From Chaucer to Tennyson / With Twenty-Nine Portraits and Selections from Thirty AuthorsHenry A. Beers
From Chaucer to Tennyson / With Twenty-Nine Portraits and Selections from Thirty Authors
Henry A. Beers
Essays
Book language: English
308 pages
From Chaucer to Tennyson is a brief survey of English literature, with twenty-nine portraits and selections from thirty authors. Henry A. Beers focuses on belles-lettres, moving from Chaucer through Shakespeare, Milton and later writers to Tennyson. It offers an accessible introduction to major English authors and their work.
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Text source: gutenberg.org · The work is in the public domain.
Opening of the book
Juliet Sutherland, Sjaani and PG Distributed Proofreaders 1894 William Shakespeare PREFACE. In so brief a history of so rich a literature, the problem is how to get room enough to give, not an adequate impression—that is impossible—but any impression at all of the subject. To do this I have crowded out every thing but belles lettres. Books in philosophy, history, science, etc., however important in the history of English thought, receive the merest incidental mention, or even no mention at all. Again, I have omitted the literature of the Anglo-Saxon period, which is written in a language nearly as hard for a modern Englishman to read as German is, or Dutch. Cædmon and Cynewulf are no more a part of English literature than Vergil and Horace are of Italian. I have also left out the vernacular literature of the Scotch before the time of Burns. Up to the date of the union Scotland was a separate kingdom, and its literature had a development independent of the English, though parallel with it. In dividing the history into periods, I have followed, with some modifications, the divisions made by Mr. Stopford Brooke in his excellent little Primer of English Literature. A short reading course is appended to each chapter. HENRY A. BEERS. CONTENTS.
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