A History of English Literature

Robert Huntington Fletcher's A History of English Literature is both a college-level survey and a guide to reading literature with intelligence. It traces English writing from its earliest beginnings to the Victorian age while showing how literary works grow out of national history, biography, and changing artistic ideals. Fletcher also teaches readers how to judge literature: by its truth to life, its balance of intellect and emotion, its imaginative power, its characters, structure, style, and use of description and narrative movement. The book then turns to poetry, defining its emotional intensity, sound, meter, and major forms, and contrasting classicism with romanticism. From there it launches into a sweeping literary history, linking medieval, Renaissance, seventeenth-century, eighteenth-century, Romantic, and Victorian writing to the political and religious forces that shaped them. Within this broad survey, Swift receives a vivid portrait as a brilliant satirist—loyal yet bitter, morally severe, politically combative, and emotionally conflicted. His poetry is presented as sharp and witty rather than lyrical, and his prose as direct, forceful, and driven by indignation, making him one of English literature's most formidable and unsettling voices. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.