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'Franco Marucci's History of English Literature is unique in its
field. There is no other book that combines such erudition and authority
in such a compact format. An indispensable work of reference.'
-- J. B. Bullen, Visiting Fellow, Kellogg College, Oxford
History of English Literature is a comprehensive, eight-volume survey
of English literature from the Middle Ages to the early twenty-first
century. This reference work provides insightful and often revisionary
readings of core texts in the English literary canon. Richly informative
analyses are framed by the biographical, historical and intellectual
context for each author.
Volume 6 addresses the literature of the 'Victorian twilight'
(1870-1901), which is marked by the shared theme, 'a world to be saved'.
In the wake of the Paris Commune of 1871, some British writers retreated
to the status quo and the desire for an ordered cosmos. Here works such
as the Idylls of the King, the later poems by Browning, the second
series of Essays in Criticism by Arnold, Fors Clavigera by Ruskin,
Trollope's novels of rural feudalism, the bold apologia of Judaism in
Eliot's Daniel Deronda, and Hardy's nostalgic novels on closed
communities are gathered together. The next literary stage of the
Victorian twilight here explored is that of the divided absorption of
'art for art's sake' - of Gautier, Baudelaire and Flaubert - by figures
such as Pater, Wilde, Swinburne and Hopkins. The twenty years 1901-1921
see the comeback of drama after a centuries-old lethargy, thanks to
Ireland's decisive contribution with Synge, Yeats and Shaw. And authors
like Kipling and Conrad bring new perspectives to Britain from abroad.
