He remained with the company for the rest of his
career, during which time it evolved into The King’s Men
under the patronage of King James I (from 1603). During
his time in the company Shakespeare wrote many of his
most famous tragedies, such as King Lear and Macbeth,
as well as great romances, like The Winter’s Tale and The
Tempest.
- Altogether Shakespeare's works include 38 plays, 2
narrative poems, 154 sonnets, and a variety of other
poems. No original manuscripts of Shakespeare's plays
are known to exist today. It is actually thanks to a group
of actors from Shakespeare's company that we have about
half of the plays at all. They collected them for
publication after Shakespeare died, preserving the plays.
These writings were brought together in what is known as
the First Folio ('Folio' refers to the size of the paper used).
It contained 36 of his plays, but none of his poetry.
Shakespeare’s legacy is as rich and diverse as his work;
his plays have spawned countless adaptations across
multiple genres and cultures. His plays have had an
enduring presence on stage and film. His writings have
been compiled in various iterations of The Complete
Works of William Shakespeare, which include all of his
plays, sonnets, and other poems. William Shakespeare
continues to be one of the most important literary figures
of the English language. Shakespeare produced most of
his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays
were mainly comedies and histories and these works
remain regarded as some of the best work produced in
these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about
1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and
Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the
English language. In his last phase, he wrote
tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated
with other playwrights. Shakespeare's plays remain highly
popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and
reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts
throughout the world.
- Shakespeare’s success in the London theatres made him
considerably wealthy, and by 1597 he was able to
purchase New Place, the largest house in the borough of
Stratford-upon-Avon. Although his professional career
was spent in London, he maintained close links with his
native town. Recent archaeological evidence discovered
on the site of Shakespeare’s New Place shows that
Shakespeare was only ever an intermittent lodger in
London. This suggests he divided his time between
Stratford and London (a two or three-day commute). In
his later years, he may have spent more time in Stratford-
upon-Avon than scholars previously thought.
Four Periods of Shakespeare's Life
Shakespeare’s dramatic work can be divided into into four
periods.:
(1) The period of experimentation up to 1594:
characterized by the exuberance of youthful love and
imagination. Among the plays typical of these years are
The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night's Dream,
Romeo and Juliet, Richard II and Richard III.
(2) The second period from 1595 to 1600, shows progress
in dramatic art. There is less exaggeration, more real
power, and a deeper insight into human nature. There
appears in his philosophy a touch of sadness. Some plays
of this period are The Merchant of Venice, Henry IV,
Henry V, and As You Like It.
(3) We may characterize the third period, from 1601 to
1608, as one in which Shakespeare felt that the time was
out of joint, that life was a fitful fever. The great plays of
this period are tragedies, among which we may quote
Julius Caesar*, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear.
(4) The plays of his fourth period, 1608_1613, are
remarkable for calm strength and sweetness. The
fierceness of Othello and Macbeth is left behind. The
greatest plays of this period are Cymbeline, The Winter's
Tale, and The Tempest.

IV. The Restoration:

1.Political, social, and economical features:
- The Civil War or the Bourgeois Revolution happened
when Charles I (son of James VI) imprisoned parliament
members. Prince of Wales at the time of the English Civil
War, Charles II fled to France after Oliver Cromwell’s
Parliamentarians defeated King Charles I’s Royalists in
1646. In 1649, Charles II vainly attempted to save his
father’s life by presenting Parliament a signed blank sheet
of paper, thereby granting whatever terms were required.
However, Oliver Cromwell was determined to execute
Charles I, and on January 30, 1649, the king was
beheaded in London. Oliver Cromwell established “The
Commonwealth of England” with him serving as Lord
Protector leading to an interruption of the monarchy of
England for the first time. Oliver ran a dictatorial
government.
- Restoration literature is the English literature written
during the historical period commonly referred to as the
English Restoration (1660–1689), which corresponds to
the last years of Stuart reign in England, Scotland, Wales,
and Ireland.
- During the Interregnum, England had been dominated
by Puritan literature and the intermittent presence of
official censorship (for example, Milton's Areopagitica
and his later retraction of that statement). While some of
the Puritan ministers of Oliver Cromwell wrote poetry
that was elaborate and carnal (such as Andrew Marvell's
poem, "To His Coy Mistress"), such poetry was not
published. Similarly, some of the poets who published
with the Restoration produced their poetry during the
Interregnum. The official break in literary culture caused
by censorship and radically moralist standards effectively
created a gap in literary tradition. At the time of the Civil
War, poetry had been dominated by metaphysical poetry
of the John Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Lovelace
sort. Drama had developed the late Elizabethan theatre
traditions and had begun to mount increasingly topical
and political plays (for example, the drama of Thomas
Middleton). The Interregnum put a stop, or at least a
caesura, to these lines of influence and allowed a
seemingly fresh start for all forms of literature after the
Restoration.- The last years of the Interregnum were
turbulent, as were the last years of the Restoration period,
and those who did not go into exile were called upon to
change their religious beliefs more than once. With each
religious preference came a different sort of literature,
both in prose and poetry (the theatres were closed during
the Interregnum). When Cromwell died and his son,
Richard Cromwell, threatened to become Lord Protector,
politicians and public figures scrambled to show
themselves as allies or enemies of the new regime. Printed
literature was dominated by odes in poetry, and religious
writing in prose. The industry of religious tract writing,
despite official efforts, did not reduce its output. Figures
such as the founder of the Society of Friends, George Fox,
were jailed by the Cromwellian authorities and published
at their own peril.
- During the Interregnum, the royalist forces attached to
the court of Charles I went into exile with the twenty-
year-old Charles II and conducted a brisk business in
intelligence and fund-raising for an eventual return to
England. Some of the royalist ladies installed themselves
in convents in Holland and France that offered safe haven
for indigent and travelling nobles and allies. The men
similarly stationed themselves in Holland and France,
with the court-in-exile being established in The Hague
before setting up more permanently in Paris.The nobility
who travelled with (and later travelled to) Charles II were
therefore lodged for more than a decade in the midst of
the continent's literary scene. As Holland and France in
the 17th century were little alike, so the influences picked
up by courtiers in exile and the travellers who sent
intelligence and money to them were not monolithic.
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. John Bramhall,
for example, had been a strongly high church theologian,
and yet, in exile, he debated willingly with Thomas
Hobbes and came into the Restored church as tolerant in
practice as he was severe in argument. Courtiers also
received an exposure to the Roman Catholic Church and
its liturgy and pageants, as well as, to a lesser extent,
Italian poetry.

2. Literature features:
* Dryden was the most influential writer of the
Restoration writing various literary forms― verses,
comedy, tragedy, heroic plays, , satires, translations of
classical works—and produced influential critical essays
concerning how one ought to write these forms.
* John Milton: Paradise Lost.
The Restoration was an age of poetry. Not only was
poetry the most popular form of literature, but it was also
the most significant form of literature, as poems affected
political events and immediately reflected thetimes. It
was, to its own people, an age dominated only by the
king, and not by any single genius. Throughout the
period, the lyric, ariel, historical, and epic poem was
being developed.
- Lyric poetry, in which the poet speaks of his or her own
feelings in the first person and expresses a mood, was not
especially common in the Restoration period. Poets
expressed their points of view in other forms, usually
public or formally disguised poetic forms such as odes,
pastoral poetry, and ariel verse. One of the characteristics
of the period is its devaluation of individual sentiment and
psychology in favour of public utterance and philosophy.
The sorts of lyric poetry found later in the Churchyard
Poets would, in the Restoration, only exist as pastorals.
- Formally, the Restoration period had a preferred rhyme
scheme. Rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter was by
far the most popular structure for poetry of all types. Neo-
Classicism meant that poets attempted adaptations of
Classical meters, but the rhyming couplet in iambic
pentameter held a near monopoly. According to Dryden
("Preface to The Conquest of Grenada"), the rhyming
couplet in iambic pentameter has the right restraint and
dignity for a lofty subject, and its rhyme allowed for a
complete, coherent statement to be made. Dryden was
struggling with the issue of what later critics in the
Augustan period would call "decorum": the fitness of
form to subject (q.v. Dryden Epic). It is the same struggle
that Davenant faced in his Gondibert. Dryden's solution
was a closed couplet in iambic pentameter that would
have a minimum of enjambment. This form was called the
"heroic couplet," because it was suitable for heroic
subjects. Additionally, the age also developed the mock-
heroic couplet. After 1672 and Samuel Butler's Hudibras,
iambic tetrameter couplets with unusual or unexpected
rhymes became known as Hudibrastic verse. It was a
formal parody of heroic verse, and it was primarily used
for satire. Jonathan Swift would use the Hudibrastic form
almost exclusively for his poetry.
- Although Dryden's reputation is greater today,
contemporaries saw the 1670s and 1680s as the age of
courtier poets in general, and Edmund Waller was as
praised as any. Dryden, Rochester, Buckingham, and
Dorset dominated verse, and all were attached to the court
of Charles. Aphra Behn, Matthew Prior, and Robert
Gould, by contrast, were outsiders who were profoundly
royalist. The court poets follow no one particular style,
except that they all show sexual awareness, a willingness
to satirise, and a dependence upon wit to dominate their
opponents. Each of these poets wrote for the stage as well
as the page. Of these, Behn, Dryden, Rochester, and
Gould deserve some separate mention.
- The Restoration period ended without an English epic.
Beowulf may now be called the English epic, but the
work was unknown to Restoration authors, and Old
English was incomprehensible to them.

