Module I

World English

The term World English (or World Englishes) refers to the English language as it is variously
used throughout the world. It is also known as International English and Global English. The
English language is now spoken in more than 100 countries. Varieties of World English
include American English, Australian English, Babu English, Banglish, British English,
Canadian English, Caribbean English, Chicano English, Chinese English, Denglish
(Denglisch) Euro-English, Hinglish, Indian English, Irish English, Japanese English, New
Zealand English, Nigerian English, Philippine English, Scottish English, Singapore English
South African English, Spanglish, Taglish, Welsh English, West African Pidgin English,
Zimbabwean English. Linguist Braj Kachru has divided the varieties of World English into
three concentric circles: inner, outer, and expanding. The Inner Circle is made up of countries
in which English is the first or the dominant language. These countries include Australia,
Britain, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United States, Page 3 of 24 also called the
core English-speaking countries. The inner circle is one of the three concentric circles of
World English identified by linguist Braj Kachru in "Standards, Codification and
Sociolinguistic Realism: The English Language in the Outer Circle" (1985). Kachru describes
the inner circle as “the traditional bases of English, dominated by the 'mother tongue'
varieties of the language.” The labels inner, outer, and expanding circles represent the type of
spread, the patterns of acquisition, and the functional allocation of the English language in
diverse cultural contexts.

Standardized Patterns

"The global spread of English, its causes and consequences, have long been a focus of critical
discussion. One of the main concerns has been that of standardization. This is also because,
unlike other international languages such as Spanish and French, English lacks any official
body setting and prescribing the norms of the language. This apparent linguistic anarchy has
generated a tension between those who seek stability of the code through some form of
convergence and the forces of linguistic diversity that are inevitably set in motion when new
demands are made on a language that has assumed a global role of such immense
proportions.

1. Airports

In the public usage of international airports, where, on signboards, English is often twinned
with other languages; announcements are commonly in English or are multilingual including
English.

2. Newspapers and periodicals English-language broadsheet newspapers and magazine-style

periodicals, in which the texts are tightly edited . . .

3. Broadcast media The programming of CNN, the BBC, and other especially TV news-and-
views services; presentational formulas and formats are at least as crucial here as in
newspapers.
4. Computer use, email, and the Internet/Web In such computer and Internet services as those
offered by Microsoft…"

Lingua Franca, Pidgins, and Creole

Throughout the course of geographic history, exploration and trade have caused various
populations of people to come into contact with each other. Because these people were of
different cultures and thus spoke different languages, communication was often difficult.
Over the decades though, languages changed to reflect such interactions and groups
sometimes developed lingua francas and pidgins. A lingua franca is a language used by
different populations to communicate when they do not share a common language. Generally,
a lingua franca is a third language that is distinct from the native language of both parties
involved in the communication. Sometimes as the language becomes more widespread, the
native populations of an area will speak the lingua franca to each other as well. A pidgin is a
simplified version of one language that combines the vocabulary of a number of different
languages. Pidgins are often just used between members of different cultures to communicate
for things like trade. A pidgin is distinct from a lingua franca in that members of the same
populations rarely use it to talk to one another. It is also important to note that because
pidgins develop out of sporadic contact between people and is a simplification of different
languages, pidgins generally have no native speakers. The Lingua Franca Arabic was an early
lingua franca to develop because of the sheer size of the Islamic Empire dating back to the
7th Century. Arabic is the native language of the peoples from the Arabian Peninsula but its
use spread with the empire as it expanded into China, India, parts of Central Asia, the Middle
East, Northern Africa, and parts of Southern Europe. The empire’s vast size exhibits the need
for a common language. Arabic also served as the lingua franca of science and diplomacy in
the 1200’s because at that time, more books were written in Arabic than any other language.
The use of Arabic as a lingua franca and others such as the romance languages and Chinese
then continued worldwide throughout history as they made it easier for diverse groups of
people in different countries to communicate. For example, until the 18th Century, Latin was
the main lingua franca of European scholars as it allowed easy communication by people
whose native languages included Italian and French. During the Age of Exploration, lingua
francas also played an enormous role in allowing European explorers to conduct trade and
other important communications in the various countries in which they went. Portuguese was
the lingua franca of diplomatic and trade relations in areas like coastal Africa, portions of
India, and even Japan. Other lingua francas developed during this time as well since
international trade and communication was becoming an important component to nearly
every area of the globe. Malay for instance was the lingua franca of Southeast Asia and was
used by Arab and Chinese traders there prior to the arrival of the Europeans. Once they
arrived, people like the Dutch and British used Malay to communicate with the native
peoples.
Modern Lingua Francas

The Pidgin

In order to create a pidgin, there needs to be regular contact between the people speaking
different languages, there needs to be a reason for communication (such as trade), and there
should be a lack of another easily accessible language between the two parties. In addition,
pidgins have a distinct set of characteristics that make them differ from the first and second
languages spoken by the pidgin developers. For example, the words used in a pidgin language
lack inflections on verbs and nouns and have no true articles or words like conjunctions. In
addition, very few pidgins use complex sentences. Because of this, some people characterize
pidgins as broken or chaotic languages. Regardless of its seemingly chaotic nature though,
several pidgins have survived for generations. These include the Nigerian Pidgin, the
Cameroon Pidgin, Bislama from Vanuatu, and Tok Pisin, a pidgin from Papua, New Guinea.
All of these pidgins are based mainly on English words.

The Creole

From time to time, long-surviving pidgins also become more widely used for communication
and expand into the general population. When this happens and the pidgin is used enough to
become the primary language of an area, it is no longer considered a pidgin, but is instead
called a creole language. An example of a creole includes Swahili, which grew out of Arabic
and Bantu languages in eastern Africa. The language Bazaar Malay, spoken in Malaysia is
another example. The Jamaican Patois is also referred to as Jamaican Creole or Patwa.
Although English is the official language of the country, Jamaican Patois is the most widely
spoken. Lingua francas, pidgins, or creoles are significant to geography because each
represents a long history of communication between various groups of people and is an
important gauge of what was taking place at the time the language developed. Today, lingua
francas especially but also pidgins represent an attempt to create universally understood
languages in a world with growing global interactions.

Contact Language

A contact language is a type of lingua franca used for purposes of basic communication by
people with no common language. English as lingua franca (ELF), says Alan Firth, is a
"contact language between persons who share neither a common native tongue nor a common
(national) culture, and for whom English is the chosen foreign language of communication"
(1996). "Ancient Greek around the Mediterranean basin, or later Latin throughout the Roman
Empire, were both contact languages. They tend to vary in use in different local contexts, and
there is often a great deal of local language interference. Latin, for example, later developed
many local forms which eventually became French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and so on.
The contact language usually dominates in situations in which the speakers of that language
have military or economic power over other language users. "When the contact between
groups of people is prolonged, a hybrid language can develop known as a pidgin. These tend
to occur in situations where one language dominates, and there are two or more other
languages at hand." (Peter Stockwell, Sociolinguistics: A Resource Book for Students.
Routledge, 2002) Page 7 of 24 "The most often cited example of a (bilingual) mixed system
is Michif, a contact language that developed in Canada between French-speaking fur traders
and their Cree-speaking wives."

English in India

The East India Company sailed forth in search of new trading posts in the 1600s. It sought
trade relations with other nations in the European continent, as well as what they called the
East Indies, i.e. the Indian subcontinent. They landed in Surat, in Gujarat, as early as 1608 or
thereabouts and in Goa, about the same time. It would be safe to assume that India’s first
brush with English began here. Over the next centuries, they commandeered all our
resources, introduced railways, expanded industries and then set about to create a band of
clerks who would document and maintain these developments.

In the 19th century, this was the vision of Lord Macaulay (1800-1859), the Whig politician
and historian, who advocated the teaching of English in India with his famous notion of
creating “a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in
morals, and in intellect”. This set the trend for the next 150 years. Learning English and
adopting British mannerisms and customs gave us wealth and power and position – and
therefore that is what people sought to do. Pre-independence, getting a government job
involved passing clerical exams in English. This people did to get that coveted job and the
post-retirement pension. Any other occupation was often a stop-gap till the ‘son’ of the
family got a government job. The daughters were preferably married off to government
officials as well.

After independence, in 1947, the brown sahib culture gained momentum. The posts hitherto
occupied by the British were now filled by educated (read ‘English speaking graduate’)
Indians. And an unfortunate class divide began appearing among men of a single country –
officers and non-officers. This happened in the administrative services, in the army, the
railways and eventually in the nationalized banks and other Public Sector units. Given India’s
caste-ridden society, this was especially detrimental, because the tribal and the urban and
rural poor had no access to an English-medium education. They remained where they were,
while the middle and upper classes raced ahead. Surprisingly, the English did not affect the
religious life of people at all. The middle classes, for instance, hankered for government jobs
and English medium education, but usually chose to marry within their communities. But it
did affect the cultural preferences of the younger population. Even in the days of LP records,
affluent people would appreciate western music and hum along with the Beatles or Elvis
Presley. Hindi cinema, one of the biggest influences on social behavior, was hugely
impacted. The heroes and heroines dressed stylishly, preferred English and loved the ‘twist’.
The young India of the 60s and 70s watched, wanted and got all of this.

In the 1980s, the debate over ‘reserved seats’ for the previously downtrodden classes gained
momentum, and thus you saw a leniency in the entry and exit points of mainstream
education. With the democratization of education came the democratization of English as
well. Small, medium and large, poor, mediocre and good institutions of education began
selling their ‘courses’ in the English medium. "There were now too many schools, too many
students, but not enough qualified teachers".

Even today schools in India that emphasize on English are considered better schools and the
same is the case at university levels, even though there is a trend towards Indianization. In the
1970s and 1980s about one third of the Indian schools had English as their first language. For
most of these students, English is their first language and it is easier for them to
communicate, read and write in English than in Indian languages, including their mother
tongues.

Just like the Americans, Australians or even the British who have their unique English words
and phrases, the Indians also have their own unique English. The Indians and the Indian
English language press uses many words derived from Indian languages, especially from
Hindi. Other than that, the Indian accent is sometimes difficult for non-Indians to understand.
There are some Indian pronunciations that don’t exist in non Indian languages. The British
also had problems with that and they caused some changes in Indian words so that they could
pronounce them. Even the Indians started using these changed words and made them part of
their English. Two examples of such changed words are currey and sari.

English in international communication and business:

It is often argued that the modern “global village” needs a “global language”, and that
(particularly in a world of modern communications, globalized trade and easy international
travel) a single lingua franca has never been more important. With the advent since 1945 of
large international bodies such as the United Nations and its various offshoots - the UN now
has over 50 different agencies and programs from the World Bank, World Health
Organization and UNICEF to more obscure arms like the Universal Postal Union - as well as
collective organizations such as the Commonwealth and the European Union, the pressure to
establish a worldwide lingua franca has never been greater. As just one example of why a
lingua franca is useful, consider that up to one-third of the administration costs of the
European Community is taken up by translations into the various member languages.

Some have seen a planned or constructed language as a solution to this need. In the short
period between 1880 and 1907, no less than 53 such “universal artificial languages” were
developed. Many of these universal languages (including Esperanto) were specifically
developed with the view in mind that a single world language would automatically lead to
world peace and unity. Setting aside for now the fact that such languages have never gained
much traction, it has to be said this assumption is not necessarily well-founded. For instance,
historically, many wars have broken out within communities of the same language (e.g. the
British and American Civil Wars, the Spanish Civil War, Vietnam, former Yugoslavia, etc)
and, on the other hand, the citizens of some countries with multiple languages (e.g.
Switzerland, Canada, Singapore, etc) manage to coexist, on the whole, quite peacefully.

