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Index
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter 1: Old English
Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People: The First English Book
A People’s History
Moments in Time
Beowulf: A Monster of Early Literature
The Conquering Hero
The Age of Beowulf
Survival and Revival
The Vision of Piers Plowman: It Was All Just a Dream
Visions and Symbols
Alliteration and Illustration
Wycliffe’s Bible: Now Available in English
A Building Resentment
Give the People What They Want
Geoffrey Chaucer: The Birth of English Poetry
The Canterbury Tales
Stories in Poem Form
The King Arthur Legends: All Hail the King
A Welsh Tale
King Arthur, English Icon
National Treasure
Chapter 2: The Elizabethan Era
The King James Bible: A Transformative Translation
Building a Better Bible
The Good Book
The Book of Common Prayer: Uncommonly Original
By Official Decree
Following Along
John Donne: Metaphysical Poetry
Early Works
The Conceit
Christopher Marlowe: Drawing a Blank
Creating Blank Verse
The Faustian Bargain
Edmund Spenser: From Castle to Castle
Fit for a Queene
Politically Incorrect
Ben Jonson: Publish or Perish
Trying on Many Masques
Going to Print
William Shakespeare: The Bard
The Plays
From the Globe to All Around the Globe
The Sonnets
Chapter 3: The Restoration and Beyond
John Milton: Paradise Found
An Epic Journey
John Locke: Creating a New Age
Governmental Affairs
Toward a Greater Understanding
Changing the World
Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
A Novel Idea
Jonathan Swift: The Sultan of Satire
Making a Point
To Lilliput and Beyond
Alexander Pope: An Un-Enlightened Man
Emulating the Classics
The Mock of the Lock
Henry Fielding: King of Comedy
What a Farce
A Joke Made Serious
Samuel Johnson: Master of the Dictionary
Words, Words, Words
Legacy of a Language
Chapter 4: The Romantic Era
William Wordsworth: Emotional Accessibility
Man versus Mankind
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Rhymes and Rimes
Truly Divine
An Unreliable Memory
Saving Shakespeare
Jane Austen: Minding Manners
Not So Happily Ever After
Lord Byron: A Romantic Don Juan
A Heroic Act
Back to Basics
Don Juan
Isn’t It Romantic?
William Blake: Burning Bright
Taking a Stand
Breaking Free
Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley, and Gothic Romanticism: Scary Monsters and Super Creeps
Downright Spooky
Horace Walpole
How to Make a Monster
Robert Burns: The Scottish Bard
The Toast of Scotland
A National Treasure
Chapter 5: The Victorian Era and the Industrial Revolution
Alfred, Lord Tennyson: It’s Good to Be the King
Good Knight
Idyll Hands
Charles Dickens: Voice of the People
Literature from Everyday Life
Becoming a Cultural and Literary Influence
George Eliot: Out in the Country
Getting Real
Mill and Marner
Glorifying the Normal
An Expanding Viewpoint
The Brontë Sisters: Moor Power
Life in a Northern Town
Pseudonym Success
A Not Very Plain Jane
To New Heights
Grey Days in the Hall
Tragic Endings
Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The First Couple of Poetry
Setting the Scene
A Man and a Woman of Letters
Unfortunate Inspiration
A Change Is Gonna Come
Lewis Carroll: Adventures in Absurdity
A Man of Many Talents
Down the Rabbit Hole
Split Personality
Robert Louis Stevenson: Set a Course for Adventure
Wanderlust
A Man of the World
Beware, Pirates
The Monster Within
For Children?
Take It Easy
Rudyard Kipling: Welcome to the Jungle
Early Life
From the Jungles of Vermont
What a Boer
Oscar Wilde: For Art’s Sake
Mentors and Modernism
Extremely Important
Gross Indecency
Thomas Hardy: Going Backward to Go Forward
An Architectural Approach
A Novel Approach
Chapter 6: The Modernist Movement
William Butler Yeats: The Diamond of the Emerald Isle
Ireland’s Poet
T.S. Eliot: Going to Waste
Heading East
Pulling from the Past
Thinking It Through
A Towering Achievement
Switching Gears
D.H. Lawrence: Love Gone Wrong
Art Imitates Life, Life Imitates Art
Courting Controversy
Forbidden Love
The Lover
E.M. Forster: Where Nature Meets Human Nature
Looking to Italy
A Broken System
Imperialism
Trudging Forward
Virginia Woolf: A Movement of One’s Own
Early Life
A Light Amongst the Darkness
Making Room
James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist
A Master of Languages
For Dublin
Up from the Ashes
A Day in the Life
In the Wake of Ulysses
Legacy
W.H. Auden: A New Classicist
To America
Dylan Thomas: The Clear Expression of Mixed Feelings
The Celebrity
Chapter 7: Contemporary English Literature
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: It’s Elementary
The Game Is Afoot
A Brief and Unfortunate Death
A Knight’s Tale
George Bernard Shaw: Ireland’s Shakespeare
Highly Theatrical
Getting Serious
Joseph Conrad: Into Darkness
Exiled
Life at Sea
Oh, the Horrors
The World Comes to England
William Golding: Lord of the Flies
Try, Try Again
Island of Misfit Boys
An Uncomfortable Reality
J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: Two Towers
Tolkien
Lewis
George Orwell: Big Brother Is Watching
Getting Experimental
An Unclear Future
Down on the Farm
Current Voices: The Widening Definition of “Englishness”
Zadie Smith
Hilary Mantel
Kazuo Ishiguro
Neil Gaiman
Nick Hornby
Harold Pinter
Martin Amis
J.K. Rowling
About the Author
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