3. Some famous authors and their popular

works:
Dryden was prolific; and he was often accused of
plagiarism. Both before and after his Laureateship, he
wrote public odes. He attempted the Jacobean pastoral
along the lines of Walter Raleigh and Philip Sidney, but
his greatest successes and fame came from his attempts at
apologetics for the restored court and the Established
Church. His Absalom and Achitophel and Religio Laici
both served the King directly by making controversial
royal actions seem reasonable. He also pioneered the
mock-heroic.Although Samuel Butler had invented the
mock-heroic in English with Hudibras (written during the
Interregnum but published in the Restoration), Dryden's
MacFlecknoe set up the satirical parody. Dryden was
himself not of noble blood, and he was never awarded the
honours that he had been promised by the King (nor was
he repaid the loans he had made to the King), but he did
as much as any peer to serve Charles II. Even when James
II came to the throne and Roman Catholicism was on the
rise, Dryden attempted to serve the court, and his The
Hind and the Panther praised the Roman church above all
others. After that point, Dryden suffered for his
conversions, and he was the victim of many satires.
Buckingham wrote some court poetry, but he, like Dorset,
was a patron of poetry more than a poet. Rochester,
meanwhile, was a prolix and outrageous poet. Rochester's
poetry is almost always sexually frank and is frequently
political. Inasmuch as the Restoration came after the
Interregnum, the very sexual explicitness of Rochester's
verse was a political statement and a thumb in the eye of
Puritans. His poetry often assumes a lyric pose, as he
pretends to write in sadness over his own impotence
("The Disabled Debauchee") or sexual conquests, but
most of Rochester's poetry is a parody of an existing,
Classically authorised form. He has a mock topographical
poem ("Ramble in St James Park", which is about the
dangers of darkness for a man intent on copulation and
the historical compulsion of that plot of ground as a place
for fornication), several mock odes ("To Signore Dildo,"
concerning the public burning of a crate of "contraband"
from France on the London docks), and mock pastorals.
Rochester's interest was in inversion, disruption, and the
superiority of wit as much as it was in hedonism.
Rochester's venality led to an early death, and he was later
frequently invoked as the exemplar of a Restoration rake.
Aphra Behn modelled the rake Willmore in her play The
Rover on Rochester;[6] and while she was best known
publicly for her drama (in the 1670s, only Dryden's plays
were staged more often than hers), Behn wrote a great
deal of poetry that would be the basis of her later
reputation. Edward Bysshe would include numerous
quotations from herverse in his Art of English Poetry
(1702).[7] While her poetry was occasionally sexually
frank, it was never as graphic or intentionally lurid and
titillating as Rochester's. Rather, her poetry was, like the
court's ethos, playful and honest about sexual desire. One
of the most remarkable aspects of Behn's success in court
poetry, however, is that Behn was herself a commoner.
She had no more relation to peers than Dryden, and
possibly quite a bit less. As a woman, a commoner, and
Kentish, she is remarkable for her success in moving in
the same circles as the King himself. As Janet Todd and
others have shown, she was likely a spy for the Royalist
side during the Interregnum. She was certainly a spy for
Charles II in the Second Anglo-Dutch War, but found her
services unrewarded (in fact, she may have spent time in
debtor's prison) and turned to writing to support herself.
[8] Her ability to write poetry that stands among the best
of the age gives some lie to the notion that the Restoration
was an age of female illiteracy and verse composed and
read only by peers.
If Behn is a curious exception to the rule of noble verse,
Robert Gould breaks that rule altogether.[citation needed]
Gould was born of a common family and orphaned at the
age of thirteen. He had no schooling at all and worked as
a domestic servant, first as a footman and then, probably,
in the pantry. However, he was attached to the Earl of
Dorset's household, and Gould somehow learned to read
and write, as well as possibly to read and write Latin. In
the 1680s and 1690s, Gould's poetry was very popular. He
attempted to write odes for money, but his great success
came with Love Given O'er, or A Satyr Upon ... Woman
in 1692. It was a partial adaptation of a satire by Juvenal,
but with an immense amount of explicit invective against
women. The misogyny in this poem is some of the
harshest and most visceral in English poetry: the poem
sold out all editions. Gould also wrote a Satyr on the Play
House (reprinted in Montagu Sommers's The London
Stage) with detailed descriptions of the actions and actors
involved in the Restoration stage. He followed the success
of Love Given O'er with a series of misogynistic poems,
all of which have specific, graphic, and witty
denunciations of female behaviour. His poetry has
"virgin" brides who, upon their wedding nights, have "the
straight gate so wide/ It's been leapt by all mankind,"
noblewomen who have money but prefer to pay the
coachman with oral sex, and noblewomen having sex in
their coaches and having the cobblestones heighten their
pleasures. Gould's career was brief, but his success was
not a novelty of subliterary misogyny. After Dryden's
conversion to Roman Catholicism, Gould even engaged in
a poison pen battle with the Laureate. His "Jack Squab"
(the Laureate getting paid with squab as well as sack and
implying that Dryden would sell his soul for a dinner)
attacked Dryden's faithlessness viciously, and Dryden and
hisfriends replied. That a footman even could conduct a
verse war is remarkable. That he did so without,
apparently, any prompting from his patron is astonishing.

V. The Age of Reason (The

Enlightenment or The 18th
century):
1. Political, social, and economical features:
- The Age of Enlightenment or the Enlightenment, also
known as the Age of Reason, was an intellectual and
philosophical movement that occurred in Europe in the
17th and 18th centuries, with global influences and
effects. The Enlightenment included a range of ideas
centered on the value of human happiness, the pursuit of
knowledge obtained by means of reason and the evidence
of the senses, and ideals such as natural law, liberty,
progress, toleration, fraternity, constitutional government,
and separation of church and state.
- The Enlightenment has long been seen as the foundation
of modern Western political and intellectual culture. The
Enlightenment brought political modernization to the
West, in terms of introducing democratic values and
institutions and the creation of modern, liberal
democracies. This thesis has been widely accepted by
scholars and has been reinforced by the large-scale studies
by Robert Darnton, Roy Porter, and, most recently, by
Jonathan Israel. Enlightenment thought was deeply
influential in the political realm. European rulers such as
Catherine II of Russia, Joseph II of Austria, and Frederick
II of Prussia tried to apply Enlightenment thought on
religious and political tolerance, which became known as
enlightened absolutism.[16] Many of the major political
and intellectual figures behind the American Revolution
associated themselves closely with the Enlightenment:
Benjamin Franklin visited Europe repeatedly and
contributed actively to the scientific and political debates
there and brought the newest ideas back to Philadelphia;
Thomas Jefferson closely followed European ideas and
later incorporated some of the ideals of the Enlightenment
into the Declaration of Independence; and Madison
incorporated these ideals into the U.S. Constitution during
its framing in 1787.
- In 1776, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations,
often considered the first work on modern economics as it
had an immediate impact on British economic policy that
continues into the 21st century. It was immediately
preceded and influenced by Anne Robert Jacques Turgot's
drafts of Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of
Wealth (1766). Smith acknowledged indebtedness and
possibly was the original English translator.
- Beccaria, a jurist, criminologist, philosopher, and
politician and one of the great Enlightenment writers,
became famous for his masterpiece Of Crimes and
Punishments (1764), later translated into 22 languages,
whichcondemned torture and the death penalty and was a
founding work in the field of penology and the classical
school of criminology by promoting criminal justice.
Francesco Mario Pagano wrote important studies such as
Saggi politici (Political Essays, 1783); and Considerazioni
sul processo criminale (Considerations on the Criminal
Trial, 1787), which established him as an international
authority on criminal law.
- The Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason
came into being during the 1700s when mankind was
emerging from centuries of ignorance into a new age
enlightened by reason, science, and respect for humanity.
People of the Enlightenment were convinced that human
reason could discover the natural laws of the universe and
assert the natural rights of mankind; thereby vast progress
in knowledge, technology, and moral values would be
realized. This new way of thinking led to the development
of a new religion known as Deism. They saw reason as
the ruling principle of life and the key to progress and
perfection.

2. Literature features:
- Literature during this period was often considered a tool
for the advancement of knowledge. Writers were often
found observing nature in their attempts to express their
beliefs. Human nature was considered a constant that
observation and reason could be applied to for the
advancement of knowledge.
- Literature during this period was often considered a tool
for the advancement of knowledge. Writers were often
found observing nature in their attempts to express their
beliefs. Human nature was considered a constant that
observation and reason could be applied to for the
advancement of knowledge. Within these circumstances,
the Age of Satire was born. Satire was the most popular
literary tool that was utilized by writers of the time. With
the help of satire, writers were better able to educate the
public through literature. Its function was to acknowledge
a problem in society and attempt to reform the problem in
a comical manner while still educating the public. Its
effectiveness can be seen in literary pieces by Jonathan
Swift such as A Modest Proposal where he addresses and
criticizes the problem of a growing famine in Ireland.
Playwrights of the time were also known to incorporate
satire in their plays. Through the use of satire, they were
able to expose and critique social injustices. “Over the
thirty years of its triumphs, Restoration comedy, in an
astounding fugue of excesses and depravities, laid bare
the turbulence and toxins of this culture” (Longman).
Satire was a highly successful literary tool that worked to
promote social awareness through literature, the theater
and periodicals of the time. To call the 18th century the
Age of Reason is toseize on a useful half-truth but to
cause confusion in the general picture, because the
primacy of reason had also been a mark of certain periods
of the previous age. It is more accurate to say that the
18th century was marked by two main impulses: reason
and passion. The respect paid to reason was shown in
pursuit of order, symmetry, decorum, and scientific
knowledge; the cultivation of the feelings stimulated
philanthropy, exaltation of personal relationships,
religious fervour, and the cult of sentiment, or sensibility.
In literature the rational impulse fostered satire, argument,
wit, plain prose; the other inspired the psychological
novel and the poetry of the sublime.
- The cult of wit, satire, and argument is evident in
England in the writings of Alexander Pope, Jonathan
Swift, and Samuel Johnson, continuing the tradition of
Dryden from the 17th century. The novel was established
as a major art form in English literature partly by a
rational realism shown in the works of Henry Fielding,
Daniel Defoe, and Tobias Smollett and partly by the
psychological probing of the novels of Samuel
Richardson and of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. In
France the major characteristic of the period lies in the
philosophical and political writings of the Enlightenment,
which had a profound influence throughout the rest of
Europe and foreshadowed the French Revolution.
Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles de
Montesquieu, and the Encyclopédistes Denis Diderot and
Jean d’Alembert all devoted much of their writing to
controversies about social and religious matters, often
involving direct conflict with the authorities. In the first
part of the century, German literature looked to English
and French models, although innovative advances were
made by the dramatist and critic Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing. The great epoch of German literature came at the
end of the century, when cultivation of the feelings and of
emotional grandeur found its most powerful expression in
what came to be called the Sturm und Drang (“Storm and
Stress”) movement. Associated with this were two of the
greatest names of German literature, Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, both of whom in
drama and poetry advanced far beyond the turbulence of
Sturm und Drang.
Literature of the Age of Reason:
Swift: attacked hypocrisy in Gulliver’s Travels (1726): a
famous satire in English.
Pope: The Rape of the Lock. Addison and Steele:
outstanding essayists: Both wrote to criticize to criticize
the social customs and attitudes of their day.
Novel: the development of the novel is one of the great
achievements of English literature of this age.
Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson.
3. Some famous authors and their popular
works:
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva, Switzerland
and moved to Paris as a young man to pursue a career as a
musician. Instead, he became famous as one of the
greatest and most revolutionary thinkers to ever live. In
the age of the absolute power of kings, Rousseau argued
against the monarchy’s divine right to rule – he
proclaimed the absurdity of submitting to coercion or
slavery, stating that true political authority lies with the
people. He also upset the other great power of the age, the
Church, by arguing that all religions are equal in their
ability to instill goodness in people. The philosopher also
belonged to the Romanticism literary movement, of which
he’s thought to be one of the pioneers.
Voltaire
Voltaire, born François-Marie Arouet, holds a special
place in the world’s collective memory as the symbol of
the Enlightenment. An extremely prolific writer, Voltaire
achieved fame for his polemic satires and acerbic wit
(although he originally wanted to be a tragedian). He
publicly argued for freedom of religion and expression,
the separation of church and state, and wrote formidable
attacks on the Catholic Church and powerful French
establishments. Voltaire has been feverishly quoted after
the dreadful attacks in Paris on Jan. 7th and Nov. 15th,
2015, as his name instantly evokes the battle against
religious fanaticism as well the love of tolerance and
freedom of thinking.
Diderot
One word cannot capture Denis Diderot who has more
than one string to his bow; he was a writer, philosopher,
encyclopedist, literary and art critic, and translator, to
only name a few. He marked history with one of most
impressive works of the time, the famous Encyclopédie,
which he co-wrote. The goal of the Encyclopédie was,
according to Diderot, to ‘change the common way of
thinking‘ through the dissemination of knowledge and
represent a revolution of scientific, secular, and open-
minded thought (thus undermining the authority of the
two great powers of the day, the French monarchy and the
Catholic Church). Not surprisingly, an entire Parisian
university was named after him.Montesquieu Born into a
French noble family in southern France, Montesquieu
practiced law in adulthood and witnessed great political
upheaval across Britain and France. In The Spirit of the
Laws, Montesquieu argued for the separation and balance
of governmental powers as a remedy for state corruption.
Indeed, he wrote, ‘Government should be set up so that no
man need be afraid of another.‘ His ideas profoundly
influenced the building of revolutionary new
governments, including the United States. He also
supported the idea of women as heads of state.
Beaumarchais
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais was many great
things, including an inventor, a watchmaker, a diplomat, a
spy, a publisher (he published Voltaire’s works despite
them being widely banned), a horticulturist, a
businessman, an arms dealer, a satirist, a revolutionary
(for both the American and the French revolutions), a
dramatist, a musician and a poet. Despite all this, he’s
mostly famous for his plays, including The Marriage of
Figaro, upon which Mozart based his opera.
D’Alembert
The Enlightenment was not only about the arts but also
about science, and Jean le Rond d’Alembert is an
excellent example of that since not only was he a
philosopher and an encyclopedist but also a renowned
mathematician. Indeed, this friend of Voltaire’s
contributed to fluid mechanics, refraction theory, and the
laws of motion. Along with Diderot, he founded the
Encyclopédie, and contributed works on differential
equations and partial derivatives.
Condorcet
The Enlightenment abounded with great minds, and
Nicolas de Condorcet was one of them. Condorcet
straddled the gap between the arts and science, by
applying mathematical principles to various social
problems. He used statistics and probabilities to design a
voting system in which voters rank candidates in order of
preference. A huge proponent of human rights, Condorcet
believed in free and equal education, citizenship,suffrage,
and equal rights for women (unlike other ‘enlightened’
thinkers), and held the same rights for people of all races.
Marivaux
This French novelist and dramatist is considered as one of
the major French playwrights of the Enlightenment.
During the 18th century, Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de
Marivaux (yes, a nobleman again!) wrote many comedies
for the Comédie Française, with his most famous
masterpieces being Les Fausses Confidences and Le Jeu
de l’Amour et du Hasard – and bear in mind that this
gentleman wrote between 30 and 40 plays during his life.
Marivaux was famous for having a volatile personality,
and although he was good-natured, he was highly critical
of philosophers, which may be the reason why Voltaire
loathed him so much.
Lavoisier
The self-proclaimed ‘father of modern chemistry,’
Antoine Laurent Lavoisier may not have been modest, but
he did have a huge impact on the fields of biology and
chemistry. He gave names to many of the elements
everyone knows today (including oxygen, which he
identified as crucial to combustion) and created a list of
elements that he asserted were substances which could not
be broken down further (including hydrogen, nitrogen,
zinc, mercury, phosphorus, and sulfur). He also
discovered that diamonds are made from carbon. This
revolutionary scientist also participated in the
construction of the metric system.

