THE INFLUENCE OF CLASSICAL LITERATURE ON OUR NATIONAL AND ENGLISH LITERATURE
English literature is generally seen as beginning with the epic poem Beowulf, the most famous work in Old English, which was written in England some time between the 8th and the early 11th century. Despite being set in Scandinavia, Beowulf has become a national epic of England. The next landmark was the work of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343– 1400), especially The Canterbury Tales.
During the Renaissance, especially the late 16th and early 17th centuries, major drama and poetry was written by Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne and others. Another great poet, from later in the 17th century, was John Milton (1608–74), author of the epic poem Paradise Lost (1667). The late 17th and the early 18th centuries are particularly associated with satire, especially in the poetry of John Dryden and Alexander Pope, and the prose works of Jonathan Swift. The 18th century also saw the first British novels in the works of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding, while the late 18th and early 19th centuries were the period of the Romantic poets, such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lord Byron, Shelley and Keats.
It was in the Victorian era (1837–1901) that the novel became the leading literary genre in English, dominated especially by Charles Dickens, but there were many other significant writers, including the BrontÍ sisters, George Eliot and then Thomas Hardy, in the final decades of the 19th century. America began to produce major writers in the 19th century, including novelist Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick (1851) and the poets Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Another American, Henry James, was a major novelist of the late 19th and early 20th century, while Polish-born Joseph Conrad was one of the most important British novelists of the first decade of the 20th century.
Irish writers were especially important in the 20th century, including James Joyce and later Samuel Beckett, both central figures in the Modernist movement. Americans, like poets T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and novelist William Faulkner, were other important modernists. In the mid 20th century major writers started to appear in the various countries of the British Commonwealth, including several Nobel laureates. Many major writers in English in the 20th and 21st centuries have come from outside the United Kingdom. The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain tendencies in post-World War II literature. It is a continuation of the experimentation championed by writers of the modernist period, relying heavily, for example, on fragmentation, paradox, questionable narrators, etc. It is also a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature