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The Short Oxford History of English Literature
Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, Andrew Sanders notes, took shape by accident. The first writer entombed there (long before it was known by today's name) was Geoffrey Chaucer--so honored not for his works, but because he had lived nearby and had distant connections to the crown. But
Chaucer was lionized by future generations, especially by Edmund Spenser, who was the next poet to take his place in the Corner. Over time, more men of letters followed (including Ben Jonson, John Dryden, and Charles Dickens), as England turned this corner of the Abbey into a tribute to its
writers. The growth of Poets' Corner, Sanders writes, mirrors the conscious efforts of writers to create the British literary tradition--the physical expression of the emerging canon.
In The Short Oxford History of English Literature , Sanders conducts us on a tour through the living past behind the stone effigies of Poets' Corner--capturing the vast history of the literature of the British isles in a single, fascinating narrative. Starting with the early Anglo-Saxon
period, he ranges right up to the present, with individual chapters on Old and Middle English literature, the Renaissance, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Romantics, Victorian and Edwardian Literature, Modernism, and post-war writing. Throughout, the author combines concise analyses
of individual works and authors with an overarching sense of how they interacted in a single literary tradition. The dramas of Shakespeare, for example, have long since eclipsed those of his contemporaries Kyd and Marlowe; but Sanders reminds us of the "symbiotic relationship" between the Bard and
his rivals, especially Marlowe. He goes on to crisply assess the interaction of Shakespeare's plays with the politics and emerging nationalism of the period. Sanders applies this sensitivity to the relationship between literature and larger social issues elsewhere as well; after providing an
outstanding critical examination of Dickens's novels, he firmly sets them in the context of the "Condition of England" fiction so popular in the nineteenth century, including the works of such lesser lights as Harriet Martineau and Charles Kingsley. Sanders ranges far beyond the boundaries of
England, examining the impact of Scottish writers and philosophers, the rich traditions of Irish literature, and the works of Welsh authors as well. And he brings his analysis up to the post-modern present, looking at such writers as Seamus Heaney and Angela Carter.
The literature of Britain has long since become the heritage of the world--an inspiration to literary traditions in America and elsewhere, and a continuing source of pleasure. The Short Oxford History of English Literature provides a remarkably concise account of this rich past, offering food
for thought and an even deeper enjoyment of the great works.
Chaucer was lionized by future generations, especially by Edmund Spenser, who was the next poet to take his place in the Corner. Over time, more men of letters followed (including Ben Jonson, John Dryden, and Charles Dickens), as England turned this corner of the Abbey into a tribute to its
writers. The growth of Poets' Corner, Sanders writes, mirrors the conscious efforts of writers to create the British literary tradition--the physical expression of the emerging canon.
In The Short Oxford History of English Literature , Sanders conducts us on a tour through the living past behind the stone effigies of Poets' Corner--capturing the vast history of the literature of the British isles in a single, fascinating narrative. Starting with the early Anglo-Saxon
period, he ranges right up to the present, with individual chapters on Old and Middle English literature, the Renaissance, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Romantics, Victorian and Edwardian Literature, Modernism, and post-war writing. Throughout, the author combines concise analyses
of individual works and authors with an overarching sense of how they interacted in a single literary tradition. The dramas of Shakespeare, for example, have long since eclipsed those of his contemporaries Kyd and Marlowe; but Sanders reminds us of the "symbiotic relationship" between the Bard and
his rivals, especially Marlowe. He goes on to crisply assess the interaction of Shakespeare's plays with the politics and emerging nationalism of the period. Sanders applies this sensitivity to the relationship between literature and larger social issues elsewhere as well; after providing an
outstanding critical examination of Dickens's novels, he firmly sets them in the context of the "Condition of England" fiction so popular in the nineteenth century, including the works of such lesser lights as Harriet Martineau and Charles Kingsley. Sanders ranges far beyond the boundaries of
England, examining the impact of Scottish writers and philosophers, the rich traditions of Irish literature, and the works of Welsh authors as well. And he brings his analysis up to the post-modern present, looking at such writers as Seamus Heaney and Angela Carter.
The literature of Britain has long since become the heritage of the world--an inspiration to literary traditions in America and elsewhere, and a continuing source of pleasure. The Short Oxford History of English Literature provides a remarkably concise account of this rich past, offering food
for thought and an even deeper enjoyment of the great works.
680 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
53 people are currently reading
594 people want to read
About the author
Andrew Sanders
111 books8 followersAbu Muahmmad Ibraheem Sanders (Andrew Sanders) is a Muslim convert who embraced Islam in 2002.
-From: Lumatul I'tiqad, About translator, page 18.
-From: Lumatul I'tiqad, About translator, page 18.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
May 28, 2016
This edition has over seven hundred pages so I wouldn't exactly call it short. The writing style is quite dry (and that is understandable) which makes it ok for academic reading but not so delightful for general reading. The history is covered chronologically and adequately with each chapter being divided into sub heads with poetry, drama or prose fiction being addressed separately. Major writers get substantial attention with a minimum of two pages dedicated to each of them. Almost eight pages are dedicated to Shakespeare. Perhaps the word short appears in the title because it is difficult to comprehensively discuss all the writers and their works in seven hundred pages. All in all a good history. Since I haven't read any other book on history of English literature so I find it difficult to compare and accord an appropriate ranking.
Still 3.5 stars for my experience with it.
Still 3.5 stars for my experience with it.
November 14, 2011
AMAZING book if you are studying English Literature.
April 23, 2012
I'm not exactly sure who the intended audience of this book is. It's too dense and precise for casual cover-to-cover reading and yet far too perfunctory for any significant research or critical insight. The greatest masterpieces of the canon receive, at most, a paragraph or two, while even a single esoteric poem might receive two or three long sentences. Some of the historical and cultural explanations are helpful, and the thing as a whole is certainly intelligent and readable, but it took me nine weeks to read the first four hundred pages and when the library renewals ran out I just didn't feel the need to finish the remaining two hundred and fifty.
Did not finish
August 18, 2020College reads: I only read chapters/sections relevant to my studies, hence the dnf (The Literature of the Romantic Period 1780-1830)
February 1, 2021
A great reference book, been used many times over the years. It would also make a great read if you are interested in the history of literature.
It might not have the modern modern stuff ( well you couldn't lift it then), but I'd say comes up to around the 50's ish or there are abouts.
if you are starting to study anything to do anything to with literature and you come across a copy in a little bookshop, then grab it!! Comes up with some great cross referencing.
It might not have the modern modern stuff ( well you couldn't lift it then), but I'd say comes up to around the 50's ish or there are abouts.
if you are starting to study anything to do anything to with literature and you come across a copy in a little bookshop, then grab it!! Comes up with some great cross referencing.
July 28, 2018
Promising, but let down by uneven coverage. The Importance of Being Earnest is given a cursory mention, but the plays of Sheridan are treated to a fuller and more helpful analysis. Sanders's feminist digest of Middlemarch is a short paragraph, but Fielding's novels are given a more comprehensive treatment.
At its best, this offers decent critical overviews – what it really needed was more space. Richard Gray's A History of American Literature is one to admire and emulate for breadth and depth of scope.
At its best, this offers decent critical overviews – what it really needed was more space. Richard Gray's A History of American Literature is one to admire and emulate for breadth and depth of scope.
December 15, 2025
There is a certain kind of ambition that rarely announces itself as ambition. It presents, instead, as composure: a steady voice, a clean chronological spine, a dependable willingness to move on before the reader has quite finished lingering. A one-volume history of English literature cannot afford luxuriance. It must be brisk without becoming breathless, judicious without lapsing into mere list-making, and capacious without pretending it can be complete. The achievement of Andrew Sanders’s “The Short Oxford History of English Literature” is that it largely meets those impossible demands by turning them into a style – a tone of lucid authority that implies, at every turn, an argument about what matters, even when it rarely pauses to quarrel in public.
