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| List of illustrations | |
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| Foreword | |
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| The Beginnings of English: Old and Middle English 600-1485 | |
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| Contexts and conditions Personal and religious voices Language note: The earliest figurative language Long poems French influence and English affirmation Language and dialect Language note: The expanding lexicon | |
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| Chaucer and Middle English From anonymity to individualism Women''s voices Fantasy Travel Geoffrey Chaucer Langland, Gower and Lydgate | |
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| The Scottish Chaucerians Medieval drama Malory and Skelton Language note: Prose and sentence structure | |
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| The Renaissance: 1485-1660 | |
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| Contexts and conditions Language note: Expanding world: expanding lexicon | |
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| Renaissance poetry Language note: Puttenham''s Social Poetics Drama before Shakespeare | |
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| From the street to the building - the Elizabethan theatre Language note | |
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| The further expanding lexicon Renaissance prose Translations of the Bible Language note | |
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| The Language of the Bible Shakespeare | |
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| The plays The sonnets Language note: Shakespeare''s language | |
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| The Metaphysical poets | |
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| The Cavalier poets Jacobean drama - to the closure of the theatres, 1642 | |
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| Other dramatists of the early seventeenth century City comedy | |
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| The end of the Renaissance theatre | |
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| Restoration To Romanticism: 1660-1789 | |
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| Contexts and conditions Early Milton Restoration drama | |
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| Journalism Scottish Enlightenment, diarists and Gibbon The novel Criticism Language note | |
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| The expanding lexicon - standards of English'' | |
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| Drama after 1737 Poetry after Pope Language note: Metrical patterns Melancholy, madness and nature | |
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| The Gothic and the sublime Language note: Point of view | |
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| The Romantic Period: 1789 - 1832 | |
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| Contexts and conditions Language note | |
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| Reading Wordsworth Language note: The ''real'' language of men | |
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| The novel in the Romantic period Jane Austen Language note | |
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| The Scottish regional novel | |
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| The Nineteenth Century | |
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| Contexts and conditions Dickens Language note: Reading Dickens Victorian thought and Victorian novels | |
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| The Brontes and Eliot Other lady novelists Late Victorian novels Wilde and Aestheticism Hardy and James Language note: Dialect and character in Hardy Victorian poetry Language note | |
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| The developing uses of dialects in literature Victorian drama Language note: Reading the language of theatre and drama | |
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| The Twentieth Century: 1900-45 | |
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| Contexts and conditions Modern poetry to 1945 Language note: Reading Hardy Later Hardy Language note | |
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| The fragmenting lexicon Georgian and Imagist poetry First World War poetry Irish writing | |
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| Language note: Modernist poetic syntax Popular poets Thirties poets Language note | |
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| Reading Auden Scottish and Welsh poetry Modern Drama to 1945 Irish drama | |
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| Literature about language The novel to 1945 Subjectivity: the popular tradition | |
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| The Kailyard School Provincial novels Social concerns Light novels Genre fiction Modernism and the novel Forster | |
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| Conrad and Ford Language note: Metaphor and metonymy | |
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| Irish English, nationality and literature Novels of the First World Wa | |
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| Ireland Early Greene and Waugh Thirties novelists | |
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| The Twentieth Century: 1945 To The Present | |
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| Contexts and conditions Drama since 1945 Language note | |
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| Drama and everyday language Poetry of the Second World War Poetry since 1945 | |
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| The novel since 1945 Writing for younger children - so-called children''s literature | |
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| Later Greene Post-war Waugh Orwell Dialogue novels Language note: Discourse, titles and dialogism | |
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| The mid-century novel Amis, father and son Language note: City slang Language note | |
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| Common speech Golding | |
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| The campus novel Excellent women Muriel Spark and o | |