4. A summary Biography of Daniel Defoe:

Daniel Defoe, orig.Daniel Foe, (born 1660, London, Eng.
—died April 24, 1731, London), British novelist,
pamphleteer, and journalist. A well-educated London
merchant, he became an acute economic theorist and
began to write eloquent, witty, often audacious tracts on
public affairs. A satire he published resulted in his being
imprisoned in 1703, and his business collapsed. He
traveled as a government secret agent while continuing to
write prolifically. In 1704–13 he wrote practically single-
handedly the periodical Review, a serious and forceful
paper that influenced later essay periodicals such as The
Spectator. His Tour Through the Whole Island of Great
Britain, 3 vol. (1724–26), followed several trips to
Scotland. Late in life he turned to fiction. He achieved
literary immortality with the novel Robinson Crusoe
(1719), which drew partly on memoirs of voyagers and
castaways. He is also remembered forthe vivid,
picaresque Moll Flanders (1722); the nonfictional Journal
of the Plague Year (1722), on the Great Plague in London
in 1664–65; and Roxana (1724), a prototype of the
modern novel. Defoe was educated at the Rev. James
Fisher's boarding school in Pixham Lane in Dorking,
Surrey. His parents were Presbyterian dissenters, and
around the age of 14, he was sent to Charles Morton's
dissenting academy at Newington Green, then a village
just north of London, where he is believed to have
attended the Dissenting church there. He lived on Church
Street, Stoke Newington, at what is now nos.95–103.
During this period, the English government persecuted
those who chose to worship outside the Church of
England. Defoe’s father, James Foe, was a hard-working
and fairly prosperous tallow chandler (perhaps also, later,
a butcher), of Flemish descent. By his middle 30s, Daniel
was calling himself “Defoe,” probably reviving a variant
of what may have been the original family name. As a
Nonconformist, or Dissenter, Foe could not send his son
to the University of Oxford or to Cambridge; he sent him
instead to the excellent academy at Newington Green kept
by the Reverend Charles Morton. There Defoe received
an education in many ways better, and certainly broader,
than any he would have had at an English university.
Morton was an admirable teacher, later becoming first
vice president of Harvard College; and the clarity,
simplicity, and ease of his style of writing—together with
the Bible, the works of John Bunyan, and the pulpit
oratory of the day—may have helped to form Defoe’s
own literary style. Although intended for the Presbyterian
ministry, Defoe decided against this and by 1683 had set
up as a merchant. He called trade his “beloved subject,”
and it was one of the abiding interests of his life. He dealt
in many commodities, traveled widely at home and
abroad, and became an acute and intelligent economic
theorist, in many respects ahead of his time; but
misfortune, in one form or another, dogged him
continually. It was true enough. In 1692, after prospering
for a while, Defoe went bankrupt for £17,000. Opinions
differ as to the cause of his collapse: on his own
admission, Defoe was apt to indulge in rash speculations
and projects; he may not always have been completely
scrupulous, and he later characterized himself as one of
those tradesmen who had “done things which their own
principles condemned, which they are not ashamed to
blush for.” But undoubtedly the main reason for his
bankruptcy was the loss that he sustained in insuring ships
during the war with France—he was one of 19
“merchants insurers” ruined in 1692. In this matter Defoe
may have been incautious, but he was not dishonourable,
and he dealt fairly with his creditors (some of whom
pursued him savagely), paying off all but £5,000 within
10 years. He suffered further severe losses in 1703, when
his prosperous brick-and-tile worksnear Tilbury failed
during his imprisonment for political offenses, and he did
not actively engage in trade after this time. With Defoe’s
interest in trade went an interest in politics. The first of
many political pamphlets by him appeared in 1683. When
the Roman Catholic James II ascended the throne in 1685,
Defoe—as a staunch Dissenter and with characteristic
impetuosity—joined the ill-fated rebellion of the Duke of
Monmouth, managing to escape after the disastrous Battle
of Sedgemoor. Three years later James had fled to France,
and Defoe rode to welcome the army of William of
Orange—“William, the Glorious, Great, and Good, and
Kind,” as Defoe was to call him. Throughout William
III’s reign, Defoe supported him loyally, becoming his
leading pamphleteer. In 1701, in reply to attacks on the
“foreign” king, Defoe published his vigorous and witty
poem The True-Born Englishman, an enormously popular
work that is still very readable and relevant in its
exposure of the fallacies of racial prejudice. Defoe was
clearly proud of this work, because he sometimes
designated himself “Author of ‘The True-Born
Englishman’” in later works. With George I’s accession
(1714), the Tories fell. The Whigs in their turn recognized
Defoe’s value, and he continued to write for the
government of the day and to carry out intelligence work.
At about this time, too (perhaps prompted by a severe
illness), he wrote the best known and most popular of his
many didactic works, The Family Instructor (1715). The
writings so far mentioned, however, would not
necessarily have procured literary immortality for Defoe;
this he achieved when in 1719 he turned his talents to an
extended work of prose fiction and (drawing partly on the
memoirs of voyagers and castaways such as Alexander
Selkirk) produced Robinson Crusoe. A German critic has
called it a “world-book,” a label justified not only by the
enormous number of translations, imitations, and
adaptations that have appeared but by the almost mythic
power with which Defoe creates a hero and a situation
with which every reader can in some sense identify. Here
(as in his works of the remarkable year 1722, which saw
the publication of Moll Flanders, A Journal of the Plague
Year, and Colonel Jack) Defoe displays his finest gift as a
novelist—his insight into human nature. The men and
women he writes about are all, it is true, placed in unusual
circumstances; they are all, in one sense or another,
solitaries; they all struggle, in their different ways,
through a life that is a constant scene of jungle warfare;
they all become, to some extent, obsessive. They are also
ordinary human beings, however, and Defoe, writing
always in the first person, enters into their minds and
analyzes their motives. His novels are given
verisimilitude by their matter-of-fact style and their vivid
concreteness of detail; the latter may seem unselective,
but it effectively helps to evoke a particular,
circumscribed world. Their main defects are
shapelessness, an overinsistent moralizing, occasional
gaucheness, and naiveté. Defoe’srange is narrow, but
within that range he is a novelist of considerable power,
and his plain, direct style, as in almost all of his writing,
holds the reader’s interest. In 1724 he published his last
major work of fiction, Roxana, though in the closing
years of his life, despite failing health, he remained active
and enterprising as a writer. While little is known about
Daniel Defoe's personal life—largely due to a lack of
documentation—Defoe is remembered today as a prolific
journalist and author, and has been applauded for his
hundreds of fiction and nonfiction works, from political
pamphlets to other journalistic pieces, to fantasy-filled
novels.

VI. The 19th century The

Romantic Period (1798_1837):
1. Political, social, and economical features:
- The Romantic Period began roughly around 1798 and
lasted until 1837. The political and economic atmosphere
at the time heavily influenced this period, with many
writers finding inspiration from the French Revolution.
There was a lot of social change during this period. Calls
for the abolition of slavery became louder during this
time, with more writing openly about their
objections.After the Agricultural Revolution people
moved away from the countryside and farmland and into
the cities, where the Industrial Revolution provided jobs
and technological innovations, something that would
spread to the United States in the 19th century.
Romanticism was a reaction against this spread of
industrialism, as well as a criticism of the aristocratic
social and political norms and a call for more attention to
nature. Although writers of this time did not think of
themselves as Romantics, Victorian writers later
classified them in this way because of their ability to
capture the emotion and tenderness of man.
- The beginning of the Romantic Age in Britain is usually
set in 1798 when William Wordsworth and Samuel
Taylor Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads. Romanticism
is a European not just an English development. The word
“Romance” originally referred to highly imaginative
medieval tales of knightly adventure often involving
amorous encounters between a knight and his lady.
- Several economic theories of the first half of the 19th
century were influenced by Romanticism, most notably
those developed by Adam Müller, Simonde de Sismondi,
Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Thomas Carlyle. Michael
Löwy and Robert Sayre first formulated their thesis about
Romanticism as an anti-capitalist and anti-modernist
worldview in a 1984 article called "Figures of Romantic
Anti-capitalism".[1] Romantic anti-capitalism was a wide
spectrum of opposition to capitalism, ultimately tracing its
roots back to the Romantic movement of the early 19th
century, but acquiring a new impetus in the latter part of
the 19th century.- Vladimir Lenin had written already in
1897 that "the wishes of the romanticists are very good
(as are those of the Narodniks). Their recognition of the
contradictions of capitalism places them above the blind
optimists who deny the existence of these contradictions."
- Karl Marx in 1868 also considered Romanticism to have
been the first historical trend of opposition to capitalism,
to be followed be the trend of socialism: "The first
reaction against the French Revolution and the period of
Enlightenment bound up with it was naturally to see
everything as mediaeval and Romantic, even people like
Grimm are not free from this. The second reaction is to
look beyond the Middle Ages into the primitive age of
each nation, and that corresponds to the socialist
tendency, although these learned men have no idea that
the two have any connection."
- Considering Romanticism as a reflection of the age
beginning after the French Revolution and its inherent
social contradictions, Marx and Engels distinguished
between "revolutionary Romanticism", which rejected
capitalism and was striving towards the future, and
Romantic criticism of capitalism from the point of view
of the past. They also differentiated between the
Romantic writers who idealized the feudal social system:
they valued those whose works concealed democratic and
critical elements under a veneer of reactionary utopias,
and criticized the "reactionary Romantics", whose
sympathies for the past amounted to a defense of the
interests of the nobility. Marx and Engels were especially
fond of the works of such revolutionary romantics as
Byron and Shelley.

2. Literature features:
- In literature, Romanticism found recurrent themes in the
evocation or criticism of the past, the cult of "sensibility"
with its emphasis on women and children, the isolation of
the artist or narrator, and respect for nature. Furthermore,
several romantic authors, such as Edgar Allan Poe,
Charles Maturin and Nathaniel Hawthorne, based their
writings on the supernatural/occult and human
psychology. Romanticism tended to regard satire as
something unworthy of serious attention, a view still
influential today. The Romantic movement in literature
was preceded by the Enlightenment and succeeded by
Realism.
- Some authors cite 16th-century poet Isabella di Morra as
an early precursor of Romantic literature. Her lyrics
covering themes of isolation and loneliness, which
reflected the tragic events of her life, are considered "an
impressive prefigurement of Romanticism", differing
from the Petrarchist fashion of the time based on the
philosophy of love.- The precursors of Romanticism in
English poetry go back to the middle of the 18th century,
including figures such as Joseph Warton (headmaster at
Winchester College) and his brother Thomas Warton,
Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. Joseph
maintained that invention and imagination were the chief
qualities of a poet. The Scottish poet James Macpherson
influenced the early development of Romanticism with
the international success of his Ossian cycle of poems
published in 1762, inspiring both Goethe and the young
Walter Scott. Thomas Chatterton is generally considered
the first Romantic poet in English. Both Chatterton and
Macpherson's work involved elements of fraud, as what
they claimed was earlier literature that they had
discovered or compiled was, in fact, entirely their own
work. The Gothic novel, beginning with Horace
Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), was an important
precursor of one strain of Romanticism, with a delight in
horror and threat, and exotic picturesque settings,
matched in Walpole's case by his role in the early revival
of Gothic architecture. Tristram Shandy, a novel by
Laurence Sterne (1759–67), introduced a whimsical
version of the anti-rational sentimental novel to the
English literary public.
- As a term to cover the most distinctive writers who
flourished in the last years of the 18th century and the
first decades of the 19th, “Romantic” is indispensable but
also a little misleading: there was no self-styled
“Romantic movement” at the time, and the great writers
of the period did not call themselves Romantics. Not until
August Wilhelm von Schlegel’s Vienna lectures of 1808–
09 was a clear distinction established between the
“organic,” “plastic” qualities of Romantic art and the
“mechanical” character of Classicism.Many of the age’s
foremost writers thought that something new was
happening in the world’s affairs, nevertheless. William
Blake’s affirmation in 1793 that “a new heaven is begun”
was matched a generation later by Percy Bysshe Shelley’s
“The world’s great age begins anew.” “These, these will
give the world another heart, / And other pulses,” wrote
John Keats, referring to Leigh Hunt and William
Wordsworth. Fresh ideals came to the fore; in particular,
the ideal of freedom, long cherished in England, was
being extended to every range of human endeavour. As
that ideal swept through Europe, it became natural to
believe that the age of tyrants might soon end.
- The most notable feature of the poetry of the time is the
new role of individual thought and personal feeling.
Where the main trend of 18th-century poetics had been to
praise the general, to see the poet as a spokesman of
society addressing a cultivated and homogeneous
audience and having as his end the conveyance of “truth,”
the Romantics found the source of poetry in the particular,
unique experience. Blake’s marginal comment on Sir
Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses expresses the position
withcharacteristic vehemence: “To Generalize is to be an
Idiot. To Particularize is the alone Distinction of Merit.”
The poet was seen as an individual distinguished from his
fellows by the intensity of his perceptions, taking as his
basic subject matter the workings of his own mind. Poetry
was regarded as conveying its own truth; sincerity was the
criterion by which it was to be judged.
- The emphasis on feeling—seen perhaps at its finest in
the poems of Robert Burns—was in some ways a
continuation of the earlier “cult of sensibility”; and it is
worth remembering that Alexander Pope praised his
father as having known no language but the language of
the heart. But feeling had begun to receive particular
emphasis and is found in most of the Romantic definitions
of poetry. Wordsworth called poetry “the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feeling,” and in 1833 John Stuart
Mill defined poetry as “feeling itself, employing thought
only as the medium of its utterance.” It followed that the
best poetry was that in which the greatest intensity of
feeling was expressed, and hence a new importance was
attached to the lyric. Another key quality of Romantic
writing was its shift from the mimetic, or imitative,
assumptions of the Neoclassical era to a new stress on
imagination. Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw the
imagination as the supreme poetic quality, a quasi-divine
creative force that made the poet a godlike being. Samuel
Johnson had seen the components of poetry as “invention,
imagination and judgement,” but Blake wrote: “One
Power alone makes a Poet: Imagination, the Divine
Vision.” The poets of this period accordingly placed great
emphasis on the workings of the unconscious mind, on
dreams and reveries, on the supernatural, and on the
childlike or primitive view of the world, this last being
regarded as valuable because its clarity and intensity had
not been overlaid by the restrictions of civilized “reason.”
Rousseau’s sentimental conception of the “noble savage”
was often invoked, and often by those who were ignorant
that the phrase is Dryden’s or that the type was
adumbrated in the “poor Indian” of Pope’s An Essay on
Man. A further sign of the diminished stress placed on
judgment is the Romantic attitude to form: if poetry must
be spontaneous, sincere, intense, it should be fashioned
primarily according to the dictates of the creative
imagination. Wordsworth advised a young poet, “You
feel strongly; trust to those feelings, and your poem will
take its shape and proportions as a tree does from the vital
principle that actuates it.” This organic view of poetry is
opposed to the classical theory of “genres,” each with its
own linguistic decorum; and it led to the feeling that
poetic sublimity was unattainable except in short
passages. Hand in hand with the new conception of poetry
and the insistence on a new subject matter went a demand
for new ways of writing. Wordsworth andhis followers,
particularly Keats, found the prevailing poetic diction of
the late 18th century stale and stilted, or “gaudy and
inane,” and totally unsuited to the expression of their
perceptions. It could not be, for them, the language of
feeling, and Wordsworth accordingly sought to bring the
language of poetry back to that of common speech.
Wordsworth’s own diction, however, often differs from
his theory. Nevertheless, when he published his preface to
Lyrical Ballads in 1800, the time was ripe for a change:
the flexible diction of earlier 18th-century poetry had
hardened into a merely conventional language.

3. Some famous authors and their popular

works:
- Robert Burns is considered the pioneer of the Romantic
Movement. Although his death in 1796 precedes what
many consider the start of Romanticism, his lyricism and
sincerity mark him as an early Romantic writer. His most
notable works are “Auld Lang Syne” (1788) and “Tam
o’ Shanter” (1791). Burns inspired many of the writers
during the Romantic Period.
- William Blake was one of the earliest Romantic Period
writers. Blake believed in spiritual and political freedom
and often wrote about these themes in his works.
Although some of his poetry was published before the
official start to the era, Blake can be seen as one of the
founders of this movement. His works, Songs of
Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794), are
two of his most significant. These collections of poetry
are some of the first to romanticize children, and in these
works Blake pits the innocence and imagination of
childhood against the harsh corruption of adulthood,
especially within the city of London. He was also known
for his beautiful drawings, which accompanied each of
these poems.
- Scholars say that the Romantic Period began with the
publishing of Lyrical Ballads (1798) by William
Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This was
one of the first collections of poems that strayed from the
more formal poetic diction of the Neoclassical Period.
Poets of the period instead used everyday words that the
average person could understand. This also aided in
expressing human emotion. Wordsworth primarily wrote
about nature. He felt it could provide a source of mental
cleanliness and spiritual understanding. One of
Wordsworth’s well-known works is “The Solitary
Reaper” (1807). This poem praises the beauty of music
and shows the outpouring of expression and emotion that
Wordsworth felt was necessary in poetry. His greatest
piece is The Prelude (1850), a semi-autobiographical,
conversation poem that chronicles Wordsworth’s entire
life. Conversational poetry was theliterary genre most
commonly used by Wordsworth and Coleridge, with the
latter writing a series of eight poems following the genre
structure of conversational verse and examining higher
ideas of nature, man, and morality. This poetry is written
in blank verse and is extremely personal and intimate in
nature, with much of the content based on the author’s
life.
- Succeeding Blake, Coleridge, and Wordsworth was a
new generation of poets, each following the pattern of
Romanticism of those before them. John Keats is still one
of the most popular of these poets, with his work
continually read and analyzed today. Keats aimed to
express extreme emotion in his poetry, using natural
imagery to do this. He is well known for his odes, lyrical
stanzas that are typically written in praise of, or in
dedication to, something or someone that the writer
admires. These odes followed the genre of lyrical poetry
and focused on intense emotion using personal narrative.
Among these odes, “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819) and
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819) are most famous. Keats
was preoccupied with death and aging throughout his life,
which is shown in each of these two odes. “Ode to a
Nightingale” discusses the temporary status of life and
beauty, but in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” he explores the
artistic permanence of the images on the urn.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley was seen as a radical thinker for
his religious atheism and largely ostracized by his
contemporaries for his political and social views. One of
his most famous works is Adonais (1821). This was a
pastoral elegy, a poem combining death and rural life,
written for John Keats. The poem mourns the death of
Keats and his contribution to poetry. Another of his well-
known works was Ode to the West Wind (1819) where
he discusses the force and power of the wild wind and
shows the Romantic writer’s tendency to connect nature
with art.
- Lord Byron differed from the writing styles of Keats
and Shelley. He was heavily influenced by the satire and
wit from the previous period and infused this in his
poetry. His satire Don Juan (1819-1824) is told in 17
cantos, divisions of long poems, and is based on the
traditional legend of Don Juan. Byron changes the
original telling of the story and instead of creating a
womanizing character, he makes Don Juan someone
easily seduced by women. The cantos follow his
character’s journey as he travels throughout Europe
meeting several women and continually trying to escape
from trouble. Byron’s other notable work is Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-1816), another lengthy
narrative poem. This poem was largely biographical and
discusses many of Byron’s personal travels. It describes
the reflections of a young man who is seeking new
beginnings in foreign countries after experiencing many
years of war.This poem issignificant because it introduced
the Byronic hero, typically a handsome and intelligent
man with a tendency to be moody, cynical, and rebellious
against social norms.

