The Short Oxford History of English Literature [Hardcover]

The Short Oxford History of English Literatureprovides in a single volume a comprehensive beginner's guide to the literature of the British Isles from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present day. Separate chapters trace the development of English literature fromBeowulfto the post-modern fictions of Seamus Heaney and Angela Carter. TheHistoryprovides detailed discussion of Old and Middle English Literature, the Renaissance, Shakespeare, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Romantics, Victorian and Edwardian literature, Modernism, and post-war writing. Discussions of key writers and works from Anselm and Chaucer to Spencer and Bunyan, and from Swift and Johnson to Dickens and D.H. Lawrence, are combined with analysis of the impact on literature of contemporary political, social, and intellectual developments. TheHistorylooks again at the canon of English literature and provides a fresh assessment of the distinctive contribution of Scottish, Irish, and Welsh writers, and it asks about the future of the canon in the light of the fragmented condition of British writing in the post-imperial period. This revised edition includes for the first time detailed, chapter-by-chapter guidance on further reading.

helpful guide ... reliable, well-informed and broad-minded commentary --Times Literary Supplement

Sanders's volume aims to match the kind of comprehensiveness pioneered by Morley, Saintsbury and Legouis and Cazamian, though with closer attention to, and fuller quotation from, selected texts than the earlier historians would have been allowed. His way of handling difficult moments of historical transition is by means of an attractive eclecticism. --Times Literary Supplement

Dr Sanders is editor of the World's Classics Editions of Gaskells'Sylvia's Lovers(1982); Thackeray'sBarry Lyndon(1984); Dickens'sA Tale of Two Cities(1988); and Hughes'sTom Brownl‡