English Literature: A Very Short Introduction

It is difficult to write a very short introduction to a subject as vast as English literature, but few people are better qualified to do so than Bate, an eminent Shakespearean and the biographer of John Clare. This book is a little classic.

He enters the subject, not conventionally by starting with Beowulf and marching straight through to the moderns, but in the way we all enter it — as child readers. The first chapter homes in on Peter Rabbit and school stories, and then, as it were, we grow up.

There are discussions of Celts and Anglo-Saxons, Shakespeare and the King James Bible, and how all writers are affected by the traditions they inherit.

There are chapters on poetry and the novel (which means ‘something new’).

And finally he discusses the meaning of ‘Englishness’ and the many modern authors who have emerged from the old Empire. It is fascinating to read his notes on the 13 British men and one woman who have won the Nobel Prize for literature. Only three of them could be described as trueborn English.

A brilliant, and not so very short, introduction.