A Brief Review of British Literature
The epic poem Beowulf, the most famous work in Old English, is generally regarded as the beginning of English literature. The following important landmark is the works of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th century,his masterpiece is The Canterbury Tales. Then during the Renaissance, especially the late 16th and early 17th centuries, major dramas and poems were written by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne and many others. From later in the 17th century, another great poet John Milton appeared. He was best known for his Paradise Lost in 1667. The late 17th and the early 18th century are particularly associated with satire, especially in the poetry of John Dryden and Alexander Pope, and the prose works of Jonathan Swift. The 18th century also saw the first British novels in the works of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding, while the late 18th and early 19th century was the period of the Romantic poets Wordsworth, Colereige, Shelly and Keats.
It was in the Victorian era(1837-1901) that the novel became the leading literary genre in English, dominated especially by Charles Dickens, and there were also many other significant writers, including the Bronte sisters, and then Thomas Hardy, in the final decades of the 19th century. Polish-born Joseph Conrad was perhaps the most important British novelist of the first two decades of the 20th century.
Irish writers were especially important in the 20th century, including James Joyce, and later Samuel Beckett, both were central figures in the Modernist movement. Many major writers in English in the 20th and 21st centuries have come from outside the United Kingdom. The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain tendencies in post-World War II literature. It is both a continuation of the experimentation championed by writers of the modernist period, relying heavily on fragmentation, paradox, questionable narrators etc., and a reaction agaginst Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature.
