The Continuum encyclopedia of British literature

"The History of British literature is one of extraordinary breadth and complexity, extending from Aneirin and the poet of Widsith to Caedmon and the author of Beowulf; from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Geoffrey Chaucer; from the Golden Age of Scottish poetry to the King James Bible; from Spenser to Shakespeare; Donne and Milton to Dryden; Dr. Johnson to Jane Austen, Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, the Shelleys, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, and William Blake; from William Morris to Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontes, the Rossettis, Kipling, and Hardy; from Virginia Woolf and the modernists to the postmodern era." "This book is a comprehensive guide and companion to literature that is by definition British in scope and origin, including surveys of the literatures written in English from the colonial to the postcolonial experience in Africa, Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, India, Ireland, and New Zealand. Specific authors from these literatures are treated in substantive topical articles on their respective literatures, unless the author is identified by nationality as British (such as Ben Okri, born in Nigeria; Caryl Philips, born in St. Kitts). Also included are Irish writers such as Berna