JHECELYN KATE ORBETA September 12 2019

BSCA III

This article is focused on English-language literature rather than the literature of England, so
that it includes writers from Scotland, Wales, the Crown dependencies, and the whole of Ireland,
as well as literature in English from countries of the former British Empire, including the United
States. However, until the early 19th century, it only deals with the literature of the United
Kingdom, the Crown dependencies and Ireland. It does not include literature written in the other
languages of Britain.
The English language has developed over the course of more than 1,400 years.[1] The earliest
forms of English, a set of Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon
settlers in the fifth century, are called Old English. Beowulf is the most famous work in Old
English, and has achieved national epic status in England, despite being set in Scandinavia.
However, following the Norman conquest of England in 1066, the written form of the Anglo-
Saxon languagebecame less common. Under the influence of the new aristocracy, French
became the standard language of courts, parliament, and polite society.[2] The English spoken
after the Normans came is known as Middle English. This form of English lasted until the 1470s,
when the Chancery Standard (late Middle English), a London-based form of English, became
widespread. Geoffrey Chaucer (1343 – 1400), author of The Canterbury Tales was a significant
figure in the development of the legitimacy of vernacular Middle English at a time when the
dominant literary languages in England were still French and Latin. The invention of the printing
press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1439 also helped to standardise the language, as did the King
James Bible(1613), and the Great Vowel Shift.[3]
Poet and playwright William Shakespeare(1564 – 1616) is widely regarded as the greatest writer
in the English language and one of the world's greatest dramatists.[4][5][6]His plays have been
translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other
playwright.[7] In the nineteenth century Sir Walter Scott's historical romances inspired a
generation of painters, composers, and writers throughout Europe.[8]
The English language spread throughout the world with the development of the British
Empire between the late 16th and early 18th centuries. At its height, it was the largest empire in
history.[9] By 1913, the British Empire held sway over 412 million people, 23% of the world
population at the time,[10]During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries these colonies and
the USA started to produce their own significant literary traditions in English. And in the last
hundred plus years numerous writers from Great Britain, the island of Ireland, the USA, and
members of other former British colonies have received the Nobel Prize for works in the English
language.
American literature
is literature written or produced in the United States of America and its preceding colonies (for
specific discussions of poetry and theater, see Poetry of the United States and Theater in the
United States). Before the founding of the United States, the British colonies on the eastern coast
of the present-day United States were heavily influenced by English literature. The American
literary tradition thus began as part of the broader tradition of English literature.
The revolutionary period is notable for the political writings of Benjamin Franklin, Alexander
Hamilton, and Thomas Paine. Thomas Jefferson's United States Declaration of
Independence solidified his status as a key American writer. It was in the late 18th and early 19th
centuries that the nation's first novels were published. An early example is William Hill
Brown's The Power of Sympathy published in 1791. Brown's novel depicts a tragic love story
between siblings who fall in love without knowing they are related.
With an increasing desire to produce uniquely American literature and culture, a number of key
new literary figures emerged, perhaps most prominently Washington Irving and Edgar Allan
Poe. In 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson started an influential movement known
as Transcendentalism. Inspired by that movement, Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden, which
celebrates individualism and nature and urges resistance to the dictates of organized society. The
political conflict surrounding abolitionism inspired the writings of William Lloyd
Garrison and Harriet Beecher Stowe in her famous novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. These efforts were
supported by the continuation of the slave narratives such as Frederick Douglass's Narrative of
the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Nathaniel Hawthorne published his magnum opus The Scarlet
Letter, a novel about adultery. Hawthorne influenced Herman Melville, who is notable for the
books Moby-Dick and Billy Budd. America's greatest poets of the nineteenth century were Walt
Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Mark Twain (the pen name used by Samuel Langhorne
Clemens) was the first major American writer to be born away from the East Coast. Henry
James put American literature on the international map with novels like The Portrait of a Lady.
At the turn of the twentieth century a strong naturalist movement emerged that comprised writers
such as Edith Wharton, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London.
American writers expressed disillusionment following World War I. The short stories and novels
of F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the mood of the 1920s, and John Dos Passos wrote too about the
war. Ernest Hemingway became famous with The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms; in
1954, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. William Faulkner became one of the greatest
American writers with novels like The Sound and the Fury. American poetry reached a peak
after World War I with such writers as Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound,
and E. E. Cummings. American drama attained international status at the time with the works
of Eugene O'Neill, who won four Pulitzer Prizes and the Nobel Prize. In the mid-twentieth
century, American drama was dominated by the work of playwrights Tennessee
Williams and Arthur Miller, as well as by the maturation of the American musical.
Depression era writers included John Steinbeck, notable for his novel The Grapes of
Wrath. Henry Miller assumed a distinct place in American Literature in the 1930s when his
semi-autobiographical novels were banned from the US. From the end of World War II until the

early 1970s many popular works in modern American literature were produced, like Harper
Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. America's involvement in World War II influenced works such
as Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948), Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961) and Kurt
Vonnegut Jr.'s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). The main literary movement since the 1970s has
been postmodernism, and since the late twentieth century ethnic and minority literature has
sharply increased.