Thirteen centuries,
one language.

Classical

The foundations: Greek and Roman epic, drama and philosophy, translated and re-translated for every century since. Almost every later English writer is arguing with something on this shelf.

• Epic scale: a single journey that stands for a whole civilisation
• Fate as a character — the gods argue, humans pay
• Heroism measured by what it costs the people at home
• Direct speech and debate rather than interior monologue

Writing then · Homer · Dante Alighieri

Old English

Nobody called it English yet. Poems were recited from memory to a hall of drinkers, in a heavily inflected Germanic language, and written down centuries after they were first sung. Almost no love poetry and no comedy survives — what we have is heroic, elegiac and religious, and much of it happens at sea.

• Alliteration instead of rhyme
• Kennings — compressed metaphors like 'whale-road' for the sea
• Heroic and elegiac in tone, with a strong sense of fate
• Pagan and Christian belief held side by side

Writing then · Anonymous · Cædmon · The Beowulf poet

Middle English

After the Norman Conquest of 1066, French floods the language and English rebuilds itself with a far bigger vocabulary and a new habit of rhyme. This is where literature starts to sound like a person talking: gossipy, funny, and interested in ordinary people rather than heroes.

• Rhyme and regular metre
• Estates satire — mocking each social class in turn
• Dream visions and frame stories
• A vocabulary roughly doubled by French

Writing then · Geoffrey Chaucer · William Langland · Julian of Norwich · The Gawain poet

Renaissance

Print, the public theatre and the sonnet arrive together. English writers discover blank verse, and with it the ability to let a character think aloud in real time. By the end of the period Milton is writing an epic and Donne is writing prose that sounds like an argument with God.

• Blank verse — unrhymed iambic pentameter
• The sonnet sequence
• The soliloquy, thought performed in public
• Metaphysical wit: arguments built from unlikely images

Writing then · William Shakespeare · Christopher Marlowe · John Donne · John Milton · Ben Jonson

Restoration & Augustan

When the monarchy returns in 1660 the theatres reopen, and prose gets sharper and funnier. This is the great age of satire: writers treat reason as the highest human virtue and then use it, mercilessly, on everybody else.

• Satire and mock-epic
• The heroic couplet, rhymed and closed
• The periodical essay and the coffee-house
• Plain, argumentative prose

Writing then · John Bunyan · John Dryden · Jonathan Swift · Alexander Pope · Samuel Johnson

Romantic

The 'I' arrives. Poets stop performing public virtue and start describing their own minds, in ordinary language, in front of a landscape. It is also the period when the novel becomes a serious form — and when a teenager invents science fiction.

• The lyric self at the centre of the poem
• Nature as a presence, not a backdrop
• The sublime — beauty that frightens
• Ordinary diction instead of poetic ornament

Writing then · William Blake · William Wordsworth · Samuel Taylor Coleridge · Lord Byron · Percy Bysshe Shelley · John Keats · Mary Shelley · Jane Austen

Victorian

The novel becomes the great machine for describing a whole society: serialised, cheap, and read by everyone. Britain is simultaneously an empire, an industrial power and a country losing its faith, and its writers feel all three at once.

• The serialised novel
• Social conscience and reform
• The dramatic monologue
• Nonsense and fantasy treated as serious play

Writing then · Charles Dickens · Charlotte Brontë · Alfred, Lord Tennyson · Robert Browning · Lewis Carroll · Edgar Allan Poe

Modern

Two world wars break the old forms. Poets abandon regular metre, novelists move inside consciousness, and writers assume you can handle fragmentation and allusion without a guide. The short poem becomes sharper, stranger and more compressed.

• Free verse
• Stream of consciousness
• Fragmentation and collage
• Heavy allusion — the poem as an argument with the past

Writing then · W. B. Yeats · T. S. Eliot · Virginia Woolf · James Joyce · Robert Frost · Katherine Mansfield

Post-war to now

English is now a global language, so English literature is written in Lagos, Toronto, Kingston and Mumbai as much as in London — and often about what London did. The centre of gravity moves; the language keeps absorbing. Most writing from this period is still in copyright, which is why the library stops here.

• Post-colonial writing, and the empire writing back
• Confessional poetry
• The theatre of the absurd
• Global Englishes, in many registers at once

Writing then · Samuel Beckett · Philip Larkin · Ted Hughes · Chinua Achebe · Derek Walcott · Salman Rushdie · Carol Ann Duffy · Zadie Smith