English as a Global Language:

There is no official definition of "global" or "world" language, but it essentially refers to a

language that is learned and spoken internationally, and is characterized not only by the
number of its native and second language speakers, but also by its geographical distribution,
and its use in international organizations and in diplomatic relations. A global language acts
as a “lingua franca”, a common language that enables people from diverse backgrounds and
ethnicities to communicate on a more or less equitable basis. English is the nearest thing there
has ever been to a global language. Its worldwide reach is much greater than anything
achieved historically by Latin or French, and there has never been a language as widely
spoken as English. Many would reasonably claim that, in the fields of business, academics,
science, computing, education, transportation, politics and entertainment, English is already
established as the de facto lingua franca.

A global language arises mainly due to the political and economic power of its native
speakers. It was British imperial and industrial power that sent English around the globe
between the 17th and 20th Century. The legacy of British imperialism has left many counties
with the language thoroughly institutionalized in their courts, parliament, civil service,
schools and higher education establishments. In other counties, English provides a neutral
means of communication between different ethnic groups.

But it has been largely American economic and cultural supremacy - in music, film and
television; business and finance; computing, information technology and the Internet; even
drugs and pornography - that has consolidated the position of the English language and
continues to maintain it today. American dominance and influence worldwide makes English
crucially important for developing international markets, especially in the areas of tourism
and advertising, and mastery of English also provides access to scientific, technological and
academic resources which would otherwise be denied developing countries.

ENL, ESL and EFL:

ENL, ESL and EFL "Basically, we can divide up countries according to whether they have
English as a Native Language, English as a Second Language, or English as a Foreign
Language. The first category is self-explanatory. The difference between English as a foreign
language and English as a second language is that in the latter instance only, English has
actual assigned communicative status within the country. All told, there is a total of 75
territories where English has a special place in society. [Braj] Kachru has divided the
English-speaking countries of the world into three broad types, which he symbolizes by
placing them in three concentric rings:

 The inner circle: These countries are the traditional bases of English, where it is the
primary language, that is Great Britain and Ireland, the United States, Canada, Australia, and
New Zealand.

 The outer or extended circle: These countries represent the earlier spread of English in
non-native contexts, where the language is part of the country's leading institutions, where it
plays a second-language role in a multilingual society. e.g. Singapore, India, Malawi, and 50
other territories.

 The expanding circle: This includes countries that represent the importance of English as
an international language though they have no history of colonization and English has no
special administrative status in these countries, e.g. China, Japan, Poland and a growing
number of other states. This is English as a foreign language. It is clear that the expanding
circle is the one that is most sensitive to the global status of English. It is here that English is
used primarily as an international language, especially in the business, scientific, legal,
political and academic communities."

Standard English

In everyday usage, standard English is taken to be the variety most widely accepted and
understood within an English-speaking country or throughout the English-speaking world. It
is more or less free of regional, class, and other shibboleths, although the issue of a ‘standard
accent’ often causes trouble and tension. It is sometimes presented as the ‘common core’
(what is left when all regional and other distinctions are stripped away), a view that remains
controversial because of the difficulty of deciding where core ends and peripheries begin.
Linguists generally agree on three things: (1) The standard is most easily identified in print,
whose conventions are more or less uniform throughout the world, and some use the
term print standard for that medium. (2) Standard forms are used by most presenters of news
on most English-language radio and television networks, but with regional and other
variations, particularly in accent. (3) Use of standard English relates to social class and level
of education, often considered (explicitly or implicitly) to match the average level of
attainment of students who have finished secondary-level schooling.

Varieties of Standard English:

Globish is a simplified version of Anglo-American English used as a worldwide lingua

franca. (See Panglish.) The trademarked term Globish, a blend of the
words global and English, was coined by French businessman Jean-Paul Nerrière in the mid-
1990s. "Globish appears to be English without idioms, making it easier for non-Anglophones
to understand and to communicate with one another (The Anthropology of Language, 2008).

Panglish is a simplified global form of the English language characterized by a large variety
of local dialects. A blend of the Greek pan (all) and English, the term Panglish was coined
by linguist and science-fiction author Suzette Haden Elgin.

Kachru’s Model of World Englishes:

Throughout the history of English experts have proposed many models to try to classify its
speakers. However, not all linguists agree in which one is the best. In this post we are trying
to take a look at Kachru’s model proposed in four decades ago. But before starting to explain
any the model we need to be aware of the fact that this is a three group model. That is, one
that classify speakers as:

 ENL: English as a native language, these are native speakers born in a English-
speaking country, having then this language as their mother tongue.

 ESL: English as a second language, these are the non-native speakers who have learnt
English almost at the same time as their mother tongue.
  EFL: English as a foreign language, these are the non-native speakers w
ho learnt English in a country where English is not usually spoken.

Although this classification shows some problems such the fact that the classification of
bilingual speakers and the psychological problems shown in ENL of speakers of non-standard
varieties and ESL of speakers who are not comfortable to use the language in certain
situations. This is the main classification that linguists are going to take into account in order
to write their own models.

For many sociolinguists the most important and accurate model is the one proposed by Braj
Kachru in 1988. His “Three circle model of World Englishes”, states that there are three
circles inside which, the different speakers are classified. The different circles are:

 The Inner Circle is made up the traditional bases of English and its speakers are the
ones in charge of providing the norms. These places are where the norms are created
and from which they spread to the other circles. Some of the countries that conform
the Inner Circle are USA, UK and Canada.

 The Outer Circle represents the places where they speak official non-native varieties
of English because of their colonial history. The speakers of these places are the ones
who challenge the norms and develop them and are mainly ESL Some of the countries
that belong to this circle are India, Pakistan and Egypt.

 The Expanding Circle is made up by EFL speakers where English is not usually
spoken. In this circle the speakers have to follow the rules stablished by the Inner
Circle and developed by the Outer one. Some examples of countries that belong to
this circle are China, Russia and Brazil.

It shows how colonization, history, and politics played a role in the spread of English in the
different countries. The Inner Circle as was explained before is made up by the countries who
belong to the first diaspora. These countries are were the linguistic and cultural bases of
English are traditionally located. The Outer Circle is conformed by the second diaspora
thanks to the colonization of different places in Asia and Africa by the British Empire. One of
the most important things to take into account regarding this circle is that the English
varieties spoken there are usually in constant contact with other languages. This is causes the
English variety to be influenced by those other languages and in some cases to incorporate
some of their features. This is why the Outer Circle is norm-developing, because the contact
with other languages prompts changes in its vocabulary and sometimes in its grammar. The
Expanding Circle was never colonized by the British Empire and therefore English is not a
language spoken by a significant number of people in the country.

Module II

Old English language, also called Anglo-Saxon, language spoken and written
in England before 1100; it is the ancestor of Middle English and Modern English. Scholars
place Old English in the Anglo-Frisian group of West Germanic languages.

Old English Dialects:

Four dialects of the Old English language are known: Northumbrian in northern England and
southeastern Scotland; Mercian in central England; Kentish in southeastern England;
and West Saxon in southern and southwestern England. Mercian and Northumbrian are often
classed together as the Anglian dialects. Most Old English writings are in the West Saxon
dialect; the first great period of literary activity occurred during the reign of King Alfred the
Great in the 9th century.

Characteristics of Old English Period:

Alphabet and Pronunciation

The alphabet used to write our Old English texts was adopted from Latin, which was
introduced by Christian missionaries. The spelling was never fully standardized: instead the
alphabet, with continental values (sounds), was used to spell words "phonetically" with the
result that each dialect, with its different sounds, was rendered differently -- and
inconsistently, over time, due to dialectal evolution. King Alfred did attempt to regularize
spelling in the 9th century, but by the 11th century continued changes in pronunciation once
again exerted their disruptive effects on spelling.

Anglo-Saxon scribes added two consonants to the Latin alphabet to render the th sounds: first
the runic thorn (þ), and later eth (ð). However, there was never a consistent distinction
between them as their modern IPA equivalents might suggest: different instances of the same
word might use þ in one place and ð in another. We follow the practices of our sources in our
textual transcriptions, but our dictionary forms tend to standardize on either þ or ð -- mostly
the latter, though it depends on the word. To help reduce confusion, we sort these letters
indistinguishably, after T; the reader should not infer any particular difference. Another
added letter was the ligature ash (æ), used to represent the broad vowel sound now rendered
by 'a' in, e.g., the word fast.

Vocabulary

At first glance, Old English texts may look decidedly strange to a modern English speaker:
many Old English words are no longer used in modern English, and the inflectional structure
was far more rich than is true of its modern descendant. However, with small spelling
differences and sometimes minor meaning changes, many of the most common words in Old
and modern English are the same. For example, over 50 percent of the thousand most
common words in Old English survive today -- and more than 75 percent of the top hundred.
Conversely, more than 80 percent of the thousand most common words in modern English
come from Old English.

 Nouns: cynn 'kin', hand, god, man(n), word.

 Pronouns: hē, ic 'I', mē, self, wē.
 Verbs: beran 'bear', cuman 'come', dyde 'did', sittan 'sit', wæs 'was'.
 Adjectives: fæst 'fast', gōd 'good', hālig 'holy', rīce 'rich', wīd 'wide'.
 Adverbs: ær 'ere', alle 'all', nū 'now', tō 'too', ðǣr 'there'.
 Prepositions: æfter 'after', for, in, on, under.
 Articles: ðæt 'that', ðis 'this'.
 Conjunctions: and, gif 'if'.

Grammar

In grammar, Old English is chiefly distinguished from later stages in the history of English by
greater use of a larger set of inflections in verbs, nouns, adjectives, and pronouns, and also
(connected with this) by a rather less fixed word order; it also preserves grammatical gender
in nouns and adjectives.

An example: The following couple of lines from Ælfric’s De temporibus anni:

‘Ðunor cymð of hætan & of wætan. Seo lyft tyhð þone wætan to hire neoðan & ða hætan
ufan.’

may be translated word-for-word as:

Thunder comes from heat and from moisture. The air draws the moisture to it from below and
the heat from above.

In contrast to Modern English, Old English had three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter)
in the noun and adjective, and nouns, pronouns, and adjectives were inflected for case. Noun
and adjective paradigms contained four cases—nominative, genitive, dative, and
accusative—while pronouns also had forms for the instrumental case. Old English had a
greater proportion of strong verbs (sometimes called irregular verbs in contemporary
grammars) than does Modern English. Many verbs that were strong in Old English are weak
(regular) verbs in Modern English (e.g., Old English helpan, present infinitive of the
verb help; healp, past singular; hulpon, past plural; holpen, past participle versus Modern
English help, helped, helped, helped, respectively).

https://public.oed.com/blog/old-english-an-overview/

Middle English Period:

Middle English language, the vernacular spoken and written in England from about 1100 to
about 1500, the descendant of the Old English language and the ancestor of Modern English.

The history of Middle English is often divided into three periods: (1) Early Middle English,
from about 1100 to about 1250, during which the Old English system of writing was still in
use; (2) the Central Middle English period from about 1250 to about 1400, which was marked
by the gradual formation of literary dialects, the use of an orthography greatly influenced by
the Anglo-Norman writing system, the loss of pronunciation of final unaccented -e, and the
borrowing of large numbers of Anglo-Norman words; the period was especially marked by
the rise of the London dialect, in the hands of such writers as John Gower and Geoffrey
Chaucer; and (3) Late Middle English, from about 1400 to about 1500, which was marked by
the spread of the London literary dialect and the gradual cleavage between the Scottish
dialect and the other northern dialects. During this period the basic lines of inflection as they
appear in Modern English were first established. Among the chief characteristic differences
between Old and Middle English were the substitution of natural gender in Middle English
for grammatical gender and the loss of the old system of declensions in the noun and
adjective and, largely, in the pronoun.

