Section 1 The UK & Ireland 英国与爱尔兰

A General Survey of the Literary Development

British or “English”（before 1948, Irish was also included）literature began with the Anglo-Saxon invasion of what is now England during the 5th century and has ever since undergone seven periods or stages of development：

1）Old English Period（600—1066）, ending with the Norman Conquest in 1066. Remarkable achievement includes: The Dream ofthe Rood（perhaps the first real English long poem）, “Beowulf”（a folk epic—notable for its alliteration）and King Alfred's translation of Latin works and chronicles.

2）Middle English Period（1066—1476）,（when “rime” or “rhyme” is introduced from France）, which may be further divided into three ages（ending with William Caxton's establishment of a printing press at Westminster）: A）Anglo-Norman Age（1066—1340）, major achievement of which includes King Arthur—metrical romances and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.B）Age of Chaucer（1340—1400）, major achievement of which includes The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, “father of English poetry and literature” .C）Fifteenth Century（1400—1476）, major achievement of which includes Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur.

3）Period of the Renaissance（1476—1660）, which may be further divided into three ages,（ending with the Restoration of Charles II）: A）Age of Experiment（1476—1579）, major achievement of which includes the poetic work of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder&Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Thomas Moore's Utopia and Edmund Spencer's Faerie Queene.B）Age of Shakespeare（1579—1616）, major achievement of which includes Thomas Marlowe's&William Shakespeare's drama or plays, Francis Bacon's Essays, the King James' Bible, and Sir Philip Sidney's poems and literary criticism.C）The Puritan Age（1616—1660）, major achievement of which includes the poetic work of Ben Jonson, John Donne, George Herbert, and Robert Herrick, Andrew Marvell's（“Metaphysical School”）poems, and John Milton's sonnets, several longer poems &three epics, including Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained' &Samson Agonistes.

4）Period of Neo-classicism（1660—1798）, which may be further divided into three ages（ending with the publication of the Lake Poets'Lyrical Ballads）: A）Age of Restoration（1660—1700）, major achievement of which includes John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and John Dryden's Dramatic Poesy and dramatic work.B）Age of Pope（1700—1740）, major achievement of which includes Alexander Pope's poems&An Essay on Criticism.This period also saw the rise and flourish of prose（novels and essays）with such well-known novelists and novels as Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe &Moll Flanders, Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal &Gulliver's Travels, Samuel Richardson's Pamela&Clarrisa Harlowe（an epistolary novel）, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones &Johnathan Wilde, Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions ofTristram Shandy（an experimental or “post-modern” novel）, Tobias Smollet's The Adventures of Roderick Random, and Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield.C）Age of Johnson（1740—1798）, major achievement of which includes Samuel Johnson's The Lives ofPoets and other work, James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson（which marks the beginning of modern biography）, and the “Sentimentalist poems” like Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard（the “Graveyard School”）as well as Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village.

5）The Romantic Period（1798—1837）, which ends with the accession of Queen Victoria, witnesses such literary achievement as: A）Poetry, in which well-known and bestloved writers are Robert Burns's lyrics（such as My Love Is Like a Red Red Rose）and William Blake's Songs of Innocence &Songs of Experience, the poetic work of the“Lake poets” or “Lakers” of William Wordsworth, Samuel T.Coleridge &Robert Southy, as well as Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimmage &Don Juan, Percy Bysshe Shelly's Ode to the West Wind and John Keats's odes.B）Prose work, the major achievement of which is Walter Scott's historical novels like Waverley, Ivanhoe&The Heart ofMidlothian, and Jane Austin's family novels like Pride &Prejudice &Sense &Sensibility.

6）The Victorian Period（1837—1901）, when Britain boasted a global empire where “the sun never sets” and English literature flourished in every possible aspect.

A）In essays there are Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution &Past and Present, Thomas B.Macaulay's The History of England from James II, John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism &On Women, John Ruskin's Modern Painters&The Stones ofVenice, Mathew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy&Literature and Science, and Thomas Henry Huxley's Science and Culture, etc.

B）The novels enjoy another renaissance and include such great works as Charles Dickens's David Copperfield, Great Expectations &A Tale of Two Cities etc., William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair, George Eliot's Adam Bede, Silas Marner&The Mill on the Floss, the Brontes's novels such as Charlotte's Jane Eyre, Emily's Wuthering Heights and Anne's Agnes Gray, Thomas Hardy's Tess ofD'Urbervilles &Jude the Obscure, Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island&Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde, H.Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines &Allan Quatermain, and Samuel Butler's Erewhon &The Way of All Flesh.

C）In poetry there are such well-reputed poets and poems as Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, Alfred Lord Tennyson's Ulysses（dramatic monologue）and other poems, Robert Browning's My Last Duchess（dramatic monologue）, William Morris' The Earthly Paradise &News from Erehwon, Dante Gabriel Rossetti &Cristina Rossetti's poems of dream, love and beauty, Thomas Hardy's Wessex Poems &The Dynasts, and Algernon Charles Swinburne's The Garden ofProserpine etc.

