THE UNITED KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN AND NORTHERN IRELAND

Literature

? The oldest written work of England is the old English epic poem Beowulf, originated in the sixth century, based on German mythology, describes the fight between a king and a dragon

? Geoffrey Chaucer as the outstanding author of the Middle English period with his Canterbury Tales (written in rhyming heroic couplets, about a party of thirty-one people  who meets in the  Tabard Inn in London before making the pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury) 

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

  •  the most outstanding representative of the Modern English Literature
  •  joined the Lord Chamberlain´s Men in 1594 and worked as a leading actor and dramatist
  •  had the Globe theatre built
  • wrote 37 plays which are commonly divided into:

-  tragedies (Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth),

-  comedies (The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night´s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, As You Like It, Twelfth Night),

- historical plays (Richard III, Henry I, II, IV, Julius Caesar, Anthony and Cleopatra),

- romances (Pericles, The Winter´s Tale, The Tempest)

  •  author of 154 sonnets, dealing with themes such as the passage of time, love, beauty and mortality
  •  lots of quotes became immortal:

- "My kingdom for a horse!(Richard III)

- "All the world´s a stage and all the men and women merely players (As You Like It)

- "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark (Hamlet)

? The contemporaries of Shakespeare were Christopher Marlowe (The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, Edward II), Thomas Kyd (1558-1594), the author of The Spanish Tragedy and Ben Jonson (1572-1637)

? Later on Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) with his famous Robinson Crusoe and Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) with his Gulliver´s Travels appeared on the scene

? The romantic period is dominated by the Lake Poets, i.e. William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge(1772-1834) who took inspiration from the Lake District in England and then by other group of poets represented by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), John Keats (1795-1821) and mainly George Gordon Byron (1788-1824), the author of Child´s Harold Pilgrimage

 Major novelists of the period of romanticism (1798-1837) were Jane Austen (1775-1817), her work include Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Emma, and Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) describing historical events in many countries (Waverley, Ivanhoe, Kenilworth)

The 1830s and 1840s saw the rise of social novel that shows life from a quite different view point, an early example is Charles Dickens (1812-1870) with his Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Little Dorrit, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club and Great Expectations (using his own experience from his childhood)

? Charlotte Bronte(1816-1855) is famous for her novel Jane Eyre, and her sister Emily Bronte (1818-1855) is the author of another famous novel called Wuthering Heights

? Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) is another representative of the realistic period with his novels The Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess of the D´Urbervilles

? The second half of the 19th century is mainly represented by Oscar Wilde (1856-1900) whose fairy story The Canterville Ghost was published in 1887, he is also famous for his fairy tales (The Happy Prince, The Nightingale and the Rose) and The Picture of Dorian Grey

? The turn of the century is represented by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), the creator of Sherlock Holmes, the world famous dramatist George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) with Pygmalion, which became world known in its film musical version under the title My Fair Lady, and Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) who wrote The Jungle Book

? The 20th century is full of names of authors who wrote important works, i.e. David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) as the author of Lady Chatterley´s Lover, Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970), author of a novel A Passage to India and Howards End, Graham Greene (1904-1991) who is probably the most important novelist in English literature in the 20th century (The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana), and George Orwell (1903-1950) who predicted the future in his 1984

? The poetry and drama of that time is represented by T. S. Eliot (1888-1965, naturalised British) with his poem The Waste Land, Samuel Beckett (1906-1989, Irish) the author of Waiting for Godot

? In the second half of the 20th century a group of young writers who are called Angry Young Men can be found, its representatives are John Osborne (1929 -1994) as the author of drama Look Back in Anger, and Kingsley Amis (1922- 1995) the author of Lucky Jim

? Last but not least to mention is William Golding(1911- 1993) the author of the famous Lord of the Flies

? Some authors were awarded the Nobel Prize for literature (R. Kipling, G.B. Shaw, J. Galsworthy, T. S. Eliot, S. Beckett, W. Golding etc.)

Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org

               T.Chudý, J. Chudá: Some Basic Facts, Fragment, Havlíčkův Brod 1996

 

Naposledy změněno: Čtvrtek, 29. říjen 2015, 10.56