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Centuries of British Literature: A Selective Survey

© Janet Kay Blaylock

What is literature? Is it the fiction of Judith Krantz? Of Mary Higgins Clark? Or is the definition limited to that which is captured between the pages of those monolithic Norton Anthologies we all lugged around campus? Loosely, anything that is a text, written, oral, and even pictorial, some may argue, falls under the literature umbrella. Perhaps the question, then, is what makes good literature? But we'll respond to that next month. This month we'll survey British literature (in 800 words or less) across the centuries.

A Concise (Extremely) Summary of British Literature:

Literature typically seeks, in some fashion or another, to answer or address questions or issues that arise from a culture's collective ideologies. Inseparable, language and culture bind to one another like tightly wound DNA strands that define civilization. Early texts, for example, were religious in theme as early mankind sought to make meaning of his world and heavens. (I use his and not hers because more he's were writing than she's. However, there are many, many, many talented and phenomenal women writing at the time. ) The earliest British literature, as commonly studied in high schools (or at least I think it's still studied...) is Beowulf (about the 8th century and recently translated by the venerable Seamus Heaney), which contains elements of primitive Christianity. The Middle Ages also offered Chaucer's bawdy and elegant Canterbury Tales and the beautiful descriptive and poetic language as evidenced in the various tales of Arthur and Lancelot and of Robin Hood, just to name a few. And as allegorical works burgeoned, they became layered within texts to provide social, religious, or political commentary.

With the dawning of the Renaissance, literature become more secularized, although it remained concerned with cultural and political issues. One need only think of Shakespeare, for instance, or of his contemporaries (loosely speaking), such as Marlowe and Spencer.

Near the end of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth, Swift (Gulliver's Travels and A Modest Proposal) and his contemporaries bring us the wild and wacky world of satire, and the novel emerges in all of its prosaic glory, with its psychological explorations (clearly Shakespeare would have been an excellent novelist), even though it was initially still burdened by the ghosts of allegory (think Fielding or Voltaire).

When the Industrial Revolution swept the eighteenth century aside in a smoggy, ashen cloud, the Romantic poets concerned themselves with a return to nature and with finding and expressing a human connection with the natural world. Wordsworth and Coleridge, to different degrees, sought symbiotic relations between emotions and the natural world. Bliss (sexual and spiritual and in Coleridge's case-Opium induced), despair, loss, longing, and loneliness were magnified by spurting fountains ("Kubla Khan") and lonely clouds ("I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud") or images of isolated flowers (more Wordsworth). Meanwhile, on the novel front, scientific advances gave birth to the development of science fiction, such as Mary Shelley's extraordinary Frankenstein, speaking of births. Mary, her husband Percy Bysshe, and Byron (how's that for a literary round table?) spent an evening trying to "out haunt" each other with ghostly tales. Mary failed to concoct her ghoulish tale in the midst of such virile competition, but when she retired to bed, she dreamt her fantastic tale that has inspired movies, the good, the bad, and the ugly, ever since.

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