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This article is focused on English-language literature rather than being limited merely to the literature of England, so that it includes writers from Scotland, the whole of Ireland, and Wales, as well as literature in English from former British colonies, including the US. However, until the early 19th century, it deals with the literature written in English in Britain and Ireland. English literature is generally seen as beginning with the epic poem ''Beowulf'', the most famous work in Old English, which was written in England some time between the 8th and the early 11th century.〔Chase, Colin. (1997). ''The dating of 'Beowulf'' ''. pp. 9–22. University of Toronto Press〕 Despite being set in Scandinavia ''Beowulf'' has achieved national epic status in England. The next important landmark is the works of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400), especially ''The Canterbury Tales''. Then during the Renaissance, especially the late 16th and early 17th centuries, major drama and poetry was written by Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne and others. Another great poet, from later in the 17th century, was John Milton (1608–74), author of the epic poem ''Paradise Lost'' (1667). The late 17th and the early 18th centuries are particularly associated with satire, especially in the poetry of John Dryden and Alexander Pope, and the prose works of Jonathan Swift. The 18th century also saw the first British novels in the works of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding, while the late 18th and early 19th centuries were the period of the Romantic poets, such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats. It was in the Victorian era (1837–1901) that the novel became the leading literary genre in English, dominated especially by Charles Dickens, but there were many other significant writers, including the Brontë sisters, and then Thomas Hardy, in the final decades of the 19th century. America began to produce major writers in the 19th century, including novelist Herman Melville, author of ''Moby Dick'' (1851) and the poets Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Another American, Henry James, was a major novelist of the late 19th and early 20th century, while Polish-born Joseph Conrad was one of the most important British novelists of the first decade of the 20th century. Irish writers were especially important in the 20th century, including James Joyce and later Samuel Beckett, both central figures in the Modernist movement. Americans, like poets T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and novelist William Faulkner, were other important modernists. In the mid 20th century major writers started to appear in the various countries of the British Commonwealth, including several Nobel laureates. Many major writers in English in the 20th and 21st centuries have come from outside the United Kingdom. The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain tendencies in post-World War II literature. It is a continuation of the experimentation championed by writers of the modernist period, relying heavily, for example, on fragmentation, paradox, questionable narrators, etc. It is also a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature. * A fuller discussion of literature in English from countries other than the UK and Ireland can be found in see also below. * For a discussion of literature from the UK in languages other than English, see British literature. == Old English literature: c. 450–1066== (詳細はOld English literature, or Anglo-Saxon literature, encompasses the surviving literature written in Old English in Anglo-Saxon England, in the period after the settlement of the Saxons and other Germanic tribes in England, as the Jutes and the Angles, c. 450, after the withdrawal of the Romans, and "ending soon after the Norman Conquest" in 1066; that is, c. 1100–50. These works include genres such as epic poetry, hagiography, sermons, Bible translations, legal works, chronicles, riddles, and others.〔Angus Cameron (1983). "Anglo-Saxon literature" in ''Dictionary of the Middle Ages'', v. 1, pp. 274–88.〕 In all there are about 400 surviving manuscripts from the period.〔 The earliest surviving work of literature in Old English is Cædmon's Hymn, which was probably composed between 658–80. Oral tradition was very strong in early English culture and most literary works were written to be performed.〔.〕〔.〕 Epic poems were thus very popular, and some, including ''Beowulf'', have survived to the present day. Much Old English verse in the extant manuscripts is probably adapted from the earlier Germanic war poems from the continent. When such poetry was brought to England it was still being handed down orally from one generation to another. Old English poetry falls broadly into two styles or fields of reference, the heroic Germanic and the Christian. The Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity after their arrival in England.〔Henry Mayr-Harting, ''The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England''. (Pennsylvania: University Press Pennsylvania, 1992).〕 The most popular and well-known of Old English poetry is alliterative verse, which uses accent, alliteration, the quantity of vowels, and patterns of syllabic accentuation. It consists of five permutations on a base verse scheme; any one of the five types can be used in any verse. The system was inherited from and exists in one form or another in all of the older Germanic languages.〔.