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English literature is literature written in the English language from the English-speaking world.The English language has developed over more than 1,400 years. [1] The earliest forms of English, a set of Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the fifth century, are called Old English.
There are multiple candidates for first novel in English partly because of ignorance of earlier works, but largely because the term novel can be defined so as to exclude earlier candidates. (The article for novel contains detailed information on the history of the terms "novel" and "romance" and the bodies of texts they defined in a historical ...
The Norton Anthology of English Literature is an anthology of English literature published by W. W. Norton & Company, one of several such compendiums.First published in 1962, it has gone through ten editions; as of 2006 there are over eight million copies in print, making it the publisher's best-selling anthology. [1]
Comparison of the 'To be, or not to be' soliloquy in the first three editions of Hamlet, showing the varying quality of the text in the Bad Quarto (Q1), the Good Quarto (Q2) and the First Folio. The earliest texts of William Shakespeare's works were published during the 16th and 17th centuries in quarto or folio format. Folios are large, tall ...
In literary theory, a text is any object that can be "read", whether this object is a work of literature, a street sign, an arrangement of buildings on a city block, or styles of clothing. [ citation needed ] It is a set of signs that is available to be reconstructed by a reader (or observer) if sufficient interpretants are available.
Factual texts merely seek to inform, whereas literary texts seek to entertain or otherwise engage the reader by using creative language and imagery. There are many aspects to literary writing, and many ways to analyse it, but four basic categories are descriptive , narrative , expository , and argumentative .
Literary theory is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for literary analysis. [1] Since the 19th century, literary scholarship includes literary theory and considerations of intellectual history, moral philosophy, social philosophy, and interdisciplinary themes relevant to how people interpret meaning. [1]
Geoffrey Chaucer, father of English literature. Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343 – 1400), known as the Father of English literature, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages and was the first poet to have been buried in Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey.