Cassell's History Of English Literature

A new edition of Peter Conrad's fresh and original account of 1200 years of English literature, updated to embrace the literature of the close of the second millennium and the beginning of the third.

This is an updated edition of a classic and much-admired history of English Literature. In it Peter Conrad offers not an encyclopedic survey but a personal, chronological interpretation of the "history" through an emphasis on the continuity of major literary forms and on the ways in which major figures transform the tradition, which in turn is accommodated, reacted against or reinterpreted by later generations.

He attempts to characterise the literature as a whole, to suggest something of its Englishness. Above all, he emphasises that English literature represents the self-image of English people whose testament and inheritance it is.

Coverage includes Chaucer, Langland and the Treachery of the Text; Two Versions of Pastoral; The Sonnet; Spenser's Garden; Shakespeare; Restoration Comedy; Inventing the Novel; Gothic Follies; Wordsworth and Coleridge; Dickens and more.