English literature: its history and its significance for the life of the English-speaking world: a text-book for schools
633 pages•about 13 h 15 min to read•Public domain
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About this book
Written for school use, William J. Long’s survey follows English literature through its changing periods and considers its place in the life of English-speaking people. The fifteenth century appears as a preparatory age, with Erasmus’s satire and More’s imagined commonwealth marking the spread of new learning before the flowering of Elizabethan writing. Dryden’s legacy is traced through his influence on verse form, prose, and criticism, while the account of Byron weighs his early self-dramatizing pose against the greater maturity that followed exile and his meeting with Shelley.
