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Reviews: "...a comprehensive overview of British literature, and a good starting point for a greater understanding of both 19th and 20th century literatures...for students who need information about significant British writers in both the 19th and 20th centuries, this two-volume set is a gold mine of useful knowledge...Recommended."
- Library Media Connection
Description: This concise encyclopedic reference profiles more than 800 British poets, novelists, playwrights, essayists, and other writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, from the early romantic poets to contemporary novelists born in distant parts of the former British Empire. Each entry includes essential details about the author’s life and work and suggestions for further reading. Entries on major writers include a critical analysis section that discusses one or more of the author’s works in greater detail. Each volume also features an author timeline, general bibliography, and entries on key terms and movements of the century.
Volume I, 19th-Century British Writers
The 19th century brought unprecedented change to British society, which led to literary innovation. Literacy increased; books, newspapers, libraries, and other literary outlets flourished; and writing became more of a profession than a pastime. The rise of romanticism transformed English poetry at the beginning of the century. By the end of the century, the novel—from the gothic to the realistic—had become the most widely read genre. Political writing, scientific and historical writing, and literary criticism also became popular and influential.
Volume I includes profiles of such influential figures as Matthew Arnold, Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Robert Browning, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Elizabeth Gaskell, John Keats, John Stuart Mill, Christina Rossetti, John Ruskin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Bram Stoker, Alfred Tennyson, Anthony Trollope, Oscar Wilde, William Wordsworth, and many more.
Volume II, 20th-Century British Writers
Modernism marked the beginning of 20th-century English literature. After the devastation of World War I, British writers rejected traditional forms and found inspiration in the literature of other cultures as well as in psychology, anthropology, and physics. World War II led to a reaction against modernism and a return to British forms, themes, and settings. Later in the century, the work of writers from former parts of the British empire brought new viewpoints to British fiction.
Volume II includes entries on such significant authors as W. H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, A. S. Byatt, G. K. Chesterton, Roald Dahl, Daphne du Maurier, E. M. Forster, John Fowles, John Galsworthy, Graham Greene, Seamus Heaney, Kazuo Ishiguro, James Joyce, Philip Larkin, D. H. Lawrence, C. S. Lewis, Doris Lessing, Katherine Mansfield, W. Somerset Maugham, V. S. Naipaul, George Orwell, Harold Pinter, Salman Rushdie, Muriel Spark, Tom Stoppard, Dylan Thomas, Evelyn Waugh, Virginia Woolf, William Butler Yeats, and many more. Contents: Preface • Introduction • Authors’ Timeline • Entries A to Z • Selected Bibliography • IndexISBN - 9788130914121
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