English Literary History and Periods

Neoclassical age

The Neoclassical Age, roughly 1660 to 1798, is the period of English literature popularly called the Age of Reason. Its writers prized reason, order, decorum, balance and the imitation of classical models such as Horace, Virgil and the rules derived from Aristotle. Satire, the heroic couplet and the mock-heroic were its favoured forms, and wit and polish were valued above raw emotion. The period is bounded by the Restoration at one end and the rise of Romanticism at the other, so when a question refers to the Age of Reason, the answer is the Neo-classical Age and not the Medieval, Romantic or Victorian periods. Alexander Pope's couplets and John Dryden's satire are typical of its style.

The label is a convenient one, and many writers mixed classical form with a growing interest in feeling and nature. Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village (1770) shows this blend: it is written in heroic couplets, yet it mourns the decline of a rural community and blames enclosure and the consolidation of land for the loss of the old pastoral life. Its lament for a vanished countryside anticipates the later sensibility, but its form remains thoroughly neoclassical.

English literary periods

English literary history is divided into periods, each named after a dominant mood, a reigning monarch or a set of shared values. The approximate sequence is Old English (to 1066), Middle English (1066 to about 1500), the English Renaissance or Elizabethan Age (roughly 1558 to 1603, with the literature continuing into the early seventeenth century), the Puritan or Commonwealth Age (about 1640 to 1660), the Restoration (1660 onward), the Neoclassical or Augustan Age (about 1700 to 1798), the Romantic Age (about 1798 to 1832) and the Victorian Age (1837 to 1901). A safe rule is to link each label with its main representative: Shakespeare with the Elizabethans, Milton with the Puritans, Dryden with the Restoration and Wordsworth with the Romantics.

Some period questions concern Indian aesthetic theory rather than English history. Rasa is the central concept of Indian aesthetics, developed in Bharata's Natyashastra and elaborated by Abhinavagupta. It denotes the aesthetic relish of an emotion that a sensitive spectator or reader, the sahrdaya, experiences through a work of art. Rasa is not a method of classifying texts by genre. Abhinavagupta held that it is generalised (sadharanikarana), so that an audience savours it together, and it is alaukika, a transcendent experience distinct from the ordinary emotions of daily life. It is evoked by poetry and literature as well as by drama and dance.

Events of 1919

The year 1919 falls just after the close of the First World War and is marked by a cluster of events that writers and public figures responded to. Rosa Luxemburg, the German socialist thinker and political activist, was murdered in Berlin in January 1919. Rabindranath Tagore renounced his knighthood in May 1919 as a protest against the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar. James Joyce's Ulysses was being serialised in literary journals, including The Egoist, between 1918 and 1920, so the serialisation was in progress during 1919. Distinguish these from later developments: the Progressive Writers' Association was founded in 1936 at Lucknow, decades after the end of the First World War, so it is not an event of 1919.

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury Tales is the major work of Geoffrey Chaucer, written in Middle English in the late fourteenth century. It is a frame narrative: a group of pilgrims travelling to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury agree to tell stories to pass the time, and the tales they tell form the body of the work. The idea of a collection of stories linked by a single journey and a storytelling contest is what distinguishes the work from other medieval and later texts. Other works in the same period do not share this structure. Edmund Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender is a set of pastoral eclogues, John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory that follows a single pilgrim, and Chaucer's own Parliament of Fowls is a dream vision about birds choosing mates.

Romantic poets and their works

The major Romantic writers each produced works that are often matched to them in examinations, so it is useful to link titles with authors. Sir Walter Scott, a Scottish novelist and poet, wrote the narrative poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), which drew on border ballads and medieval romance. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote the meditative poem 'The Eolian Harp' and the critical work Biographia Literaria. John Keats wrote 'Ode to Psyche', which is one of his odes on classical and mythological subjects. Thomas De Quincey is best known for Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, which includes the autobiographical account 'The Pains of Opium'. A common error is to attribute a title to the wrong poet, such as assigning Scott's narrative poem to Keats or a meditative lyric to De Quincey.

Cavalier Poets

The Cavalier Poets were a group of seventeenth-century lyric poets who supported the Royalist cause in the English Civil War. Their verse is courtly, witty, graceful and light in tone, and it often treats love, pleasure and loyalty with an air of elegant ease. Robert Herrick, whose Hesperides contains songs and occasional verse, and Richard Lovelace, whose lyrics such as 'To Althea, from Prison' express loyalty and love under political pressure, are standard members of the group. Other Cavaliers include Thomas Carew and John Suckling. The Cavaliers should be distinguished from the Metaphysical poets, who used intellectual conceits and were often religious in theme. George Herbert, for example, is a religious Metaphysical poet, and Andrew Marvell is generally classed as a Metaphysical poet although he wrote on political subjects.

Women's suffrage movement

The women's suffrage movement campaigned for the right of women to vote. In Britain, the movement divided between the suffragists, who pursued the cause by constitutional means, and the suffragettes, who adopted militant tactics in the early twentieth century. Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women's Social and Political Union in 1903 and became the best-known leader of the militant campaign. Emily Wilding Davison, a militant member of the same organisation, died in 1913 after an incident at the Epsom Derby, and her death made the campaign widely known.