www.bl.uk/englishtimeline
This period runs from 1000 to the arrival of printed books in England in 1473. The timeline includes the only surviving manuscript of the Anglo Saxon poem Beowulf, one of the most famous poems in Old English, the language spoken in Anglo-Saxon England before the Norman Conquest. The manuscript is believed to have been written at the beginning of the 11th century, although the story had probably been passed down orally over many previous generations.
From the Norman Conquest it took about 200 years for English to re-assert itself as a literary language, and the period 1000-1476 sees the development of the language from Old English, through Middle English, to the beginnings of Modern English. Low literacy rates meant that reading and writing were the province of few people, and much literature was delivered orally. Though the first book printed in English was produced in Bruges or Ghent in 1473, it was three years before William Caxton set up his printing press in Westminster.
From Caxton until the death of Shakespeare
This period covers the emergence of Modern English. Drama moves from the stalls in the marketplace to purpose-built theatres, producing some of the world’s greatest literature. The English language becomes the subject of study, and attempts are made to regulate grammar and spelling. New genres emerge: the sonnet, influenced by Italian Renaissance forms; the essay; and the first steps towards what will become the novel. The Reformation of the Church brings the translation of the Bible into English and the Book of Common Prayer in English. The comparative political stability at the beginning of the reign of Henry VIII and at end of Elizabeth’s reign sees the dominant role of music and literature at Court; Henry himself composed songs, while Elizabeth’s Protestant court saw the blossoming of cultural life. In the earlier context, More’s Utopia is illustrative of the type of intellectual argument encouraged by Henry’s own publication, The Defence ot the Seven Sacraments, the first publication by a reigning monarch for 650 years, while at Elizabeth’s court poetry and drama flourished. The growth of grammar schools led to an increase in general literacy.
The 17th century
This section covers the turbulent period of the Civil War, the Restoration of the monarchy, and the 1688 revolution that severely curtailed the power of the Crown. Drama following Shakespeare flourishes, and following the suppression of the theatres during the Commonwealth, is revived during the Restoration. Metaphysical poetry explored the language’s potential for extended metaphors and witty paradoxes. Expressing the turmoil of the conflict between Crown and Parliament, pamphleteers express the range of political views of the time, and after the Restoration, journalists continue the debate. Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost explores the intense personal religious experience which set Puritan against Anglican against Catholic. The novel form is developed in the works of John Bunyan and Aphra Benn. Dictionary-writers look at different kinds of English, and begin to explore the idea of standardization and ‘correct’ spelling. English is fully established as the language of literature and government, and reading becomes more widespread, with Samuel Pepys describing seeing a shepherd and his son reading from the Bible; foreign trade brings many new words into the language. London is rocked by plague and fire. Coffee becomes the country’s most fashionable drink, and coffee houses become hubs of social and cultural activity.
The 18th century and the Romantics
Political stability at home, apart from the mid-century Jacobean rebellion, protected by the growth of naval power, allowed increased economic and industrial activity, and increased trade abroad. While drama became less important, the novel form emerged, and began to explore social, philosophical and political themes. Vast social differences existed: the period saw the rise of slavery, the growth of criminal underclasses, and the rewriting of social codes. The beginnings of the industrial revolution moved people away from agricultural work and into factory labour. Towards the end of the period, radical thought influenced by the French Revolution brought the end of slavery, the rise of unionism, and challenges to the limitations of the voting system. The Romantic poets, much influenced by the political turmoil of the late 18th century, took as their subjects imagination, nature, social observation and mysticism. Literary criticism grew, aspects of English such as grammar, spelling and pronunciation became major subjects of study, and the essay form was used to discuss social and philosophical matters.
The 19th century
The 19th century saw the growth of the novel as a medium of social criticism and psychological exploration of the individual. Historical and detective novels became popular, and from mid-century many works were published in installments in magazines. Women writers pushed the possibilities of the novel forward, particularly considering the position of women in a society where marriage largely governed women’s roles and possibilities. At the end of the century there was a resurgence in drama, with works exploring social and political themes. Journalism and advertising grew rapidly, with the vast increase in improved communications and manufactured goods. With greater travel people became aware of identities within the British Isles, and the use of dialect in literature became more widespread. Mass entertainment required mass publicity; and political awareness, sometimes violent, was supported by a greater market for political writing. With the growth of the British Empire, English was being taken to every area of the globe, while the beginning of what would be the Oxford English Dictionary shows the language being studied scientifically and comprehensively at home.
