English literature

The Old English period > Prose

Page from a manuscript of St. Bede the Venerable's Historia ecclesiastica gentis …

The Granger Collection, New York

The earliest English prose work, the law code of King Aethelberht I of Kent, was written within a few years of the arrival in England (597) of St. Augustine of Canterbury. Other 7th- and 8th-century prose, similarly practical in character, includes more laws, wills, and charters. According to Cuthbert, who was a monk at Jarrow, Bede at the time of his death had just finished a translation of the Gospel of St. John, though this does not survive. Two medical tracts, Herbarium and Medicina de quadrupedibus, very likely date from the 8th century.

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  Introduction
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  The Old English period
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    Poetry
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      Alliterative verse
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      The major manuscripts
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      Problems of dating
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      Religious verse
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      Elegiac and heroic verse
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    Prose
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      Early translations into English
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      Late 10th- and 11th-century prose
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  The early Middle English period
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    Poetry
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      Influence of French poetry
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      Didactic poetry
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      Verse romance
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      The lyric
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    Prose
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  The later Middle English and early Renaissance periods
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    Later Middle English poetry
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      The revival of alliterative poetry
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      Courtly poetry
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      Chaucer and Gower
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      Poetry after Chaucer and Gower
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        Courtly poetry
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        Popular and secular verse
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        Political verse
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    Later Middle English prose
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      Religious prose
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      Secular prose
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    Middle English drama
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    The transition from medieval to Renaissance
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  The Renaissance period: 1550–1660
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    Literature and the age
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      Social conditions
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      Intellectual and religious revolution
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      The race for cultural development
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    Elizabethan poetry and prose
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      Development of the English language
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      Sidney and Spenser
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      Elizabethan lyric
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      The sonnet sequence
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      Other poetic styles
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      Prose styles, 1550–1600
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    Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
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      Theatre and society
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        Theatres in London and the provinces
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        Professional playwrights
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        Marlowe
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      Shakespeare's works
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        The early histories
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        The early comedies
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        The tragedies
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        Shakespeare's later works
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      Playwrights after Shakespeare
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        Jonson
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        Other Jacobean dramatists
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        The last Renaissance dramatists
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    Early Stuart poetry and prose
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      The Metaphysical poets
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        Donne
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        Donne's influence
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      Jonson and the Cavalier poets
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      Continued influence of Spenser
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      Effect of religion and science on early Stuart prose
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      Prose styles
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      Milton
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  The Restoration
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    Literary reactions to the political climate
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      The defeated republicans
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      Writings of the Nonconformists
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      Writings of the royalists
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    Major genres and major authors of the period
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      Locke
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      Chroniclers
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      Diarists
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      The court wits
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      Dryden
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      Drama by Dryden and others
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  The 18th century
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    Publication of political literature
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      Journalism
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      Major political writers
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        Pope
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        Thomson, Prior, and Gay
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        Swift
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        Shaftesbury and others
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    The novel
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      The major novelists
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        Defoe
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        Richardson
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        Fielding
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        Smollett
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        Sterne
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      Other novelists
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    Poets and poetry after Pope
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      Burns
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      Goldsmith
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      Johnson's poetry and prose
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  The Romantic period
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    The nature of Romanticism
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    Poetry
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      Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge
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      Other poets of the early Romantic period
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      The later Romantics: Shelley, Keats, and Byron
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      Other poets of the later period
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    The novel: from the Gothic novel to Austen and Scott
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    Discursive prose
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    Drama
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  The post-Romantic and Victorian eras
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    Early Victorian literature: the age of the novel
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      Dickens
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      Thackeray, Gaskell, and others
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      The Brontës
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    Early Victorian verse
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      Tennyson
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      Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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      Arnold and Clough
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    Early Victorian nonfiction prose
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    Late Victorian literature
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      The novel
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      Verse
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    The Victorian theatre
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    Victorian literary comedy
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  The 20th century
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    From 1900 to 1945
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      The Edwardians
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      The Modernist revolution
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        Anglo-American Modernism: Pound, Lewis, Lawrence, and Eliot
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        Celtic Modernism: Yeats, Joyce, Jones, and MacDiarmid
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      The literature of World War I and the interwar period
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      The 1930s
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      The literature of World War II (1939–45)
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    Literature after 1945
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      Fiction
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      Poetry
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      Drama
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  The 21st century
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  Additional Reading
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    General works
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    The Old English period
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    The Middle English period
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    The Renaissance period, 1550–1660
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      Elizabethan poetry and prose
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      Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
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      Early Stuart poetry and prose
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    The Restoration and the 18th century
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    The Romantic period
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    The Post-Romantic and Victorian eras
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    The 20th century
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      From 1900 to 1945
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      Literature after 1945