Middle English Dialects

The dialects of Middle English are usually divided into three large groups: (1) Southern
(subdivided into Southeastern, or Kentish, and Southwestern), chiefly in the counties south of
the River Thames; (2) Midland (corresponding roughly to the Mercian dialect area of Old
English times) in the area from the Thames to southern South Yorkshire and northern
Lancashire; and (3) Northern, in the Scottish Lowlands, Northumberland, Cumbria, Durham,
northern Lancashire, and most of Yorkshire.

Spelling and Vocabulary

The outcome of the Norman Conquest was to change the writing of English from the clear
and easily readable insular hand of Irish origin to the delicate Carolingian script then in use
on the Continent. With the change in appearance came a change in spelling. Norman scribes
wrote Old English y as u, ȳ as ui, ū as ou (ow when final). Thus, mycel (“much”) appeared
as muchel, fȳr (“fire”) as fuir, hūs (“house”) as hous, and hū (“how”) as how. For the sake of
clarity (i.e., legibility) u was often written o before and after m, n, u, v, and w; and i was
sometimes written y before and after m and n. So sunu (“son”) appeared
as sone and him (“him”) as hym. Old English cw was changed to qu; hw to wh, qu,
or quh; ċ to ch or tch; sċ to sh; -ċġ- to -gg-; and -ht to ght. So Old English cwēn appeared
as queen; hwaet as what, quat, or quhat; dīċ as ditch; sċip as ship; secge as segge;
and miht as might.

For the first century after the Conquest, most loanwords came from Normandy and Picardy,
but with Henry II (reigned 1154–89), other dialects, especially Central French contributed to
the speech of the aristocracy. As a result, Modern English acquired the forms canal, catch,
leal, real, reward, wage, warden, and warrant from Norman French side by side with the
corresponding forms channel, chase, loyal, royal, regard, gage, guardian, and guarantee,
from French. King John lost Normandy in 1204. With the increasing power of the Capetian
kings of Paris, Francien/ Central French gradually predominated. Meanwhile, Latin stood
intact as the language of learning. For three centuries, therefore, the literature of England was
trilingual.
The sounds of the native speech changed slowly. Even in late Old English short vowels had
been lengthened before ld, rd, mb, and nd, and long vowels had been shortened before all
other consonant groups and before double consonants. In early Middle English short vowels
of whatever origin were lengthened in the open stressed syllables of disyllabic words. An
open syllable is one ending in a vowel.

Both syllables in Old English nama “name,” mete “meat, food,” nosu “nose,” wicu “week,”
and duru “door” were short, and the first syllables, being stressed, were lengthened to nāme,
mēte, nōse, wēke, and dōre in the 13th and 14th centuries. A similar change occurred in 4th-
century Latin, in 13th-century German, and at different times in other languages. The popular
notion has arisen that final mute -e in English makes a preceding vowel long; in fact, it is the
lengthening of the vowel that has caused e to be lost in pronunciation. On the other hand, Old
English long vowels were shortened in the first syllables of trisyllabic words, even when
those syllables were open; e.g., hāligdaeg “holy day,” ærende “message,
errand,” crīstendōm “Christianity,”and sūtherne “southern”became hǒliday (Northern hăliday
), ěrrende, chrǐstendom, and sǔtherne. This principle still operates in current English.
Compare, for example, trisyllabic derivatives such as the words chastity, criminal, fabulous,
gradual, gravity, linear, national, ominous, sanity, and tabulate with the simple nouns and
adjectives chaste, crime, fable, grade, grave, line, nation, omen, sane, and table.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Middle-English-language

Latin/ French borrowings:

The Latin component in the vocabulary of Old English was small, only amounting to a few
per cent of the total of surviving Old English words, and many (but by no means all) of these
words were doubtless of very rare occurrence, confined to very occasional use by scholars.
The securely identified pre-Conquest borrowings from French amount to barely a handful,
and even in very late, post-Conquest Old English not many more are recorded.

In Middle English this picture changes radically. If we look at the vocabulary of Middle
English as a whole, the evidence of dictionaries suggests that the number of words borrowed
from French and/or Latin outstrips the number of words surviving from Old English by quite
a margin. However, words surviving from Old English (as well as a few of the Scandinavian
borrowings, especially they) continue to top the high frequency lists (as indeed mostly
remains the case even in modern-day English).

The formulation ‘French and/or Latin’ is an important one in this period. Often we can tell
that a word has come from French rather than Latin very clearly because of differences of
word form: for instance, English peace is clearly a borrowing from Anglo-Norman and Old
French pais, not from Latin pac-, pāx. Some other pretty clear examples
are marble, mercy, prison, palfrey, to pay, poor, and rule. It is often much more difficult to be
certain that a Middle English word has come solely from Latin and not partly also from
French; this is because, in addition to the words it inherited from Latin (which typically
showed centuries of change in word form), French also borrowed extensively from Latin
(often re-borrowing words which already existed in a distinct form). Some typical examples
are animal, imagination, to inform, patient, perfection, profession, religion, remedy.

Given these factors, any figures for the relative proportions of French and Latin borrowings
in the Middle English period have to be hedged about with many provisos. However, the
broad picture is clear. In Middle English, borrowing from French is at least as frequent as
borrowing from Latin, and probably rather more frequent.

By 1500, over 40 per cent of all of the words that English has borrowed from French had
made a first appearance in the language, including a very high proportion of those French
words which have come to play a central part in the vocabulary of modern English. By
contrast, the greatest peak of borrowing from Latin was still to come, in the early modern
period; by 1500, under 20 per cent of the Latin borrowings found in modern English had yet
entered the language.

The greatest peak of first examples of French borrowings in English comes in the late
fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. This probably largely corresponds to the realities of
linguistic change, since we know that this is the period in which English was taking on many
technical functions from Latin and, especially, French, at least so far as written records were
concerned. However, this is precisely when our volume of surviving Middle English material
also goes up dramatically, and so we cannot always rule out the possibility that words existed
in English rather earlier. Certainly, some much earlier texts, such as the thirteenth-
century Ancrene Wisse, show considerable borrowing from French at an early date, and we
cannot always be certain that an absence of earlier attestations necessarily means that a word
did not exist in at least some varieties of English at an earlier date.

Borrowing from early Scandinavian

The long succession of Viking Age raids, settlements, conquests, and political take-overs that
played such a large part in Anglo-Saxon history from the late-eighth century onwards
resulted in many speakers of varieties of early Scandinavian being found in Britain. In
particular, there were areas of significant Scandinavian settlement in the east and north east
of England (chiefly of speakers of East Norse varieties) and in the north west of England
(chiefly of speakers of West Norse varieties), as well as in parts of Scotland. We speak of
‘early Scandinavian’ in this context because we are dealing with the antecedent stage of the
later Scandinavian languages, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, etc. (As regards the
divisions among the Scandinavian languages, Icelandic and Norwegian are both West Norse
languages, while Swedish and Danish are East Norse languages; however, very few of the
Scandinavian loanwords in English can be assigned with any confidence to specifically East
Norse or West Norse input.)

Gradually, over the course of generations, the use of early Scandinavian died out in England,
but not without leaving a significant impact on the vocabulary of English. When most
borrowings occurred is a matter of some uncertainty; Old English texts up to about the year
1100 are estimated to contain only about 100 Scandinavian loanwords, many of them in
isolated examples. Most of these words come from semantic areas in which there was
significant cultural influence from the Scandinavians, such as seafaring, warfare, social ranks,
law, or coins and measures. Many, many more Scandinavian borrowings are first recorded in
Middle English texts, but it is very possible (and indeed likely) that most of these first entered
some varieties of English in the Old English period. One major indicator of this is that very
early Middle English texts from areas of high Scandinavian settlement are full of
Scandinavian borrowings.

The long homiletic poem entitled the Ormulum is the work of an Augustinian canon called
Orm (a name of Scandinavian origin) who probably lived in south Lincolnshire; the dating is
controversial, but Orm may have started work on the text as early as the middle of the twelfth
century and continued well into old age. It contains well over a hundred words of either
certain or likely Scandinavian origin, including some which are of common occurrence in
modern English such as to anger, to bait, bloom, boon, booth, bull, to die, to flit, ill, law,
low, meek, to raise, root, to scare, skill, skin, to take, though, to thrive, wand, to want, wing,
wrong. Perhaps most interestingly of all, it contains some of the earliest evidence for one of
the most important Scandinavian borrowings, the pronoun they and the related object
form them and possessive their.

The example of they, them, and their is very instructive about the nature and extent of
Scandinavian influence on English. It is very rare for pronouns to be borrowed; the fact that
these forms were borrowed probably reflects both the very close contact between
Scandinavian and English speakers, and the close structural and lexical similarities between
the two languages. Because so many words, forms, and constructions were already either
identical or very similar, this made it much easier for even grammatical words to be
borrowed.

Something else illustrated by they, them, and their is the long process of internal spread, from
variety to variety, shown by many words of Scandinavian origin after they entered English.
Orm uses they invariably, but them and their vary in his text with the native
forms hem and her. In later northern or eastern texts them and their quite quickly become the
normal forms, but this takes much longer in other varieties: the most important early Chaucer
manuscripts, from London in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth centuries, have
typically they for the subject form but still hem and her for the object and possessive forms.

https://public.oed.com/blog/middle-english-an-overview/

Modern English Period

Early Modern English Period

Modern English is the form of the English language spoken since the Great Vowel Shift in
England completed in roughly 1550. The English language was shaped by regularized
spelling and grammatical forms. English is the mother tongue of some 400 million people,
nearly two- thirds in North America. During the period of Modern English the language
became systemized. Its pronunciation and vocabulary was structured.
Great Vowel Shift

A major factor separating Middle English from Modern English is known as the Great Vowel
Shift, a radical change in pronunciation during the 15th, 16th and 17th Century, as a result of
which long vowel sounds began to be made higher and further forward in the mouth (short
vowel sounds were largely unchanged). In fact, the shift probably started very gradually some
centuries before 1400, and continued long after 1700 (some subtle changes arguably continue
even to this day). Many languages have undergone vowel shifts, but the major changes of the
English vowel shift occurred within the relatively short space of a century or two, quite a
sudden and dramatic shift in linguistic terms. It was largely during this short period of time
that English lost the purer vowel sounds of most European languages, as well as the phonetic
pairing between long and short vowel sounds. The causes of the shift are still highly debated,
although an important factor may have been the very fact of the large intake of loanwords
from the Romance languages of Europe during this time, which required a different kind of
pronunciation. It was, however, a peculiarly English phenomenon, and contemporary and
neighbouring languages like French, German and Spanish were entirely unaffected. It
affected words of both native ancestry as well as borrowings from French and Latin.

The English Renaissance

The next wave of innovation in English vocabulary came with the revival of classical
scholarship known as the Renaissance. The English Renaissance roughly covers the 16th and
early 17th Century (the European Renaissance had begun in Italy as early as the 14th
Century), and is often referred to as the “Elizabethan Era” or the “Age of Shakespeare” after
the most important monarch and most famous writer of the period. The additions to English
vocabulary during this period were deliberate borrowings, and not the result of any invasion
or influx of new nationalities or any top-down decrees.
Latin (and to a lesser extent Greek and French) was still very much considered the language
of education and scholarship at this time, and the great enthusiasm for the classical languages
during the English Renaissance brought thousands of new words into the language, peaking
around 1600. A huge number of classical works were being translated into English during the
16th Century, and many new terms were introduced where a satisfactory English equivalent
did not exist.

