HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Six Programs for Grades 8 - Adult

This series offers a concise and unified survey of English literature, from the Anglo-Saxon period to the 1980s.   As the title suggests, the series is a history of major trends and movements in the development of one of the world’s great literatures.  Its primary function is to place writers in their historical and literary context, relating them to their contemporaries, to the social and political events of their time, to the literary forms that they have developed, and the themes that they have explored.

To narrate the programs, the producers have assembled a small troop of young actors and to give dramatic quality to the many examples presented of poetry, prose, and scenes from plays.  Students see a group of aspiring professionals, all close to their own age, bring to life lines by such literary masters as Shakespeare, Wilde, Pinter, Donne, Tennyson, T.S. Eliot, and Auden.  The immediacy of this presentation may help students to sense some of the undiminished vitality of these works and whet their appetites for more.  This is the main objective of the program:  to delight students into wanting to broaden their knowledge of English literature.

Program 1 – EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE
This program focuses on the various forces behind the first English writings including Germanic tribes who brought Old English, pre-Christian or pagan influences, the beginnings of Christianity and the Norman Invasion.  Christianity emerges as a strong force behind literature as the Monks are the first to read and write.  The Middle Ages bring extreme hardships such as the Black Death and an escape into fantasy was the relief of the times. Morality plays, mystery plays and allegories dominate the dramatic venues.   With the Renaissance, the individual and his quality of life on earth instead of his relationship with God and the hereafter are explored.  By the time of the Reformation, printing technology had developed and literature flourished.  Some of the works and authors discussed are Beowulf, Sir Thomas Malory, Everyman, The Canterbury Tales, Utopia, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Sir Philip Sidney.

Program 2 – MORALITY, MYSTERY AND SHAKESPEARE
In the Elizabethan Age, permanent public theaters were built to house professional acting companies.  The Globe Theatre, where Shakespeare worked as an actor and playwright, was built in 1599.  Drama developed rapidly.  Marlowe wrote the first plays in blank verse and Shakespeare penned numerous plays and sonnets where his human characters and universal themes appealed to the public.  Also covered are works of Edmund Spenser.

Program 3 – THE 17^TH AND 18^TH CENTURIES AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE NOVEL
The instability of the times included religious dissent in the form of the Puritan movement and political upheaval.  Many of the writings reflect religious concerns including conceits by John Donne, Paradise Lost by John Milton and The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan.  Francis Bacon and John Dryden were some of the voices of the times.  The Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 re-opened theatres, closed for their immorality.  The plays were now comedies about and for the upper classes called Restoration comedy.  Excerpts from William Congreve’s Love For Love are dramatized.  The early years of the 18^th Century are often called the Age of Reason, and writers were concerned with the organization of society and social behavior, developing satire to a fine point.  Alexander Pope, the poet, and Jonathan Swift best represent this literary form.  Perhaps the most important development in English literature in the 18^th century was the appearance of a major new literary form – the novel, one of the first of which was Robinson Crusoe.  More developments in the basic techniques used by novelists ever since were introduced by Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding.

Program 4 – THE ROMANTIC ERA
In the middle of the 18^th century, Samuel Johnson published the first English-language dictionary.  At this time the Industrial Revolution was transforming England’s social structure, creating a new working class.  Out of this came a whole new direction in literature.  William Blake was a herald of this new movement, which would become known as Romanticism.  His, and other romantic poets such as William Wordsworth believed that creativity comes from the imagination, not rational thought.  Others included are Samuel Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats.  Gothic novels became popular as well as satirized, such as the novels Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.  A time of intellectual ferment followed, where literature reflected a need to understand man’s place in the universe, reflected by the poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson and The Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin.  Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetry is also covered in this segment.

Program 5 – VICTORIAN POETS AND MODERNISM
London was the center of the literary world in England.   Charles Dickens’ novels, although often humorous, sharply criticized the abuses and injustices of Victorian society.  Many women novelists emerged such as the Bronte sisters and Mary Ann Evans, pen named George Eliot.  As industrialization progressed, writers such as Thomas Hardy tried to preserve local custom in their novels.  The playwright, Oscar Wilde, chided the upper class where trivial things are treated seriously and serious things are treated trivially.  Around 1900 Modernism swept through English literature, rejecting all that had come before.  Included in this movement were Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.  William Butler Yeats’ poety is covered also.

Program 6- INTO THE EIGHTIES 
T.S. Eliot, one of the most important 20^th century English poets, reflected the modern antihero in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock as well as the devastating effects of World War I in The Waste Land.  Young poet soldiers described the realities of war.  In response to the devastation, the public turned to escape provided so cleverly in the plays of Noel Coward.  During Hitler’s Nazi regime in Germany, the voice of social protest grew as reflected in the poetry of W.H. Auden.   Focusing on postwar political climate, George Orwell wrote Animal Farm and 1984.  Novelists and playwrights of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Kingsley Amis, William Golding, Doris Lessing, John Osborne, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter are featured.  Poets including Donald Davie, Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Jennings and Kingsley Amis of the 1950’s were dubbed “the Movement.”

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