English Literature

Overview from the Continuum Encyclopedia of British Literature

Topic Page offering information on the Jacobean Era from numerous resources.

Overview from the Bloomsbury Dictionary of English Literature

Bacon was born 22 January 1561 at York House in the Strand in London. He died near London on 9 April 1626. He was the second child of Anne Cooke...

English dramatist and poet, b. Westminster, London. The high-spirited buoyancy of Jonson's plays and the brilliance of his language...

English poet and dramatist. His work includes the blank-verse (written in unrhymed verse) plays Tamburlaine the Great in two parts...

English dramatist. He produced numerous romantic plays, tragedies, and realistic comedies, both alone and in collaboration, including...

Re-established after the English Civil War and the fall of the Protectorate in 1660). See also English literature...

1628–88, English author, b. Elstow, Bedfordshire. After a brief period at the village free school, Bunyan learned the tinker's trade, which he...

English poet and dramatist. He is noted for his satirical verse and for his use of the heroic couplet . His poetry includes the...

English diarist and author. He was a friend of the diarist Samuel Pepys, and like him remained in London during the Plague and the...

Hobbes was born at Westport (now a part of Malmesbury), Wiltshire on 5 April 1588. He died 4 December 1679 at Hardwick, Derbyshire. He was...

Locke was born on 29 August 1632 at Wrington, Somerset, into a Puritan family of the minor gentry. He died on 28 October 1704 at Oates in Essex,...

English poet and prose writer. His epic Paradise Lost (1667) is one of the landmarks of English literature. Early poems,...

English public official, and celebrated diarist, b. London, grad. Magdalene College, Cambridge, 1653. In 1656 he entered the service...

The aesthetic characteristics of Augustan literature are outlined in the following gloss on the adjective Neo-Classical....

Gothic fiction emerged in England when Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto (1764), continued in vogue through the early 1800s, and enjoyed...

English dramatist, b. near Leeds, educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and studied law in the Middle Temple. After publishing a novel...

Defoe was born Daniel Foe in London in late 1660, and died in London 26 April 1731. He adopted the name ‘de Foe’ in 1695, possibly for business...

Fielding was born on 22 April 1707 at Sharpham Park in Somerset, and died on 8 October 1754 near Lisbon, Portugal. His maternal grandfather, Sir...

English poet. His Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751), a dignified contemplation of death, was instantly acclaimed and is...

English poet and satirist. He established his poetic reputation with the precocious Pastorals (1709) and An Essay on Criticism ..

1689–1761, English novelist, b. Derbyshire. When he was 50 and established as a prosperous printer, Richardson was asked to compose a guide to...

Scottish novelist. After studying at Glasgow he came to London in 1739. Failing to get his tragedy The Regicide produced, he shipped..

The work of Ann Radcliffe helped to create the fashion for Gothic novels – fantastic tales of terror and suspense..

English novelist, b. Derbyshire. When he was 50 and established as a prosperous printer, Richardson was asked to compose a guide to..

English author; youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole . Educated at Eton and Cambridge, he toured the Continent with his friend Thomas ...

A Topic Page offering information on William Shakespeare from numerous library resources.

A Topic Page offering information on Hamlet from numerous resources.

Romantic tragedy by Shakespeare . It was published in quarto in a corrupt form in 1597, and in a better edition in 1599...

Images taken from The Bridgeman Art Library Archive of Shakespeare and his works.