ENGL 2122: Difference between revisions
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===T. S. Eliot=== | ===T. S. Eliot=== | ||
* ''[[The Waste Land]]'' | * ''[[The Waste Land]]'' | ||
* [[The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock]] | |||
===Seamus Heany=== | ===Seamus Heany=== | ||
Latest revision as of 14:23, 9 November 2025
The literature of the British Isles from the late eighteenth century to the present traces the evolution of thought, form, and cultural identity across more than two centuries of social transformation.
The Romantic movement emerged as a rebellion against Enlightenment rationalism and industrial modernity, celebrating emotion, imagination, and the sublime in nature through writers such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The Victorian age that followed explored the tensions between faith and science, empire and morality, realism and idealism, in the works of figures like Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Charles Dickens.
By the early twentieth century, the disillusionment of war and rapid modernization gave rise to Modernism, a period of radical experimentation represented by T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. Postwar literature responded to decolonization, gender politics, and class struggle, as postcolonial and feminist voices—from Jean Rhys and Doris Lessing to Salman Rushdie and Angela Carter—redefined the scope of “British” identity.
Contemporary British writing remains diverse and dynamic, addressing globalization, migration, technology, and ecological crisis. Authors such as Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Carol Ann Duffy continue to expand the language of British experience, demonstrating that the literary tradition, from Romanticism to today, is one of perpetual reinvention and critical reflection.
Period Backgrounds
- Romanticism: Revolt of the Spirit
- Victorian British Literature
- Edwardian British Literature
- The Poetry of World War I
- Modern British Literature
- Contemporary British Literature