The Short Oxford History of English Literature

Citation

Sanders, A. (2004). The Short Oxford History of English Literature (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press.

Chapter Summary

The book is a single-author history of the literature of the British Isles in English, from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present. First published in 1994 as a volume of about 680 pages, it has grown with revision; later editions run to more than 700 pages. The chapters are arranged chronologically, and the book opens with a framing chapter before the first period chapter.

Poets' Corners: The Development of a Canon of English Literature

The opening chapter starts from Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. Chaucer was the first writer buried there, for reasons that had little to do with his poetry, and Spenser, Jonson, Dryden and Dickens followed. Sanders reads the growth of the Corner as a mirror of writers' conscious efforts to create a British literary tradition, the physical form of an emerging canon.

Old English Literature and Medieval Literature 1066–1510

The first two period chapters cover Old English writing and the literature of the centuries after the Norman Conquest, to 1510. They cover works such as Beowulf and the writing associated with Cædmon, and they reach Chaucer's medieval English.

The Renaissance

The Renaissance chapter treats Shakespeare in relation to his contemporaries. Sanders stresses a "symbiotic relationship" between Shakespeare and rivals such as Marlowe and Kyd, and assesses how the plays interact with the politics and emerging nationalism of the period.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

The publisher describes the third edition as giving greater attention to women writers of these two centuries. The sections follow the literary and political changes of the period in one narrative line.

The Romantics, and Victorian and Edwardian literature

The Romantic period and the Victorian and Edwardian years each have their own chapters. For the Victorian novel, Sanders sets Dickens in the tradition of "Condition of England" fiction, alongside writers such as Harriet Martineau and Charles Kingsley.

Modernism and post-war writing

The final chapters treat Modernism and the literature after the Second World War, including recent writers such as Seamus Heaney and Angela Carter. The third edition adds a range of new entries on important contemporary authors.

Irish, Scottish and Welsh writing

The book gives full treatment to writing in English from Ireland, Scotland and Wales within the same chronological account. The author also considers the impact of Scottish writers and philosophers.

Key Concepts

Throughout the book

• Canon: the body of works that comes to be regarded as central, a theme introduced in the opening chapter through Poets' Corner.
• A single literary tradition: the book's governing idea that writers across periods and nations interact, so that works are read in relation to one another.
• Literature in its context: the effort to relate writers and genres to the political, social and intellectual developments of each period.
• Periodisation: the division into Old English, medieval, Renaissance, seventeenth and eighteenth century, Romantic, Victorian and Edwardian, Modernist and post-war.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• One continuous voice. A single author gives the whole history a consistent argument about how literature changed, with the "overarching sense" of one literary tradition the publisher highlights.
• Beyond England. The publisher stresses full treatment of Irish, Scottish and Welsh writing in English.
• Context. Authors and genres are related to wider developments, as in the discussion of Shakespeare's politics or Dickens and the "Condition of England" tradition.
• Revised. The third edition updates the bibliography, adds entries on contemporary authors and gives more space to women writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Limitations

• Compression. A thousand-plus years of literature in one volume means that individual works and authors can receive only brief treatment.
• One scholar's selection. The shape of the narrative reflects the choices of its author, and readers who need alternative perspectives should consult other histories or anthologies.
• Not a source of primary texts. The volume discusses works but does not reprint them.
• Date. The third edition is dated 2004 in the catalogue, so writing since then is not covered.
• Not as short as the title suggests. The book runs to well over 700 pages in its later printings.

Where It Fits in the Course

Within the British literature course, this is a survey for students who want a continuous narrative of the whole field. Jonathan Bate's English Literature: A Very Short Introduction is much shorter and more personal and asks what the subject is; it is a gentler place to start. Carter and McRae's The Routledge History of Literature in English is another one-volume history written with students in mind, and it adds notes on the English language at each stage, so the two can be read side by side.

The Norton Anthology of English Literature supplies the primary texts that Sanders discusses, and Middlemarch and Paradise Lost are individual works from his later and earlier chapters. Raymond Williams's The Country and the City is a more specialised study of how English writing has imagined countryside and city, and it works well after Sanders has given the periods.

How to Use This Book

The book suits undergraduates who want an overview of literature in the British Isles and graduate students who need a refresher on periods outside their specialty. It does not require previous reading, though it benefits from some acquaintance with major authors.

Use it as a companion, not as a text to read straight through. Before studying a period, read the relevant chapter for context. Then read the works from the anthology and return to Sanders afterward to see how his account connects them. The opening chapter on the canon is worth reading at the start of a course, since it sets out the idea of an English literary tradition that the rest of the book assumes. Use the bibliography to find more specialised studies of authors and periods.