Words from Latin or Greek (often via Latin) were imported wholesale during this period,
either intact
(e.g. genius, species, militia, radius, specimen, criterion, squalor, apparatus, focus, tedium, le
ns, antenna, paralysis, nausea, etc) or, more commonly, slightly altered
(e.g. horrid, pathetic, iilicit, pungent, frugal, anonymous, dislocate, explain, excavate, medita
te, adapt, enthusiasm, absurdity, area, complex, concept, invention, technique, temperature, c
apsule, premium, system, expensive, notorious, gradual, habitual, insane, ultimate, agile, ficti
tious, physician, anatomy, skeleton, orbit, atmosphere, catastrophe, parasite, manuscript, lexi
con, comedy, tragedy, anthology, fact, biography, mythology, sarcasm, paradox, chaos, crisis
, climax, etc). A whole category of words ending with the Greek-based suffixes “-ize” and “-
ism” were also introduced around this time.

Sometimes, Latin-based adjectives were introduced to plug "lexical gaps" where no adjective
was available for an existing Germanic noun (e.g. marine for sea, pedestrian for walk), or
where an existing adjective had acquired unfortunate connotations
(e.g. equine or equestrian for horsey, aquatic for watery), or merely as an additional synonym
(e.g. masculine and feminine in addition to manly and womanly, paternal in addition
to fatherly, etc). Several rather ostentatious French phrases also became naturalized in
English at this juncture, including soi-disant, vis-à-vis, sang-froid, etc, as well as more
mundane French borrowings such as crêpe, étiquette, etc.

Printing Press

The final major factor in the development of Modern English was the advent of the printing
press, one of the world’s great technological innovations, introduced into England by William
Caxton in 1476 (Johann Gutenberg had originally invented the printing press in Germany
around 1450). The first book printed in the English language was Caxton's own
translation, “The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye”, actually printed in Bruges in 1473 or
early 1474. Up to 20,000 books were printed in the following 150 years, ranging from mythic
tales and popular stories to poems, phrasebooks, devotional pieces and grammars, and Caxton
himself became quite rich from his printing business (among his best sellers were
Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” and Thomas Malory’s “Tales of King Arthur”). As mass-
produced books became cheaper and more commonly available, literacy mushroomed, and
soon works in English became even more popular than books in Latin.

The Chancery of Westminster made some efforts from the 1430s onwards to set standard
spellings for official documents, specifying I instead of ich and various other common
variants of the first person pronoun, land instead of lond, and modern spellings
of such, right, not, but, these, any, many, can, cannot, but, shall, should, could, ought, thorou
gh, etc, all of which previously appeared in many variants. Chancery Standard contributed
significantly to the development of a Standard English, and the political, commercial and
cultural dominance of the "East Midlands triangle" (London-Oxford-Cambridge) was well
established long before the 15th Century, but it was the printing press that was really
responsible for carrying through the standardization process. With the advent of mass
printing, the dialect and spelling of the East Midlands (and, more specifically, that of the
national capital, London, where most publishing houses were located) became the de facto
standard and, over time, spelling and grammar gradually became more and more fixed.

Dictionaries and Grammarians

The first dictionary considered anything like reliable was Samuel Johnson’s “Dictionary of
the English Language”, published in 1755, over 150 years after Cawdrey’s. An impressive
academic achievement in its own right, Johnson’s 43,000 word dictionary remained the pre-
eminent English dictionary until the much more comprehensive “Oxford English
Dictionary” 150 more years later, although it was actually riddled with inconsistencies in
both spelling and definitions. Johnson’s dictionary included many flagrant examples of
inkhorn terms which have not survived,
including digladation, cubiculary, incompossibility, clancular, denominable, opiniatry, ariola
tion, assation, ataraxy, deuteroscopy, disubitary, esurine, estuation, indignate and others.
Johnson also deliberately omitted from his dictionary several words he disliked or considered
vulgar (including bang, budge, fuss, gambler, shabby and touchy), but these useful words
have clearly survived intact regardless of his opinions. Several of his definitions appear
deliberately jokey or politically motivated.

Modern English Grammar:

Modern English nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and verbs are inflected. Adverbs,
prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections are invariable.

Most English nouns have plural inflection in (-e)s, but that form shows variations in
pronunciation in the words cats (with a final s sound), dogs (with a final z sound),
and horses (with a final iz sound), as also in the 3rd person singular present-tense forms of
verbs: cuts (s), jogs (z), and forces (iz). Seven nouns have mutated (umlauted) plurals: man,
men; woman, women; tooth, teeth; foot, feet; goose, geese; mouse, mice; louse, lice. Three
have plurals in -en: ox, oxen; child, children; brother, brethren. Some remain unchanged
(e.g., deer, sheep, moose, grouse). Five of the seven personal pronouns have distinctive forms
for subject and object (e.g., he/him, she/her). Adjectives have distinctive endings for
comparison (e.g., comparative bigger, superlative biggest), with several irregular forms
(e.g., good, better, best).

The forms of verbs are not complex. Only the substantive verb (to be) has eight forms: be,
am, is, are, was, were, being, been. Strong verbs have five forms: ride, rides, rode, riding,
ridden. Regular or weak verbs customarily have four: walk, walks, walked, walking. Some
that end in t or d have three forms only: cut, cuts, cutting.
In addition to the above inflections, English employs two other main morphological
(structural) processes—affixation and composition—and two subsidiary ones—back-
formation and blend.

Back-formations and blends are widespread. Back-formation is the reverse of affixation,

being the analogical creation of a new word from an existing word falsely assumed to be its
derivative. For example, the verb to edit has been formed from the noun editor on the
reverse analogy of the noun actor from to act, and similarly the verbs automate, bulldoze,
commute, escalate, liaise, loaf, sightsee, and televise are backformed from the
nouns automation, bulldozer, commuter, escalation, liaison, loafer, sightseer, and television.
From the single noun procession are backformed two verbs with different stresses and
meanings: procéss, “to walk in procession,” and prócess, “to subject food (and other
material) to a special operation.”

Blends fall into two groups: (1) coalescences, such as bash from bang and smash; and (2)
telescoped forms, called portmanteau words, such as motorcade from motor cavalcade. In the
first group are the words clash, from clack and crash, and geep, offspring of goat and sheep.
To the second group belong dormobiles, or dormitory automobiles, and slurbs, or slum
suburbs. A travel monologue becomes a travelogue and a telegram sent by cable
a cablegram. Aviation electronics becomes avionics; biology electronics, bionics; and nuclear
electronics, nucleonics. In cablese a question mark is a quark; in computerese a binary unit is
a bit. In astrophysics a quasistellar source of radio energy becomes a quasar, and a pulsating
star becomes a pulsar.

Simple shortenings, such as ad for advertisement, that some time ago might have been
sneered at by some are now in common use. They are listed in dictionaries side by side with
their full forms. Among such abbreviations are exam, gym, lab, lib, op, spec, sub, tech,
veg, and vet. Compound shortenings, after the pattern of Russian agitprop for agitatsiya
propaganda, are also used. Initial syllables are joined as in the words linocut (linoleum cut)
and FORTRAN (formula translation); these shortenings are not uncommon in, and often
become, the names of corporations and other organizations (FedEx [Federal Express], Intelsat
[International Telecommunications Satellite Organization]).

https://www.thehistoryofenglish.com/history_early_modern.html

Late Modern English Period

The Industrial and Scientific Revolution

The dates may be rather arbitrary, but the main distinction between Early Modern and Late
Modern English (or just Modern English as it is sometimes referred to) lies in its vocabulary -
pronunciation, grammar and spelling remained largely unchanged. Late Modern English
accumulated many more words as a result of two main historical factors: the Industrial
Revolution, which necessitated new words for things and ideas that had not previously
existed; and the rise of the British Empire, during which time English adopted many foreign
words and made them its own. No single one of the socio-cultural developments of the 19th
Century could have established English as a world language, but together they did just that.

Most of the innovations of the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th Century
were of British origin, including the harnessing of steam to drive heavy machinery, the
development of new materials, techniques and equipment in a range of manufacturing
industries, and the emergence of new means of transportation (e.g. steamships, railways). At
least half of the influential scientific and technological output between 1750 and 1900 was
written in English. Another English speaking country, the USA, continued the English
language dominance of new technology and innovation with inventions like electricity, the
telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the sewing machine, the computer, etc.

New ideas, new concepts and new words were introduced in the early science fiction and
speculative fiction novels of Mary Shelley, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Lewis Carroll began
to experiment with invented words (particularly blended or "portmanteau" words) in poems
like “Jabberwocky” (1872). Chortle and galumph are two words from the poem that made
the jump to everyday English, but the work is jam-packed with nonsense words as may be
seen from its first few lines: “Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the
wabe: / All mimsy were the borogoves, / And the mome raths outgrabe”).

The 20th Century was, among other things, a century of world wars, technological
transformation, and globalization, and each has provided a source of new additions to the
lexicon. For example, words like blockbuster, nose-dive, shell-
shocked, camouflage, radar , barrage, boondocks, roadblock, snafu, boffin, brainwashing, sp
earhead, etc, are all military terms which have made their way into standard English during
the World Wars. As an interesting aside, in 1941, when Sir Winston Churchill wanted to
plumb the depths of the English soul at a particularly crucial and difficult time in the Second
World War, almost all of the words in the main part of his famous speech ("we shall fight on
the beaches... we shall never surrender") were of Anglo-Saxon origin, with the significant
exception of surrender (a French loanword). The speech is also a good example of what was
considered Received Pronunciation at the time.

The explosion in electronic and computer terminology in the latter part of the 20th Century
(e.g. byte, cyberspace, software, hacker, laptop, hard-drive, database, online, hi-
tech, microchip, etc) was just one element driving the dramatic increase in new English
terms, particularly due to the dominance of the USA in the development of computer
technology, from IBM to Apple to Microsoft. Parallel to this, science fiction literature has
contributed it own vocabulary to the common word-stock, including terms such
as robotics, hyperspace, warp-speed, cyberpunk, droid, nanotech, nanobot, etc.

The language continues to change and develop and to grow apace, expanding to incorporate
new jargons, slangs, technologies, toys, foods and gadgets. In the current digital age, English
is going though a new linguistic peak in terms of word acquisition, as it peaked before during
Shakespeare’s time, and then again during the Industrial Revolution, and at the height of the
British Empire. According to one recent estimate, it is expanding by over 8,500 words a year
(other estimates are significantly higher), compared to an estimated annual increase of around
1,000 words at the beginning of the 20th Century, and has almost doubled in size in the last
century.

Neologisms are being added all the time, including recent inclusions such
as fashionista, metrosexual, McJob, McMansion, wussy, bling, nerd, pear-
shaped, unplugged, fracking, truthiness, locavore, parkour, sexting, crowdsourcing, regift, m
eme, selfie, earworm, meh, diss, suss, emo, twerk, schmeat, chav, ladette, punked, vaping, etc,
etc.

In recent years, there has been an increasing trend towards using an existing words as a
different part of speech, especially the “verbification” of nouns (e.g. the word verbify is itself
a prime example; others include to thumb, to parrot, to email, to text, to google, to medal,
to critique, to leverage, to sequence, to interface, to tase, to speechify, to incentivize, etc),
although some modern-sounding verbs have surprisingly been in the language for centuries
(e.g. to author, to impact, to message, to parent, to channel, to monetize, to mentor, etc).
"Nounification" also occurs, particularly in business contexts (e.g. an ask, a build, a solve,
a fail, etc).

Compound or Portmanteau words are an increasingly common source of new vocabulary

(e.g. stagflation, edutainment, flexitarian, Disneyfication, frenemy, confuzzle, gastropub, bro
mance, hacktivist, chillax, infomercial, shareware, dramedy, gaydar, wellderly, techlash,
etc).

The meanings of words also continue to change, part of a process that has been going on
almost as long as the language itself. For instance, to the disgust of many, alternate is now
almost universally accepted in North America as a replacement
for alternative; momentarily has come to mean "very soon" and not (or as well as) "for a very
short period of time"; and the use of the modifier literally to mean its exact opposite has
recently found it way into the Oxford English Dictionary (where one of its meanings is
shown as "used for emphasis rather than being actually true"). In some walks of
life, bad, sick, dope and wicked are all now different varieties of good.

Module III

Old English Literature

Beowulf is the oldest surviving Germanic epic and the longest Old English poem; it was
likely composed between 700 and 750. Other great works of Old English poetry include The
Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Battle of Maldon, and The Dream of the Rood. This poetry
is alliterative; one of its features is the kenning, a metaphorical phrase used in place of a
common noun (e.g., “swan road” for “sea”). Two known poets from this period are Caedmon,
considered the first Old English Christian poet, and Cynewulf. Old English poetry has
survived almost entirely in four manuscripts: the Exeter Book, the Junius Manuscript,
the Vercelli Book, and the Beowulf manuscript.
Old English prose works include legal writings, medical tracts, religious texts, and
translations from Latin and other languages. Particularly notable is the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle, a historical record begun about the time of King Alfred’s reign (871–899) and
continuing for more than three centuries.

Middle English Literature

The 13th century saw a rise in the popularity of long didactic poems presenting biblical
narrative, saints’ lives, or moral instruction for those untutored in Latin or French. The
most idiosyncratic of these is the Ormulum by Orm, an Augustinian canon in the north
of England. The lyric was virtually unknown to Old English poets. Poems such as “Deor” and
“Wulf and Eadwacer,” which have been called lyrics, are thematically different from those
that began to circulate orally in the 12th century and to be written down in great numbers in
the 13th; these Old English poems also have a stronger narrative component than the later
productions.

One of the most important factors in the nature and development of

English literature between about 1350 and 1550 was the peculiar linguistic situation
in England at the beginning of the period. Among the small minority of the population that
could be regarded as literate, bilingualism and even trilingualism were common. Insofar as it
was considered a serious literary medium at all, English was obliged to compete on uneven
terms with Latin and with the Anglo-Norman dialect of French widely used in England at the
time.

Chaucer and Gower

Geoffrey Chaucer, a Londoner of bourgeois origins, was at various times a courtier, a

diplomat, and a civil servant. His poetry frequently (but not always unironically) reflects the
views and values associated with the term courtly. It is in some ways not easy to account for
his decision to write in English, and it is not surprising that his earliest substantial poems,
the Book of the Duchess (c. 1370) and the House of Fame (1370s), were heavily indebted to
the fashionable French courtly love poetry of the time. Also of French origin was the
octosyllabic couplet used in these poems. Chaucer’s abandonment of this engaging but
ultimately jejune metre in favour of a 10-syllable line (specifically, iambic pentameter) was a
portentous moment for English poetry. His mastery of it was first revealed in stanzaic form,
notably the seven-line stanza (rhyme royal) of the Parliament of Fowls (c. 1382) and Troilus
and Criseyde (c. 1385), and later was extended in the decasyllabic couplets of the prologue to
the Legend of Good Women (1380s) and large parts of The Canterbury Tales (c. 1387–1400).

Though Chaucer wrote a number of moral and amatory lyrics, which were imitated by his
15th-century followers, his major achievements were in the field of narrative poetry. The
early influence of French courtly love poetry (notably the Roman de la Rose, which he
translated) gave way to an interest in Italian literature. Chaucer was acquainted with Dante’s
writings and took a story from Petrarch for the substance of “The Clerk’s Tale.” Two of his
major poems, Troilus and Criseyde and “The Knight’s Tale,” were based, respectively, on
the Filostrato and the Teseida of Boccaccio. The Troilus, Chaucer’s single most ambitious
poem, is a moving story of love gained and betrayed set against the background of the Trojan
War. As well as being a poem of profound human sympathy and insight, it also has a marked
philosophical dimension derived from Chaucer’s reading of Boethius’s De consolatione
philosophiae, a work that he also translated in prose. His consummate skill in narrative art,
however, was most fully displayed in The Canterbury Tales, an unfinished series of stories
purporting to be told by a group of pilgrims journeying from London to the shrine of St.
Thomas Becket and back. The illusion that the individual pilgrims (rather than Chaucer
himself) tell their tales gave him an unprecedented freedom of authorial stance, which
enabled him to explore the rich fictive potentialities of a number of genres: pious legend (in
“The Man of Law’s Tale” and “The Prioress’s Tale”), fabliau (“The Shipman’s Tale,” “The
Miller’s Tale,” and “The Reeve’s Tale”), chivalric romance (“The Knight’s Tale”), popular
romance (parodied in Chaucer’s “own” “Tale of Sir Thopas”), beast fable (“The Nun’s
Priest’s Tale” and “The Manciple’s Tale”), and more—what the poet John Dryden later
summed up as “God’s plenty.”

Elizabethan Period:

The background of the Elizabethan socio-political life includes two great movements—”The
Reformation” and “the Renaissance”. It began during the reign of Henry VIII, the father of
Queen Elizabeth I and the king of England. His reign ended in 1647. In fact, the entire period
was a period of religious movement in the English religio-political life. The national focus
was on the liberation of the Church of England from the authority of the Roman church. This
liberation movement is known as the Reformation. This is also known as the Protestant
Revolution because it could establish the Reformation Church or Protestant Church, making a
complete break with Roman Church. This movement was greatly influenced by a German
leader—Martin Luther and spread all over Europe, leading to the establishment of Protestant
Church.

The Renaissance (1500–1660)

Recently, critics and literary historians have begun to call this the “Early Modern” period, but
here we retain the historically familiar term “Renaissance.” This period is often subdivided
into four parts, including the Elizabethan Age (1558–1603), the Jacobean Age (1603–1625),
the Caroline Age (1625–1649), and the Commonwealth Period (1649–1660).

The Elizabethan Age was the golden age of English drama. Some of its noteworthy figures
include Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, Edmund Spenser, Sir Walter Raleigh, and, of
course, William Shakespeare. The Jacobean Age is named for the reign of James I. It includes
the works of John Donne, Shakespeare, Michael Drayton, John Webster, Elizabeth Cary, Ben
Jonson, and Lady Mary Wroth. The King James translation of the Bible also appeared during
the Jacobean Age. The Caroline Age covers the reign of Charles I (“Carolus”). John Milton,
Robert Burton, and George Herbert are some of the notable figures.

Finally, the Commonwealth Age was so named for the period between the end of the English
Civil War and the restoration of the Stuart monarchy. This is the time when Oliver Cromwell,
a Puritan, led Parliament, who ruled the nation. At this time, public theaters were closed (for
nearly two decades) to prevent public assembly and to combat moral and religious
transgressions. John Milton and Thomas Hobbes’ political writings appeared and, while
drama suffered, prose writers such as Thomas Fuller, Abraham Cowley, and Andrew Marvell
published prolifically.

The Elizabethan Era, which is generally considered one of the golden ages in
English literature,was a great boom in literature, particularly in the area of the tragedy.
William Shakespeare emerged from this period as a poet and playwright never seen before.
Other important playwrights of the era of Elizabeth include Christopher Marlowe, Thomas
Dekker, John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont. Sir Philip Sidney (1554 –1586) was an English
poet, who is also remembered as one of the most prominent figures of the Elizabethan Age.
These great people are recognized as the most Famous Playwrights and Authors of
Elizabethan period. It was at this time that the city comedy genre developed.

Theatre and poetry were the dominant forms of literature during this period. Drama was at its
heyday during the Elizabethan era, and English people developed a sense of appreciation to
plays performance, and very quickly that the habit of attending the theater halls rooted in the
English culture. During Elizabethan England, the theater was the haven of all walks of life,
with rich and poor alike enjoying afternoon shows. Conventionally, the poorest spectators got
to stand closest to the stage while the rich sat in elevated seats farther back.

Originated from the Italian word sonetto, meaning “little song,” Sonnet, a 14 line lyric poem,
was also one of the poetic elements that gained a deep interest in this period. Having
composed 145 sonnets, William Shakespeare was widely regarded as one of the best-known
“sonneteers,” a name usually attributed to the writers of sonnets. The Shakespearean sonnets
are rich and revolve around various themes such as the passage of time, love, beauty and
mortality.

Shakespeare
Shakespeare had influence on the Modern English language more than any one body of
writing. He had one of the largest vocabularies of any English Writer. Prior to and during
Shakespeare's time, the grammar and rules of English were not standardized. However, once
Shakespeare's plays became popular in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century, they
helped contribute to the standardization of the English language. The Shakespearean words
and phrases becoming embedded in the English language.
A. Shakespeare expressed new ideals and distinctions by inventing borrowing on adopting a
word or a phrase from other languages.
B. Shakespeare worked on projects such as Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English
Language which quoted Shakespeare more than any other writer.
C. "With spoken English you need fluency and confidence, and how can you get fluency and
confidence? Why not do drama in schools and why not do the best drama, which is
Shakespeare (South China Morning Post, 2008).
He had a vast vocabulary (34,000 words by some counts) and he personally coined an
estimated 2,000 neologisms or new words in his many works, including, but by no means
limitedto, barefaced, leapfrog, monumental, castigate, majestic, obscene, frugal, aerial, gnarl
ed, homicide, brittle, radiance, dwindle, puking, countless, submerged, vast, lack-
lustre, bump, cranny, fitful, premeditated, assassination, courtship, eyeballs, ill-tuned, hot-
blooded, laughable, dislocate, accommodation, eventful, pell-mell,
aggravate, excellent, fretful, fragrant, gust, hint, hurry, lonely, summit, pedant, gloomy, and
hundreds of other terms still commonly used today. By some counts, almost one in ten of the
words used by Shakespeare were his own invention, a truly remarkable achievement (it is the
equivalent of a new word here and then, after just a few short phrases, another other new
word here). However, not all of these were necessarily personally invented by Shakespeare
himself: they merely appear for the first time in his published works, and he was more than
happy to make use of other people’s neologisms and local dialect words, and to mine the
latest fashions and fads for new ideas.
He also introduced countless phrases in common use today, such as one fell swoop, vanish
into thin air, brave new world, in my mind’s eye, laughing stock, love is blind, star-crossed
lovers, as luck would have it, fast and loose, once more into the breach, sea change, there’s
the rub, to the manner born, a foregone conclusion, beggars all description, it's Greek to
me, a tower of strength, make a virtue of necessity, brevity is the soul of wit, with bated
breath, more in sorrow than in anger, truth will out, cold comfort, cruel only to be
kind, fool’s paradise and flesh and blood, among many others.
University Wits
University Wits were a group of young dramatists who wrote and performed in London
towards the end of the 16th century. They are called University Wits because they were the
witty students of Cambridge or Oxford. They were all more or less acquainted with each
other and most of them led irregular and uncertain life. Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd,
Thomas Lodge, Thomas Nash, Robert Greene, George Peele and John Lyly were the
members of this group. Their plays had some common characteristics.

