History of English Literature, Volume 1 - eBook

Medieval and Renaissance Literature to 1625

Franco Marucci

• Publisher: Peter Lang Group
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783034322287
• eBook ISBN: 9781788741941
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

For ordering the hardcover version of this book, please contact [email protected] (Retail Price: £90.00, $135.90).

History of English Literature is a comprehensive, eight-volume survey of English literature from the Middle Ages to the early twenty-first century. This reference work provides insightful and often revisionary readings of core texts in the English literary canon. Richly informative analyses are framed by the biographical, historical and intellectual context for each author.

Volume 1 begins by discussing Anglo-Saxon literature before focusing on the three major Middle English poets of the late fourteenth century: Gower, Langland and Chaucer. It then engages with the sixteenth-century prose romances of Sidney, the epic and lyrical poetry of Spenser, and Donne's love and religious poems. Full coverage is devoted to the legendary fifty-year blossoming of the Elizabethan theatre (excluding Shakespeare, the object of Volume 2), from Kyd and Marlowe up to Jonson, Webster, Middleton, Ford and Shirley. The final part addresses the sixteenth-century prose works of Lyly, Greene and Nashe, homiletics by Hooker and others, and Elizabethan travel literature and historiography.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• § 1. The initial and terminal dates of this volume
• Part I: The Formation of a National Literature
• Part II: The Middle English Period
• Part III: The Sixteenth Century
• Part IV: The Elizabethan Theatre
• Part V: The Beginnings of Narrative Prose
• Index of names
• Thematic index