4. A summary Biography of William

Wordsworth:
- The poet William Wordsworth was born in
Cockermouth, Cumberland on 7 April 1770. Much of his
poetry was inspired by the dramatic landscapes of the
Lake District, and his work did much to alter public
perceptions of that part of England. His sister and lifelong
companion, Dorothy, was born in 1771. They were
looked after by relatives after the early death of their
parents. Between 1787 and 1790, William studied at
Cambridge, spending holidays walking in the lakes and
trekking across revolutionary France to the Alps. In 1795,
William and Dorothy set up home together in the West
Country. There they met Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with
whom Wordsworth published Lyrical Ballads (1798),
which included ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern
Abbey’. Wordsworth and Dorothy returned to the Lake
District in 1799, settling at Dove Cottage in Grasmere;
Robert Southey and Coleridge lived nearby. In 1802,
repayment of substantial debt owed to his father enabled
Wordsworth to marry Mary Hutchinson. Life at Grasmere
inspired some of his greatest poetry, including ‘I
wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ and ‘Ode: Intimations of
Immortality’ – as well as the prose work A Description of
the Scenery of the Lakes in the North of England (1822).
In 1813, the Wordsworths moved to Rydal Mount,
Ambleside. He continued to write poetry, including The
Excursion (1814) and The River Duddon (1820), but the
conservatism of his later work annoyed radical friends.
Wordsworth died on 23 April 1850 and was buried in
Grasmere churchyard. His great autobiographical poem,
The Prelude, which he had worked on since 1798, was
published shortly after his death.
- William Wordsworth, (born April 7, 1770,
Cockermouth, Cumberland, Eng.—died April 23, 1850,
Rydal Mount, Westmorland), English poet.
Orphaned at age 13, Wordsworth attended Cambridge
University, but he remained rootless and virtually
penniless until 1795, when a legacy made possible a
reunion with his sister Dorothy Wordsworth. He became
friends with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with whom he
wrote Lyrical Ballads (1798), the collection often
considered to have launched the English Romantic
movement. Wordsworth’s contributions include “Tintern
Abbey” and many lyrics controversial for their common,
everyday language. About 1798 he began writing The
Prelude (1850), the epic autobiographical poem that
would absorb him intermittently for the next 40 years. His
second verse collection, Poems, in Two Volumes (1807),
includes many of the rest of his finest works, including
“Ode: Intimationsof Immortality.” His poetry is perhaps
most original in its vision of the organic relation between
man and the natural world, a vision that culminated in the
sweeping metaphor of nature as emblematic of the mind
of God. The most memorable poems of his middle and
late years were often cast in elegaic mode; few match the
best of his earlier works. By the
time he became widely appreciated by the critics and the
public, his poetry had lost much of its force and his
radical politics had yielded to conservatism. In 1843 he
became England’s poet laureate. He is regarded as the
central figure in the initiation of English Romanticism.

* THE VICTORIAN
PERIOD (1832_1900)
1. Political, social, and economical features
- Victorian era, in British history, the period between
approximately 1820 and 1914, corresponding roughly but
not exactly to the period of Queen Victoria’s reign (1837–
1901) and characterized by a class-based society, a
growing number of people able to vote, a growing state
and economy, and Britain’s status as the most powerful
empire in the world.
- During the Victorian period, Britain was a powerful
nation with a rich culture. It had a stable government, a
growing state, and an expanding franchise. It also
controlled a large empire, and it was wealthy, in part
because of its degree of industrialization and its imperial
holdings and in spite of the fact that three-fourths or more
of its population was working-class. Late in the period,
Britain began to decline as a global political and
economic power relative to other major powers,
particularly the United States, but this decline was not
acutely noticeable until after World War II.
- Important political events during this period included the
abolition of slavery in the British Empire; the expansions
of the franchise; working-class political activism, most
notably Chartism; the rise of liberalism as the dominant
political ideology, especially of the middle class; and the
nationalization of Conservative and Liberal parties (and
the emergence of the British Labour Party in 1906). The
growth of the state and state intervention were seen in
major acts that limited hours for factory workers and
miners, in public health acts, and in the provision of
elementary education by the state. Political conflicts
between Ireland and Britain and the rise of Irish
nationalism were also hallmarks of the era, as were
women’s rights activism, which resulted in the Married
Women’s Property Acts, the repeal of the Contagious
Diseases Acts, and the growth of education and
employment options for women.
- Britain’s status as a world political power was bolstered
by a strong economy, which grew rapidly between 1820
and 1873. This half-century of growth was followed by an
economic depression and from 1896 until 1914 by a
modest recovery. With the earliest phases of
industrializationover by about 1840, the British economy
expanded. Britain became the richest country in the
world, but many people worked long hours in harsh
conditions. Yet, overall, standards of living were rising.
While the 1840s were a bad time for workers and the poor
—they were dubbed “the hungry forties”—overall the
trend was toward a less precarious life. Most families not
only had a home and enough to eat but also had
something leftover for alcohol, tobacco, and even
vacations to the countryside or the seaside. Of course,
some decades were times of plenty, others of want.
Relative prosperity meant that Britain was a nation not
only of shopkeepers but of shoppers (with the rise of the
department store from mid-century transforming the
shopping experience). Increased wealth, including higher
real wages from the 1870s, meant that even working-class
people could purchase discretionary items. Mass
production meant that clothes, souvenirs, newspapers, and
more were affordable to almost everyone.
2. Literature features:
- As reading became less of a privilege of the wealthy and
more of a pastime of the common British citizen,
publications such as periodicals flourished. These
magazines provided monthly installments of news
articles, satiric essays, poetry and fiction. These serial
publications enabled many authors to easily share their
work with the public and helped launch the careers of
prominent Victorian writers such as Dickens, Eliot,
Tennyson, and the Brownings (Norton). Because
literature was an accessible and pervasive part of
Victorian society, studying it is crucial in understanding
the attitudes and concerns of the people who lived during
this era. Much of the writing during this time was a
reaction to the rapidly changing notions of science,
morality, and society. Victorian writers also reacted to the
writings of previous generations. George Landow argues
that the Victorians wanted to escape what they saw as ‘the
excessive subjectivity of the Romantics’ while at the same
time keeping their “individuality, originality, intensity,
and, above all, sincerity.” Thus Victorian literature tries to
combine the use of Romantic subjectivity(~1798-1830)
with the objectivity of the Augustans (~1660-1798).
Landow argues that the birth of the dramatic monologue
and autobiographical fiction were used to bring personal
experiences to literature without the author seeming self-
obsessed.
- Victorian era literature was characterized by depictions
of everyday people, hard lives, and moral lessons. They
were meant for more than just entertainment. Victorians
were interested in the hero as well as folk art. Victorian
novels often focused on these themes.
- Victorian literature refers to English literature during the
reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901). The 19th century is
considered by some to be the Golden Age of English
Literature, especially for British novels. It was in the
Victorian era that the novel became the leading literary
genre inEnglish. English writing from this era reflects the
major transformations in most aspects of English life,
from scientific, economic, and technological advances to
changes in class structures and the role of religion in
society. Famous novelists from this period include
Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, the
three Brontë sisters, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and
Rudyard Kipling.
- While the Romantic period was a time of abstract
expression and inward focus, essayists, poets, and
novelists during the Victorian era began to direct their
attention toward social issues. Writers such as Thomas
Carlyle called attention to the dehumanizing effects of the
Industrial Revolution and what Carlyle called the
"Mechanical Age". This awareness inspired the subject
matter of other authors, like poet Elizabeth Barrett
Browning and novelists Charles Dickens and Thomas
Hardy. Barrett's works on child labor cemented her
success in a male-dominated world where women writers
often had to use masculine pseudonyms. Dickens
employed humor and an approachable tone while
addressing social problems such as wealth disparity.
Hardy used his novels to question religion and social
structures. Poetry and theatre were also present during the
Victorian era. Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson
were Victorian England's most famous poets. With regard
to the theatre it was not until the last decades of the 19th
century that any significant works were produced.
Notable playwrights of the time include Gilbert and
Sullivan, George Bernard Shaw, and Oscar Wilde.