The 20th century
Drama after the First World War becomes an avant garde medium, pushing forward the boundaries of narrative and dialogue away from realism. The century begins with the suffragette movement, and ends with English as a medium for post-colonial writing in novels, poetry and drama. Journalism reaches everyone, through magazines, newspapers, then radio and television. Among cross-influences, film and the novel feed each other, and poets use the iconoclasm of modernist art in making visual poetry.
Language change SUMMARY
Over the past thousand years English has changed from being a largely Germanic inflexion-based isolated language to one that embraces words from hundreds of languages spoken around the world and is spoken round the world. Successive waves of influence include the influx of words from French in the Medieval period, the debate over ‘inkhorn terms’ in the later Renaissance, the invention of words for the fields of science and technology, worldwide trade in goods and foodstuffs, the colonial ventures in Africa, Asia and the Pacific. With over a million words, English is now being developed in separate ways around the world.
Fiction SUMMARY
Several authors have been claimed as ‘the father of English fiction’ – Geoffrey of Monmouth, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding. The seeds of fiction lie in the longer Old English poems like Beowulf, and the French romances introduced in the twelfth century, and verse and drama remained the format for fiction until the seventeenth century. It took a long time for the novel to become an established form in English literature, Pilgrim’s Progress appearing several decades after Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532- 4) in France and Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605-15) in Spain. ‘Three-decker’ (three volume) novels in the nineteenth century were the format for extensive investigation of relationships and social pressures.
Suggested sources The History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth (1130s) Piers Plowman by William Langland (1370) Gawayn and the Green Knight (1370s)
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (1400s) The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser (1590)
Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan (1678) Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1720)
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726) Pamela by Samuel Richardson (1740) Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (1749) Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne (1759) Persuasion by Jane Austen (1816) Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens (1837) Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (1847) Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (1847) The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (1860) East Lynne by Mrs Henry Wood (1861) Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871)
The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner (1883) The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
(1886) Tess of the D’urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (1891) Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899) The Time Machine by H G Wells (1895) Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle (1904)
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
Poetry SUMMARY
The earliest known poetry in Old English dates from the seventh century, and the English language has produced a stream of poetry ranging from epics such as Paradise Lost to Edward Lear’s limericks. The range of verse forms used in English have allowed the succinct expression of ideas and emotions providing enduring material for studying the relationship between form and content in the language.
Suggested sources Sumer is icumen in (1230) Gawayn and the Green Knight (1375) The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (1375) The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser (1590) Paradise Lost by John Milton (1667) An Horatian Ode by Andrew Marvell (1650) The Iliad translated by Alexander Pope (1720) William Blake’s notebook (1794)
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth (1807) Ozymandias by Percy Shelley (1818)
Don Juan by George Gordon, Lord Byron (1819) The Charge of the Light Brigade by Tennyson (1854) Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen (1918)
Drama SUMMARY
English drama could claim to derive ultimately from the performed poems of Old English, but is generally considered to have emerged as a discreet activity when performed Biblical stories came out of the church, via the entrance steps, to the pageant taken round the town. Highly developed during the late Elizabethan period, the Restoration, and from the later nineteenth century, writing for drama was less active during the Commonwealth and the eighteenth century.
Suggested sources History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth (1130s) Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe (1592) Richard III by William Shakespeare (1597) King Lear by William Shakespeare (1608) The First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays (1623) Theatrical figures (1662) The Way of the World by William Congreve (1700) She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith (1773)
Notes on Shakespeare by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (c1810) East Lynne by Ellen Wood (1861) Saturday Night at the Victoria Theatre (1872) The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde (1894) Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw (1913)
Journalism SUMMARY
Journalism developed from the handwritten corantos and newsletters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the newsbooks and newspapers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Pamphlets were published in vast numbers during the period of the civil war in the mid-seventeenth century, and journals such as The Spectator were used as vehicles for political debate in the early eighteenth century. Some of today’s newspapers were started in the eighteenth century, and large numbers of specialist newspapers were published in Victorian Britain, serving different interests. Independent newspapers blossomed in the mid-twentieth century, with technologies such as Xeroxing giving rise to samizdat newspapers and fanzines, long before desktop publishing offered the possibility of everyone being a newspaper publisher. As the processes of journalism have moved more to online publishing, the major newspapers are consciously updating their printing presses ‘for the last time’.
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento