Additional influence was exercised by deconstructionist analysis, based largely on the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida.įurther, Britain’s past imperial activities around the globe continued to inspire literature-in some cases wistful, in other cases hostile. Nor was attraction toward European intellectualism dead in the late 20th century, for by the mid-1980s the approach known as structuralism, a phenomenon predominantly French and German in origin, infused the very study of English literature itself in a host of published critical studies and university departments. The Decadents of the late 19th century and the Modernists of the early 20th looked to continental European individuals and movements for inspiration. All three of these impulses derived from a foreign source, namely the Mediterranean basin. During the Renaissance the renewed interest in Classical learning and values had an important effect on English literature, as on all the arts and ideas of Augustan literary propriety in the 18th century and reverence in the 19th century for a less specific, though still selectively viewed, Classical antiquity continued to shape the literature. From this combination emerged a flexible and subtle linguistic instrument exploited by Geoffrey Chaucer and brought to supreme application by William Shakespeare. Yet in the Middle Ages the Old English literature of the subjugated Saxons was leavened by the Latin and Anglo-Norman writings, eminently foreign in origin, in which the churchmen and the Norman conquerors expressed themselves. It can be argued that no single English novel attains the universality of the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace or the French writer Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. The major literatures written in English outside the British Isles are treated separately under American literature, Australian literature, Canadian literature, and New Zealand literature.Įnglish literature has sometimes been stigmatized as insular.
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