ENGLISH LITERATURE: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION: PB,A renowned critic biographer and Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate provides in this Very Short Introduction a lively and engaging overview of the literature that Jorge Luis Borges called the richest in the world From the medieval Hymn of Caedmon to George Orwell s Why I Write from Jane Austen to Ian McEwan and from Winnie the Pooh to Dr Johnson this brilliant compact survey stretches across the centuries exploring the major literary forms poetry novel drama essay and more the many histories and theories of the very idea of literature and the role of writers in shaping English British and post imperial identities Bate illuminates the work of Chaucer Shakespeare Wordsworth Dickens and many other major figures of English literature He looks at the Renaissance Romanticism and Modernism at the birth of the novel and the Elizabethan invention of the idea of a national literature and at the nature of writing itself Ranging from children s literature to biography this is an indispensable guide and an inspiration for anyone interested in England s magnificent literary heritage Sweeping across two millennia and every literary genre acclaimed scholar and biographer Jonathan Bate provides a dazzling introduction to English Literature The focus is wide shifting from the birth of the novel and the brilliance of English comedy to the deep Englishness of landscapepoetry and the ethnic diversity of Britain s Nobel literature laureates It goes on to provide a more in depth analysis with close readings from an extraordinary scene in King Lear to a war poem by Carol Ann Duffy and a series of striking examples of how literary texts change as they aretransmitted from writer to reader The narrative embraces not only the major literary movements such as Romanticism and Modernism together with the most influential authors including Chaucer Donne Johnson Wordsworth Austen Dickens and Woolf but also little known stories such as the identit