ENGL 2122
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 Zadie Smith, 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.