Introduction       Modernism is a blanket term that refers to a wide variety of international movements, which took place in the arts starting from the closing years of the 19th century till the culmination of the second world war. Some prominent movements in this regard include symbolism, imagism, surrealism, expressionism and impressionism. Though all modernist movements were unique in their own ways, a common denominator that united them was that they were all avantgarde in scope. This is to say, they exhibited a strong reactionary stance against tradition ..read more

The Middle English Period (1066-1400)       The true history of English poetry may be said to begin only in the second half of the 14th century with the poetical works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Does this mean that no poetry was written in England prior to this period? Not so, the anonymous epic Beowulf was apparently written during the 9th century, which is in fact more than a century before the Normans conquered England. There are specific reasons as to why we consider Chaucer as the first formal poet in England, and his poetry as marking the inception of the grand history of ..read more

 Beginning: In tracing the outline history of English poetry, those that were written prior to the 14thcentury could be ruled out from consideration. The point is, the form of English exemplified in them is so archaic that without special skills or scholarship to bear, they are essentially unintelligible. In fact, even with regard to the 14th century, it is only with the poetical works of Geoffrey Chaucer, which belong to its latter half, that the history of English poetry is formally said to commence. There are two specific factors that account for this point. The first which is linguist ..read more

 Preamble       Romantic revival denotes a literary movement in which romanticism reasserted itself as the dominant trend in English literature again, after playing second fiddle to classicism during the neoclassical movement. The publication of the anthology Lyrical Ballads containing poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge is generally recognized as marking the formal inauguration of the movement in the literature of England, and 1850 the year of the former’s death is widely considered as indicating its conclusion. With the dominant trend shifting from classicism to romant ..read more

  Victorian Era: The Victorian era was witness to a paradigm shift in English poetry, with the emphasis shifting from classicism to romanticism as the dominant trend. It is however noteworthy that not until the dawn of the 20th century and the modernist movement did this change become complete. The Victorian poetic scene was in essence spearheaded by the works of two quintessential figures. These were Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning, poets who constituted a perfect foil to each other. Nowhere is this disparity more obvious than in their attitude towards human nature. Tennyson pre ..read more

  Preamble       In the literature of England, there are basically two trends to reckon with. These are classicism and romanticism. The established pattern is that in every epoch of English literary history, one of these two trends emerges as a dominant force by which the literature of that age comes to be defined. The difference between the two trends could be understood in the most basic terms as follows. Classicism as a trend can be said to uphold ideals such as order, norms, and critical sensibility as the seminal characteristics to be sought for, while romanticism ..read more

  Background       The millennium starting from roughly the 5th century B. C., during which European civilization was dominated by the Greeks followed by the Romans, is generally known as the era of classical antiquity. This period exemplifies a significant chapter in the annals of western civilization in that it marked a phase of sustained intellectual and artistic progress. With the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century A. D., this glorious epoch of Greeco-Roman scholarship drew to a close, casting Europe into a lengthy phase of intellectual dearth known as the ..read more

  Irish Theatre While Wilde and Shaw were spearheading the resurgence of drama in England during the 1890s, a similar attempt was underway in Ireland. Three artists, Lady Gregory, William Butler Yeats, and Edward Martin, conceived in 1898 a plan for setting up an Irish theatre that exclusively staged plays by Irish playwrights as an attempt to win recognition for Irish dramatists. The idea eventually materialised the following year in 1899 when the Irish Literary Theatre was set up. The theatre which remained professionally alive for three years focused on staging plays by Irish artists g ..read more

  1.       The first phase in the evolution of English drama is the medieval era, which roughly spans the time period from the 9th to the 16th century. During this phase, drama developed in terms of two stages. The first entitled the stage of medieval religious drama, comprises of two types of plays namely the mystery and the miracle. The second called the stage of medieval secular drama, is constituted by similarly two types of plays, the morality and the interlude. The basic difference between the two stages could be explained thus. In the first stage, play ..read more

  Social novel exemplifies a type of novel in which the plot deals with social affairs that concern the public at large. The 19th century, specifically the later half when the industrial revolution was at its peak marks the heyday of this novelistic variety in English literature. The novelist Charles Dickens is widely recognized by one and all as the most famous exponent of this genre. His noteworthy works such as Oliver Twist(1838), Nicholas Nickleby (1839), David Copperfield (1850) and Hard Times (1854) are identified as some of the most impressive instances of social novels in English ..read more