University Wits had a fondness of introducing heroic themes in their dramas. They often took
it from the lives of great figures. They gave heroic treatment to the heroic themes. Their
dramas usually had variety, splendid description and violent incidents. Their chief aim was to
achieve strong and sounding lines. The best example was Marlowe, who is famous for his use
of blank-verse. Again, the themes, used in their dramas, were usually tragic in nature. There
was lack of real humor in their dramas. The only exception was Lyly. His “The Woman in
the Moon” is the first example of romantic comedy.

Christopher Marlowe: Christopher Marlowe was perhaps the greatest among the University
Wits. He was the only dramatist who was compared to Shakespeare even though he lacked
the warm humanity of Shakespearean plays. All his plays were poetic and artistic. “The Jew
of Malta” and “Dr. Faustus” are two of his best works. These two plays clearly show
Marlowe’s love for conventional Machiavellian hero.

Thomas Kyd: Thomas Kyd is another important dramatist of the University Wits. He
introduced the tradition of revenge play. We can easily find the influence of Kyd in the works
of Shakespeare. “The Spanish Tragedy” is the best work of Thomas Kyd. This play had some
outstanding features. The plot is horrific. There are murders, madness and death, but it earned
a huge popularity for the play.
Thomas Lodge: Thomas Lodge was a lawyer by profession but he gave up his career and
took literature as career. He wrote only few dramas. “Rosalynde” is the most famous of his
romantic comedies. It is said that Shakespeare took the plot of his “As You Like It” from
Lodge’s “Rosalynde”.

Thomas Nash: Thomas Nash was a professional journalist. He got involved in politics as
well. His works had satiric tone. “Unfortunate Traveller” is his best work, which had much
influence as far as the development of English novel is concerned.

Robert Greene: Robert Greene’s plays had a great contribution in the development of English
drama. Although his art of characterization was weak and his style was not outstanding, his
humor was highly interesting. His method was not very strict like the other tragedians of that
time. He was witty, humorous and imaginative.

Restoration Period:
Restoration literature, English literature written after the Restoration of the monarchy in
1660 following the period of the Commonwealth. Some literary historians speak of the period
as bounded by the reign of Charles II (1660–85), while others prefer to include within its
scope the writings produced during the reign of James II (1685–88), and even literature of the
1690s is often spoken of as “Restoration.” By that time, however, the reign of William
III and Mary II(1689–1702) had begun, and the ethos of courtly and urban fashion was as a
result sober, Protestant, and even pious, in contrast to the sexually and intellectually libertine
spirit of court life under Charles II. Many typical literary forms of the modern
world—including the novel, biography, history, travel writing, and journalism—gained
confidence during the Restoration period, when new scientific discoveries and philosophical
concepts as well as new social and economic conditions came into play. There was a great
outpouring of pamphlet literature, too, much of it politico-religious, while John
Bunyan’s great allegory, Pilgrim’s Progress, also belongs to this period. Much of the best
poetry, notably that of John Dryden (the great literary figure of his time, in both poetry and
prose), the earl of Rochester, Samuel Butler, and John Oldham, was satirical and led directly
to the later achievements of Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and John Gay in the Augustan
Age. The Restoration period was, above all, a great age of drama. Heroic plays, influenced by
principles of French Neoclassicism, enjoyed a vogue, but the age is chiefly remembered for
its glittering, critical comedies of manners by such playwrights as George Etherege, William
Wycherley, Sir John Vanbrugh, and William Congreve. (For further discussion of this
period, see English literature: The Restoration.)

Restoration comedies are English plays written and performed between 1660 and 1710, the
"Restoration" period. Also known as "comedy of manners" plays, these works are known for
their risqué, explicit depictions of extramarital affairs. Restoration followed a nearly two-
decade ban on stage performances by Puritans, which may explain why the plays of the
period were so bawdy. The Restoration gave rise to the first female playwright of the English
stage, Aphra Behn. It also marked the first instances of actresses appearing on stage in female
(and sometimes male) roles. William Wycherley, George Etherege, William Congreve,
George Farquhar, and Aphra Behncreated bawdy works of Restoration comedy with The
Country Wife, The Man of Mode, The Way of the World, and The Rover
Metaphysical Poetry:

Metaphysical poet, any of the poets in 17th-century England who inclined to the personal
and intellectual complexity and concentration that is displayed in the poetry of John Donne,
the chief of the Metaphysicals. Others include Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, John
Cleveland, and Abraham Cowley as well as, to a lesser extent, George Herbert and Richard
Crashaw.
Their work is a blend of emotion and intellectual ingenuity, characterized by conceit or
“wit”—that is, by the sometimes violent yoking together of apparently unconnected ideas and
things so that the reader is startled out of his complacency and forced to think through the
argument of the poem. Metaphysical poetry is less concerned with expressing feeling than
with analyzing it, with the poet exploring the recesses of his consciousness. The boldness of
the literary devices used—especially obliquity, irony, and paradox—are often reinforced by a
dramatic directness of language and by rhythms derived from that of living speech.
At the end of the century, John Dryden censured Donne for affecting “the metaphysics” and
for perplexing “the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy when he should
engage their hearts . . . with the softnesses of love.” Samuel Johnson, in referring to the
learning that their poetry displays, also dubbed them “the metaphysical poets,” and the term
has continued in use ever since. Eliot’s adoption of the label as a term of praise is arguably a
better guide to his personal aspirations about his own poetry than to the Metaphysical poets
themselves; his use of metaphysical underestimates these poets’ debt to lyrical and socially
engaged verse. Nonetheless, the term is useful for identifying the often-intellectual character
of their writing.
https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2012/12/71311/the-concise-history-of-english-
literature-the-elizabethan-period/

https://www.britannica.com/art/Metaphysical-poets
https://www.thoughtco.com/top-restoration-comedy-plays-741213

The Neoclassical Period (1600–1785)

The Neoclassical period is also subdivided into ages, including The Restoration (1660–1700),
The Augustan Age (1700–1745), and The Age of Sensibility (1745–1785). The Restoration
period sees some response to the puritanical age, especially in the theater. Restoration
comedies (comedies of manner) developed during this time under the talent of playwrights
such as William Congreve and John Dryden. Satire, too, became quite popular, as evidenced
by the success of Samuel Butler. Other notable writers of the age include Aphra Behn, John
Bunyan, and John Locke.
The Augustan Age was the time of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, who imitated those
first Augustans and even drew parallels between themselves and the first set. Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu, a poet, was prolific at this time and noted for challenging stereotypically
female roles. Daniel Defoe was also popular.
The Age of Sensibility (sometimes referred to as the Age of Johnson) was the time of
Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon, Hester Lynch Thrale, James Boswell, and, of course,
Samuel Johnson. Ideas such as neoclassicism, a critical and literary mode, and the
Enlightenment, a particular worldview shared by many intellectuals, were championed during
this age. Novelists to explore include Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett,
and Laurence Sterne, as well as the poets William Cowper and Thomas Percy.
The 18th century is known as The Age of Enlightenment or The Age of reason, to stress the
rational trend of the period and the attitude according to which reason and judgement should
be the guiding principles for human activities. It saw the birth of a new literary
movement: Neoclassicism or Rationalism. This movement was greatly influenced by the
ideas of John Locke and Isaac Newton. The importance of Newton is clearly seen in the
epitaph written by Alexander Pope: “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said,’
Let Newton be! ‘And all was light”. In his Principia Matematica the scientist showed that the
universe was governed by mechanical principles and exact laws rather than by divine ones as
it was believed before. He left little place for God and we may say that he destroyed the
traditional religious view of the world making God subject to the laws of science. Newton
was elected President of the Royal Society, an association of learned man who wanted to
promote scientific studies and to try new methods of experiment. Thanks to the research, new
discoveries that religion seemed unable to explain, were made and Science became the new
authority. It was believed that science and reason would have improved man’s condition
turning him into a social being who would conform to the rules of civilised life. Reason ,
the most important man’s ability, enabled him not only to think but also to act correctly. Man,
the only living creature to have it, became important for his power of observation more than
for his power of feelings. Reason became the criterion of everything: what could be justified
by reason was right and what could not be justified or proved by reason was false and
rejected.

The Augustan Age:

The importance of reason was also influential in the literature of the time and English literary
standards were reformed. The artistic creation, like science, had to follow exact rules and
was to be based on reason. The writers modelled much of their works on Classical
writers and referred to ancient Greece and Rome using subjects from classical mythology
and history. All that brought to the birth of a new movement known as Neoclassicism. The
reform was helped by the French writer Nicolas Boileau , who published a book, Art
Poetique , which provided the key idea of neoclassicism: in good art inspiration must be
controlled by judgement. He listed the rules of good writing: writing should be clear,
balanced, ordered, elegant and eloquent. Neoclassicism provided the basis for the Augustan
school of writing which dominated the 18th century literature.
s far as poetry, we have to say that Augustan poetry was of secondary importance and
continued the restoration trend for satire and mock-heroic poems written in heroic
couplet in which a trivial subject was treated with the seriousness of epic for comic effect.
The most important representative was Alexander Pope and his finest work was The Rape of
the Lock, telling about a quarrel between two aristocrat families because of a trivial incident:
Lord Petre had cut a lock of hair of Miss Arabella Fermor and that action was considered as
an insult. Pope wrote it to ridicule the narcissistic attitude of the aristocracy.In the second half
of the century new trends started to emerge and the heroic couplet lost its dominant position.

Coffee houses

Politicians are gregarious by nature, and the increased activity in politics lead to a great
addition to the number of political clubs and coffee-houses, which became the center of
fashionable and public life. These coffee-houses were entirely dominated by the party. People
gathered there to show their ‘wit’, discuss the news of the day, and forecast the fall of one,
and the rise another. Swift once declared that this party spirit infected even the cats and dogs.
It was natural that it should infect literate also. “Books were seldom judged”, says John
Dennis, “On their merits, the praise or blame being generally awarded according to the
political principles of their authors.” An impartial literary journal did not exist in the Age.
These coffee houses gave rise to purely literary associate such as the famous Scribblers and
Kit-cat clubs. They were be popular haunts of fashionable writers, and they figure so
prominently in the writings of the period. As the press was frequently used to hurl abuses at
personal or political adversaries, the rise of satire was the natural result.

Module IV

The Romantic Period (1785–1832)

The beginning date for the Romantic period is often debated. Some claim it is 1785,
immediately following the Age of Sensibility. Others say it began in 1789 with the start of
the French Revolution, and still, others believe that 1798, the publication year for William
Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s book "Lyrical Ballads," is its true beginning.
The time period ends with the passage of the Reform Bill (which signaled the Victorian Era)
and with the death of Sir Walter Scott. American literature has its own Romantic period, but
typically when one speaks of Romanticism, one is referring to this great and diverse age of
British literature, perhaps the most popular and well-known of all literary ages. This era
includes the works of such juggernauts as Wordsworth, Coleridge, William Blake, Lord
Byron, John Keats, Charles Lamb, Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas De
Quincey, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley. There is also a minor period, also quite popular
(between 1786–1800), called the Gothic era.

Writers of note for this period include Matthew Lewis, Anne Radcliffe, and William
Beckford.

Romanticism

The beginning of the British Romantic Movement is generally considered to have been
marked by the collection of poems titled Lyrical Ballads, first published in 1798, most of the
poems of this first edition belonged to William Wordsworth, while only four were
contributed by Samuel T. Coleridge, among which, one of his best known works: The Rime of
the Ancient Mariner.

A second edition was published in 1800 with the famous Preface written by W. Wordsworth
in which the poet outlines his poetic standpoints about Romanticism and that can be
accounted for as the Manifesto of English Romanticism. In 1802 yet another edition came
out with an appendix written by Wordsworth, Poetic Diction, to provide further insight
regarding the main features and the radical changes that both these poets brought forth in the
development of this new poetic theory. The Romantics renounced the rationalism and order
associated with the preceding Enlightenment era, stressing the importance of expressing
authentic personal feelings. They had a real sense of responsibility to their fellow men: they
felt it was their duty to use their poetry to inform and inspire others, and to change society.

Revolution

When reference is made to Romantic verse, the poets who generally spring to mind
are William Blake (1757-1827), William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Samuel Taylor
Coleridge (1772-1834), George Gordon, 6th Lord Byron (1788-1824), Percy Bysshe
Shelley (1792-1822) and John Keats (1795-1821). These writers had an intuitive feeling that
they were ‘chosen’ to guide others through the tempestuous period of change.

This was a time of physical confrontation; of violent rebellion in parts of Europe and the New
World. Conscious of anarchy across the English Channel, the British government feared
similar outbreaks. The early Romantic poets tended to be supporters of the French
Revolution, hoping that it would bring about political change; however, the bloody Reign of
Terror shocked them profoundly and affected their views. In his youth William Wordsworth
was drawn to the Republican cause in France, until he gradually became disenchanted with
the Revolutionaries.

The second-generation Romantics

Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge were first-generation Romantics, writing against a

backdrop of war. Wordsworth, however, became increasingly conservative in his outlook:
indeed, second-generation Romantics, such as Byron, Shelley and Keats, felt that he had
‘sold out’ to the Establishment. In the suppressed Dedication to Don Juan (1819-1824) Byron
criticised the Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, and the other ‘Lakers’, Wordsworth and
Coleridge (all three lived in the Lake District). Byron also vented his spleen on the English
Foreign Secretary, Viscount Castlereagh, denouncing him as an ‘intellectual eunuch’, a
‘bungler’ and a ‘tinkering slavemaker’ (stanzas 11 and 14). Although the Romantics stressed
the importance of the individual, they also advocated a commitment to mankind. Byron
became actively involved in the struggles for Italian nationalism and the liberation of Greece
from Ottoman rule.

https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/the-romantics

The Victorian Period (1832–1901)

VICTORIAN ENGLAND (1837–1901)

Queen Victoria ruled Britain for over 60 years. During this long reign, the country acquired
unprecedented power and wealth. Britain’s reach extended across the globe because of its
empire, political stability, and revolutionary developments in transport and communication.
Many of the intellectual and cultural achievements of this period are still with us today.

Industrial Revolution
The 1840s, which saw years of poor harvests, were known as the Hungry Forties. Most
catastrophic of all was the Irish Famine of 1845–9, during which well over a million people
died and some two million emigrated. Initially caused by potato blight, the famine was
exacerbated by the British government’s laissez-faire policy of economic non-interference.

It was particularly shocking that this could occur in a land governed by Britain, supposedly
the most progressive and prosperous nation in the world.

At the same time the pace of change, already fast, was quickening thanks to a revolutionary
expansion in communications. The growth, from the 1840s onwards, of railway and
steamship networks – combined with the invention of the electric telegraph – underpinned
Britain’s economic success.

In 1851 the Great Exhibition was held in London. The next two decades and beyond saw a
tremendous economic upswing. For the first time in history, population growth and economic
expansion went hand in hand.

This period is named for the reign of Queen Victoria, who ascended to the throne in
1837, and it lasts until her death in 1901. It was a time of great social, religious, intellectual,
and economic issues, heralded by the passage of the Reform Bill, which expanded voting
rights. The period has often been divided into “Early” (1832–1848), “Mid” (1848–1870) and
“Late” (1870–1901) periods or into two phases, that of the Pre-Raphaelites (1848–1860) and
that of Aestheticism and Decadence (1880–1901). This period is in strong contention with the
Romantic period for being the most popular, influential, and prolific period in all of English
(and world) literature. Poets of this time include Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
Christina Rossetti, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold, among others. Thomas
Carlyle, John Ruskin, and Walter Pater were advancing the essay form at this time. Finally,
prose fiction truly found its place under the auspices of Charles Dickens, Charlotte and Emily
Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Anthony Trollope, Thomas
Hardy, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Samuel Butler.

Women novelists:

In Victorian period, the view on women was around an image of women as both inferior and
superior to men. They did not have their legally rights , they could not vote and had to pay
workforce that appeared after the Revolution. Women forced to do their domestic sphere ,
they should clean, home, food and raise their children. The husband controlled all the
property. The rights and privileges of Victorian women were very limited for both, the single
and married. She faced many kinds of verbally and physically violence, and she did not have
the right to divorce. The educated class especially the writers appeared to stand against the
injustice law. Victorian culture exhibits in both literature and visual arts an accruing interest
in nineteenth-century women's periodicals has found expression over the last decade in
countless volumes of literary and historical scholarship. Many authors began to write about
the sufferings and endurances of women in Victorian Age. Their novels focused heavily on
traditional, typical Victorian female characters and their interactions.
Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) was particularly drawn, by experience as well as by
imagination, to the troubles of the unmarried and monetarily poor women. She dramatises
those cases in Jane Eyre (1847) and Villette (1853). Charlotte Brontë wrote under the
masculine pseudonym Currer Bell. She was received with great praise, and this is one of the
reasons that allowed her to write about the injustice on woman.

Emily was a poet as well as a novelist, and her only novel Wuthering Heights is a poem as
well as a- novel “There is no other book.” says Legouis, “which contains so many of the-
troubled, tumultuous, and rebellious elements of romanticism,” She-is fiercer than even
Charlotte but her fierceness is strangely accompanied by numerous strokes of intuitive
illumination.

With George Eliot we come to the most philosophical of all the major Victorian novelists,
both female and male. Philosophy is both her strength and weakness as a novelist. It keeps
her from falling into pathos or triviality, but at the same time gives her art an ultra serious and
reflective quality which makes it “heavy reading.” Her novels include The Mill on the Floss,
Romola, Middlemarch.

The Edwardian Period (1901–1914)

This period is named for King Edward VII and covers the period between Victoria’s death
and the outbreak of World War I. Although a short period (and a short reign for Edward VII),
the era includes incredible classic novelists such as Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford,
Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, and Henry James (who was born in America but who spent
most of his writing career in England), notable poets such as Alfred Noyes and William
Butler Yeats, as well as dramatists such as James Barrie, George Bernard Shaw, and John
Galsworthy.

The 20th century opened with great hope but also with some apprehension, for the new
century marked the final approach to a new millennium. Many writers of the Edwardian
period, drawing widely upon the realistic and naturalistic conventions of the 19th century
(upon Ibsen in drama and Balzac, Turgenev, Flaubert, Zola, Eliot, and Dickens in fiction) and
in tune with the anti-Aestheticism unleashed by the trial of the archetypal Aesthete, Oscar
Wilde, saw their task in the new century to be an unashamedly didactic one. George Bernard
Shaw turned the Edwardian theatre into an arena for debate upon the principal concerns of
the day: the question of political organization, the morality of armaments and war, the
function of class and of the professions, the validity of the family and of marriage, and the
issue of female emancipation.

The Georgian Period (1910–1936)

The Georgian period usually refers to the reign of George V (1910–1936) but sometimes also
includes the reigns of the four successive Georges from 1714–1830. Here, we refer to the
former description as it applies chronologically and covers, for example, the Georgian poets,
such as Ralph Hodgson, John Masefield, W.H. Davies, and Rupert Brooke. Georgian poetry
today is typically considered to be the works of minor poets anthologized by Edward Marsh.
The themes and subject matter tended to be rural or pastoral in nature, treated delicately and
traditionally rather than with passion (like was found in the previous periods) or with
experimentation (as would be seen in the upcoming modern period). From 1908 to 1914 there
was a remarkably productive period of innovation and experiment as novelists and poets
undertook, in anthologies and magazines, to challenge the literary conventions not just of the
recent past but of the entire post-Romantic era. For a brief moment, London, which up to that
point had been culturally one of the dullest of the European capitals, boasted an avant-garde
to rival those of Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, even if its leading personality, Ezra Pound, and
many of its most notable figures were American.

The spirit of Modernism—a radical and utopian spirit stimulated by new ideas in
anthropology, psychology, philosophy, political theory, and psychoanalysis—was in the air,
expressed rather mutedly by the pastoral and often anti-Modern poets of the Georgian
movement.

The impact of World War I upon the Anglo-American Modernists has been noted. In addition
the war brought a variety of responses from the more-traditionalist writers, predominantly
poets, who saw action. Rupert Brooke caught the idealism of the opening months of the war
(and died in service); Siegfried Sassoon and Ivor Gurney caught the mounting anger and
sense of waste as the war continued; and Isaac Rosenberg (perhaps the most original of the
war poets), Wilfred Owen, and Edmund Blunden not only caught the comradely compassion
of the trenches but also addressed themselves to the larger moral perplexities raised by the
war (Rosenberg and Owen were killed in action).

The Modern Period (1914- )

The modern period traditionally applies to works written after the start of World War I.
Common features include bold experimentation with subject matter, style, and form,
encompassing narrative, verse, and drama. W.B. Yeats’ words, “Things fall apart; the center
cannot hold” are often referred to when describing the core tenet or “feeling” of modernist
concerns. Some of the most notable writers of this period, among many, include the novelists
James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Dorothy
Richardson, Graham Greene, E.M. Forster, and Doris Lessing; the poets W.B. Yeats, T.S.
Eliot, W.H. Auden, Seamus Heaney, Wilfred Owens, Dylan Thomas, and Robert Graves; and
the dramatists Tom Stoppard, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Frank McGuinness,
Harold Pinter, and Caryl Churchill. New Criticism also appeared at this time, led by the likes
of Woolf, Eliot, William Empson, and others, which reinvigorated literary criticism in
general. It is difficult to say whether modernism has ended, though we know that
postmodernism has developed after and from it; for now, the genre remains ongoing.

The Postmodern Period (1945– )

The postmodern period begins about the time that World War II ended. Many believe it is a
direct response to modernism. Some say the period ended about 1990, but it is likely too soon
to declare this period closed. Poststructuralist literary theory and criticism developed during
this time. Some notable writers of the period include Samuel Beckett, Joseph Heller, Anthony
Burgess, John Fowles, Penelope M. Lively, and Iain Banks. Many postmodern authors wrote
during the modern period as well.

https://www.britannica.com/art/English-literature/The-20th-century

If Modernism as a movement is considered as the labour for a new era in English literature,
postmodernism is the child that was born out of the ideals of modernism and grew into a
super power that has been in dominance for decades. The expansive nature of postmodernism
is such that historians, critics and language researchers have found it very hard to determine a
date or year as to when postmodernism in English Literature started. As estimation, the
movement started after the Second World War in the later part of the 20th century.

Characteristics of Postmodernism in English Literature

Modernism and Postmodernism are almost inseparable as both the movements consisted of
similar interests with authors focusing on different/unique styles in contrast to the preceding
literary movements. However, one can observe the uniqueness of postmodernism by the use
of these styles with a lot of variation and distinctive employing in comparison to modernism.

Flexible Fragmentation

During the modernist era, fragmentation is embraced to unveil the tragic conditions of the
World War. There was no sense of happiness and all there was, was morbid truth. In the
postmodern era fragmentation as a literary tool got new meaning. It got more flexible stories,
more humour and more ways to present the information without being tragic.

Irony

The playfulness that existed with experimentation influenced the literature of the period.
Postmodernism in English literature consists of irony, parody, pastiche and satirical elements
and authors seem to rely heavily on these elements to make their topic interesting. This led to
shift of focus from the writer to the reader. Most authors, even now, think of the reader before
writing rather than write what they love in the manner they love.

Simple Language & complex structure

It is difficult to understand the author’s intentions in postmodern era as the literary devices
employed in a work make it quite complex. The reader has to focus hard to understand where
the fragments are leading and where they are joining together to reveal the plot. It sounds
difficult, but the use of simple language by postmodern writers helps a lot in understanding
the complex structure. The language of postmodern period is so simple when compared to
Elizabethan age or Puritan age that people who moderately understand English can read
through a book with no or slight difficulty.

While modernist literary writers often depicted the world as fragmented, troubled and on the
edge of disaster, which is best displayed in the stories and novels of such modernist authors
as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Albert Camus, Virginia Woolf and
Thomas Mann, postmodern authors tend to depict the world as having already undergone
countless disasters and being beyond redemption or understanding.

Module V

Poetry: A poem is a collection of spoken or written words that expresses ideas or emotions in
a powerfully vivid and imaginative style. A poem is comprised of a particular rhythmic and
metrical pattern. In fact, it is a literary technique that is different from prose or ordinary
speech, as it is either in metrical pattern or in free verse. Writers or poets express their
emotions through this medium more easily, as they face difficulty when expressing through
some other medium.

Types of Poem

 Haiku – A type of Japanese poem consisting of three unrhymed lines, with mostly
five, seven, and five syllables in each line. Examples: Haikus by Matsuo Basho

 Free Verse – Consists of non–rhyming lines, without any metrical pattern, but which
follow a natural rhythm. Example: The Garden by Ezra Pound

 Epic – A form of lengthy poem, often written in blank verse, in which poet shows
a protagonist in action of historical significance, or a great mythic. Example: Paradise
Lost by John Milton

 Ballad – A type of narrative poem in which a story often talks about folk or legendary
tales. It may take the form of a moral lesson or a song. Example: The Ballad of East
and West by Rudyard Kipling

 Sonnet – It is a form of lyrical poem containing fourteen lines, with

iambic pentameter and tone or mood changes after the eighth line. Example:
Shakespearean sonnets, Spenserian sonnets

 Elegy – A melancholic poem in which the poet laments the death of a subject, though
he gives consolation towards the end. Example: Elegy written in a Country
Churchyard by Thomas Gray

 Limerick – This is a type of humorous poem with five anapestic lines in which the
first, second, and fifth lines have three feet, and the third and fourth lines have two
feet, with a strict rhyme scheme of aabba.

Function of poetry: The main function of a poem is to convey an idea or emotion in

beautiful language. It paints a picture of what the poet feels about a thing, person, idea,
concept, or even an object. Poets grab the attention of the audience through the use of
vivid imagery, emotional shades, figurative language, and other rhetorical devices. However,
the supreme function of a poem is to transform imagery and words into verse form, to touch
the hearts and minds of the readers. They can easily arouse the sentiments of their readers
through versification. In addition, poets evoke imaginative awareness about things by using a
specific diction, sound, and rhythm.
Drama: Drama is a mode of fictional representation through dialogue and performance. It is
one of the literary genres, which is an imitation of some action. Drama is also a type of
a play written for theater, television, radio, and film.

Types of Drama

 Comedy – Comedies are lighter in tone than ordinary works, and provide a
happy conclusion. The intention of dramatists in comedies is to make their audience
laugh. Hence, they use quaint circumstances, unusual characters, and witty remarks.
Eg: Much Ado About Nothing (By William Shakespeare)

 Tragedy – Tragic dramas use darker themes, such as disaster, pain, and death.
Protagonists often have a tragic flaw — a characteristic that leads them to their
downfall. Eg: Oedipus Rex (By Sophocles)

 Farce – Generally, a farce is a nonsensical genre of drama, which often overacts or

engages slapstick humor. Eg: The Importance of Being Earnest (By Oscar Wilde)

 Melodrama – Melodrama is an exaggerated drama, which is sensational and appeals

directly to the senses of the audience. Just like the farce, the characters are of a single
dimension and simple, or may be stereotyped. Eg: The Heiress (By Henry James)

Novel: It is an invented prose narrative of considerable length and a certain complexity that
deals imaginatively with human experience, usually through a connected sequence of events
involving a group of persons in a specific setting. Within its broad framework, the genre of
the novel has encompassed an extensive range of types and styles: picaresque, epistolary,
Gothic, romantic, realist, historical—to name only some of the more important ones.

The term novel is a truncation of the Italian word novella (from the plural of Latin novellus, a
late variant of novus, meaning “new”), so that what is now, in most languages, a diminutive
denotes historically the parent form. The novella was a kind of enlarged anecdote like those
to be found in the 14th-century Italian classic Boccaccio’s Decameron, each of which
exemplifies the etymology well enough.

Short Story:

A short story is a fully developed story which is shorter than a novel and longer than a fable.
It typically takes just a single sitting for reading. Short Story focuses on the incidents bigger
or smaller and evokes strong feelings from its readers. A short story often has a few
characters in the plot.

Features of a Short Story

As a short story is mostly a short narrative and has few features. The standard features
include exposition, complication, crisis, climax, and resolution of the crisis. However, it is
not essential that all short stories follow the same pattern.

Example: The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde

Biography:

A biography is a description of a real person’s life, including factual details as well as stories
from the person’s life. Biographies usually include information about the subject’s
personality and motivations, and other kinds of intimate details excluded in a general
overview or profile of a person’s life. The vast majority of biography examples are written
about people who are or were famous, such as politicians, actors, athletes, and so on.
However, some biographies can be written about people who lived incredible lives, but were
not necessarily well-known. A biography can be labelled “authorized” if the person being
written about, or his or her family members, have given permission for a certain author to
write the biography.

Difference between Biography and Autobiography: A biography is a description of a life that

is not the author’s own, while an autobiography is the description of a writer’s own life.
There can be some gray area, however, in the definition of biography when a ghostwriter is
employed. A ghostwriter is an author who helps in the creation of a book, either collaborating
with someone else or doing all of the writing him- or herself.

 Examples: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

Autobiography: Autobiography is one type of biography, which tells a life story of its
author, meaning it is a written record of the author’s life. Rather than being written by
somebody else, an autobiography comes through the person’s own pen, in his own words.
Some autobiographies are written in the form of a fictional tale; as novels or stories that
closely mirror events from the author’s real life. Such stories include Charles Dickens’ David
Copperfield, and J.D Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. In writing about personal experience,
one discovers himself. Therefore, it is not merely a collection of anecdotes – it is a revelation
to the readers about author’s self-discovery.

Plot:

Plot is a literary term used to describe the events that make up a story, or the main part of a
story. These events relate to each other in a pattern or a sequence. The structure of
a novel depends on the organization of events in the plot of the story.

Plot is known as the foundation of a novel or story, around which the characters and settings
are built. It is meant to organize information and events in a logical manner. When writing
the plot of a piece of literature, the author has to be careful that it does not dominate the other
parts of the story.

Elements of a Plot

There are five main elements in a plot.

1. Exposition or Introduction
This is the beginning of the story, where characters and setting are established.
The conflict or main problem is introduced as well.
2. Rising Action
Rising action which occurs when a series of events build up to the conflict. The main
characters are established by the time the rising action of a plot occurs, and at the same time,
events begin to get complicated. It is during this part of a story that excitement, tension, or
crisis is encountered.
3. Climax
In the climax, or the main point of the plot, there is a turning point of the story. This is meant
to be the moment of highest interest and emotion, leaving the reader wondering what is going
to happen next.
4. Falling Action
Falling action, or the winding up of the story, occurs when events and complications begin to
resolve. The result of the actions of the main characters are put forward.
5. Resolution
Resolution, or the conclusion, is the end of a story, which may occur with either a happy or a
tragic ending.
Function of a plot:
Firstly, the plot focuses attention on the important characters and their roles in the story. It
motivates the characters to affect the story, and connects the events in an orderly manner. The
plot is what forms a memory in readers’ minds, allowing them to think about the book and
even making them want to read it again. By identifying and understanding the plot, the reader
is able to understand the message being conveyed by the author, and the explicit or
implicit moral of the story. Examples: Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol (1843), Jane
Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749).

Theme:

Theme is defined as a main idea or an underlying meaning of a literary work, which may be
stated directly or indirectly. Major and minor themes are two types of themes that appear in
literary works. A major theme is an idea that a writer repeats in his literary work, making it
the most significant idea in the work. A minor theme, on the other hand, refers to an idea that
appears in a work briefly, giving way to another minor theme. Examples of theme in Jane
Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” are matrimony, love, friendship, and affection. The
whole narrative revolves around the major theme of matrimony. Its minor themes are love,
friendship.

Character:

All stories need certain necessary elements. Without these elements, literary works often fail
to make sense. For instance, one of the essential elements of every story is a plot with a series
of events. Another important element is a character. A character can be any person, a figure,
an inanimate object, or animal. There are different types of characters, and each serves its
unique function in a story or a piece of literature.

Types of Characters

There are many types of the characters which include:

Protagonist

Every story has a protagonist, the main character, who creates the action of the plot and
engages readers, arousing their empathy and interest. The protagonist is often a hero or
heroine of the story, as the whole plot moves around him or her.

Example: Othello from Willaim Shakespeare’s Othello

Antagonist

An antagonist is a bad guy, or an opponent of the protagonist or the main character. The
action in the story arises from a conflict between the protagonist and the antagonist. The
antagonist can be a person, an inanimate object, an animal, or nature itself.

Example: Iago from Shakespeare’s Othello

Dynamic Character

A dynamic character changes during the course of a novel or a story. This change in character
or his/her outlook is permanent. That is why sometimes a dynamic character is also called a
“developing character.”

Example: Ebenezer Scrooge from Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens)

Static Character

A static character remains the same throughout the whole story. Even the events in a story or
novel do not change character’s outlook, perceptions, habits, personality, or motivations.

Example: Mr. Collins from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

Round Character

The round characters are well-developed and complex figures in a story. They are more
realistic, and demonstrate more depth in their personalities. They can make surprising or
puzzling decisions, and attract readers’ attention. There are many factors that may affect
them, and round characters react to such factors realistically.

Example: Becky Sharp from William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair

Flat Character

A flat character does not change during a story. Also, he or she usually only reveals one or
two personality traits.

Example: Queen Gertrude from Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Stock Character

A stock character is a flat character that is instantly recognizable by readers. Like a flat
character, the stock character does not undergo any development throughout the story.
Example: Falstaff from Shakespeare’s Henry IV

Setting: The setting of a piece of literature is the time and place in which the story takes
place. The definition of setting can also include social statuses, weather, historical period, and
details about immediate surroundings. Settings can be real or fictional, or a combination of
both real and fictional elements.

Significance of Setting in Literature

Setting is an extremely important aspect of almost every piece of fiction and drama, and can
be an important element in poetry as well. In many narrative examples the setting can act
almost as a nonhuman character, affecting the characters in many different large and small
ways. Indeed, most plot lines are so tied to their settings that they could not be put in other
places, time periods, or socioeconomic environments.

Example: Two households, both alike in dignity,

In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

(Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare)

Tone: Tone, in written composition, is an attitude of a writer toward a subject or an audience.

Tone is generally conveyed through the choice of words, or the viewpoint of a writer on a
particular subject. Every written piece comprises a central theme or subject matter. The
manner in which a writer approaches this theme and subject is the tone. The tone can be
formal, informal, serious, comic, sarcastic, sad, or cheerful, or it may be any other existing
attitude.

Example: Robert Frost, in the last stanza of his poem The Road Not Taken, gives us an
insight into the effect of tone:

“I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”

Frost tells us about his past with a “sigh,” this gives the above lines an unhappy tone. This
tone leads us into thinking that the speaker in the poem had to make a difficult choice.