3. Some famous authors and their popular

works:
Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870)
Occupation: writer, social critic
Charles Dickens created some of the world's best-known
fictional characters and is regarded as the greatest novelist
of the Victorian era. The Posthumous Papers of the
Pickwick Club (also known as The Pickwick Papers) was
Charles Dickens's first and personal favourite novel. His
most important works include "Oliver Twist", "A
Christmas Carol", "Dombey and Son", "David
Copperfield", "Bleak House", "Little Dorrit", "A Tale of
Two Cities", and "Great Expectations".
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811 – 1863)
Occupation: novelist, poet
William Thackeray was Dickens' great rival in the first
half of Queen Victoria's reign. He is known for his
satirical works, particularly Vanity Fair, subtitled A
Novel without a Hero, which is an example of a
formpopular in Victorian literature. Among his famous
works are the novels "Pendennis", "Catherine", "The Luck
of Barry Lyndon" and "The Adventures of Philip".
Brontë sisters
Occupation: poets and novelists
Three Brontë sisters, Charlotte (1816–1855), Emily
(1818–1848) and Anne (1820–1849) published significant
works in the 1840s. Charlotte's "Jane Eyre" was the first
to achieve success, while Emily's "Wuthering Heights",
Anne's "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" and other works
were not immediately appreciated by Victorian critics.
George Eliot (1819 – 1880)
Occupation: novelist, poet, journalist, translator
Mary Ann Evans, known by her pen name George Eliot,
was one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She is
the author of seven novels: "Adam Bede", "The Mill on
the Floss", "Silas Marner", "Romola", "Felix Holt, the
Radical", "Middlemarch", and "Daniel Deronda", most of
which are known for their realism and psychological
insight.
Thomas Hardy (1840 – 1928)
Occupation: novelist, poet, short story writer
In the later decades of the Victorian era, Thomas Hardy
was the most important novelist in the tradition of George
Eliot. He was influenced both in his novels and in his
poetry by Romanticism. His works include "Under the
Greenwood Tree", "Far from the Madding Crowd", "The
Mayor of Casterbridge", "Tess of the d'Urbervilles", "The
Woodlandersand" and "Jude the Obscure".

4. A summary Biography of Charlotte Bronte:

Charlotte Bronte was a great writer of the early 19th
century. Charlotte was born on 21 April 1816 at the
parsonage in Market Street in Thornton near the rapidly
growing town of Bradford. Her father was Reverend
Patrick Bronte. Her mother was Maria. They had 6
children. However, two girls, Maria Bronte and Elizabeth
Bronte died when they were children. In the early 19th
century the Industrial Revolution was transforming life in
Britain. In the north of England industrial towns were
booming. However, in 1820 Charlotte Bronte’s family
moved to a moorland village called Haworth. Her mother
died in 1821. Her mother’ssister Elizabeth moved to
Yorkshire to look after the children. In 1824 Charlotte
Bronte and her sister Emily were sent to join two older
sisters Maria and Elizabeth at the Clergy Daughters
School in Cowan Bridge in Lancashire. However, in 1825
Maria and Elizabeth Bronte both died of tuberculosis.
Charlotte and Emily Bronte returned home. Afterward,
they were educated at home for some years. In 1831-32
Charlotte Bronte went to Margaret Wooler’s school near
Dewsbury. Meanwhile, Charlotte loved writing and
painting. In 1835 Charlotte Bronte went to work at
Wooler’s school as a teacher. She worked there till 1838.
Then in 1839 Charlotte began working as a governess.
However, in 1842 her aunt provided the money for her
and her sister Emily to study in Brussels. Charlotte Bronte
returned to Yorkshire in 1844. Then in 1846 Charlotte,
Emily, and Anne Bronte published some of their poems.
Charlotte Bronte wrote a story called Jane Eyre. It was
published in 1847. Charlotte‘s second work Shirley was
published in 1848. The third book by Charlotte Bronte
was Villette published in 1853. In 1854 Charlotte Bronte
married a man named Arthur Bell Nicholls. However,
Charlotte died on 31 March 1855. She was only 38.
Charlotte Bronte was buried in Haworth. Charlotte Brontë
worked as a teacher and governess before collaborating
on a book of poetry with her two sisters, Emily and Anne,
who were writers as well. In 1847, Brontë published the
semi-autobiographical novel Jane Eyre, which was a hit
and would become a literary classic.The deaths of the
Brontë siblings are almost as notable as their literary
legacy. Her brother, Branwell, and Emily died in 1848,
and Anne died the following year. In 1854, Charlotte
married Arthur Bell Nicholls, but died the following year
during her pregnancy, on March 31, 1855, in Haworth,
Yorkshire, England. The first novel she ever wrote, The
Professor, was published posthumously in 1857.

VII. The Modern Age:

1. Political, social, and economical features
- The economy of the Modern Age developed between the
15th and 17th centuries. It is characterized by agriculture,
as the main economic activity, the emergence of
capitalism, the growing influence of the bourgeoisie and
an increase in commercial relations. The Modern Age not
only brought with it events such as the discovery of
America or the Renaissance. It also meant great advances
economically. Thus, the bourgeoisie assumed a much
more active role in the economy compared to the nobility,
or the first elements of capitalism began to appear. And it
is that, during this historical epoch, large commercial
operations began to develop, mercantile companies arose,
at the same time that credit mechanisms were developed.-
Agriculture continued to be the great economic activity of
the Modern Age. Thanks to agriculture wealth was
generated, the nobles could have income and also the
States collected taxes thanks to the income generated by
this activity. In those times, agriculture was extensive,
that is, large areas of land were dedicated to a single type
of cultivation (monoculture); which was mainly the
cereal. As for land ownership, he continued to focus on
the nobility and the Church. However, dependence on an
activity such as agriculture subjected the people to strong
ups and downs. Thus, the fall in agricultural activity could
lead to very convulsive scenarios at the economic and
social level. This could occur in unfavorable weather
conditions, which could lead to famines.
- The Modern Age, or modernity, is the postmedieval era,
a wide span of time marked in part by technological
innovations, urbanization, scientific discoveries, and
globalization. The Modern Age is generally split into two
parts: the early and the late modern periods. The early
modern period began with Gutenberg’s invention of the
movable type printing press in the late 15th century and
ended in the late 18th century. Thanks to Gutenberg’s
press, the European population of the early modern period
saw rising literacy rates, which led to educational reform.
As noted in preceding sections, Gutenberg’s machine also
greatly enabled the spread of knowledge and, in turn,
spurred the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation.
During the early modern period, transportation improved,
politics became more secularized, capitalism spread,
nation-states grew more powerful, and information
became more widely accessible.
Enlightenment ideals of reason, rationalism, and faith in
scientific inquiry slowly began to replace the previously
dominant authorities of king and church.
- Huge political, social, and economic changes marked the
end of the 18th century and the beginning of the late
modern period. The Industrial Revolution, which began in
England around 1750, combined with the American
Revolution in 1776 and the French Revolution in 1789,
marked the beginning of massive changes in the
world.The French and American revolutions were
inspired by a rejection of monarchy in favor of national
sovereignty and representative democracy. Both
revolutions also heralded the rise of secular society as
opposed to church-based authority systems. Democracy
was well suited to the so-called Age of Reason, with its
ideals of individual rights and progress. Though less
political, the Industrial Revolution had equally far-
reaching consequences. It did not merely change the way
goods were produced—it also fundamentally changed the
economic, social, and cultural framework of its time. The
Industrial Revolution doesn’t have clear start or end dates.
However, during the 19th century, several crucial
inventions—the internal combustion engine,steam
powered ships, and railways, among others—led to
innovations in various industries. Steam power and
machine tools increased production dramatically. But
some of the biggest changes coming out of the Industrial
Revolution were social in character. An economy based
on manufacturing instead of agriculture meant that more
people moved to cities, where techniques of mass
production led people to value efficiency both in and out
of the factory. Newly urbanized factory laborers could no
longer produce their own food, clothing, or supplies, and
instead turned to consumer goods. Increased production
led to increases in wealth, though income inequalities
between classes also started to grow. These overwhelming
changes affected (and were affected by) the media. As
noted in preceding sections, the fusing of steam power
and the printing press enabled the explosive expansion of
books and newspapers. Literacy rates rose, as did support
for public participation in politics. More and more people
lived in the city, had an education, got their news from the
newspaper, spent their wages on consumer goods, and
identified as citizens of an industrialized nation.
Urbanization, mass literacy, and new forms of mass
media contributed to a sense of mass culture that united
people across regional, social, and cultural boundaries.
Modernity and the Modern Age, it should be noted, are
distinct from (but related to) the cultural movement of
modernism. The Modern Era lasted from the end of the
Middle Ages to the middle of the 20 th century;
modernism, however, refers to the artistic movement of
late 19th and early 20th centuries that arose from the
widespread changes that swept the world during that
period. Most notably, modernism questioned the
limitations of traditional forms of art and culture.
Modernist art was in part a reaction against the
Enlightenment’s certainty of progress and rationality. It
celebrated subjectivity through abstraction,
experimentalism, surrealism, and sometimes pessimism or
even nihilism. Prominent examples of modernist works
include James Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness novels,
cubist paintings by Pablo Picasso, atonal compositions by
Claude Debussy, and absurdist plays by Luigi Pirandello.