The book’s governing premise is disarmingly simple: English literature is a long conversation conducted under changing historical pressure. “English” itself is not treated as a stable essence but as a set of institutions, accents, translations, conquests, partitions, and inheritances. Sanders begins, appropriately, with the problem of survival: Old English writing as something rescued from the accidents of manuscript culture and the interruptions of violence. From the start, the reader is invited to hear literature as both sound and artifact: oral performance hardening into copied texts, heroic idioms being repurposed for Christian ends, the hall and the cloister sharing more traffic than a modern syllabus sometimes admits. The discussion of “Beowulf” and the elegies (“The Wanderer”, “The Seafarer”, “The Wife’s Lament”) sets a pattern that recurs throughout the volume: a compact account of social world and imaginative world, followed by a quick, telling gesture toward form – alliteration, voice, the pressure of fate and providence, the moral weather of exile. The prose doesn’t sentimentalize the distance. It makes the distance legible.
From there, the narrative of English literature becomes, for a long stretch, a narrative of multilingual England. The post-Conquest period is rendered as a series of crossings: Latin learning, French courtly culture, and the slow, stubborn enlargement of the vernacular’s prestige. Sanders is particularly good at showing how “English literature” is not born whole but assembled – romance imported, refitted, naturalized; “courtly love” migrating from continental codes into English plots; Arthurian matter working as both fantasy and national myth. In this telling, the Middle Ages are not a dim prelude but a field of experiments: the alliterative revival, the distinct energies of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, the visionary and social ferocity of “Piers Plowman”, Chaucer’s balancing of moral architecture and worldly comedy. It’s also, crucially, an age of institutions: monasteries and universities, civic life and devotional life, drama as communal pedagogy. Sanders’s attention to the theatre – cycles and moralities, “Everyman” and its kin – keeps the period from narrowing into the familiar handful of “major authors.”
What distinguishes the best literary histories is not simply inclusion but calibration: the sense that a work’s aesthetic life is inseparable from its historical conditions, and yet not reducible to them. Sanders’s chapters on Renaissance and Reformation, for instance, move with a sure awareness that the English Bible, the “Book of Common Prayer”, and the complicated cultural machinery of the Tudor state are not merely background but sources of English cadence and rhetorical habit. Here the book is at its most persuasive about how prose becomes a national instrument. Translation, in this account, is both spiritual event and stylistic event: Tyndale’s phrasing and Cranmer’s rhythms becoming part of the language’s public bloodstream. Literary change is not just “new forms” arriving; it is new kinds of authority claiming the right to speak.
And yet Sanders is no simple celebrant of national consolidation. One of the book’s recurrent strengths is its willingness to point out the costs of cultural projects that later generations inherit as “greatness.” Spenser’s imperial imagination, for example, does not pass as harmless allegory. The court masque is not treated as innocent entertainment but as theatre in service of ordained power. The Restoration’s glitter does not obscure the bruised political theology beneath it. If the book has a quiet thesis, it might be that literature is often at its most formally inventive when history forces writers to negotiate contradictions they cannot resolve: liberty and coercion, conscience and spectacle, private desire and public obligation, order and fracture.
This is why the seventeenth century, in Sanders’s handling, feels less like a tidy sequence of “metaphysical poets” and “Puritans” than an arena of argument. The pivot from revolutionary prose to Milton’s epic, from Hobbes’s grim absolutism to the diary’s intimate record, from Bunyan’s portable allegory to the Royal Society’s new prose ideal, is arranged so that the reader senses not mere variety but a culture searching for stabilizers. The book’s account of “Paradise Lost” is especially attentive to the poem’s refusal of easy heroic triumph – epic recast as loss, disobedience, and the slow education of the human. It is characteristic of Sanders that he rarely overpraises in a gush; he prefers to let a work’s structural audacity speak through measured description.
From the eighteenth century onward, Sanders’s narrative becomes, necessarily, a story of expanding readerships, multiplying print forms, and the professionalization of literary life. Here the book’s chief gift is its ability to compress without turning writers into cardboard. Swift is not merely “a satirist” but an expert in masks and moral shock. Pope’s brilliance is described as both refinement and weapon. The periodical essay, the theatre, and the novel are treated as parts of a single ecosystem: an emergent public sphere learning how to argue, laugh, and consume. The “rise of the novel” is handled with a sensible caution that feels increasingly important: a reminder that literary histories love origin myths more than literature itself does. Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne – these are presented as a rapid sequence of formal improvisations, as if the genre discovers, almost at once, how unstable it can be. “Tristram Shandy”, in particular, becomes a sign that the eighteenth century’s supposedly orderly temperament includes an appetite for chaos and reflexive play.
The Romantic chapter is strongest where it resists the sentimental museum version of Romanticism. The book is alive to the French Revolution’s aftershocks and the consequent anxieties about rights, authority, and the crowd. It is also attentive to the ways “anti-rational” modes – Gothic, ruin, terror and horror – function as critiques of complacent progress rather than mere entertainment. At the same time, Sanders does not allow “Romanticism” to become a monopoly held by poets alone. Austen’s “admirable copy of life” is treated as a serious alternative to visionary transcendence, not a lesser art. Byron’s talkative modern narrator, Shelley’s prophetic insistence on poetry’s social function, Keats’s intricate negotiations with transience and art’s cold durability – these are read with a calm fidelity to their distinct temperaments. Sanders writes about “the imagination” without inflating it into mysticism; he keeps returning, instead, to the practical question of what poetry and fiction are trying to do in an age that is remaking its own sense of experience.
When the book reaches the Victorian period, it becomes a study in pressure systems. “Progress” is not treated as a triumphal march but as a condition that generates both confidence and dread. The “Condition of England” novel, the industrial city, the moral intensity of criticism – all are presented as evidence that literature is being asked to act as social diagnosis. Dickens’s London is not simply scenery but an engine. Tennyson’s grief is not simply personal but emblematic of a culture trying to reconcile religious inheritance with scientific and historical doubt. Browning’s dramatic monologue becomes a method for distributing truth among competing voices, a form suited to an era skeptical of single, stable perspectives. Eliot’s moral seriousness is treated not as piety but as intellectual urgency – the novel as a machine for sympathy, judgement, and the slow recognition of consequences.
One of Sanders’s most valuable instincts is to treat criticism as literature’s equal partner, not its servant. Ruskin and Arnold do not appear as footnotes; they appear as makers of Victorian cultural conscience – sometimes brilliant, sometimes anxious, always consequential. This emphasis pays dividends later, as the book moves into the late Victorian and Edwardian period, where “earnestness” itself becomes a subject to be mocked, revised, or mourned. Wilde’s comedy of surfaces, Hardy’s tragic dislocation and dense allusiveness, the hard urban realism of Gissing, the imperial confidence of Kipling set against Conrad’s corrosive exposures – these are arranged less as a parade of names than as a debate about what modernity feels like when it begins to ache.
The modernist chapter is judicious in its breadth. It acknowledges the gravitational pull of Joyce and Woolf without letting them swallow the entire period. It makes room for camp provocation, for satirical comedy, for dystopian unease. It reminds the reader that “modernism” is not a single aesthetic but a cluster of strategies – fragmentation, collage, interiority, iconoclasm – and that there were always alternatives: writers who chose clarity, satire, or narrative propulsion over formal difficulty, and who nonetheless register the inter-war world’s peculiar tensions. The section on the 1930s and political commitment is especially effective at conveying how literature can become a barometer of ideological weather: the Spanish Civil War, communism, the pressure to “bear witness,” the friction between private art and public urgency.
Finally, the post-war and post-modern chapter gives the book its closing mood: ruins as both literal landscape and metaphorical condition. The turn toward plainer diction and anti-elitist suspicion in post-war poetry, the bleak wit and minimalism of Beckett’s theatre, the allegorical abrasiveness of “Lord of the Flies”, the fractured consciousness of “The Golden Notebook”, the later swell of postcolonial and post-imperial narratives – all are treated as evidence that English literature after 1945 is both haunted by history and newly global in its imaginative reach. Sanders is alert to the ways “English literature” becomes, increasingly, a literature written in English – a subtle but decisive shift in what the category can mean.
If there is a limitation to the book, it is the limitation that defines the genre. Compression is both its method and its hazard. The briskness that makes the history readable can, at times, smooth over the very quarrels that would complicate a student’s sense of the canon: the exclusions that built it, the institutional biases that protected it, the uneven distribution of space between periods, the ways some writers become “representative” by longstanding habit rather than fresh argument. The late twentieth century, in particular, can feel like a swift survey of proliferating scenes – inevitable, perhaps, given the sheer volume of contemporary production, but still capable of leaving the reader hungry for a stronger sense of what is being valued and why. Sanders’s tone – admirably measured – also means that moments of overt interpretive risk are relatively rare. The book is more cartographer than polemicist, more guide than provocateur.
Yet this is also why it works. Literary histories often fail when they confuse personality for insight, or when they drown the reader in the bibliographic sea they have crossed. Sanders’s virtues are, in the best sense, classical: proportion, clarity, and an underlying confidence that literature is worth the discipline of attention. He writes as if chronology is not a prison but a way of seeing connections – the recurrence of certain moral questions, the migration of forms, the reappearance of old arguments under new historical names. The result is a book that can serve both as introduction and as return-point: something a reader consults, then argues with, then consults again.
My rating: 86/100.
The book’s governing premise is disarmingly simple: English literature is a long conversation conducted under changing historical pressure. “English” itself is not treated as a stable essence but as a set of institutions, accents, translations, conquests, partitions, and inheritances. Sanders begins, appropriately, with the problem of survival: Old English writing as something rescued from the accidents of manuscript culture and the interruptions of violence. From the start, the reader is invited to hear literature as both sound and artifact: oral performance hardening into copied texts, heroic idioms being repurposed for Christian ends, the hall and the cloister sharing more traffic than a modern syllabus sometimes admits. The discussion of “Beowulf” and the elegies (“The Wanderer”, “The Seafarer”, “The Wife’s Lament”) sets a pattern that recurs throughout the volume: a compact account of social world and imaginative world, followed by a quick, telling gesture toward form – alliteration, voice, the pressure of fate and providence, the moral weather of exile. The prose doesn’t sentimentalize the distance. It makes the distance legible.
From there, the narrative of English literature becomes, for a long stretch, a narrative of multilingual England. The post-Conquest period is rendered as a series of crossings: Latin learning, French courtly culture, and the slow, stubborn enlargement of the vernacular’s prestige. Sanders is particularly good at showing how “English literature” is not born whole but assembled – romance imported, refitted, naturalized; “courtly love” migrating from continental codes into English plots; Arthurian matter working as both fantasy and national myth. In this telling, the Middle Ages are not a dim prelude but a field of experiments: the alliterative revival, the distinct energies of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, the visionary and social ferocity of “Piers Plowman”, Chaucer’s balancing of moral architecture and worldly comedy. It’s also, crucially, an age of institutions: monasteries and universities, civic life and devotional life, drama as communal pedagogy. Sanders’s attention to the theatre – cycles and moralities, “Everyman” and its kin – keeps the period from narrowing into the familiar handful of “major authors.”
What distinguishes the best literary histories is not simply inclusion but calibration: the sense that a work’s aesthetic life is inseparable from its historical conditions, and yet not reducible to them. Sanders’s chapters on Renaissance and Reformation, for instance, move with a sure awareness that the English Bible, the “Book of Common Prayer”, and the complicated cultural machinery of the Tudor state are not merely background but sources of English cadence and rhetorical habit. Here the book is at its most persuasive about how prose becomes a national instrument. Translation, in this account, is both spiritual event and stylistic event: Tyndale’s phrasing and Cranmer’s rhythms becoming part of the language’s public bloodstream. Literary change is not just “new forms” arriving; it is new kinds of authority claiming the right to speak.
And yet Sanders is no simple celebrant of national consolidation. One of the book’s recurrent strengths is its willingness to point out the costs of cultural projects that later generations inherit as “greatness.” Spenser’s imperial imagination, for example, does not pass as harmless allegory. The court masque is not treated as innocent entertainment but as theatre in service of ordained power. The Restoration’s glitter does not obscure the bruised political theology beneath it. If the book has a quiet thesis, it might be that literature is often at its most formally inventive when history forces writers to negotiate contradictions they cannot resolve: liberty and coercion, conscience and spectacle, private desire and public obligation, order and fracture.
