English literature as an integral part of the world cultural heritage. Periodization of English literature. Brief characteristics of each period, major authors and works.

English literature is an integral part of the world cultural heritage. The best traditions of English art have enriched the world literature. The masterpieces of English prose and poetry were translated into almost all languages, thus winning the recognition far overseas.

A literary language goes through a great range of adventures and experiments. Forms and genres take shape: the comedy and the tragedy, the ode /əʊd/ and the epic /ˈɛpɪk/, the novel and the dramatic poem, blank verse and stream of consciousness /ˈkɒnʃəsnɪs/. Literary language moves between high formality and vernacular ease; common speech frequently transforms conventions when they grow fixed, so creating – as with the Romantic movement – a major literary and emotional revolution. Tradition deposits a vast stock of words and meanings, complex grammatical and artistic devices: simile and metaphor, irony and burlesque /bəːˈlɛsk/ and satire. Literature is our link with great humane /hjʊˈmeɪn/ and moral ideas; it is part of the advancement of learning and the imaginative /ɪˈmadʒɪnətɪv/ understanding of other people’s lived experience. Literature is always an experiment, as significant and innovative as any in medicine and science – as well as an eternal story of the power of the human imagination.

600-1200 Old English (Anglo-Saxon). In Old English period, oral composition was not meant to be written. Poetry was entertainment! A poem was a social act, like telling a story today, not a thing which belonged to its performer. The first works, written in old english appeared in the early middle ages(the oldest surviving text is Cedmon’s hymn) The poem is one of the earliest attested examples of Old English. Epic poems was very popular, including beowulf which manuscript have survived to the present day.

1200-1500 Middle English. Literature in English suffered a severe downfall in 1066. The Norman Conquest reduced the Saxon language almost to the peasants’ dialect and kept it for more than two centuries in that position. Classical Old English verse died out. When the new writing appeared, it was in an English which had become very different from that of the 11th century. The reasons for this include the lack of any written standard to discourage dialectal variety; scribal practice; linguistic change; and a new literary consciousness. Geoffrey Chaucer a father of English poetry. Also he is known "The Canterbury Tales" the inner stories told by the pilgrims form the images on the canvas; the outer story told by Chaucer forms the frame.

1500-1660 The English Renaissance. Elizabethan era (1558-1603). The Elizabethan era saw a great flourishing of literature,especially in the field of Drama.the most important author was William Shakespeare,with his brilliant plays:’’hamlet’’, ‘’romeo and juliet’’,’’othello’’,’’king lear’’ and so.on other important figures were christopher marlowe,thomas dekker.

Restoration literature (1625-1649). Restoration literature includes both john.miltons ‘’paradise lost’’ and the’’ earl of rochester sodom’’.the largest and most important poetic form of the era was satire. Prose in the Restoration period is dominated by Christian religious writing, but the Restoration also saw the beginnings of two genres that would dominate later periods: fiction and journalism.

Romanticism (1785-1830). Age of revolution. The superiority of nature and instinct over civilisation had been preached by Jean Jacques Rousseau and his message was picked by almost all European poets. The first in England were the Lake Poets, a small group of friends including William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The "Second generation" of Romantic poets includes Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. Some rightly think that the most popular novelist of the era was Sir Walter Scott, whose grand historical romances inspired a generation of painters, composers, and writers throughout Europe.(‘’rob roy,’’ivanhoe’’)and jane austen and her ‘’pride and prejudice’.

14. Shakespeare: life, literary career, authorship debate. Shakespeare’s influence on English language and literature.

William Shakespeare was born in April 1564 in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, on England’s Avon River. When he was eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway. The couple had three children—their older daughter Susanna and the twins Judith and Hamnet. Hamnet, Shakespeare’s only son, died in childhood.

The bulk of Shakespeare’s working life was spent, not in Stratford, but in the theater world of London, where he established himself professionally by the early 1590s. He enjoyed success not only as a playwright, but as an actor and shareholder in an acting company. Sometime between 1610 and 1613, Shakespeare is thought to have retired from the stage and returned home to Stratford, where he died in 1616.

Shakespeare’s true identity has been in dispute since the Eighteenth Century because only fragments of evidence have survived the 400 years since his death. There are a number of theories surrounding the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, but most are based on one of the following ideas: 1. The William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon and the William Shakespeare working in London were two separate people. They have been falsely connected by historians. 2. Someone called William Shakespeare did work with Burbage’s theater company at The Globe, but did not write the plays. Shakespeare was putting his name to plays given to him by someone else.

Shakespeare enriched the English language by breathing into it a lot of striking metaphors, new phrases and a host of new words which he coined. The metaphors which Shakespeare employed were out of the ordinary: He introduced a number of phrases which have entered into our daily conversation like- ‘Pink of courtesy’ ввічливості, ‘hoist with his own petard’ потрапити у власну пастку and more.

Shakespeare introduced a number of words in the English vocabulary such as assassination вбивства, dwindle танути, enthrone престол and so on. He even tried to suggest local color through usage of provincial words such as ‘pheeze’ in ‘Taming of the Shrew’ and ‘blood bolter’d’ in Macbeth. He formed a lot of new words by adding prefixes ‘en’ (or ‘em’) and ‘un’ such as endeared розташував, enkindle запалювати, empoison отруювати, unexpressive. He made new effective poetic compound adjectives like ‘daring-hardy’, ‘happy-valiant’доблесних.

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