Carter: Routledge History of Literature/Britain

List of illustrations Foreword by Malcolm Bradbury THE BEGINNINGS OF ENGLISH: OLD AND MIDDLE ENGLISH 600-1485 Contexts and conditions Personal and religious voices Language note: The earliest figurative language Long poems French influence and English affirmation Language and dialect Language note: The expanding lexicon - Chaucer and Middle English From anonymity to individualism Women's voices Fantasy Travel Geoffrey Chaucer Langland, Gower and Lydgate The Scottish Chaucerians Medieval drama Malory and Skelton Language note: Prose and sentence structure THE RENAISSANCE: 1485-1660 Contexts and conditions Language note: Expanding world: expanding lexicon Renaissance poetry Language note: Puttenham's Social Poetics Drama before Shakespeare From the street to the building - the Elizabethan theatre Language note: The further expanding lexicon Renaissance prose Translations of the Bible Language note: The Language of the Bible Shakespeare The plays The sonnets Language note: Shakespeare's language The Metaphysical poets The Cavalier poets Jacobean drama - to the closure of the theatres, 1642 Ben Jonson Masques Other dramatists of the early seventeenth century City comedy The end of the Renaissance theatre RESTORATION TO ROMANTICISM: 1660-1789 Contexts and conditions Early Milton Restoration drama Rochester Dryden Pope Journalism Scottish Enlightenment, diarists and Gibbon The novel Criticism Language note: The expanding lexicon - standards of English' Johnson Sterne, Smollett and Scottish voices Drama after 1737 Poetry after Pope Language note: Metrical patterns Melancholy, madness and nature The Gothic and the sublime Language note: Point of view THE ROMANTIC PERIOD: 1789 - 1832 Contexts and conditions Language note: William Cobbett, grammar and politics Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge Language note: Reading Wordsworth Language note: The 'real' language of men Keats Shelley Byron Rights and voices in poetry Clare Romantic prose The novel in the Romantic period Jane

Ronald Carter is Professor of Modern English Language in the School of English Studies at the University of Nottingham. He has published widely in the fields of English Language and Literary Studies. John McRae is Special Professor of Language in Literature Studies at the University of Nottingham and has been a Visiting Professor and Lecturer in more than twenty countries.

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