〕 The epic poem ''Beowulf'', of 3182 alliterative lines, is the most famous work in Old English and has achieved national epic status in England, despite being set in Scandinavia. The only surviving manuscript is the Nowell Codex, the precise date of which is debated, but most estimates place it close to the year 1000. Beowulf is the conventional title, and its composition by an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet, who is commonly referred to as the "''Beowulf'' poet", is dated between the 8th and the early 11th century. In the poem, Beowulf, a hero of the Geats in Scandinavia, comes to the help of Hroðgar, the king of the Danes, whose mead hall (in Heorot) has been under attack by a monster known as Grendel. After Beowulf slays him, Grendel's mother attacks the hall and is then also defeated. Victorious, Beowulf goes home to Geatland in Sweden and later becomes king of the Geats. After fifty years, Beowulf defeats a dragon, but is fatally wounded in the battle. After his death, his attendants bury him in a tumulus, a burial mound, in Geatland. Found in the same manuscript as the heroic poem Beowulf, the Nowell Codex, is the poem ''Judith'', a retelling of the story found in the Latin Vulgate Bible's Book of Judith about the beheader of the Assyrian general Holofernes.〔Chamberlain, D. "Judith: a Fragmentary and Political Poem", in ''Anglo-Saxon Poetry: Essays in Appreciation for John C McGalliard'', ed. LE Nicholson and DW Frese (Notre Dame, IN, 1975), pp. 145–59.〕 The ''Old English Martyrology'' is a Mercian collection of hagiographies. Ælfric of Eynsham was a prolific 10th-century writer of hagiographies and homilies.〔Bruce Mitchell, ''A Guide to Old English''. 6th ed (Massachusetts. Blackwell Publishers, 2001).〕 Nearly all Anglo-Saxon authors are anonymous: twelve are known by name from Medieval sources, but only four of those are known by their vernacular works with any certainty: Cædmon, Bede, Alfred the Great, and Cynewulf. Cædmon is the earliest English poet whose name is known. Cædmon's only known surviving work is ''Cædmon's Hymn'', which probably dates from the late 7th century. The ''Hymn'' itself was composed between 658 and 680, recorded in the earlier part of the 8th century, and survives today in at least 14 verified manuscript copies.〔EVK Dobbie, "The manuscripts of Cædmon's Hymn and Bede's Death Song with a critical text of the Epistola Cuthberti de obitu Bedae". ''Columbia University Studies in English and Comparative Literature'' (New York: Columbia University, 1937), p. 128.〕 The poem is one of the earliest attested examples of Old English and is, with the runic Ruthwell Cross and Franks Casket inscriptions, one of three candidates for the earliest attested example of Old English poetry. It is also one of the earliest recorded examples of sustained poetry in a Germanic language. The poem, ''The Dream of the Rood'', was inscribed upon the Ruthwell Cross. Chronicles contained a range of historical and literary accounts, and a notable example is the ''Anglo-Saxon Chronicle''. This is a collection of annals in Old English chronicling the history of the Anglo-Saxons. Nine manuscripts survive in whole or in part, though not all are of equal historical value and none of them is the original version. The oldest seems to have been started towards the end of King Alfred's reign in the 9th century, and the most recent was written at Peterborough Abbey in 1116. Almost all of the material in the ''Chronicle'' is in the form of annals by year, the earliest being dated at 60 BC (the annals' date for Caesar's invasions of Britain), and historical material follows up to the year in which the chronicle was written, at which point contemporary records begin.〔Stanley Brian Greenfield, ''A New Critical History of Old English Literature'' (New York: New York University Press, 1986).〕 The poem Battle of Maldon also deals with history. This is the name given to a work, of uncertain date, celebrating the real Battle of Maldon of 991, at which the Anglo-Saxons failed to prevent a Viking invasion. Only 325 lines of the poem are extant; both the beginning and the ending are lost. The Wanderer is an Old English poem preserved only in an anthology known as the Exeter Book, a manuscript dating from the late 10th century. It counts 115 lines of alliterative verse. As often the case in Anglo-Saxon verse, the composer and compiler are anonymous, and within the manuscript the poem is untitled. The Wanderer conveys the meditations of a solitary exile on his past glories as a warrior in his lord's band of retainers, his present hardships and the values of forbearance and faith in the heavenly Lord. Another poem with a religious theme, The Seafarer is also recorded in the Exeter Book, one of the four surviving manuscripts, and consists of 124 lines, followed by the single word "Amen". In the past it has been frequently referred to as an elegy, a poem that mourns a loss, or has the more general meaning of a simply sorrowful piece of writing. Some scholars, however, have argued that the content of the poem also links it with Sapiential Books, or Wisdom Literature. In the ''Cambridge Old English Reader'' (2004), Richard Marsden writes, “It is an exhortatory and didactic poem, in which the miseries of winter seafaring are used as a metaphor for the challenge faced by the committed Christian ()” (p. 221). Classical antiquity was not forgotten in Anglo-Saxon England and several Old English poems are adaptations of late classical philosophical texts. The longest is King Alfred's (849–99) 9th-century translation of Boethius' ''Consolation of Philosophy''.〔Walter John Sedgefield (ed.), ''King Alfred's Old English Version of Boethius: De consolatione philosophiae'', 1968 (1899)〕 The ''Metres of Boethius'' are a series of Old English alliterative poems adapted from the Latin ''metra'' of the ''Consolation of Philosophy'' soon after Alfred's prose translation. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「English literature」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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