2. Literature features:
Modernism is about the new period of art that progressed
after WW II. Since literary modernism is a response
opposed to the traditional writing practices and
industrialism, a wide array of themes are present within
modernist writings. These themes include alienation,
transformation, and consumption. Modernism searches
for new voices and untraditional values. There are five
main characteristics in modern British literature. The
main characteristics of modern literature include
Individualism, experimentation, symbolism, absurdity,
and formalism. British literature refers to works of British
authors. British literature is associated with the United
Kingdom, Isle of Man, and the Channel Islands. The
largest part of British literatureis written in English but
there are some works written in other languages. Modern
literature is from the modernist period. The modernist
period refers to late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. In this period, modern literature was written,
explained, and spoken. Modern Literature is literature that
is written during the contemporary period. In Britain, the
modern period began in 1901 with the end of the
Victorian era and literature. Modernism is a branch of
modern literature that deviated from the realist novels that
were more dominant in the Victorian Era. It was a kind of
literary movement that presented a disregard for
conventions and various other forms. This in turn finally
led to fascism and narcissism. The 20th century is a
period during which people experienced enormous
advancements in both natural and social sciences. Mainly,
because of this rapid progress, great profit was shown in
material wealth. However, the entire scenario changed
when capitalism came into the limelight. The economic
conditions were affected because of the contradictions
between social and private ownership. Even, because of
World War I and II, more chaos was seen in society and
literature. The modern period in English literature likely
defines anti-war opinions and reflects thoughts on science
and psychology to show the effect of colonialism.

3. Some famous authors and their popular

works:
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
First published in three instalments in Blackwood’s
Magazine in 1899, and then in book form in 1902, Heart
of Darkness thus straddles the Victorian and ‘modern’
eras: it first appeared when Victoria was still on the
throne, but by the time the book version was published,
Britain had a new monarch and was firmly in a new
century. This novella examines the evils of Belgian
imperialism in Africa, but also interrogates the very
nature of storytelling itself – and all that comes with it,
whether truth, trust, the reliability of language to convey
one’s experiences, and a whole host of other quasi-
metaphysical issues. The book also inspired the 1979 film
Apocalypse Now about a modern ‘imperialistic’ mission,
namely the American presence in Vietnam. Mr Kurtz
became Colonel Kurtz.
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land.
This 1922 long poem features (as it must) in our pick of
Eliot’s best poems, and it’s one of the landmark works of
modernist literature – perhaps the most important poem in
all of modernism. In the poem, T. S. Eliot draws on
personal experience (his first marriage, his knowledge of
London, his convalescence following some sort of
nervous breakdown) but transmutes it into something
universal and, in his word, ‘impersonal’ – a poem that
spoke for an entire generation. A medley of Arthurian
legend, Greek myth, quotations from Shakespeare, jazz
rhythms, and Wagner –among much else besides – the
poem as we have it was beaten into shape by Ezra Pound,
to whom Eliot dedicated the final poem.
D. H. Lawrence, ‘Tickets, Please’.
Written during WWI and focusing on the men and women
who work on the trams in Nottingham, ‘Tickets, Please’
examines the shifting gender roles in the early twentieth
century and the latent desires and impulses which
Freudian psychoanalysis had lain bare. If you need
another reason to read this short story, the principal male
character is named John Thomas, after a slang term for
‘penis’.Typical Lawrence.
Ezra Pound,‘In a Station of the Metro’.
Like T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound was born in the United States
but moved to Europe – and London – as a young man. His
two most famous works are among the longest and
shortest in canonical ‘English’ literature: The Cantos runs
to nearly a thousand pages, while ‘In a Station of the
Metro’ (1913) is just two lines in length.
Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Garden Party’.
Katherine Mansfield was the one writer Virginia Woolf
was jealous of, according to Woolf herself. Mansfield
never wrote a full-length novel, but wrote a number of
classic modernist short stories. This story, from 1920, is
probably her most famous: it focuses on a young woman,
Laura Sheridan, whose family is holding a garden party at
their home in New Zealand. Shortly before the guests
arrive, tragedy strikes: one of their neighbours from the
poor part of the village dies in an accident. The story is
told in a spare, simple style, but with moments of
trademark modernist features: in particular, stream of
consciousness and the idea of the ‘epiphany’ or moment
of consciousness.
James Joyce, Ulysses.
Published in the annus mirabilis of modernism, 1922,
Ulysses is Joyce’s masterpiece. It’s also one of the best
modernist novels ever written. The novel is a retelling of
Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, about Greek hero
Odysseus’ return home from the Trojan Wars (a journey
which took him ten years, but which Joyce condenses to a
single day in Dublin, 16 June 1904). Joyce had been
interested in the figure of Odysseus (or Ulysses, as the
Romans called him) since his schooldays, and organised
Ulysses around eighteen episodes, each of which is
devised to echo one of the episodes from Homer’s epic.
Joyce’s attention to detail was impressive.
Henry James, ‘The Figure in the Carpet’.
This story has variously been described as a satire on
literary criticism and simply ‘a joke’. It is narrated by a
rather odd and self-absorbed critic for a fictional
newspaper; this narrator is told by a leading novelist,
Hugh Vereker, that he – Vereker – has concealed a
‘secret’ within all of his fiction. Every one of his novels
contains this secret which, like a thread in a Turkish
carpet, has been so carefully woven into the fabric of the
novel that only the most careful reader will find it. The
story that ensues is part mystery, part detective story, part
exposé of the worst aspects of the literary world.

4. A summary Biography of Virginia Woolf:

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) is recognised as one of the
most innovative writers of the 20th century. Perhaps best
known as the author of Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the
Lighthouse (1927), she was also a prolific writer of
essays, diaries, letters and biographies. Both in style and
subject matter, Woolf’s work captures the fast-changing
world in which she was working, from transformations in
gender roles, sexuality and class to technologies such as
cars, airplanes and cinema. Influenced by seminal writers
and artists of the period such as Marcel Proust, Igor
Stravinsky and the Post-Impressionists, Woolf’s work
explores the key motifs of modernism, including the
subconscious, time, perception, the city and the impact of
war. Her ‘stream of consciousness’ technique enabled her
to portray the interior lives of her characters and to depict
the montage-like imprint of memory.
Woolf’s work often explored her fascination with the
marginal and overlooked: of ‘an ordinary mind on an
ordinary day’, as she put in her essay ‘Modern Fiction’
(1919/25). In ‘The Art of Biography’ (1939), she argued
that
The question now inevitably asks itself, whether the lives
of great men only should be recorded. Is not anyone who
has lived a life, and left a record of that life, worthy of
biography – the failures as well as the successes,the
humble as well as the illustrious
She refused patriarchal honours like the Companion of
Honour (1935) and honorary degrees from Manchester
and Liverpool (1933 and 1939), and wrote polemical
works about the position of women in society, such as A
Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938). In
Flush (1933) she wrote of the life of the spaniel owned by
the poet Elizabeth BarrettBrowning, in Orlando (1928),
she fictionalised the life of her friend Vita Sackville-West
into that of a man-woman, born in the Renaissance but
surviving till the present day.
Besides her writing, Woolf had a considerable impact on
the cultural life around her. The publishing house she ran
with her husband Leonard Woolf, the Hogarth Press, was
originally established in Richmond and then in London’s
Bloomsbury, an area after which the ‘Bloomsbury Set’ of
artists, writers and intellectuals is named. Woolf’s house
was a hub for some of the most interesting cultural
activity of the time, and Hogarth Press publications
included books by writers such as T S Eliot, Sigmund
Freud, Katherine Mansfield, E M Forster, and the Woolfs
themselves. Born Virginia Adeline Stephen in 1882, her
parents were Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), the founder of
the Oxford Dictionary of Biography, and his second wife,
Julia Duckworth (1846–1895). Woolf’s father – who was
later knighted for services to literature – gave her the run
of his substantial library. Her mother, father and brother
died in quick succession, and she suffered from poor
mental health for much of her life, committing suicide in
1941.