English Literature: A Very Short Introduction 1st Edition

Author Jonathan Bate takes the reader on a tour of the realm of English Literature. Along the way, he samples authors and literary genres, while carefully avoiding taking sides. He even dares to wrestle with the larger problem of definition (does English Lit include Irish, Welsh, and Scottish authors too?). It may be that he and the reader will just have to muddle through and enjoy the journey.At only 166 pages of text, this book can only be the briefest of surveys. The author has done his due diligence; the book is very readable. Well recommended, even if your last encounter was high school's English Lit.

Sir Jonathan is brilliant. Do yourself a favor: read everything he has published, and take his classes on futurelearn.com

The author assumes a knowledge of English literature, while summarizing periods of English literature.I am not sure who the audience is supposed to be. It is interesting reading but not what I expected.

fast shipping, great deal, item as described

Not an introduction. Great for someone with a background who needs or wants to brush up.

Excellent Work!

Very helpful and clear.

There's a lot of ground to cover in Eng Lit: 'sweeping across two millennia and every literary genre', as the inside flap promises. For a while, it seems as though the need to cram everything in might be the book's undoing - even though at 167pp it's one of the longer Shorts. Such worries are premature: analysis comfortably outweighs potted literary history.For me, it isn't the chapter on Shakespeare (Bate's specialism) that forms the book's highlight, but the last two, on the novel and on multicultural English. In the first of these, the development of the 'stream of consciousness' in such novels as Ulysses and Orlando is considered in relation to recent work in brain science. As with The Genius of Shakespeare, therefore, Bate shows a willingness to look beyond the confines of his own subject in order to understand it more fully. And in his concluding chapter, entitled The Englishness of English Literature?, Bate examines a diversity that has characterised the literature of the British Isles since even the pre-modern, pre-mass immigration era, with its sharp political, religious and social divisions.Witty as well as thought-provoking, the book is itself literary (I noted homage to EM Forster and Blake, and doubtless missed other instances) in a way that will probably appeal to those who are 'in' without annoying those who aren't. It is also wide-ranging, up to date and perceptive (Coleridge and Hazlitt are seen as the originators of opposing 'formalist' and 'historicist' schools of criticism). With so much to commend it, we might even excuse its rather sniffy attitude to the on-line review - the 'free-for-all ... in which everyone is a critic'. Bate does, after all, concede that such electronic chat may just be an extension of the democratisation that began in the C18 coffee house.Ultimately, therefore, one of the more inspired and inspiring VSIs.