A Brief History of English Literature

John Peck and Martin Coyle, A Brief History of English Literature Second Edition (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013)

Reading more about English history and the history of English theatre over the Christmas break got me thinking about the history of English literature.  John Peck and Martin Coyle’s A Brief History of English Literature does exactly what it suggests, and in 300 pages tells the story of English literature from Beowulf to Jonathan Lewis’s play Our Boys (not quite such a neat ending as the first edition, which finished with Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf).  Much like the histories of theatre I’ve been reading, the central argument is that literature both shapes and is shaped by the broader history of England.  Despite the model provided by Chaucer in the late fourteenth century, for example, very little of note was published in the fifteenth century, during the chaos of the end of the One Hundred Years War and the Wars of the Roses. 

I very much enjoyed this book, and if not quite able to finish in a single sitting (one of the stated goals of the volume) I wasn’t far away.  The writing is lively, and there’s just the right level of details for an introductory volume.  The introduction discusses some of the challenges of writing a brief history of English literature, and it acknowledges the problem that most of the books included are from the traditional canon, while trying to discuss more contemporary approaches.  Its lack of any real focus of black and ethnic minority authors seems quite dated, despite the book being only seven or eight years old.  This is not a criticism of the authors, but more an observation about the pace at which we’ve started to discuss themes like ‘decolonizing the curriculum’.  Another challenge acknowledged by the introduction is that any historical narrative imposes a false sense of order onto the subject matter.  A big theme throughout the book is that literature is often a response to times of change and disruption, with some writers embracing this change and others reacting against it.  From the second world war onwards, the authors suggest that there is a fragmentation in English literature that means that its much more difficult, if not impossible, to identify trends.  The additional chapter written for the second edition on the most recent English literature, suggests that most of the real innovation now seems to be happening in US literature, although it offers a defence of English creativity.