This is why the seventeenth century, in Sanders’s handling, feels less like a tidy sequence of “metaphysical poets” and “Puritans” than an arena of argument. The pivot from revolutionary prose to Milton’s epic, from Hobbes’s grim absolutism to the diary’s intimate record, from Bunyan’s portable allegory to the Royal Society’s new prose ideal, is arranged so that the reader senses not mere variety but a culture searching for stabilizers. The book’s account of “Paradise Lost” is especially attentive to the poem’s refusal of easy heroic triumph – epic recast as loss, disobedience, and the slow education of the human. It is characteristic of Sanders that he rarely overpraises in a gush; he prefers to let a work’s structural audacity speak through measured description.
From the eighteenth century onward, Sanders’s narrative becomes, necessarily, a story of expanding readerships, multiplying print forms, and the professionalization of literary life. Here the book’s chief gift is its ability to compress without turning writers into cardboard. Swift is not merely “a satirist” but an expert in masks and moral shock. Pope’s brilliance is described as both refinement and weapon. The periodical essay, the theatre, and the novel are treated as parts of a single ecosystem: an emergent public sphere learning how to argue, laugh, and consume. The “rise of the novel” is handled with a sensible caution that feels increasingly important: a reminder that literary histories love origin myths more than literature itself does. Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne – these are presented as a rapid sequence of formal improvisations, as if the genre discovers, almost at once, how unstable it can be. “Tristram Shandy”, in particular, becomes a sign that the eighteenth century’s supposedly orderly temperament includes an appetite for chaos and reflexive play.
The Romantic chapter is strongest where it resists the sentimental museum version of Romanticism. The book is alive to the French Revolution’s aftershocks and the consequent anxieties about rights, authority, and the crowd. It is also attentive to the ways “anti-rational” modes – Gothic, ruin, terror and horror – function as critiques of complacent progress rather than mere entertainment. At the same time, Sanders does not allow “Romanticism” to become a monopoly held by poets alone. Austen’s “admirable copy of life” is treated as a serious alternative to visionary transcendence, not a lesser art. Byron’s talkative modern narrator, Shelley’s prophetic insistence on poetry’s social function, Keats’s intricate negotiations with transience and art’s cold durability – these are read with a calm fidelity to their distinct temperaments. Sanders writes about “the imagination” without inflating it into mysticism; he keeps returning, instead, to the practical question of what poetry and fiction are trying to do in an age that is remaking its own sense of experience.
When the book reaches the Victorian period, it becomes a study in pressure systems. “Progress” is not treated as a triumphal march but as a condition that generates both confidence and dread. The “Condition of England” novel, the industrial city, the moral intensity of criticism – all are presented as evidence that literature is being asked to act as social diagnosis. Dickens’s London is not simply scenery but an engine. Tennyson’s grief is not simply personal but emblematic of a culture trying to reconcile religious inheritance with scientific and historical doubt. Browning’s dramatic monologue becomes a method for distributing truth among competing voices, a form suited to an era skeptical of single, stable perspectives. Eliot’s moral seriousness is treated not as piety but as intellectual urgency – the novel as a machine for sympathy, judgement, and the slow recognition of consequences.
One of Sanders’s most valuable instincts is to treat criticism as literature’s equal partner, not its servant. Ruskin and Arnold do not appear as footnotes; they appear as makers of Victorian cultural conscience – sometimes brilliant, sometimes anxious, always consequential. This emphasis pays dividends later, as the book moves into the late Victorian and Edwardian period, where “earnestness” itself becomes a subject to be mocked, revised, or mourned. Wilde’s comedy of surfaces, Hardy’s tragic dislocation and dense allusiveness, the hard urban realism of Gissing, the imperial confidence of Kipling set against Conrad’s corrosive exposures – these are arranged less as a parade of names than as a debate about what modernity feels like when it begins to ache.
The modernist chapter is judicious in its breadth. It acknowledges the gravitational pull of Joyce and Woolf without letting them swallow the entire period. It makes room for camp provocation, for satirical comedy, for dystopian unease. It reminds the reader that “modernism” is not a single aesthetic but a cluster of strategies – fragmentation, collage, interiority, iconoclasm – and that there were always alternatives: writers who chose clarity, satire, or narrative propulsion over formal difficulty, and who nonetheless register the inter-war world’s peculiar tensions. The section on the 1930s and political commitment is especially effective at conveying how literature can become a barometer of ideological weather: the Spanish Civil War, communism, the pressure to “bear witness,” the friction between private art and public urgency.