D）Dramatic masterpieces include Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Ernest and George Bernard Shaw's Mrs.Warren's Profession, The Widower's Property, Major Babara, Pygmalion and The Bleak House etc.

7）The Twentieth Century, which may be further divided into two ages around the end of the Second World War, i.e.modernist and post-modernist literature.

A）Before World War II or the first half of the century saw great achievement in drama, prose as well as in poetry.Great dramatic work includes John Galsworthy's The Silver Box trilogy, John Millington Synge's Riders to the Sea, and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godet&Endgame.Major novelists and novels include Rudyard Kipling's（the first British Nobel prize winner）Kim &The Jungle Book, Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, Nostromo, Heart ofDarkness &The Secret Agent, Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga, Arnold Bennett's Old Wives' Tale, David H.Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love &Lady Chatterlery's Lover, E.M.Forster's A Passage to India &Howards End, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, H.G.Wells' Tono-Boungay &Time Machine, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Waves &Mrs.Dalloway, James Joyce's The Dubliners, Ulysses &Finnegan's Wake, Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies, Decline and Fall, A Handful ofDust &Brideshead Revisited, Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, The Heart ofthe Matter, Brighton Rock &The Third Man, J.B.Priestley's Good Companions, Agathe Christie's detective stories like Death on the Nile &Murder in the Orient Express, Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes series, and Robert Graves'I, Claudius &Count Belisaurius.Major poets and poetic works include A.E.Houseman, Rupert Brooke, Rudyard Kipling, Siegfried Sassoon, John Masefield, Dylan Thomas, Stephen Spender, and most notably W.H.Auden's Petition, In Praise of Limestone &The Shield of Achillies，William Butler Yeats'The Lake Isle of Innisfree, The Wild Swan at Coole, Sailing to Byzantium &The Winding Stair etc.and T.S.Eliot's Prufrock and Other Observations, The Waste Land, Four Quartets &The Hollow Men etc.

B）After World War II or the second half and the turn of the century saw greater achievements in almost every genre of literature.Major novelists and novels in this period include George Orwell's Animal Farm &Nineteen Eighty Four, William Golding's Lord of Flies &Darkness Visible, Angus Wilson's Anglo-Saxon Attitudes &As If By Magic, and “Angry Young Men” writers of Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim and John Wain's short stories, together with John Fowels' The Collector &The French Lieutenant's Woman, Muriel Sarah Spark's The Prime ofMiss Jean Brodie &Loitering with Intent, Doris Lessing's The Grass is Singing, Children ofthe Violence &The Golden Notebook and science fiction, Iris Murdoch's Under the Net, The Black Prince &The Sea, the Sea, Martin Amis' Money: A Suicide Note&Time's Arrow, David Lodge's Small World &Changing Places, Graham Swift's Waterland and Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot, A.S.Byatt's Possession and Margaret Drabble's The Ice Age, V.S. Naipaul's Miguel Street, A House for Mr.Biswas, A Bend in the River, A Way in the World &The Enigma of Arrival, Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, Shame, Midnight's Children &East, West, Kazuo Ishiguro's A Pale View ofHills, An Artist ofthe Floating World, The Remains ofthe Days, The Unconsoled, When We Were Orphans&Never Let Me Go, and Timothy Mo's The Monkey King, Sour Sweet &An Insular Possession.

Major playwrights and dramatic work include Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot &Endgame（Theatre of Absurdity）, John Osborne's Looking Back in Anger（1956, a realist play）, Arnold Weskers Chiken Soup with Barley, Harold Pinter's “comedies of menace” such as Chandeliers and Shadows（1950）, Room（1957）, The Dumb Waiter（1957）, Homecoming（1964）, Tea Party（1965）, Old Times（1971）, Mountain Language（1988）, Moonlight（1993）, God Bless America（2003）&Special Relationship（2004）—“one way of looking at Pinter's plays is to say that they are dramatic stratagems that uncover nakedness”, Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildensterm Are Dead（1967）, The Real Inspector Hound（1968）&Indian Ink（1993）, and Peter Shaffer's Amadeu's（a musical“上帝的宠儿”）.Major poets and poetic work include Hugh MacDiarmid's A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, Robert Gravis, Louis MacNeice, Edith Sitwell, Philip Larkin's Church Song, Ted Hughes' The Seven Sorrows, Seamus Heaney Station Island and other poems.

英国（包括1948年前的爱尔兰）文学是生活在欧洲西部不列颠群岛上的居民在漫长的历史发展进程中所创造的文化与文明之精华，也是世界文学宝库之中一颗璀璨耀眼的明珠。迄今为止，已有15位英国（包括爱尔兰）作家获得了诺贝尔文学奖，他们分别是：R.Kipling（1907）, W.B.Yeats（1923）, G.Bernard Shaw（1925）, John Galsworthy（1932）, T.S.Eliot（1948）, Bertrand A.W.Russell（1950）, Winston Churchill（1953）, Samuel Becket（1969）, Elias Canetti（1981, novelist and dramatist mainly using the German language）, William Golding（1983）, Seamus Heaney（1995）, V.S.Naipaul（2001）, Harold Pinter（2005）, Doris Lessing（2007）和Kazuo Ishiguro（2017）.