User:OnBeyondZebrax/sandbox/English literature

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Oral tradition was very strong in early English culture and most literary works were written to be performed. In the Middle Ages, drama in the vernacular languages of Europe may have emerged from religious enactments of the liturgy. Following the introduction of a printing press into England by William Caxton in 1476, vernacular literature flourished. During the reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603) and then James I (1603–25), in the late 16th and early 17th century, a London-centred culture, that was both courtly and popular, produced great poetry and drama. William Shakespeare (1564–1616) stands out in this period as a poet and playwright as yet unsurpassed. During the 18th century literature reflected the worldview of the Age of Enlightenment (or Age of Reason): a rational and scientific approach to religious, social, political, and economic issues that promoted a secular view of the world and a general sense of progress and perfectibility. The form of the British periodical essay was created.

The Romantic movement in English literature of the early 19th century has its roots in 18th-century poetry, the Gothic novel and the novel of sensibility. During the end of the 18th century, Horace Walpole's 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, created the Gothic fiction genre, that combines elements of horror and romance. Romanticism was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century. Robert Burns (1759–1796) was a pioneer of the Romantic movement. The early Romantic Poets brought a new emotionalism and introspection. Jane Austen's works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century realism.

It was in the Victorian era (1837–1901) that the novel became the leading literary genre in English. The 1830s and 1840s saw the rise of social novel, that "arose out of the social and political upheavals which followed the Reform Act of 1832". This was in many ways a reaction to rapid industrialization, and the social, political and economic issues associated with it, and was a means of commenting on abuses of government and industry and the suffering of the poor, who were not profiting from England's economic prosperity. Charles Dickens (1812–70) emerged on the literary scene in the late 1830s and soon became probably the most famous novelist in the history of English literature. The Brontë sisters, Emily, Charlotte and Anne, were other significant novelists in the 1840s and 1850s. By the mid-19th century, the pre-eminence of literature from the British Isles began to be challenged by writers from the former American colonies. 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, for example, on fragmentation, paradox, questionable narrators, etc.) and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature.