English Literature: A Very Short Introduction

Citation

Bate, J. (2010). English Literature: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.

Chapter Summary

The book belongs to Oxford's Very Short Introductions series and runs to nine chapters, about 167 pages of text, followed by publisher's acknowledgements, a further reading list and an index. It is not a chronological history. The first four chapters ask what literature is, where English literature began and how it came to be studied; the remaining five take periods, poetry, drama and the novel in turn and end with the question of what is "English" about the subject. The publisher's description names Chaucer, Donne, Johnson, Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens and Woolf among the authors discussed, and mentions close readings that range from a scene in King Lear to a war poem by Carol Ann Duffy.

Chapter 1: Once upon a time

The book opens with children's literature. Using works such as Winnie-the-Pooh and The Tale of Peter Rabbit, it asks what lets a story keep its readers across generations, pointing to storytelling, character and the quality of the writing. The chapter suggests that literature inverts traditions as much as it inherits them, that its most interesting characters are often outsiders, and that reading is a solitary activity.

Chapter 2: What it is

The second chapter sets out competing answers to what English literature is: the books people live with and love, the books that invite feats of interpretation, or texts that use language cleverly and support many readings. It takes up the worry, common among book lovers meeting criticism for the first time, that analysis reduces literature to facts, and suggests instead that study can add layers to the pleasure of reading and rereading.

Chapter 3: When it began

Against an Anglocentric story, the chapter presents a long and mixed prehistory: Celtic bards, Julius Caesar, Cædmon, Alfred, the poem on the battle of Brunanburh, the Anglo-Saxons, the Normans and Chaucer are all candidates for a beginning. It gives the Bible a founding place because of its mixture of genres, and notes that hermeneutics, the art of interpretation on which literary study relies, was devised for reading scripture.

Chapter 4: The study of English

This chapter traces how English language and literature have been studied since the sixteenth century. It argues that detailed analysis of English texts began outside the education system, in the polite urban "public sphere" of the eighteenth century, and that establishing accurate texts has been central to English studies, since editorial choices are already interpretive ones.

Chapter 5: Periods and movements

Starting from the nineteenth-century belief that a society's culture can be traced through its literature, the chapter surveys the rise and fall of periods and movements. It questions the Romantic image of the solitary inspired writer, presenting Romantic solitude as often a poetic device, and compares Romanticism with Modernism as two revolutions in poetic language pursued collectively and announced in manifestos.

Chapter 6: Among the English poets

The poetry chapter begins from the fact that poetry was once oral and communal, recited by bards rather than read in silence. It looks at the history of poetry and the lives of poets, at public and private kinds of verse, at Romanticism's turn to the writer's own feelings (with Keats's odes as an example) and at the poetry of war and desire, arguing that the First World War poets shaped war poetry so decisively that later poets have struggled to move beyond them.

Chapter 7: Shakespeare and dramatic literature

The chapter asks whether Shakespeare should be seen or read. It weighs the complaint that drilling schoolchildren in his language for examinations spoils the plays, the fact that Shakespeare did not write for print, and the plays' long life as literature. It ends by suggesting that if English literature has a national characteristic, it lies in wit and humour, seen in its relative success in comedy.

Chapter 8: Aspects of the English novel

Beginning with romance, an ancient form represented by the many versions of the adventures of Apollonius, the chapter asks why popularity in the marketplace has so often meant low standing with the literary establishment. It then turns to the side of the novel that demands intelligence about individuals, their relationships and their social world, and to fiction's power to transport the reader.

Chapter 9: The Englishness of English Literature?

The final chapter tests the idea of a distinctive Englishness. It sets "English" against British, Scottish, Welsh and Irish, looks at the interplay between home and abroad, and identifies court against country and country against city as basic oppositions in the literature. It closes on English literature as the product of many peoples, from Celts, Romans and Normans to migrants, refugees and colonial subjects.

Key Concepts

What literature is and how it is studied (Chapters 1–4)

• Re-readability: the qualities of storytelling, character and style that let a work survive repeated reading.
• Definitions of literature: the competing views of literature as loved books, as material for interpretation, or as clever uses of language.
• Hermeneutics: the art of interpretation, first developed for reading the Bible.
• The public sphere: the eighteenth-century world of polite urban society in which close discussion of literature began.
• Editing as interpretation: the view that choices made in establishing a text shape how it is read.

Forms, periods and identity (Chapters 5–9)

• Periods and movements: the division of literary history into eras such as Romanticism and Modernism, and its limits.
• Public and private poetry: verse addressed to a community versus verse centred on the writer's own feelings.
• Page and stage: the tension between reading Shakespeare and seeing him performed.
• Romance and the novel: the old popular form behind the novel, and the gap between popularity and prestige.
• Englishness: the relation of English to British, Scottish, Welsh and Irish writing, and the oppositions of court and country, country and city.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Questions before chronology. Four of the nine chapters deal with what literature is, where English literature began and how it came to be studied. For a student starting a degree this frames the subject itself, not only its contents.
• An argued view of English literature's beginnings and identity. Chapters 3 and 9 work against an Anglocentric account, bringing in Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Norman and biblical sources at the start and migrant and colonial writers at the end.
• Attention to texts as objects. Chapter 4 treats editing and the transmission of texts as part of literary study, and the publisher's description mentions a series of examples of how texts change between writer and reader.
• Range of material. The examples run from children's books to Shakespeare and war poetry, and the publisher's description adds biography and the essay among the forms covered.

Limitations

• Not a survey. Because the book is organised by question and form, it cannot be used to learn the sequence of periods and authors; a narrative history or an anthology is needed for that.
• Selective coverage. With nine short chapters, whole areas receive only part of a chapter; the novel, for example, has one chapter, which begins with romance and the question of literary prestige.
• A personal choice of examples. The book follows the author's own selection of texts and arguments, so students should expect a point of view rather than a balanced map of the field.

Where It Fits in the Course

In the British literature course this is the shortest book and the one most concerned with what the subject is. It works best at the very start, before the historical surveys. Carter and McRae's Routledge History of Literature in English and Andrew Sanders's Short Oxford History of English Literature give the chronological narrative that Bate deliberately does not provide; read one of them alongside or after this book to place its examples in sequence. The Norton Anthology of English Literature supplies the primary texts that the chapters refer to.

Bate's final chapter, on court and country and country and city, makes a natural bridge to Raymond Williams's The Country and the City, a full critical study of one of those oppositions. The Norton Critical Editions of Middlemarch and Paradise Lost give complete texts with annotation and criticism, and Chapter 8's account of the novel's prestige and its demands on the reader is a useful preface to Eliot's novel.

How to Use This Book

The book suits first-year students of English and general readers who want to know what the discipline involves. It assumes no prior study. Read it straight through in order; the chapters are short, and the early ones prepare the questions that the later ones apply. Chapters 2 and 4 repay a second reading at the point in a course when critical method and textual editing come up.

Use it alongside an anthology: when a chapter names a poem, play or novel, read that text in full, then return to Bate's discussion. Keep a chronology from a narrative history at hand to place the authors he mentions. Treat Chapter 9 as a set of questions for later study, for example by tracing the country and city opposition through texts read in the course, and use the further reading list to choose where to go next.