Finally, the post-war and post-modern chapter gives the book its closing mood: ruins as both literal landscape and metaphorical condition. The turn toward plainer diction and anti-elitist suspicion in post-war poetry, the bleak wit and minimalism of Beckett’s theatre, the allegorical abrasiveness of “Lord of the Flies”, the fractured consciousness of “The Golden Notebook”, the later swell of postcolonial and post-imperial narratives – all are treated as evidence that English literature after 1945 is both haunted by history and newly global in its imaginative reach. Sanders is alert to the ways “English literature” becomes, increasingly, a literature written in English – a subtle but decisive shift in what the category can mean.
If there is a limitation to the book, it is the limitation that defines the genre. Compression is both its method and its hazard. The briskness that makes the history readable can, at times, smooth over the very quarrels that would complicate a student’s sense of the canon: the exclusions that built it, the institutional biases that protected it, the uneven distribution of space between periods, the ways some writers become “representative” by longstanding habit rather than fresh argument. The late twentieth century, in particular, can feel like a swift survey of proliferating scenes – inevitable, perhaps, given the sheer volume of contemporary production, but still capable of leaving the reader hungry for a stronger sense of what is being valued and why. Sanders’s tone – admirably measured – also means that moments of overt interpretive risk are relatively rare. The book is more cartographer than polemicist, more guide than provocateur.
Yet this is also why it works. Literary histories often fail when they confuse personality for insight, or when they drown the reader in the bibliographic sea they have crossed. Sanders’s virtues are, in the best sense, classical: proportion, clarity, and an underlying confidence that literature is worth the discipline of attention. He writes as if chronology is not a prison but a way of seeing connections – the recurrence of certain moral questions, the migration of forms, the reappearance of old arguments under new historical names. The result is a book that can serve both as introduction and as return-point: something a reader consults, then argues with, then consults again.
My rating: 86/100.
Read
December 29, 2013I browsed through chapters 4-8 for a lit course. Frankly, this felt like a good book, but it never quite seemed to get to the core issues. It was just endless anecdotes and letters written by obscure writers. The worst feature is that there are no summaries after each chapter, so finding the important bits can be a challenge.
January 27, 2018
I've not read this from cover to cover, however, I purchased it some years ago whilst still at school and I've found it a very valuable resource from 'A' level through to my MA in English. Thoroughly recommendable. Very detailed and scholarly. A tough read as a sixth form student, but it stretch me somewhat.
December 9, 2021
2019: this book isn't short and, although it was "required" reading, i don't think it's suitable and comprehensible enough for someone who isn't already a bit well versed into english literary history.
only read chapters 7, 8, 9 & 10 for my english literature exam.
2021: read only ch. 3 for another english literature exam
only read chapters 7, 8, 9 & 10 for my english literature exam.
2021: read only ch. 3 for another english literature exam
July 21, 2018
Had to do it to myself. Curse NET.
October 10, 2024
I fucking hated this but at least I aced my exam, sooo.....
On a more serious note:
- my guy. a "short" history is not over 700 pages.
- you CANNOT sum up all English lit in one book!!! You CANNOT give me one measly paragraph on poets like Blake or two pages on Virginia Woolf!!!
Maybe useful for absolute newbies or if you want to revise your general knowledge of English lit, but awful if you're looking for an in depth analysis.
On a more serious note:
- my guy. a "short" history is not over 700 pages.
- you CANNOT sum up all English lit in one book!!! You CANNOT give me one measly paragraph on poets like Blake or two pages on Virginia Woolf!!!
Maybe useful for absolute newbies or if you want to revise your general knowledge of English lit, but awful if you're looking for an in depth analysis.
July 22, 2021
It doesn't explain anything, I had to look up everything he was talking about because he just assumes people know every single author or work he's talking about.
Read
September 13, 2016A good informative book. That is what it is supposed to be. As I said, I loved best the Elizabethan era.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews