History of English Literature

Literature is a term used to describe written or spoken material. Literature is an aesthetic pleasure which shows or expresses the beauty of visual art, feelings, raw material and art of life. This is most commonly used to refer the works of the creative imagination, including works of poetry, drama, fiction, & nonfiction, classically & romantically. In academic circles, this decoding of the text is often carried out through the use of literary theory, used in mythological, sociological, psychological, historical, or other approach. Literature is a source of communication between writer’s experiences of life with readers. Connection between literature and life is not as simple as it seems to be.

Literature according to;

PLATO: Literature or Poetry is the reflection or imitation of life. Or “imitation of an imitation”.

ARISTOTLE: Literature or Poetry is the existence of art implies the existence of imaginative impulse. That will be enough to make the resultant poetry, something more different from imitation of world.

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: He refuted Plato’s contention of literature. According to him “the poet does not imitate, but creates; it is the reader who imitates what the poet creates”. Poet presents a better world than the real world in such a way that the reader is stimulated to try and imitate it in his own practice.

DR. JOHNSON: The poet “holds up a mirror to nature”. The poet is the illuminator of human nature. The duty of imaginative literature is to provide accurate pictures of nature to reader.

WALTER PATER: The writer’s aim, “consciously or unconsciously, come to be transcribing, not the world, not of mere fact, but his sense of it, he becomes an artist, his work fine art and good art in proportion to the truth of his presentment of that sense”, transcription of his vision of it.

THOMAS DE QUINCEY: The function of the literature is first to teach the reader and second is to move the reader to literary world.

Literature and its relationship with Life: The connection between literature and life is intimate and vital. Literature is the expression of individual and social life and thought through vernacular. While the subject matter and treatment must be such as are of general human interest, the expression must be emotive; the form must give aesthetic pleasure and satisfaction.

Importance of Literature: It is a curious and prevalent opinion that literature, like all art, is a mere play of imagination, pleasing enough, like a new novel, but without any serious or practical importance. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Literature preserves the ideals of a people; and ideals--love, faith, duty, friendship, freedom, reverence--are the part of human life most worthy of preservation. The Greeks were a marvelous people; yet of all their mighty works we cherish only a few ideals,--ideals of beauty in perishable stone, and ideals of truth in imperishable prose and poetry.

It was simply the ideals of the Greeks and Hebrews and Romans, preserved in their literature, which made them what they were, and which determined their value to future generations. Our democracy, the boast of all English-speaking nations, is a dream; not the doubtful and sometimes disheartening spectacle presented in our legislative halls, but the lovely and immortal ideal of a free and equal manhood, preserved as a most precious heritage in every great literature from the Greeks to the Anglo-Saxons. All our arts, our sciences, even our inventions are founded squarely upon ideals; for under every invention is still the dream of Beowulf, that man may overcome the forces of nature; and the foundation of all our sciences and discoveries is the immortal dream that men "shall be as gods, knowing good and evil."

In a word, our whole civilization, our freedom, our progress, our homes, our religion, rest solidly upon ideals for their foundation. Nothing but an ideal ever endures upon earth. It is therefore impossible to overestimate the practical importance of literature, which preserves these ideals from generation to generation, while men, cities, governments, civilizations, vanish from the face of the earth. It is only when we remember this that we appreciate the action of the devout Mussulman, who picks up and carefully preserves every scrap of paper on which words are written, because the scrap may perchance contain the name of Allah, and the ideal is too enormously important to be neglected or lost.

English Literature is the study of literature written in the English language. The writers can be from all over the world. The English Literature period started from 670 and remains popular. English literature deals with universal themes and values that help us grow in our everyday lives. It also teaches us about different time periods and faraway places. The most famous writers are; Geoffrey Chaucer known as the Father of English Poetry (England), James Joyce (Ireland), William Shakespeare (England), Mark Twain (United States), Arthur Conan Doyle (Scotland), Dylan Thomas (Wales) and Vladimir Nabokov (Russia).