導讀： 簡介: The Short Oxford History of English Literature provides, in a single volume, a comprehensive beginner 簡介:


The Short Oxford History of English Literature provides, in a single volume, a comprehensive beginner's guide to the literature of the British Isles from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present day. Ranging from Beowolf to the post-modern fictions of Seamus Heaney and Angela Carter, separate chapters discuss Old and Middle English Literature, the Renaissance, Shakespeare, the 17th and 18th centuries, the Romantics, Victorian and Edwardian Literature, Modernism, and post-war writing. Examinations of key writers and works include Anselm, Chaucer, Spenser, Bunyan, Swift, Johnson, Dickens, and D. H. Lawrence; and are combined with analysis of the impact on literature of contemporay political, social, and economic developments.
Andrew Sanders is Professor of English Literature at Durham University, so you'd hope he might know what he's talking about. Fortunately, he does. This book is a triumph of top-flight scholarship married to the kind of compulsive readability that most novelists can only dream sweatily about.
The big risk with Shorter... books like this is either that they're not Shorter at all, or that they take their abbreviated nature a bit too seriously and end up reading like a beach romance. Sanders has avoided these pitfalls by producing a book that's satisfyingly weighty and detailed, but which never veers off into full-on literati pretension. His treatment of Chaucer, for instance, is a dream - real appreciation and explanation of the poet's impact on English literature, mitigated by a lightness of touch and refreshing appreciation for the naughty bits that still cause teenagers up and down the land to snigger behind their hands. Great stuff.
Aside from the purely historical, Sanders has the originality to kick things off with an interesting debate on what constitutes the Canon of English Literature. This, as any Lit student or teacher of 16 year olds knows, is a thorny issue: WHY do we have to learn Shakespeare? , WHO SAYS this is so great? etc etc. No assumptions are made, no diktats laid down. This same approach is used throughout: Sanders is lucid and enthusiastic about everything from Coleridge to Larkin without ever quite allowing himself the luxury of partiality.
Which is, of course, the exact and proper function of a book like this. It's digestible and fun, but also - and make no mistake about it - learned and scholarly. Anyone with even a passing interest in English Literature should read it immediately.