particularly British cuisine.
The cultures of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are
diverse and have varying degrees of overlap and distinctiveness.
The Arts. Literature
At its formation, the United Kingdom inherited the literary traditions of
England, Scotland and Wales, including the earliest existing native literature
written in the Celtic languages, Old English literature and more recent English
literature including
the
works
of Geoffrey
Chaucer,
William
Shakespeare and John Milton.
The early 18th century is known as the Augustan Age of English
literature. The poetry of the time was highly formal, as exemplified by the
works of Alexander Pope, and the English novel became popular, with Daniel
Defoe's
Robinson
Crusoe
(1721), Samuel
Richardson's
Pamela
(1740)
and Henry Fielding's
Tom Jones
(1749).
From the late 18th century, the Romantic period showed a flowering of
poetry comparable with the Renaissance 200 years earlier and a revival of
interest in vernacular literature. In Scotland the poetry of Robert
Burns revived interest in Scots literature, and the Weaver Poets of Ulster were
influenced by literature from Scotland. In Wales the late 18th century saw the
revival of the eisteddfod tradition, inspired by Iolo Morganwg.
A Vindication
of the Rights of Woman
(1792) by Mary Wollstonecraft, is one of the earliest
works of feminist philosophy.
In the 19th century, major poets in English literature included William
Blake, William
Wordsworth, Samuel
Taylor
Coleridge, Alfred
Lord
Tennyson, John Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Percy Shelley and Lord
Byron. The Victorian period was the golden age of the realistic English novel,
represented
by Jane
Austen,
the Brontë
sisters (Charlotte, Emily and Anne), Charles
Dickens, William
Thackeray, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy.
World War I gave rise to British war poets and writers such as Wilfred
Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Rupert Brooke who wrote
(often paradoxically), of their expectations of war, and/or their experiences in
the trench. The most widely popular writer of the early years of the 20th
115
century was arguably Rudyard Kipling. To date the youngest ever recipient of
the Nobel Prize for Literature, Kipling's novels include
The Jungle Book
,
The
Man Who Would Be King
and
Kim
, while his inspirational poem
If—
is a
national favourite. Like William Ernest Henley's poem
Invictus
, it is a
memorable evocation of Victorian stoicism, a traditional British virtue.
Notable Irish writers include Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Bram
Stoker, Jonathan Swift, George Bernard Shaw and W. B. Yeats. The Celtic
Revival stimulated a new appreciation of traditional Irish literature.
The Scottish Renaissance of the early 20th century brought modernism
to Scottish literature as well as an interest in new forms in the literatures of
Scottish Gaelic and Scots. The English novel developed in the 20th century
into much greater variety and it remains today the dominant English literary
form.
Other globally well-known British novelists include George Orwell, C.
S. Lewis, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, D. H.
Lawrence, Mary Shelley, Lewis Carroll, J. R. R. Tolkien, Virginia Woolf, Ian
Fleming, Walter Scott, Agatha Christie, J. M. Barrie, Joseph Conrad, Graham
Greene, E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, Roald Dahl, Helen Fielding, Arthur C.
Clarke, Alan Moore, Ian McEwan, Anthony Burgess, Evelyn Waugh, William
Golding, Salman Rushdie, Douglas Adams, P. G. Wodehouse, Martin
Amis, Anthony Trollope, Beatrix Potter, A. A. Milne, Philip Pullman, Terry
Pratchett, H. Rider Haggard, Neil Gaiman and J. K. Rowling. Important
British poets of the 20th century include Rudyard Kipling, W. H. Auden, Ted
Hughes, Philip
Larkin, John
Betjeman and Dylan
Thomas.
In
2003
the BBC carried out a UK survey entitled
The Big Read
in order to find the
"nation's best-loved novel" of all time, with works by English
novelists Tolkien, Austen, Pullman, Adams and Rowling making up the top
five on the list.
|